WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO LATELY.

 To answer Inger's question,  I haven't been up to much, except practicing music for the Holy Week with our choir until my voice gave up, planting seeds, and taking care of seedlings, working in the office, doing housework. I've attended Zoom meetings and attended meetings with my church women group. I did some reverse hooking on my rug and rehooked the shoulder to make it more rounded but I'm still not liking how it looks. This post was started on  Sunday...

My Coleus seedlings started from seeds. I'm only showing a small sample. I have way too many.

A small sample of my blue Lobellias seedlings. The seeds are smaller than a grain of salt and I plant them in little bunches for ease of transplanting them.

I have a good assortment of peppers seedlings, and 16 plants in all.

Now my mind is turning to the outdoors and today I pulled a bunch of dandelions in my vegetable garden and I dug up some asparagus plants that were planted in one area temporarily and transplanted them in a permanent spot. I was surprised at how big the roots were.  I still have a few more to dig and transplant to their permanent place. I only took a photo of the crocuses. The bees were really excited.

I also planted a variety of tomato seeds.  No Photos... This was on Monday. 

Now here is the piece de resistance: Are you ready for this? I was invited to join a hooking group by Kimm Moore of Sheepunderfoot blog, a few weeks ago. My first time was last evening and it was really nice to meet blogger, Kimm in person, although we were all masked, I recognized her from the photo on her blog.  It was an enjoyable two hours and I did get a bit of hooking done. I'm looking forward to our next meeting on the 26th. This was on Tuesday...

I was going to work in the garden or yard today, Wednesday,  but my back was aching as so I rested.  I made a pan of spanakopita with an olive oil crust for supper. It's much quicker than wrapping individual spanokopita with phyllo pastry as I've done in the past. This was a recipe that I found in a Canadian magazine years ago and I've made it often in the past. It can be made like turnovers for individual servings but much quicker in a pan and just as good. 

So, that's what I've been up to this past week. I do what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it so.

I just got notified that my cousin, Sylvia, found her husband dead, at home when she arrived home after work yesterday. It looks like he died of a heart attack. My cousin is a florist. This is very sad, just before Easter.

Thank you for stopping in and leaving a comment. I really appreciate all your comments.

IT'S AUGUST AND IT'S FULL STEAM AHEAD

 I know, August is almost gone already and I only turned the calendar page a few days ago it seems. The weeds and harvest have kept me busy. Everything is ripening fast and in some places, the weeds are still ahead of me but little by little, I'm gaining momentum.  

George is busy with the haying and there is an abundance of hay this year. He's been filling his hay barns and selling large and small truckloads of hay from the field. He goes out early in the morning and comes back just before it gets dark. Too much work for an old fella. He's been dodging the frequent rains and lost two fields of mowed hay all ready because of the rain. Thankfully, they were smaller fields.

This is only a straight-ahead view of one of the baled hayfields. I took the camera and made a 360-degree turn and there were bales everywhere until they looked tiny.  It would take many pictures to show all the bales. Each bale weighs approximately 800 lbs.

My husband will be cutting hay into September he says. 

This is my potato garden at the farm. I planted two rows with four different types of potatoes. My husband George dug the rows for me but he dug them too close together and not deep enough.  I dug them deeper before planting my potatoes and he added the compost and I planted the spuds. Because of an ample supply of rain, they grew big this year.

These are called Norland and are good potatoes. 

This is the first year that I planted corn and it grew fast and furious. I can almost see it grow before my eyes. I keep checking up on it often and no beast has attacked it yet but the blackbirds and the crows have their eyes on them.  So I purchased 3 yards of sturdy unbleached cotton and with my serger machine, I sewed some little bags to protect the ear of corn. With the Serger it went super fast. In no time I had over 100 bags sewed and on the cobs. As soon as the silk on the cobs turns a light brown, it means that the cob has been fertilized and the bags can be safely put on to prevent the birds from pecking the kernels.

It looks pretty funny if you ask me. I sure hope it works. This will surely not please those feathered thieves. I wouldn't mind sharing some corn with them but they only pick open the top and go to the next and when it rains, the corn rots and is not edible. This is supposed to be super sweet corn and I can't wait to sample it soon.

The pattern I made was 9 1/2 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches long. Nothing fancy, I serge the edge. 

I thought I was thinking ahead and went to the Co-op and bought  6 ears of fresh corn and tried my first bag on this very long ear of corn. Then I went to the garden to put it on. It was way too long. 

My first prototype was 12 inches long but I had to reduce the length because I had not noticed that the long leaves on each side of the cob are halfway up the cob which made it impossible to fit the bag all the way down, silly me.  Of course, by then, I had already cut 75 pieces, thankfully, I had only sewed one before I tried it on the cob. No problem, I just cut off the excess on all 75 pieces and I just serged the two cut-off pieces together and it made just the right length for the bags as you can see on the left top corner of the photo. I'm always experimenting with something it seems.  

I have no rack to dry my onions so I used one of my swing seats in the gazebo. 

This year, I put some wood ash from the woodstove and they grew big. I have used a lot for my Lady Ashburnham pickles already. I've picked loads of cucumbers and made 3 batches of Lady Ashburnham pickles, and two batches of Bread N' Butter pickles. I didn't have time to take photos. 

The tomatoes are ripening fast also but I only have a few plants this year as my husband has some planted at the farm.

I'm showing off one of my large peppers that survived the deer and gophers attacks. Most of my peppers blossoms have been eaten.

I have to process my beans tomorrow and there's plenty.  There will be more garden stuff later on because I'm a farmer's wife after all. 

Stay safe and well. Thanks for visiting and leaving comments.

Julia

TRYING OUT MY NEW DISCOVERY

It may not be a big deal to most of you but to me the computer illiterate blogger, it a small victory. For so long I wanted to know how to print on my photos but I had no idea where to look to do this.  My laptop is an Apple computer called  MacBook Pro and the Apple computers name things differently than other PCs. I possibly could walk you through the process if you have a similar computer but I have no idea about other type of computers.

My husband gets me to take the official  photos for calf registration and he had a terrible time to enter them in his computer LacT program for our farm data. The photos of the calves that we sent to be registered came back on their registration papers the size of thumbnail icons which was ridiculously small. We tried everything and my husband is no more computer savvy than me. We even had the Valacta technician to register the calves for us and she couldn't do any better than us.

After talking to a technician at Holstein Canada, he told us to reduce the pixels on my camera between 3 and 4 and I had no idea about pixels setting on my camera but I managed to reduce them and took a photo of my husband to test it and put it in a folder on my desktop and emailed it to his computer. It was the right size for our purpose...

Yesterday, quite by accident, I discovered how to write on my photos but the writing was so tiny and no matter the font size I chose, it wouldn't get any bigger. I was getting pretty frustrated. For a good part of the afternoon while it poured outside, I tried to figure out how to fix it. When I use his photo to try printing larger I was surprised to see that I had succeded. The print was larger finally. Then I put 2 and 2 together and realized that with higher the pixel, the writing was tiny and with the lower the pixels, the writing was larger and the same must be true for the photos we were sending to Holstein Canada. Nobody had been able to help us before this. Mystery solved and we are both happy campers.

Today I bake the soft molasses cookies that I was supposed to bake yesterday but had run out of powdered ginger.

I froze some sweet red and green peppers that I bought on sale at the Coop.

I dyed some grey wool with some left over dye I had in jars by mixing some red, green and a tiny bit of blue to get a light grey.

I picked the first of my yellow beans that I planted very late but I didn't took a photo of it.

I appreciate your visit and comments and I hope that you have a nice  weekend.  JB