BLOGGER TEMPLATES - TWITTER BACKGROUNDS »

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Summer of learning!!!

Hellooo everyone!!!! I am still here. I wanted to give a quick update on the pregnancy although this has been the toughest of all my pregnancies, I am 28 weeks and all is going well. Well if you don't count the extreme tiredness and the nausea , to which I think I am getting a bit used to. I had some good news at the last Dr. visit, I gained 8 lbs in 2 months. This is unusual for me since my last 2 pregnancies I never gained any weight but lost. I am hoping to get the baby into that 6 lb area at least this time!!! And even more so I am hoping to get into that 38-40 week range.
Now on to my summer of learning. I have been on a learning kick this summer. I love learning but this summer I just want to know it all!!! I have been reading like mad, Internet and library books. I have been perfecting my gardening and keeping a garden journal. Although I have done much better this year with garden I am still having trouble with some things. I did get many tomatoes this year with my 1 tomato plant. Since figuring out how to keep the squirrels away I see now I can plant more of these next year. Once again my beans and peas did not do well. I think I have finally figured out how to grow them next year with some easy plans I found online for building a simple string setup for them to keep off the ground. I also finally got cucumbers to grow. I lost 4 of my 8 plants early on to rotting on the ground. I had an old crib that I could not bear to throw out and broke it down and used the slats, 3 slats to a plant to build a teepee type system and trained the remaing plants up the slats and then zip tied them to the top and now in just a few weeks I have about 10 cukes growing huge. I now know how to do this next year and plan on planting many more. I also got my sunflowers to grow this year and my bell peppers. I posted early summer about getting my dehydrator and have been going like mad with that this summer and experimenting with different dehydrating techniques. I have quite a stockpile of fresh herbs and done a few jars of sun dried tomatoes, among other things. I have a vacuum bag system on my Christmas wish list this year!!!
Last week I cashed in $25 of my swag bucks and purchased from amazon.com a water canner. I am going to do my first canning this week, I have 20 lbs of peaches to can and tomatoes for sauces. I have been having the kids searching like crazy to earn more swag bucks so I can get the steam canner. I would love to have a nice pantry of canned foods for the winter. I will blog more about this as I learn and post pictures soon.
Hope all is going well for you all this summer!!! Michelle

2 comments:

Jessica said...

Sounds like you've been very busy! I'm glad things are going well with you. Take care :)

frugalredneck said...

Thanks so much, I appreciate the thouht, Michelle have a wonderful rest of summer!!! Michelle