My Blue Eyed Girl!

Well, it's official!

I've been married for 9 years

We've owned our land for two years

I've been in my job for two years

All in the same week!

Oh, and I'm 29. That was last week. Yeahhhh....

FAMILY

My brother is getting married in 5 days, which means his anniversary is pretty much going to coincide with mine. Again, my darling wife is doing the pictures, so perhaps with his permission, you might see a few here!

My son is becoming a massive no-longer-newborn, he's tipping out around 16 lbs at 4 months old, and is one of the content-est babies I've ever met. His sister has put aside most of her jealousy, and has got some milestones of her own, including the finishing of Grade 1, and the starting of Grade 2 in a few weeks, or whenever I get around to finding the books. She now reads silently to herself, and can read words like "difficult" and "pronounce". We need to work on spelling and writing, but I have no doubts that she will follow in my footsteps, and become a voracious reader of anything printed!

GARDEN

This is my most successful year of gardening EVER, and we've been eating fresh garden veggies every day now for a month! The harvests are small, but steady, and the weather has been excellent (no hail). The peas are pretty much spent, the brocolli has started making heads, and is huge, I've picked about two handfuls of beans, several dozen monster onions are protruding from the soil, there is a couple of small but growing watermelons, and the cukes are spreading rapidly, and will cover the mounds they are on within a week's time. I don't know if the corn will actually produce, but the plants are tall and vigorous, so here's hoping for a nice September. Oh, and the sunflowers are taller than I am (not difficult, but still...) I have some potato tires with leafy growth, but when I push down I can't feel any spuds growing yet. Could be that they are deeper than the straw.

Today, I pulled a microscopic handful of saskatoons off one bush, and they were tasty!!! I think there were twelve berries in total, but they were large and plump, bending the branch over with their weight. Next year I'm going to plant 100 of those 3 year bushes, and some apple trees.

HOME PROJECTS

I've come up with an interesting idea, hopefully I haven't mentioned it already. I need to excavate a large pit to put my water tanks in. It would not be difficult to dig that pit out to twice as wide as the water tanks, and put a pit greenhouse in that spot. The tanks will be painted black, and the top will be insulated up to ground level, where I will build a platform over top of them, and make a sun-room at that level. Inside the sunroom will be some solar heating boxes, funelling heat under my house, which will hopefully keep the floors a bit warmer, and stop any drain pipe freezing. Then, I need to seal any gaps around the rest of the skirting, and tack some insulation along the inside of the plywood. That should hopefully help the floors from getting too cold, without actually pumping much heat down there. If the solar space heater works, I might put one on some of the sun-facing windows, or even along the south facing wall, with vents coming through the wall!