Beautiful Weekend

We had truly beautiful weather this weekend. Yeah! First project was minivan repairs. We were really lucky our trip to North Carolina, Florida, and back went as smoothly as it did. Tom discovered that he needed to replace some bushings (I didn't take notes, so I'm probably a little off in what I may call things). He had planned this project, so he already had the new bushings. In order to put the new ones in he had to take the radiator out. Somehow that led to know we need a new radiator. The old one wasn't leaking, but it was a bit rusty. We did smell a burnt electrical smell on our trip, and Tommy discovered that that was a fan. I have no idea what fan, but he showed it to me and it was pretty burnt up.

I raked away the mulch I had down to cover the new rows that I tilled. Then I weeded that row, planted 6 bulbs of garlic (about 36 cloves spaced 4" apart), and then covered the row with mulch. The row in front of Kyle is the raspberries we planted when my parents were here. The row in front of Reeve is where I planted the garlic. The row behind Reeve (not weeded yet, but it's there) is where I will plant next years tomato plants. I'm going to do something similar to what we'll do with the raspberries. I'll put fence posts at the ends of the row and then as the tomatoes grow I will string them up off the ground. I have tomato clips that I can use to attach the vines to the string. I sure hope it will turn out better for the tomatoes next year.

I thought this would be an interesting picture. It's the start of our woodpile for the winter season. Unfortunately a lot of it is pretty green, so we shouldn't burn it this year. The flipside is that if we don't burn it this year we'll have a headstart on next year. Our neighbor has been incredibly generous and has brought us many truckloads of wood. All Tom has to do is split it up. He's got a huge pile of burnable wood yet to split, so we're thinking that we have at least half the wood we need for winter heating. We burn the wood in a wood boiler that heats our floors and all of our domestic hot water. On sunny days it's assisted by the solar water panels. If it's a real sunny day we don't even need to light a fire thanks to the solar panels.

The kids wanted me to take a couple of pictures on their slide. They were really enjoying the warm weather. They love posing for the camera.