We got a little ambitious when we put this garden in. We fenced off a whole corner of the backyard so the dogs would stay out and not dig up and pee on everything. That took a couple of weeks and no small amount of money. More money was spent fixing the water to the back section and putting in drip irrigation. There was a lot of trial and error. It seems that even the same brand of soaker hoses don’t all emit water at the same rate, so in the bed I’d patched two together, I was either drowning plants or making them crispy critters.

Then we started way too many seeds, and they didn’t all come up. Some of the peppers and melons never did, actually. Eventually though, I had something like three dozen assorted tomato seedlings going, and three or four small plants that I bought when I got impatient.

The weather was weird. We got late, late frosts, and it kept fluctuating between unseasonably hot and unseasonably cold. The poor little plants that we managed to get in the ground didn’t know if they should grow like crazy or shrivel up and hide. They seemed to compromise, with some doing each even now.

Finally the weather stuck to warm, more or less, and things started to take off.  The spring peas didn’t have a chance, and each managed to squeeze out one peapod before they gave up the ghost. I ripped them out and planted yellow runner beans in their place, and those are very enthusiastic. They’re catching up to the bush beans, which were planted at least a month and a half earlier. Good, I can make two-bean salad someday.

We’ve got way more hot peppers than we’ll ever eat. Junior got a little carried away with those. What we don’t pickle, we’ll give away. Even though the plants aren’t huge, they’re starting to put on significant peppers.

I ended up planting about seven Brandywine tomatoes, a couple of Big Boys, two that I don’t remember that came as plants, and a couple of cherries. I don’t even have them all in cages yet, but I’d better get going before they take over the world. And then I’m going to have to learn to can tomato sauce after all of those Brandywines erupt at once.

The weeds are crazy. The back lot is full of puncture vine and I’ve made it my mission to eradicate it. I’m out there with a scuffle hoe just about every night, and it’s all I can do to keep up with them.

The house came with three grapevines. Junior thought they were dead, but they were just dormant. He fixed their trellises and we duly strung the canes up, waiting for growth. Man, did we ever get growth. All three of those grapevines have bunches and bunches of grapes on them; all we have to do is wait and see what varieties there are. I’m hoping for at least one Concord, to make jam out of. If there isn’t one, well, we can build one more trellis. We have the room.

We planted three kinds of corn at three different times with the idea that we’d see what variety we liked the best. But the tags faded and at least one kind must have been old seeds because we didn’t get very good germination from that batch. So we’re very hopeful about our short stalks with tassels.

We’ve got a lot of lessons-learned in this go-around. We’re going to add a bunch of compost in the fall, after everything’s pulled out, to make up for the crappy soil. The compost piles I’m making are nice, but it won’t be enough. Junior wants to rearrange some of the beds, and I keep thinking of more or different things to plant. This garden’s been a very nice evening diversion; we like to walk outside and weed and admire it. The kids each have a designated vegetable, and it keeps them invested in it too.

But really, I’m just waiting for that first Brandywine tomato, and a nice fresh cucumber to go with it. Pick some basil from the herb garden, drizzle it with some fresh local olive oil, and I’m done.

I’d picked up the girls yesterday, from my mother-in-law’s house, and we were so very close to home. I started smelling diesel, and wondered if it was the truck in front of us.

Seamus pointed at the steering wheel and said there was smoke coming out. Sure enough, there was, sort of.  Thick, oily black smoke was coming up from under the steering column. The last time there was smoke in the truck like that, the trailer brake controller was on fire, so that’s where my mind went, but we weren’t using the trailer brake.

I pulled off the side of the road in a hurry, thumping my wheels so bad that I thought I also blew a tire. I wrestled that beastie a little further down the road, as I’d pulled off next to a straawberry field and didn’t think it’d be a good idea to set the dry grass around it on fire. Just past the field was a flatter spot, so I threw it in park and cut the engine and made all of the kids get out of the truck and go stand way out of the way.

It’s a diesel truck and diesel isn’t particularly flammable but still, I dove into the toolbox for the fire extinguisher, just in case. At the same time, I was on my phone calling a local buddy, as I knew Junior was at work and half an hour away at best. While I was doing those two things, the guy who lives in the house I’d stopped near came out to check on us. We could see fuel pumping out under the truck, and when we popped the hood, it was sort of everywhere in there. Clearly I’d broken a pressure fuel line.

He offered us something to drink and tools if we needed them, said it looked like I had things well in hand. Probably he couldn’t see my hands shaking, but I was starting to calm down by then.

Marv swooped in and took us all home; fortunately John was there to babysit the youngers while Marv and I went back for the truck. We hooked up the tow strap to his truck, but unfortunately, when my winch was installed they took out the front hooks. We hooked the strap to the winch carrier and crawled on down the road.  Turning and stopping that beastie without power steering or brakes is no joke, and when Marv made a wrong turn that involved about three times the number of corners, I just groaned.

When he stopped before we were there, I wondered why. Turns out he’d caught a glimpse of my winch in his mirror during one of the turns, and we’d bent the shit out of the piece we attached to. As Murphy would have it, I used to have an extra one of those pieces, but threw it away when we moved, thinking I’d never need it. So we repositioned the tow strap and got the truck on home, where I unloaded the rest of our junk and left it parked on the street. It’s not getting up the driveway without a few strong backs or possibly a tow truck.

