Our garden has been growing really well, the ears on our corn may be big enough to eat in a week or two! The tomatoes are a little behind where they should be but they're still doing really well. Our potatoes are also coming along nicely. Joel and I picked one plant two days ago and there were four medium-sized potatoes and a couple of babies. They still have a while to go I think though I'm not positive about when they need to be picked. Our bush beans are doing fantastically! Our squash is getting ready for the first harvest but they're still not quite there yet.
Our chickens are also doing really well, they're getting bigger and bigger. Clara's chicken is starting to cluck and not just peep and its pretty cute. And as you can see, its been really hot recently.
Joel has been doing a lot of work in the garage and getting it set up for being a small woodshop.
Recently we've been experimenting with fermentation (Wild Fermentation by Sandor Elix Katz). We first started by making a raspberry wine and then this last sunday we started a plum & cherry wine. Neither one will be ready for about a year from now! We also started making a citrus (mostly lemon) vinegar but that will only be a few more weeks, not months, thankfully. This is the raspberry wine.
Also with our surplus of raspberries I made peppermint and raspberry sorbet. Its a really delicious, fresh, palate cleansing sorbet, yum!
Two days ago a friend of mine, Lindsay, stopped by Portland on her way up from Salem to Seattle and gave us some delicious pesto! (Thanks Lindsay!) So we made a pesto based pizza with shiitake mushrooms and kielbasa. It was really yummy!
About three days ago Orson caught a rat! And by "caught" I mean he *only* caught the rat, he didn't bother to kill it before he brought it inside! It turned into quite an adventure because he let it go in the basement and didn't pursue it too much beyond that. It took Joel (the poker/clubber), Marie (the trapper) and me (the eyes) to catch the rat again. Marie caught it once under a big plastic planter and then we put him into the utility sink (high sided) and he promptly jumped out of it! that freaked me out a little cause I was standing on the bath tub edge watching everything and I was afraid he'd jump on me (yuck!).
Joel caught him the second time between a grate and the wall but didn't have the heart to squish him (but then again, it would take a really detached person to do that I think).
So Marie swooped in with her magical rat-catching-planter and trapped him under it. This time we decided to take him outside since the sink didn't work out so well last time. We took Orson out with him in hopes that he would actually *kill* the rat this time.
No such luck.
But the whole point of getting Orson in the first place was because he was supposed to kill the mice and rats, so this was a nice little trial run. Let's hope he kills the animals before bringing them inside next time...
Yesterday our friend Kelley came over for a barbeque and...s'mores! For my birthday Joel's parents sent me a book (Jam It, PIckle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon -- thanks Linda!) that had a recipe for marshmallows so Joel made some and we made s'mores with them. Joel coated them with cocoa powder too! Kevin fashioned some cooking sticks from a recent tree trimming.
What ensued were many unattractive photos and a lot of inappropriate jokes, but a good time was had by all.
And then the evening ended with arm-farting. We're definitely really grown up and respectable. We are the face of America's next generation of Thinkers!
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