Or, in our case, when it doesn't rain, it pours! Does that even make any sense? No? Figures.
OK, I apologize for my absence, but I've been swamped as usual. Last month, my boss left our company for other opportunities and my team lead took his place. When this happened, I took over all but one of my team lead's products in addition to my own, and now I'm up to my armpits in work. It's a special challenge because I've got no less than 10 totally different products all at varying stages of development and all of which require my constant supervision. It is a balancing game, to be sure. In fact, my personal organizational skills have been forced into a major overhaul in the past few weeks and luckily, I seem to be coming out ahead. But barely!
On the homestead, things are buzzing along nicely. We have a beautiful tomato crop just starting to ripen, gorgeous red plums that we are devouring as fast as possible, blackberries just coming ripe and of course, the never ending supply of zucchini. This weekend, I'll be making MORE zucchini bread, freezing bags of it, and making a huge plethora of plum recipes. We had our first rain of the summer yesterday and as a result, all of our nearly ripe plums are now splitting open. It's going to be a mad dash to pick them all and save them before the birds and bugs get to them!
We also have one apple tree that is just about ready to start harvesting. In fact, I'm sure we'll be picking the first few bushels this weekend. Time to pull out the apple peeler/slicer and the food mill!
We have installed a new drip irrigation system initially to keep our tomatoes happy, but as we've discovered how well it's working, we've expanded it. We now have it in most of the boxes and half the row garden with plans to further expand. I'll do a whole post about it this weekend once I've had a chance to take some photos. It's really an amazingly simple and helpful system and we are both kicking ourselves that we didn't start this sooner!
Lastly, we are actually selling eggs faster than our chickens are laying them, so we are contemplating expanding our flock. We probably can't order layers right now (at least, not without ordering WAY more chickens than we have room for), so we are thinking about trying to hatch a few of our own eggs in an incubator. I also saw that there are a couple of 6 month old pullets at the local feed store, so we may take those off their hands. We just need to work on the logistics, first. Apparently, you can't just toss a couple of new chickens in with a flock without some prep work/controlled introductions ahead of time. Doing so would be cause for a chicken riot and probably cost us the lives of the new birds!
We are also selling goats milk occasionally, but all of our animals are thankful that our demand for goats milk has not yet outstripped supply. They LOVE that they all get the extra!
Lastly, both my H and I have been working very hard at getting healthy again. We've both let the craziness of the past year be an excuse to slack off on our own personal health and we decided jointly that enough is enough. We are eating better (and less) and we are actually working out in addition to the 'farm chores'. It's been about 3 weeks or so and we both feel SO much better. Now...if we can just keep this up until all our clothes all fit again, we'll be golden! ;-)
