Vince loves to dig.  I’m so lucky because he never minds planting a tree for me, or tilling up another garden spot.  I’m happy as long as he stays off the trencher because I know that means I’ll be without water . . he always cuts a water line as soon as he gets on the trencher.

My main question is . . how many shovels and picks or whatever those things are . . does it take to dig a hole?  I guess one could ask how many sewing machines it takes to make a quilt so I should probably just forget my question.

There’s an RV hookup in this area and we had been using that water  for watering the garden but it isn’t a freeze proof connection and there’s no turn off valve.  If something happens to that line, we have to turn off all the water.  Our house was built to be a deer camp and putting an engineer (Vince) in a house that was built kinda haphazardly almost guarantees that Vince has a project.

So, he’s digging up this line, digging to where it can be deep enough to put the drain below the freeze lines, which is only 12″ here, and then he’ll re-install the RV water connection and put a couple of water hose connections.  We’re going to add a second well as soon as we can get a witcher and driller out here to see where we need to put it.  That second well will be mainly for the garden, will work off a solar powered pump and will also have a hand pump.  Witchers and drillers are in pretty high demand around here and it takes a while to get them out.

Then he saw me over taking pictures of his handiwork and he came at me with the ax!  Not really.  He went to get an ax because there were some roots in the way of his digging.

And . . what about those blue shorts?  In order to get the best possible markdown rock bottom bargain price, you sometimes have to buy what no other human would be caught wearing.  I think electric blue shorts may fall into that category.  Some days I’m just not sure about that man of mine! 

It’s now been a year since we closed on this house.  We’ve worked hard to get things done and as most any homeowner would say, we still have a lot to get done. While our neighbors were visiting the other night, they were talking about how much we had done.  When you have your list and you’re just checking things off, you don’t realize how much you truly have done til you stop and think about it.  Here’s a little rundown on what we’ve done so far.

All the gutters got pipes added to keep them from draining against the foundation of the house.  I remember when Vince first did this and I was complaining about them being white and blog readers told me I could paint them, or I was going to plant something around them.  You can see how far I got with that plan.

Since watering is such a huge chore around here, I think in almost every picture, you’ll see water hoses stretched across the yard.  And yet, even with lots of watering, there’s so much bare dirt with no grass growing.  We’ve done our best to keep the fruit trees, blueberries and garden alive but we just can’t spare enough water to keep grass growing.

We (mostly Vince) has planted 12 fruit trees.  We have a dozen pomegranates ordered.  We have one pomegranate, four figs, three peaches, one cherry, two sugar pears and one regular pear.  I deserve a little credit because I’m the one who keeps them watered and that is important, right?

Several of our fruit trees are a bit confused.  The pear tree is covered in little pears and the fig trees all have small figs on them.

Vince got my garden spot ready, got it fenced and we had a spring garden and now a fall garden.  Everything is doing great!  There are 2 rows of beets, 1 row of lettuce, 2 rows of carrots, 1 row of chard, 2 rows of mustard greens, 2 rows of kale, 1/2 row of broccoli, and 1/2 row of cauliflower.  Somewhere in there is spinach . . I think it’s at the end of the chard row.

Strawberries are in a permanent location.  If you enlarge the photo you’ll see that they’re blooming.  I get a few strawberries per day from the plants.  They never make it inside the house.  I usually eat them right out in the garden!

The asparagus is in a permanent location too.  Now that the grasshoppers have stopped eating the tops out of the plants, it’s doing so good.

When we got here, we had two outside faucets – one on each end of the house, but they both go through the water softener.  As much as we water, it was crazy using softened water so Vince added several freeze proof (or resistant) hydrants around the yard.  I do keep soaker hoses attached to the faucets at the house and use those to keep the foundation watered.  I wish it wasn’t softened water but . . it is.

The faucet for the cows’ tank leaked so Vince re-did that one.  You can see the trench still open.  That’s for water lines to be run to an area where we’re going to plant more trees.

There were two chicken coops built, along with the chicken runs.  There was a driveway built and the gate maker is still working with us on the design for the gate.  Hopefully he’ll start working on that very soon.  And, the big item was getting the sewing room built.

I can’t imagine that we could be happier anywhere . . right here is where we belong.  I’m not even sure what we plan to do in the next year but you can bet it will be something and we’ll have fun doing it!