The Last Days of Summer

You can feel it in the air... my favorite season is coming to an end. We wake up for work in the morning and we turn off the fan because there's a nip in the air and my husband has to water the garden in the dark. The evenings are starting to close in quickly and I am personally hanging on to every bit of summer that there is left...  and there is still a little bit left.

And as much as I hate to say goodbye, I love to reflect on it all! I feel like somewhat of a slacker when it comes to blogging lately but with everything we have been so busy doing, I just haven't had the time to sit down and write a post. So I do it now, quite literally the first free evening I've had in a long time. I just finished opening my Etsy shop, I'm in the middle of the busiest work season of my career and we just returned from a mini vacation in Oregon for my cousin's wedding.

So first off, a little late, but about a month ago was our annual friends trip and this year we wound up at the back side of Loon Lake... as usual, we had a great time and it was even funner with the babies in tow for the first time! The weather was very nice that weekend and the water was even nicer! My husband and I took out our new-to-us mini trailer for its maiden voyage and although I don't have any good pictures of it right now, we plan on fixing it up as our winter project. As is, it worked out great on the trip and we even baked cookies in the little oven for all of the campers! Here are a few shots of the trip... and I'm not gonna lie, it's mostly dirty, camping babies...

Sneak Peak of the trailer

Group pic, kinda hard to get a good one of us all!

Twinning!

And speaking of trips, like I said, we just got home from a mini roadtrip to Troutdale, Oregon for my cousins wedding! We were accompanied my my mom and my sister and her boyfriend. The first night, we camped out at Whistlers Bend park, right on the Umpqua river, which was beautiful, and the next day we played a round of disc golf at the park, which was definitely one of the prettiest courses I've ever played! Then we headed to Portland that evening and had dinner and brews at Deschutes... my sister and I had to revisit after our great meal during our last visit.

The day of the wedding we wandered around Portland and shopped a little and then of course, celebrated the nuptials. It was a quick, but fun weekend, with lots of laughs at each others expense...

The Umpqua River

Twinning Birks

Whistler's Bend

My sister being weird in Portland

Somewhere in Oregon

Mt. Shasta with a storm brewing?

What else do I have... Oh, an update on the garden. Right now we only have a few lone survivors... our tomato plants are still kicking but, I've still got potatoes on the way and all of the herbs are going good. I have one melon still ripening on the vine, but other than that, most of our squash and peppers are done for the season. Last weekend we built some boxes around our existing lasagna beds and very soon we are going to start sowing seeds for a fall garden... more to come on that later. I'd say we did pretty good for our first garden, we killed it on a few things aaaaand we killed a few things, overall we learned A LOT and I can't wait to implement it in the spring (and this fall for that matter!) Most of the stuff we grew, we just straight up ate but we also made some very delicious salsa and I dried most of the herbs and jarred them for cooking! We are so excited to grow some fall veggies, especially Kale!

little melon

My mint came back in full force after being completely eaten by a creature

and just a picture of my favorite liken.

And my final update is a little addition to our family... 

...meet Cruiser. He came into our lives by chance and it just so happened that we had some room in our hearts for a kitty again. He is by far the coolest cat I have ever met, very affectionate and yet, still a little wild. Before my first cat, the cat of my life, passed away, I used to say "I'm not a cat person, I just like my cat." Well. Cruiser is going to make me start saying that again, because he is pretty rad (except for his litter flinging habit).Anyway, we are looking forward to many years of cuddling with him.

Stay tuned for some fall projects, especially the trailer-fixer-upper... it's gonna be a doozy! (But if we can remodel a house, we can remodel a trailer, right?!)

Progress

This is just a short, simple blog post by a girl who is excited about her growing garden. In fact, you can see these same pictures in my last post, only now, my garden is flourishing and more full! 

I've gotta say, I am legitimately proud of, not only keeping these plants alive, but for the fact that they are edible (so far). And although I do realize I am making it sound like I've accomplished some amazing feat... it sort of feels like I have.

I know that, at one time, growing your own food was a necessity rather than a novelty or hobby. I know that there are folks out there who grow enough food to make up a majority (if not all) of their daily intake. There are people who have perfected aspects of gardening, amplified output and diminished costs from their wallets as well as from the earth. And I can barely call myself a beginner, if anything I am still a student. 

I am watching beautiful, shiny peppers grow bigger and bigger... fuzzy little snap peas pop up all over the tops of their vines... bright orange squash blossoms opening with the sun and closing in the evening... but still, I have yet to consume anything from my garden besides lettuce. Patience... patience.

I worry... who knows if anything will turn out right! I've still got potatoes, beets and onions that I can't see and squash and tomatoes that haven't begun to fruit yet. There are already a few failures, all of our garlic died (but at least we know why) and I think my broccoli is bolting. But I'm learning so so much, if nothing else. We already have new ideas, improvements, for the winter garden. Next Spring, we plan on going bigger... I'd like to learn more about (or improve upon) succession planting... and I'd like to grow as much as we can from seed. Watching those tiny seeds germinate and those little pieces of green popping out of the dirt was so much more gratifying than planting our Home Depot transplants... I want to do more from scratch and less bought from the store.

Going out to the garden and picking my husband and I a salad before dinner is seriously one of the best feelings... and I swear, it makes the lettuce taste better. There is something primitive about it all, something so satisfying about watering your garden that doesn't make it feel like a chore (minus the mosquitoes, I could do without those guys). I feel like I've finally joined a club that was never really that hard to get into but people never really talked about it so I never knew how awesome it was. I mean, I've always thought growing your own food was rad but I never realized it could be so exciting. It makes me so much more excited for my goats to be producing milk... I get butterflies thinking about a salad from my garden, topped with a buttermilk dressing from fresh goat milk. I could cry.