Moving, Progress and Tall Tales

First things first I guess.  We've moved as some of you already know.  Our days at the Cox Farm Road house have ended.  We'll miss it and all the flora and fauna that came with it.  Yes, even the snakes!

Ahh...memories...

Our travels and moving adventures took us right around the corner...literally.

That's the turn sign for the old house in the front yard of the new house.

And now we're here...for only a few months we hope.

From 4 bedrooms, 2 baths to 2 bedrooms, 1 bath.  It's...cozy.

The move has been an adventure. as we mentioned, but it was made so much easier by hiring movers through the U-Haul website.  We've used it to pack up from Vienna, unload when we got here last summer, and now again to move down the road.  We've never had a bad experience and the movers this time (Olsen's Affordable Movers) were excellent.  They helped us load and unload 3 truckloads on one of the hottest days we've had.  I've got them on speed dial for our move into the new house!

Speaking of the new house...we've got a brand new, shiny roof.

When the sun hits it, the space station has to draw its blinds

Who wants to help us set the record for most fried eggs on a roof?

The plumbing and electrical have all been roughed in and now they are starting on the interior heating & A/C, by installing the duct work and coil for the heat pump.

It feels cooler in here already.

Duct...duct...duct...

GOOSE!!!!

Sorry...I couldn't resist the joke.

Next week we hope to have the exterior walls and inside of the roof spray foamed (insulation) and later this week the windows (and maybe doors?) will be installed.

Moving on to the garden...

Neta has certainly demonstrated quite the green thumb this year.  I'd like to say that my masterful plowing and discing of the garden, along with the years of "pasteurized" soil were the main culprits, but a lot of the credit has to go to Neta.  Usually after just a few minutes of garden work, and I do mean "work", she is covered from head to toe in dirt from all of the weeding, pruning, digging, picking, tilling, crawling and TLC'ing.  (You don't even want to see her after a full day of gardening.)  For all that effort, she has produced stuff like this:

That's 22 pounds of tomatoes...and that's not all of them.

There have been numerous peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, cantaloupe and watermelon.  Our last watermelon, on Saturday, almost needed moving help to get it home.  She has made some delicious refrigerator pickles and processed and frozen a bunch of tomatoes.  Even Emily got in on the game and made a batch of pickled green tomatoes that were so good I didn't think they'd last the first hour after we opened them.

We also have some really large (they weren't supposed to be!) pumpkins growing as well.  But my favorite of all things in the garden has to be the sunflowers.

That PVC pipe is 10 feet tall and it's not a tall as the tallest one!

I told Neta when she bought the seeds to "go big or stay home".  She (and they) did not disappoint!  I've seen some tall sunflowers, but these make me happy.

Big as a dinner plate!

Sun...flowers

Blooms everywhere!

Only thing missing is the stars

That's it for now.  We hope to have more news later this week or next.  Our schedule is staying busy with a family reunion (Neta's paternal grandmother's family) this weekend, a trip to Maryland next weekend, my brother and his kids will visit for a day later that week and Neta's brother and his family coming up for a visit the weekend of the 30th.  July has been and will be a busy month!

Prolific Produce

Craig and I are no strangers to gardening. We've both been growing in some fashion for years, even if it was just a few plants in pots on the patio. When we bought our house in Vienna, we had just one small patch that (barely) got enough sun for a vegetable garden. We had to battle squirrels, deer and the wilt to get the occasional tomato, but we did all right.

Weekend before last's harvest

So you can understand that the gardening possibilities that we have on the farm are pretty heady stuff, and I freely admit we have some pretty ambitious plans. But we tried very hard to start small and not bite off more than we could chew (literally). We staked out our proposed plot, then cut it in half. We said we'd stick to the basics the first year, and we mostly did. Tomatoes, peppers, cukes, eggplant, melons, and okra. Pumpkins because I love to decorate with them in the fall, and if I grow my own I don't have to limit myself to just a few. Sunflowers for Craig and zinnias for me, just to make it pretty. A modest garden to introduce us to growing in Georgia.

Modest, 9 foot tall sunflowers.

There has previously been a garden in the spot we chose, although it was many years ago. It has mostly been pasture for goats, cows and horses, also many years ago. I think that's probably the key: all those years of liberal application of organic fertilizer.

This Saturday's harvest.  

Because despite our plan to keep it small, we are being inundated with produce. I've joked about foisting veggies on visitors but believe me, if you come to visit you are taking produce home with you!  We can't really take credit for this bumper crop because we haven't done much.  We're amazed at how well everything is doing; far better than any garden we've ever had before.  There is occasional gleeful chortling on our parts.  Although I am a little apprehensive of what the okra is going to do when it gets going. 

The pumpkin patch

I mentioned our garden plot had been pasture before, but it must have also been the Wild West, because I think a junior cowboy lost his six-shooter there a long time ago. I tilled this up recently while weeding.  It was so heavy we weren't sure if it was a toy at first. Toys were better made back in the day, obviously!  

I'm just glad I didn't have to can it!

The thing with fresh veggies is, they don't stay fresh for long. You have to eat or process them on their timetable, not yours. I love cooking and canning, but I'm also in the middle of not one but two moves, plus building a house and working for a living.  Thankfully refrigerator pickles are pretty quick, and I've been freezing (rather than canning) the tomatoes and blueberries.  

4th of July harvest - 2 days after the harvest on Saturday.

I managed to work a good bit of our produce into yesterday's dinner.  We grilled burgers and dogs, and I made shakshouky (a Lebanese Taverna recipe for roasted eggplant salad) with our eggplants, peppers and tomatoes.  Plus fresh tomatoes and pickles, watermelon, and blueberry shortcake for dessert.  Yum!

Goose, goose, turkey!

We've got quite the twist on the old duck, duck, goose game going on at the farm.  We set up our wildlife camera near the little pond, where we've seen the fox(es) several times.  I am hoping to get some good pictures of the foxes (if I am right that there is more than one) and just to see what else might be visiting the area.  We didn't get any clear pictures of the foxes, yet.  However, our resident geese like to frequent that area too, and we got PLENTY of pictures of them.  They took a starring role in more than 600 pictures.  Got to adjust the camera settings!

The smaller family in the foreground, the (almost) Brady bunch coming in from the back.

We have two goose couples - one with 2 goslings and one with 5.  The goslings are growing up and getting a bit more independent, but their parents still keep a close eye on them and don't miss much. They certainly didn't miss the camera - it makes just enough of a noise to alert them that something is up.  Hence we have quite the set of "stink-eye" snapshots:

Not exactly the wildlife I was expecting...

Even the turkey is giving us the stink eye.

Scrolling through 600 pictures of geese and then flashing past a turkey made me do a double take. That's a strange looking goose!  Then I spotted the babies - squee!   

You talkin' to me?

YOU TALKIN' TO ME?!!

I don't know what is making that noise, but I am going to attack it!

Me too, me too!
Okay fine, they are practicing for flying, not attacking.  So adorably derpy!

We did have some fox photos, but they were blurry and/or dark, as the batteries were too low on the camera to get good night time shots.  We've replaced them and I adjusted the camera setting so I'm looking forward to checking the next batch of pictures.