Too bad I never went to sleep last night LOL!  Long story but I’ll give you the short version after I share some gardening news with you.

Saturday morning and afternoon we had a great time outside in the garden!  It just felt so good to get out and dig in the dirt, ya know what I mean?  There’s just something about getting back to the Earth and enjoying the great outdoors with the plants (veggies in my situation) and animals (cows and chickens for me!). 

Kitty and Davison (our Black Angus “puppy” cows) are getting so fat!  And they are so spoiled too.   I would have never imagined in a million years that I would begin to love cows!  But I’m really attached to them and I’m glad that we’re going to keep them through the winter and into the Spring.  To the casual passer-by they are just two black cows or steers.  But we can see how they are both so unique and different in everything they do and how they act.  Kitty has a “moo” that sounds like an elk call.  Davison has a very deep “moo” that will rattle the windows LOL  The shapes of their faces and necks are different, the “tuffs” on the top of their heads are different…. we can just see how beautiful they are and how individual each of them are.

Now the chickens, we’ll they are just so entertaining!  I had a little fun with them today.  Most of the hens had already gone into the next boxes to leave their “presents” for me (eggs) and I thought I would give another peek just to make sure one of them didn’t slip back in to lay another egg.  Well, I interrupted “Miss Priss” (her nickname for today).  She is one of the Rhode Island Reds.  She gave me a look like “Hello, can’t you tell I’m busy in here?”  Take a look:

So I quickly excused myself and went back to the garden to work a little more.  I decided I would go back later (which I did) and this time she was ready for me… head first waiting for me to open the nest box door…

For some reason she was just taking her own dear sweet time laying her egg today….   Now Buffy, she wanted to play Peek-A-Boo…

And she caught me in this pic:

DH worked on flipping the compost bins which is a big job considering they are 3×3x4′ tall and… there are 4 bins!  We really needed to flip them so that we could get some air mixed up and fluff them some AND, we also needed more room because we’re running out!  I was able to use a couple of wheelbarrow loads from the compost bins.  Some of the material on the very bottom was close to being finished - so that is what we used to supplement several of the raised beds that I was going to plant in today.

Later this morning (after I’ve had a little sleep), I’ll be going out to do some planting in those beds that DH prepared for me.  I am so excited that we are making our own compost from the leaves that fall out of our trees, from our kitchen scraps, from our steers’ manure, from our chickens’ manure, and from the lawn clippings that we obtain from our yard.  It’s had to tell in the picture above, but this stuff is rich and black. 

DH asked me what are we going to do with all of this compost.  That was an easy question to answer…. I told him that we’d be using it in the new raised beds we are going to build for the Spring planting LOL  Between that and supplementing the raised beds we already have, I’m sure that I’ll find a home for all of this compost.

Now a quick explanation of what I was blogging about with the peas and the tomato cages…. I planted “Alaska” which is a shelling pea.  The vines are supposed to grow to be 2 1/2 feet high.  So I planted the seeds around the base of the tomato cage and I’m using the tomato cage as a mini trellis.  And, around the tomato cages I planted some lettuce and some chard in the empty space.  Here’s a pic:

OK, time for me to end this post and get some sleep…. now for the reason that I haven’t been to sleep all night.  Well, around 2 PM I headed up to the office to meet another volunteer who is working on “the project”.  Well, we have so much work to do up there and we stayed until very late and until we were very tired - until 3 AM.  As we locked up and were headed to our vehicles, I saw a dog in the parking lot.  At first it scared me because you never know if stray dogs are mean or nice.  Well, the office is right next to a 5 lane highway…. I told the other volunteer that I was afraid that the puppy would get hit by a car.  Well, when I said “puppy”, he stopped, turned around and looked at me and wagged his tail.

That was it… I couldn’t leave him.  He came over to me wagging his tail and was the sweetest thing ever!  He was a full-grown chocolate lab.  No collar or tag.  I took him inside the office and locked him up in the bathroom while I ran to WalMart and purchased treats, a water bowl, a food bowl, a collar and a leash.  Oh, and I found him a huge rawride bone to chew on.  When I came back to the office, I got the collar on him, loaded him up in my vehicle and took him home.   So this morning, he is in the living room, relaxing and occasionally looking over at me and wagging his tail almost like he is saying “thank you” for saving me.  I woke DD and DH up and they are both in love with him already.  He’s just the sweetest dog.  He even knows how to sit for a treat and he minds pretty good too.

He’s definitely someone’s pet because he teeth are pretty and clean, he’s been trained a little, and even his toenails are clipped (meaning he’s a dog that also lives inside the home).  Let’s hope that he’s “trained” too or I’m going to wake up in a couple of hours to a mess by the front door LOL

I took off today…. decided that I needed to take a break, ya know?  Sometimes we just reach that point where we need a little time for ourselves.  I’ve been working on the “project” day and night and I just needed to take a little time off to spend with DH and DD as well as to do some cleaning inside the house LOL   With DH working and me volunteering 12-16 hours per day, needless to say the house is a wreck!  So many things need to be “DONE”….  I  started in the kitchen this afternoon and I just about have everything cleaned up and back in place.  I still have some more work to do in the kitchen, but things are looking much better.

This morning DH and I went to Lowes to look around a little bit.  I think I mentioned on the blog that I came home one night to find that my office, sunroom, kitchen, laundry office bathroom, and breakfast were all flooded with water.  Well, DH has done a great job of trying to get up all of the old flooring and now, we’re walking on concrete floors.   I’ve wanted to change out the flooring in the kitchen, breakfast and laundry for a while now but decided we’d leave down the linoleum we had until we  had the time/money to replace it.  Needless to say, the water leak moved that date up quite a bit LOL   So we looked at some ceramic tile this morning.  We’ll begin to start putting away some money from every paycheck until we have enough to cover the expense of buying the tile, the adhesive and the grout.  DH is going to measure and determine how many tiles that we are going to need and we’ll get an estimate based on the cost of the materials.  Then, all we will need is the time to install it.

We are very lucky because DH can do just about anything…. besides being raised on a dairy farm, he also built and remodeled homes in his father’s business.  So these things he learned as a teenager and young adult have really helped us through the years!   DH has already tiled 2 of our bathrooms and he did such a great job with them.  So we’ll save the cost of labor and I’ll help him install the ceramic tile in the kitchen, breakfast and laundry room…

Now back to our Lowe’s trip this morning.   Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten any seeds started inside for my fall garden :-(   I have just been too busy and didn’t have enough time.  So, we headed to the garden area where I found some Georgia Collards, Swiss Chard and Red Sails Lettuce transplants! I purchased several packs of each one :-)  Here’s some pics of them:

As you can tell, the lettuce and the chard transplants are a bit big so I trimmed both of them up a little.  Now, I have some chard that I’ll saute in a little butter to go with my scrambled eggs in the morning and I’ll have some baby leaf lettuce for lunch tomorrow!  Here’s what the lettuce transplants look like now:

I have them under the light setup I have in my formal dining room (where I usually get my seeds started).  I’ll leave them there for a couple of days until I have some time to get them transplanted into the garden.

How’s your fall garden coming along?