Monthly 9 - June

May was a long month!  It is time to link up with other bloggers and see what we have been doing for the past month.  Be sure to check out the other blogs here.  Part of the reason May seemed long was that our eagerness to get the garden going was thwarted by the rain.  Don't get me wrong we have not had the kind of rain Texas and Oklahoma have gotten.  We have had a quarter inch here, half there, but something almost every day including a fairly hard hail storm.  We began to think we would only have weeds!  Add in a few minor catastrophes and we are just ready for a new month!


Nourish - We had hoped to be eating lettuce out of the garden by now but even though our lettuces loved the cooler weather the lack of sun has slowed them down.  They are beginning to perk up now though and the kale, carrots and spinach are coming along.  With the cooler weather, rain, thunder and lightning it just seemed like a good month for more soups, and hubby has been working on his Mexican food repertoire!

the upper right hand is the iceberg lettuce we are trying this year

Prepare - Preparing this month was me rototilling between rains and putting down the mulch in the herb garden.  This area was a lovely green last week - but it was weeds.  This is the season hubby claims I like the rototiller more than him!  (I don't - but I do tell him the tiller is better at the weeds!)

This will hopefully be full of green that is not weeds by July!

I am pleased with the look of the bark mulch, we will see if it keeps the weeds at bay!

Reduce - This is another reuse rather than reduce.  When we moved in to this house we had to tear down a building that was in bad shape and in the middle of the driveway!  Three of the recent planters are made from wood from the old building.  There was not a lot usable but what there was of course we saved!  The strawberry planter, this one that the broccoli and onions are in, and one that will come out next week for beets, turnips and radishes are all made of 'recycled' wood.

That is the tuxedo cat 'Buddy' in the background

Green - I bought all the ingredients for the vinegar weed killer that I want to try but rain is a bad thing for this kind of experiment so I will try it in June, I have a special patch of weeds I'm 'saving' for the trials!

Grow - Since my month was all garden (almost) I will share one of our other crops - pine cones!  Seems that our pine tree goes through stages and this year it is losing all the old cones and growing new ones.  Hubby and I are in awe of the number of cones that drop every day!  This picture is one days worth of cones.  I assume it will run out of them soon but for now we walk underneath it with some trepidation and we listen to the cones fall on the roof in a wind!

Create -  My create this month was finishing my afghan posted here I am very pleased with both the look of it and the number of new stitches I learned.  My confidence level grew by leaps and bounds with this project.

Discover - We discovered that it was nice to have a second vehicle!  This may not be the original thought of the category but this is where we are right now!  (smile) Hubby had gone to town and I got the phone call - "could you come get me?"  Our poor old reliable (212,000 miles on the odometer) Honda had quit on him.  We are having it towed to a shop where we have a friend from church who is a mechanic and see if it is repairable, hubby thinks so.  (sigh...this is why we have an emergency fund, but it will be gone after this)

Enhance - We helped our older friend with her computer set up and getting her new office chair put together, her daughter fixed a lovely lunch so we ate and then spent a lovely afternoon visiting.  Her husband has Alzheimer's and she can't get out much so company is fun and they lived in some of the same places we did so we have much in common.

Enjoy - We have enjoyed the flowers growing this month, we have added a flower bed in the front, had some pots produce from seeds and uncovered a couple of returning friends.

The honeysuckle have recovered from their 'butchery' by my hand!

This little gem came up on its own when I cleaned out an old bed. I think it's a pansy!

This is Hubby's wildflower pot!

top pot - snapdragons and salvia, purple pot - dianthus, brown are cosmos and the black are zinnias

Well I hope your June is a good one - whether you are preparing for summer or winter, and I hope you enjoyed the tour.  Come back again!