Bounty

I fully realize it has been over a month since I have written anything here, but well, it is summer and my brain has ceased to function properly.  It as if there was only so much power in my brain and the end of the school year sucked up what was there, leaving me with only enough to make Isabella behave and the house and garden to function.  There was simply no space for written word.

Usually, I have a summer's worth of projects planned.  This year the only project was painting my classroom, which didn't and won't get done.  Jack just hasn't had time and our artsy plan of superhero bodies with famous author heads is just too much for my poor abilities.  It seems that my yard and garden has become my only project.

When we moved here, the grass was mostly stickers, but we have treated with corn gluten and have been faithful to water and fertilize.  Between the grass we planted last year and what I have planted and babied along this summer, we are starting to get a real yard.  At least we are in the back, but I so rarely spend time in the front that I have trouble getting worked up about it.  The stickers are still there, but at least there is more grass than stickers now.Two weeks ago, the burn ban was actually lifted on a week that Jack was home, so we managed to get four huge brush piles burned.  There are probably ten more piles worth of downed limbs (thanks to the ice this winter) in the woods behind the garden, but at least we knocked out the ones in the yard.  We also moved the fence farther out to encompass my hundred plus pumpkin patch; I know the deer still get in, but at least the horses can't.

Jack put the garden and orchard on an irrigation line with auto on and offs, leaving me about an hour every other day in the things that weren't irrigated, but that is doable.  In the meantime, canning season has hit for me.  This week has yielded six half pints of apple butter, fourteen half pints of tart plum jam, and fifteen pints of salsa.  A quart of roasted and peeled peppers and three quarts of blackberries went to the freezer.  Not shabby for a a few afternoons' worth of work.

Sunday I leave for AP conference in Tulsa, so I am callng a halt to the garden work.  I picked a bucket  of tomatoes that will have to find a new home and I need to hoe out the asparagus patch in the morning, but other than that, I leave my garden on its own for a week.  It's just too hot, outside and in my kitchen both.  Jack  will make sure things are watered.  I am sure my jungle of tomatoes will be more riotous, but it will be there when I come home with my brain once again full of school stuff.