A scorching hot break between heavy rain storms gave me a chance to finish the carrot bed. A friend came to visit for a few day. Her visit was jinxed with bad weather and my period being particularly painful. Nonetheless, we harvested and processed cherries, dug for potatoes, and weeded the tomato bed.

A scorching hot break between heavy rain storms gave me a chance to finish the carrot bed. The moody weather is exhausting–and requires a lot of flexibility. I’ll take what I can get for some garden time.

Pepper really has no clue this is a garden bed. He is so confused.

This was supposed to be a three-sisters bed but things did not work out. Many things did not germinate. So I adapted.

Corn, a single bean, a single squash–I guess it is technically the three sisters… I’ll try again next year. I now know better how long each seed needs to germinate and grow.

The rhizomatous grass is hard to pull–and will grow back from tiny pieces left behind. Just like the horsetail, I’ll figure it out.

A hazelnut tree had been growing back toward the garden house, so my husband cut some branches. They are still alive, so they might grow a tree here. I am okay with that possibility. In the meantime, they’ll make great edges for the bed.

We work with what we have here. And right now, I have these branches.

They sure are less ugly than the plastic planters on the rest of the bed. I do have an idea for those, but not yet.

I planted more carrots, some beans and squash, in the hopes that I’d have better luck this time.

And then I tested the slow-motion function of my new camera. I’d sold my iPhone in favor of a cheaper phone. One of my big worries had been the camera.

We are trying hard to get away from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the like. Big corporations should not get a free pass just because they are big.

Oh, right. Garden. This is a potato fruit. It’s toxic. There are no children here, so we leave them.

The next day brought another window to rush to the garden for some work. The rain had stopped a few hours earlier, giving the grass a chance to dry.

A neighbor gave me his very old scythe. It still needs work but it is already better than the cheap one.

This bed has been mulched since the fall. Not as heavily as I would have liked, but it was never bare soil.

The horsetail and one of the rhizomatous grasses like the bed anyway, but otherwise, weeds are rare. It often seems like horsetail is worse here, but it just has no competition. I keep plucking it out.

Everything in the garden is slowly ripening. We’re almost ready to harvest cherries, especially the tree that’s where I park my car all the time.

And there are the first… Look at that.

The first hazelnuts are clearly forming and I really hope I get to harvest a lot of these because I have a lot of hazelnuts so even if most of them get eaten by birds and such, I’ll have some.

And you can see the first things happening on the walnut as well. It’s really great. I love it.

And plums, too!

The next day brought even heavier rain. The rain just would not stop.

It’s another really ugly day. We had another really bad rainstorm last night. It was really bad all night. You could hear the thunder all the time. It’s probably even too windy to talk but I’m going to try. We’re just here to quickly move some water into the barrels that still have room. And then we’re going to head back home because this isn’t fun.

While the pump was pumping water from the other side into the bottom storage barrels, I moved water on this side to speed things up. I did not want to wait for the pump to do it all. I wanted to get back home. I was sick of rain.

The pump was still pumping, so I cleaned up everything else, then packed up the pump. The shorter hose was definitely helping. Now, there was some pressure on the hose.

Some of the tomatoes have started fruiting. I hope the rain stops before they all burst. In real time, the rains are still here. I am worried about these.

None of the peppers have sprouted, but a few of the rescues are still alive. Maybe, some of them will make it. It’s been a bad pepper year.

They’d need some help against the weeds but some of the beets and chard had sprouted successfully. I could use a ginormous pile of grass clippings or straw, please.

I spent a lot of time hiding from rain. It wasn’t too bad when there projects at home like the white currants I’d harvested in the rain a few days earlier.

I’d spent hours in front of the TV to get these sorted and cleaned up. Next time, I’ll leave the stems if I don’t plan to make jam from the pulp.

The previous year, I’d accidentally bought a steam juicer that someone had sold as a canner. I did not notice my mistake until I was home.

I’ve been cleaning up a lot because my friend is coming today, but obviously there’s always a project that needs to get done.

And the white current was ready to harvest, so obviously I harvested it before the rain, which means I had to process it and I made syrup from most of it. And I put the pulp in here to see if I can make some juice from what’s left in, well, after all the syrup making.

I’d never used a steam juicer–and didn’t know there should be a hose attached.

I’m sure I lost quite a bit of juice to steam. It still worked.

A friend was coming to visit me for a few days. We’d planned for a few nice days in the garden. But, guess what… it rained.

We had two missions that needed to get done anyway: straw for the potatoes, and cherries. She filmed and handed me straw, I dug around the potatoes.

I was able to get some straw from the garden neighbor but apparently, the rain is not just affecting my garden. One small bail was all I could get.

She harvested in full force. My period had arrived and I was in pain.

Her time here was jinxed. Despite my strongest pain killers, I was barely able to do anything. For her entire stay, she did almost all of the work for us while I tried to stay upright.

She harvested a basket of cherries. I harvested mullein leaves for tea.

Look at all those cherries. We sorted, cleaned, and pitted them in my living room that night.

The neighbor’s chickens definitely liked her being here.

One afternoon brought a break in the rain. We used it to weed half of the tomato bed. My friend and I had a lot of fun chatting while we plucked away at the weeds.

She had even more fun digging around the dirt for potatoes. She found a lot–but also a lot of rotten ones. We discarded the yucky mom potatoes and took the rest home for dinner.

We’d planned to go swim in the ocean but weather and period turned it into a short visit to the beach. There was a sports event on the beach, so we did not stay long.

My friend watched (and filmed) some of the wildlife while I sat on the beach struggling with pain. I never even saw this snail in real life.

Pepper would have preferred to stay dry but braved the water.

So long, and thanks for being here.