It can all be fixed, but I hate to see it like that. I have another truck, but I hate to drive the work beastie around town when I don’t have to. That’s a good way to get my tools stolen out of the back, and if I want to put any more than two people in it, I’m going to have to clean the inside tools out of the back seat. At least Junior says he can fix it, although there may be a lot of cussing coming from the shop. Just what we needed, another money and time suck. It is what it is, and what it is is broken.

It’s still really new to me to share life with someone that I can share lots of different activities with too. The hunting is easy enough; plenty of men are into that. But the gardening and food preservation that I’ve always dabbled in, I’ve dabbled alone.

Not any more though. Junior was right on board with making the garden, even if it started out as my project that he was helping me get started. At this point it’s both our project; he’s enjoying it every bit as much as I am. He gets out there and weeds and checks every little plant for signs of vegetables popping out. When his peppers started growing little micro-jalapenos, he was the proud papa.

It did surprise me to find him developing an interest in food preservation. He started pretty traditionally, wanting to make deer jerky. Since he gave me a smoker for Christmas, we cured some meat and gave it a shot. Come to think of it, I don’t think I got to taste much of that first batch of jerky. I think it all went to work with him to share. That led to a kitchen purchase, the electric slicer, and my realization that two people in a hobby do nothing but feed off each other in the purchasing department. That can be hard on the checkbook, but at least we’re acquiring some of the machines that I’ve wanted for a while.

The next logical step was to try to make snack sticks from venison. We do have a lot of venison and it’s so expensive to have the butcher make them, but they’re always the first things to get gobbled up. I already had a meat grinder as part of my KitchenAid, so we defrosted a little bit of meat, per the recipe on the sausage spice pack we got, and added some pork roast to it. Deer meat is really dry; the fat tastes about terrible, so we trim it very lean when we initially process it. Pork fat is added back in to give some body and moisture. Since we’re on diets, we stuck with whole pork, not just the fat.

We had a good old time stuffing these things. I’d bought the stuffer attachment and some casings for myself for Christmas in 2007, and hadn’t got to using them yet. They went on really well, and then into the smoker they went, to cook slowly for six or eight hours. We had some lessons learned in this batch, but we’ll try it again and continue tweaking as we go. This also gave us incentive to finally get that vacuum sealer that really makes a lot of sense when you’ve got a lot of meat to process.

Since I was online buying a meat slicer anyway, I added to my cart a giant pressure canner that I’ve always wanted. I’ve done a little canning but only with a water bath – pickles and jams. I’d love to try pressure canning, like you need for low-acid vegetables, meats, and fish. Since we live in one of the most productive agriculture areas in the country, we could probably be preserving something local about every weekend. For now, we’ll start with the easier, safer stuff, and work our way up into the more complicated.

This weekend, it was pickled asparagus. I don’t have an asparagus plot yet. If I did plant one this year, it wouldn’t be producing enough to set aside for a long time, considering how much I adore fresh grilled asparagus. So we bought about nine pounds at Costco; it’s California-grown and a really good quality. I’ve been buying two to four pounds a week there anyway.

Junior’s not a vinegar fan, so he did the cutting of the vegetables and peppers to spice things up while I made the brine. We didn’t need to use the pressure canner – any old big pot would have done the job – but we broke it in anyway. It works just fine for water-bath canning. We learned the lesson that for things not under pressure, we might as well set up a table outside and use the turkey fryer and gas grill burners, and keep the heat out of the house while heating the water faster.

We did it in two batches, producing less than I would have thought from that giant pile of asparagus spears. But at the moment we have about seven quarts sealed and cooling on the counter and we’re very pleased with ourselves. We’d thought about wokring with strawberry jam while we were at it today, but the fruitstand was closed. It’s just as well; that canning is more work than it seems reading through the recipe. It’ll just take practice; I hope by the end of the summer that we’ll be old hats at it. Maybe we can even justify that tuna fishing trip that I’m jonesing for. Home-canned tuna is to die for.

My writing goes in cycles. I tend to pour it all out when I’m miserable, and am not too quiet when there are really interesting things going on, but the days in between? I get very lethargic about documenting contentment.

What am I going to write about? The excruciatingly slow progress on the yard? Sure, we’re doing things with it every weekend, but sometimes those things are just weeding, and there’s not a lot to show for it.

The nice weekend kept largely inside from the rain? Wow, did I ever need that, but it doesn’t make for good journal fodder. We did a little shopping, did a little shooting, and a fair amount of cooking and cleaning. None of that is earth-shattering.

The brutal weekend taking three-quarters of the kids camping to a trap shoot? Yeah, I was stressed to the max before we went; that trip didn’t help. Best if I don’t actually put what I was thinking to paper. I’d rather just forget about it.

The diet that continues to work, if slowly? Nah, not interesting to anyone but us. Although between us, we’ve lost almost sixty pounds. I’ve bought new pants; Junior prefers to just wear his really baggy.

Work that’s driving me crazy? We’re at another Monday, but this is the end of the project and it’s no longer quite so bad. Some customers love the meters and some hate them. I’m tired of dealing with the ones that are screaming because their water is no longer essentially free. They got away with it for a long time; what made them think it would be forever?

So I’ll just keep on living, and working, and weeding. When something interesting happens, I’m sure I’ll get back into it.