Greening Up

Our gardens are looking pretty good, in spite of how cool our spring turned out to be this year. Our tomato plants that were planted in the hoop house are doing very well. That is a very good thing, since last year we hardly had any tomatoes that made it to maturity on the vines. Most of them had to be picked just before a killing frost and left to ripen in the upstairs of our house.

Above are our raspberry plants. The boys were complaining that they couldn't do any weeding in there because there are too many bees buzzing the plants! That is a very good thing, too.

We've had many occasions when there was rain in the forecast, but none came. This is what the clouds looked like on Friday afternoon. We thought for sure it would rain -- but there was only a brief period of showers.

From this photo you can tell the rain went north of us, and headed into Canada.

Today we actually had a good soaking rain. Since we've been skunked so many times the boys waited to get the animals into the barn, and the joke was on them. Everyone was soaked to the skin by the time they got back into the house. We are very thankful for every drop of rain.

We are in the beginning of our harvest of strawberries. They are so good! I'm not sure how we'll market them, but until then we are enjoying them ourselves.

I've been busy cleaning canning jars that weren't used last year for the harvest. We placed an ad in the local weekly newspaper for jars, and came up with quite a few. I didn't have time to do anything with the remaining jars, so for the past few days I've been cleaning and organizing them into boxes for water bath canning and pressure canning. It will be so nice to have them ready for me when it's time to begin.