Usual activities

For a gift last Christmas I received the book, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward Smith.  He advocates planning your garden so that you have walking paths in it so you don't walk on the planted area and compress it.  I had tilled my garden earlier so made plots and then delineated the paths with cardboard.  I plan to then cover the cardboard with straw.  I only have tomatoes and basil in it this year.  One plot will be for garlic that I will plant this Fall yet.  My friend who gave me the garlic to plant said to plant it when the moon is Full Moon in October.  

Two years ago G said we needed to replace the mowers that I use.  I have learned to never mow unless he is home to repair them during the mowing.  This is what they currently look like.  The deck is so worn through that he can no longer weld it so he has resorted to repairing it with wood.  I guess if it still works, why get a new one!   It did make me smile while using it, because this is rather pitiful. So stay posted as to what happens.

Busy week

I know it is a bit late for this, but Happy Birthday to me.  I told my granddaughter that I was putting two candles on my cake, a 7 and a 0.  She said "Good, I am glad you didn't put 70 candles on it, that would have been too much."  Since it was right before the Pig Roast, a friend made the cake for me.

My two sisters were visiting which was great. I think it was more of a working vacation than a relaxing one.  Thank you to both of them.

We had about 110 people at the party.  Next year we need a bigger tent.

These friends are resting after cutting up the meat.  We did not get a whole pig this year, just 9 pork butts.  No one seemed to miss seeing the whole pig.  

This is the welcoming tent, where we gave out name tags (and took donations).  

Cleaning and weeding

Most of my energy these days is getting the house and yard ready for the visit of about 110 people on Saturday (the annual pig roast).   We will have eight house guests for the weekend also.  I feel like things are under control, although there always are more things on the "to do" list.

Since I had two  three-week vacations this summer, the weeding in the landscaping got ahead of me.  Fortunately it has rained a lot so it is easy to pull them out.  I also received a birthday gift of eight iris rhizomes (Thank you Gill) but I needed to find a permanent home for them.  I have chosen the south side of my house to be the iris garden.  I now have twelve different colors of iris planted there.  In case you haven't figured it out, iris is my favorite flower.  So be prepared for lots of iris pictures next year.

Regarding the weeding, I thought of putting before and after pictures, but the before ones were too embarrassing.