Home-Front Update

Labor Day Greetings from Coshocton, Ohio, where the weather is finally a bit cooler and the moisture from Irene floats overhead.

It's so hard to believe it's already September and that Fall 2011 is on our doorstep. We certainly won't mind the cooler weather after slogging and sweating our way through this past summer.

Pepper Relish & Salsa
Believe it or not, we actually were able to cobble together a few pints of salsa from our garden after all though we ended up focusing more on making relish by picking the green tomatoes that weren't going to make it to ripeness before rotting.

We were also blessed to have one of the MMS families donate two batches of tomatoes to us. So, thanks to Mike and Isobel, our salsa season wasn't a total bust. But because our peppers also failed so miserably we were blessed to support the local farmer's market to supply what we needed to go with the tomatoes.

Preparing to slice and dice green tomatoes, onions and Bell peppers for relish.

Karen loads up the relish jars.

Home Project: French Drain
To help pull water away from our house I recently installed a french drain. When heavy rains coupled with already saturated ground, sometimes we'd have some water weep into our basement. The drain eliminates the "ponding" that used to occur along the sidewalk beside our house and directs the runoff down over our berm and into the street. It's been tested several times since I dug it in and it's working great!

Cutting the sidewalk concrete.

Placing the pipe in position.

Local Flora & Fauna

A bumble bee enjoys one of our Purple Hyacinth Bean flowers.

Another bumble bee enjoys one of our Mexican Daisies.

While our veggies didn't do all that well, our flowers along the deck have thrived creating quite the gathering place for friendly honey bees, butterflies and bumble bees. With our little bird feeder nearby and a couple families of Cardinals nested across the street (and rabbits and squirrels and a neighborhood skunk) there's always some sort of suburban wild life activity going on around here.

In fact, Mr. Skunk and I had a close encounter early the other morning when I stepped off the front porch on my way to the mission as he came around the corner of our walkway from behind the bush and we both ended up trying to occupy the same piece of cement. There was all of 18 inches between his nose and my left ankle.

He was caught by surprise as much as I was and I graciously offered my verbal apology for disrupting his (her?) morning rounds, slowly stepped out of his path, and gave him the right of way. The skunk accepted my apology with great aplomb, gave me a nod, and continued on his pre-dawn journey across our front flower bed and beyond...