Turkey in the solar oven

Our live is getting back to normal. Michael feels he's 100% recovered from surgery and is starting to work outside again! Speaking of outside, we have had some real heat this summer with most days 95+. We're doing as good as we can to keep our tomatoes, peppers, and okra alive.

It's been too hot to cook. So, last week I cooked a turkey breast in our solar oven. It turned out really well and was completely done. The meat just fell off the bones.

A special horn blower at the world cup!

Last month at the World Cup, there was a special horn in the crowd!

The mystery of the missing fruit trees

About two weeks ago, I went out one morning and discovered that one of our peach trees was completely gone.  All that was left was about 18" of the trunk. There were not any branches on the ground or any signs of it being cut by a saw. At first I thought someone was in our garden.  The cut was fairly smooth with a little bit of grooves in it.


On Monday, the same scenario happened again. We were completely stumped (no pun intended).

Living in South Carolina, I didn't believe there were beavers here but the thought crossed our minds. Our property borders a neighbor's 5 acre pond and two smaller ponds and then a creek in the woods on the other side.



This morning, the third or our five peach trees suffered the same fate. We have a total of about 20 trees and they are about six years old so just producing for us!

We talked to one of our neighbors that has a pond and he said on the other side of the 5 acre pond at the spillway, they have discovered beavers building a home.



As I called around farm and garden centers, etc. the most popular solution was a rifle. One guy told me to open two cans of sardines and place them at the edge of the pond and then get a lawn chair and sit with a shotgun on our laps and wait for them to come for the sardines and shoot away!

We did find something called Ropel that you can spray on the trunks of trees that make it taste terrible and also gets on their paws. We bought it at a pest control place and used it last night and didn't lose another tree. We'll see if it works. I stayed out a dusk last night to see if we could see them (we were told they come out at dusk) but didn't see any!

We haven't had too good of luck with wildlife. We have had deer eat out strawberries, a duck get in our garage, the cats bringing rabbits into the house and now beavers stealing our trees!

Michael's recovery

This is Michael last Monday, awaiting his surgery. Boy I'm glad this past week is over but it went as well as we could have prayed for. Just one week later, he's able to move around, get up and down and is no longer on any pain medication.
He ended up with about an 8" incision. This is just part of it. They took out 8" of his colon. The mass was just confined to the inside of the colon. Nothing looked abnormal and when the pathology came back, everything was negative so he is considered cured! He will have close follow up for many years but that is a small price to pay!
Here he is the day before he came home. He was able to come home on Friday night about 9:00 after eating a couple of regular meals and having his bowels move. He's now able to eat whatever he wants. We consider this such a blessing and a real miracle! He doesn't have all of his energy back yet but he is starting to teach an online class tomorrow! Hopefully, he will get his staples out in the next couple of days.

My sweet Husband!

Please keep Michael in your prayers this next week. June 8th he went to have a routine colonoscopy and they found a mass that was malignant. He is going to have surgery Monday to remove 8" of his colon. He will be in the hospital 5-7 days. We will know three days after the surgery if the colon mass is intact and not spread to lymph nodes or elsewhere. We are praying that it was caught early and he will be fine.

He's had a lot on his plate this summer while he is out of school and so we've reprioritized what he could do before surgery. He is in great health otherwise and has worked hard outside all spring so hopefully he will recover quickly.

Again, keep him in your prayers.

New Steps

Michael has been busy this week with a lot of jobs and one of them was to build steps to go down the hill into the greenhouse. I didn't know how we would do it, but he had a plan and went to work.

Here's the finished product. The top step isn't slanted, but he put some extra wood and dirt in their to hopefully redirect the rainwater. We eventually want to build a swell to direct the water but in the meantime we were able to get some bales of hay and played them down the hill to help in the meantime.


Here is a picture of the new part of the garden. We probably have about 10 cantaloupe almost ready. I'm very disappointed in our corn as it just hasn't set many ears. In fact, I'm a little worried. Most years there have been a lot of bees around and I have hardly seen any and I think that is a factor. Our tomatoes started out setting fruit and after several days of rain the end of May, they are not setting fruit much even though the plants look beautiful. I may have to start hand pollinating them!

Hydrangeas

We finally have some beautiful hydrangeas just filled with blooms! One year I accidentally pruned them back too much and another year we had a late freeze but this year they are in their beautiful glory! I love the purple ones. The pictures don't do it justice but they are almost velvety looking.
The blue ones are a great color as well.

All of the cousins!

Kevin had a canoe trip last week so Bonnie bravely drove up for a visit and a canning frenzy! I hope she got a little rest!
It was so much fun to see little Katie and how much she has grown. She loved being around people and was just so cute. She stands and is almost ready to walk. She screamed with delight as she chased the cats around.

Ethan lost a tooth while he was here, his second front tooth!
Here's all of my precious girls! They had a blast together. They got to try out the new water slide park up the street.
We had to put up a gate for Katie but the kids loved playing downstairs. The week flew by.

A Garden Harvest this week!

This was the harvest from our garden last Tuesday. The little pink berries are pink raspberries and boy are they sweet. We've picked about 5 gallons of blackberries so far and probably a bushel of green beans. I think we will pick our first tomato tomorrow! We're having a heat wave (101 today) so I hope it doesn't ruin our garden production. We are trying to keep the water to everything!

A duck in the garage?

We have had a lot of rain lately, but I always thought ducks liked to be in the rain. I went out to the garage this afternoon and there in the garage was a duck, looking out the door at the rain!
The grandkids were here minus Caleb and they got excited to see the duck close up.
The duck "ducked" under the car until they went back into the house.
Finally Maggie got some bread and made a bread trail to the side of the house where he "ducked" under some bushes. I'm assuming he ended up at the pond (the cats were inside!)