Friday bullets, August 7, 2020

And suddenly it is August. It always feels a little as though the fast forward button gets pushed once August rolls around.

• The garden is booming. Some days I come in with fairly large baskets of produce. This is great. It also means I need to do something with all this food. Here is the haul from the other day.

This was all from the same day except for a bunch of those cucumbers in the middle. Those have been decorating the counter for several days. We cannot eat them fast enough.

Poblano and jalapeno peppers

Beets... lots of beets

• The beets L. and I took care of yesterday. She loves pickled beets almost more than life itself, so was quite happy to lend a hand. I got six pints of pickled beets made and had enough left over to serve beets as a side dish tonight.
• I also made six more pints of sweet pickle relish earlier in the week.
• I am running out of room in the pantry cupboards to store all the jars of things I've canned.
• I am also running out of pint jars and have had to make a couple of dashes to the store to get more. I don't know where all my pint jars went. I must have had more. I know where all of my quart jars are. It's a mystery.
• In other garden news, B. came out today and we did some work taking out plants that were done and putting in more seeds for things that will be ripe in the fall. Some of it looks so neat and tidy now.

We worked on the front two beds. We left the green onions (there in front on the right), the rainbow chard, and the kale (on the left), everything else came out. We've started more lettuce, more beets, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, and leeks. There in the back left of the garden you can see the amazingly huge okra plants. The vines on the right in the back are the cucumbers which are trying to take over everything.

• Did you know that okra has amazingly beautiful flowers?
• How about something non-garden related? Here is a picture of me and the horse which I get to drive once a week. He's a hafflinger and has the most amazing hair.

• The weather has been so nice we've been able to eat outside a few times. I love that.
• The pork chops, the recipe for which was chosen by random selection, were very good. We'll have to make it again.
• R. has not had a good couple of days. Thank goodness for the medicine we now have.
• Look what J. and B. started today!

Any ideas? It's a tack room in the barn!! I'm so excited. There's still quite a bit of framing to do, but it will have walls and a floor and I'll finally be able to store the saddles and things in an organized manner.

This is looking through the barn towards the house. Do you see the people door there on the left? That is where the tack room will be in relation to the rest of the barn. 

• I am not close to being done with school planning, though I'm making some progress.
• Sorry, back to gardening and canning for a moment. I have enough cucumbers for the first time to pick them when they are very small in order to try to make sweet baby gherkins. What I didn't realize when I first started was that the canning process is a four day extravaganza with multiple steps which need to be done each day. I am a little afraid I am going to forget about doing one of the steps.
• Okay, maybe two moments. B. and I also pulled up all the fennel because it grew very, very tall, but never developed bulbs on the bottom which was what I really wanted. It seemed a shame to not do something with all the fennel fronds, so I put a lot in my dehydrator to see if I can dry it. Unlike so many things, herbs take very little time, so I have to remember to go check on it before bed. If I let it go overnight there will be nothing left of it in the morning.
• Did you know fennel is related to catnip? We only found this out because when I brought the fennel inside, Nefertiti went crazy for it, wanting to put her head right inside the whole clump. also like catnip, because it is a diuretic, if dogs eat it, it can make them pee a lot more than usual. It just seems like a piece of information that could be important to know.
• We have cement that goes around the entire outside of the house. K., earlier this week, spent a good chunk of time sweeping and moving things so that he could ripstick in a continuous circle around the house. This is what he has been doing. A lot. He is now remarkably fast and very good at avoiding obstacles as he goes around and around and around...
• We think one of our ducks is a drake. I think you can figure out why we might make that assumption.
• Dutch Blitz has been the game of choice this past week. It seems that we has literally worn out our first deck. The cards were very well used which made them extremely difficult to shuffle or pick up quickly. If you know the game, then you understand why this would be a problem. A. ordered a new deck plus an expansion deck so that eight people can now play together. Everyone has been doing their part to wear out deck number two. If you do not know the game, you should find a deck and learn. It is very fun. It is even more fun if you are not playing against your older teens/young adults because then you have a chance of winning... or at least not losing horribly.
• G. wants a kitten. In case I have, by chance, forgotten this piece of information, G. feel compelled to remind me several times a day for the past year. 
• I don't understand parents who are choosing to homeschool instead of using remote learning if all they want is an online curriculum. It seems they could save a lot of headaches about credits being accepted if they chose the simpler route. 
• I also don't understand why people who have set themselves up as homeschool consultants and are charging for helping people figure out homeschooling get their pants in a knot when they are called out. There is no proprietary information to be a gatekeeper of. IL doesn't have requirements that would make it necessary to hire someone to help you through them; there is a whole internet full of free information as well as dozens of books. The whole point of homeschooling, in my (possibly not so) humble opinion is that parents learn to take responsibility for educating their children because they know them best. Homeschooling is as much a growing process for the parent as it is a way of educating a child. Accepting payment for helping a parent sort things out is the absolute antithesis of homeschooling. Someone may be an expert about their own children, but there is no such thing as being an expert about someone else's children. Just cross it off your shingle that you just hung up.
• Horse Power has a new horse which has joined the program who is a very, very large Percheron cross. His withers (the place where his neck meets his back) are taller than I am. I got to work with him today and he is a sweetheart. Heaving a heavy saddle on the back of a horse so significantly taller than you is a pretty good workout.

And now I am hearing R. making noise in her bed (again), so I will leave off here. Thank you for reading this edition of gardening, canning, and horses.