Rolinco Road Ramblings: After the rain....

What a beautiful day today. It was cool and cloudy, just what we needed to let the moisture soak in to the parched soil. By the afternoon, the clouds were breaking up and now and then the sun would peak through.

I spent the morning in the house. I worked on that blasted feathered star quilt and did up the cucumbers that Beth gave me, in to dill pickles. There were quite a few teeny tiny ones. Beth suggested that I put those in half pint jars......little mini dill pickles. (Beth has lots of fun ideas!) So that's what I did! I don't know how they will taste, if they will be crisp, but they sure are cute in their little jars, with their little clove of garlic and little sprig of dill!!!!

I spent a fair amount of time this morning cutting 1 1/2 inch squares for the feathered star quilt.

This is part of the tedium of the project. But, it will be worth it in the end.

Dill pickles! Cucumbers from Beth, garlic and dill from my garden.

I think these little half pint jars are so cute!

I spent some time outside this afternoon. The flower beds were too wet to work in so I decided to clean up the raspberry patch.

So, the raspberry patch is always a mess by this time of year.

Here's a little closer look.

And the view from the other direction.

And now, doesn't that look better? I think the black berry on the end is going to go away this fall. It does an awful lot of growing and not much producing!

It always looks so nice when all the old wood is cleaned up and cleared away.

Speaking of messes, my tomato patch is a terrible mess! I know what I need to do to clean it up, but I just never get around to doing it. I need to get Reynald to help me make some heavy duty cages to corral them up and off the ground, then I need to prune them hard and often. The trouble with the pruning part is that usually needs to be done during harvest, and then after harvest and then during seeding. That's kind of a busy time and it just doesn't get done. But, getting cages around them, would help a ton.

Just look at this jungle. It's almost impossible to pick the fruit.

But the reward is worth the effort....

Reynald checked off a project on his "honey do" list. I wanted a way to hang the garlic in the cellar. I had these two trees that I scoured from a junk pile. Reynald had to fashion a way to hang them. I found an old hook that I picked up in the field with the cultivator this spring. He used that for one hanger, and the other he used a broken horse shoe that he welded to a square piece of something, both items I also picked up in the field with the cultivator! I'm so thrilled with how this turned out.

Roni and I harvest the garlic earlier this summer. I dug the bulbs and she did the braiding.

This is a closer view of the found hook!

And the other tree, that doesn't have anything hanging from it yet. I'm hoping to cut some lavender one of these days soon. Hoping would be the key word here!

Now isn't this just so cool? That broken horse shoe welded on to this square of metal?

Here are few photos of the squash patch and some pretty flowers!!

Not sure where this huge pumpkin came from? I don't remember planting a variety that was supposed to get this big?

A group of pumpkins, more the size I thought that I had planted.

There will be no shortage of butternut squash this fall!

I took this photo to show that my garden isn't big enough! The pumpkins are reaching half way across the gravel to the windmill and the grapes are out of control. That's another thing I need to do a better job of managing next year.