War with the Beavers!

Our ordeal with the beavers is far from over. We bought some spray that was supposed to be a deterent and it worked for a little while. . . but they are determined.

They have taken all five peach trees, two plum and now our Nectarine.

Here's the nectarine. This is the first time that they actually cut the tree down and left it there. It stayed there for three days but last night they came back and finished taking it to their home.

I have researched what to do. I found some things on line that sounded like a solution only to order it and have it never delivered! Thanks to Paypal we got our money back. I have heard the best thing to do it to make a fence around the trees. Today we finished fencing up what is left. I hope this works. We've ordered some more trees but we have to make sure we can keep the beavers off! Anyone got other ideas except shooting them?

Canning our own pears!

We picked our pears earlier this week and I canned the first pears ever from our own trees! I canned 7 quarts and probably have enough for five more quarts that still need to ripen.

PS - I love my new stove with the boost burner. It doesn't take long at all for the canner to get going!

Apple trees

One thing I need to do is get better with handling our orchard. We have several dwarf trees that we've gotten a little bit off fruit but we plan on expanding our fruit production.

So, we ordered four more apples trees, standard size! We have two Gala and two Anne. These apples are very sweet. We will have to probably wait a couple of years to see the fruits of our labors.

In other pictures you may have seen all of the 5 gallon buckets by the trees. We have attached a drain spout on the bottom and put them in the soil so we can water where the roots are.

In other news, we have some lines of water, electricity and natural gas going down to the greenhouse. I'm relieved that we didn't have to break down any of our concrete on our little driveway area that goes to the back of the house.

We are getting a lot of wonderful lettuce of various varieties right now. I hope the colder nights won't be too hard on it! We'll cover it up if we need to as our cold doesn't normally last right now.

Michael is so great to do so much work around the home. I'm so blessed to have a sweetie who has so many talents on building and fixing things. If he doesn't know how to do it, he works to learn it!

Another walk through the garden!

I know this is turning into a garden tour but that has been our life this year in are "spare time" and something we really enjoy (except when it's in the 90s). We're about done with our strawberries but have some peaches about ripe. In fact, I took this picture and then picked them!

It seems like we can see our grapes get bigger every day.

One big job for Michael this week was making a bed for our blueberries. We still need to mulch them but hope they can grow like crazy for a lot more next year.

These beds are our green beans which are just about to bloom and our sweet potatoes. We also got the cane berry posts put in and wires strung. That was a hard job for Michael!

We're excited to have a fig tree that will produce this year.