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Every time you feel in God's creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say: "O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy art Thou Thyself, Creator of all!
- Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

You can’t get to joy by making everything perfect. You can only get there by seeing in every imperfection all that’s joy.
-Ann Voscamp

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Garden and Chicks

Mama and her adopted brood.  There are five chicks, but one is usually under mom.. 

Still five, four under mom.  She is very careful of her chicks, and very patient even when they peck at her eyes.

The lone lettuce plant

A jungle of tomatoes and broccoli.  It's even worse now, as these photos are already a week or two old.

Jalapenos are doing well this year.  Usually I can't get them to grow very big.  But it's hot out there!  Hot enough to grow hot peppers! :)




Puny cucumber plant.  There are four of them.  I planted about 30.  Sad...and not one flower on them yet.  Hopefully they'll make up for lost time and give me a few, anyway.

Potatoes.  I think the ones on the right are Youkon Gold.  I can't think of what the others are right now.  At this moment they look even worse than in this picture.  Especially those on the left.  The foliage looks downright on deaths door.  I've never grown potatoes before, so I don't know what normal is, but to me they look bad.  And I don't think I've seen any flowers on the plants.  I thought flowers were supposed to form, and at that time there would be "new potatoes" to eat?  Please, enlighten me.

My broccoli usually doesn't grow well, as you could probably see in the above jungle pic.  The heads are so tiny, not enough to feed one person if I picked it all, and while I'm waiting for it to grow larger it flowers out and is wasted.  This plant is actually producing a lovely head that looks like what I'd expect it to.   yay!

Harvest for tonight's supper.
My garden has pretty much had to fend for itself this summer, as I'm really busy with the rest of life.  Goat care and milking takes up about two to three hours of each day right now, with 7 sets of hooves to trim, fighting parasites, cleaning up after them, taking them to pasture, hauling water, milking and caring for milk and milking equipment.
Right now, sadly, we've had to do some pretty aggressive treatment for threadworms, so all that lovely milk is going to the neighbors pigs.  Happy pigs, sad us...And I'd wanted to avoid dewormers so badly.  However, things are looking up, so in about five days we should be back in the lovely, clean, creamy white bliss again.  Hooray!

Happy Wednesday to all you lovely blog pals! :)

3 comments:

  1. seems like you went through this before,worming,is there no way to avoid it? I suppose a lot of unhealthy drugs! but your veggies sure look good and I still envy that gorgeous peace and quiet up there

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  2. oh darn .I forgot to look and see if my daughter was sighed out--that's me in disguise as Rebecca

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  3. :) You don't have to explain, I always know it's you!

    Theoretically, yes, there are ways to avoid it, and some people have fewer problems than others. The crazy thing is, I've done everything I've heard of to keep the worm load down. Cleaning pens, rotating pastures almost daily and not using any pasture area again for a month or more, not putting goats out on wet pasture, feeding things known to keep the worm load down...
    I have had just an awful time with thread worms this spring, and I'm hoping that other years won't be so bad.
    The crazy thing about thread worms is they have two forms, a free living form that's in the environment and doesn't need a host, and a parasitic form that takes advantage of a host. Any time there's a host available, the free living form can create?, umm...hatch? ...I'm not sure the right word, but anyway, make the parasitic form. It's just crazy. But, I am learning an awful lot, and hopefully next spring I'll be able to stay on top of things.

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