Knitted hat

dear friend visited last Thursday and walked me through knitting a hat. here it is, my first hat!

Sauerkraut-making season

harvested 5 of our cabbages, totaling 17 lbs. husband cleaned them off, weighed them - a 6 lb-er!

shredded them...

and crushed them in the our harsch crock until their liquid rose above the level of the cabbage. added brine, and it's good to go! will ferment for six weeks in the crock, then will go into the fridge for us to eat.

Sourdough!

Harvesting Garlic & Onions

Finally harvested garlic and onions yesterday, between downpours. Stalks were browning on the garlic a couple of weeks ago and it was ready to come out, but supposed to harvest after a few sunny days, which we never got, so out it came yesterday, soggy with a few of the stalks starting to rot. Onions came out right on time, when their stalks had all been lying on the ground about ten days.

Amazed again this year at the baby worm nurseries created by the garlic roots. Such tiny little things, just about 3/4 of an inch long, and almost traslucent some of them, with grown worms wrapped around the roots near them. I suppose that perhaps the garlic roots, being so thin and dense, are ideal for baby worms because they can intertwine amongst them and thus be safer from moles and other predators.

Father-in-law lent us the back of his garage to dry them in, since our porch is much more exposed to the humid weather. We set up a construction fan to blow on all of the plants so they wouldn't rot from all the water in them, and today they are drying and beautiful. 160 garlic bulbs, 50 onions.

Hornworms

the hornworms have found the tomatoes, and the wasps have found the hornworms.

more rain, more rain, more rain. summer squash and zucchini have been putting out many blossoms for a month now, but we've only gotten one vegetable from each plant so far. the rain two summers ago also created this issue. i've read that rain can cut down on the visits from bees, so i've been pollinating them this week with a paintbrush to see if that will help. but each time i do it, the blossoms all have at least one bee drinking away within, so i don't see how lack of pollinators could be the problem.

house wrens are busy feeding their little ones, woodpecker (downy or hairy? i still confuse them) has been making daily visits to our suet feeder (with the suet from our grass-fed cow), and black raspberries are ripening all around us!

Birds

a couple of days ago, i spotted a large moth resting on the inside of our porch screen, so i opened the door and, snapping the screen with my fingers, sent it on its way. it flew in its wild moth pattern toward a nearby tree, and a small bird shot down from the sky and proceeded to chase it. the moth zig-zagged and swirled successfully for a few moments, but then the bird caught it and shot back over the roof of our house to wherever it was going.

our house wrens' babies hatched last week. can you hear them cheeping?