Summer Simmer

Wow, where does the time go?? Spring is gone and summer has been flying by here at Peace Pups. This year I decided to stay home this summer and focus on getting things done around here. During the fall and winter months I'm so busy with the dogs that I have little time to keep up with household projects.

After years of my wife doing our garden I have taken over that task. We doubled our garden space and now have close to a acre tilled and planted with every kind of vegetable you can imagine. I built a small green house and started all of my own plants from seed this year. Our berry and fruit trees are maturing and beginning to produce as well. It's so rewarding to be able to walk out into the front yard and pick dinner; not to mention how good the fresh picked food is too eat. All of our gardens and fruit are grown completely organic. I've even added some laying hens to the mix this year. No eggs yet as they are only around ten weeks old but hopefully by fall we'll be collecting fresh organic eggs. I see this entire project as a means of not only eating better but it also saving us money on our food bill. If only I could feed the dogs from the garden!

Front Yard Gardens

 The flower gardens are compliments of my wife. Since she's not doing as much with the vegetable gardens she now has much more time to plant flowers and plant flowers she has! There's not much lawn left to mow with all of the new flower beds she has tilled up but that's a good thing. One thing I don't like spending my time on is mowing lawns. There are many other things I would rather be doing so the less lawn the better.

Two skin boat kayaks were on the project list for this summer. They have been completed and we just returned from a  week of paddling and camping on Acadia Island Maine. Both boats worked very well and seemed to draw attention everywhere we went. They were a great conversation starter and I met quite a few interesting folks over the course of the week. I did see a couple of home built skin boats but the majority are plastic or fiberglass. This is a picture I took of both kayaks resting on the shore of Somes Sound where we paddled our first day.

Skin Boats on Somes Sound

As usual the coast of Maine was beautiful. We've never stayed in Acadia National Park before but I enjoyed it very much. There is a lot of traffic in July but there are plenty of hiking trails and open water where you can escape the crowds. We brought our bicycles and did several rides on the car free carriage roads. Of course I can't go to Maine with out eating some sea food and with our camp stove set up we were able to find plenty of that to bring back and cook ourselves.

Now that my one week vacation is over it's back to the garden and preparing for fall and winter. We usually begin fall cart training with the dogs around the beginning of September so with a little luck that is only five weeks away! We've had record highs here in July so I'm very much looking forward to some nice cool fall weather.

Off to do some weeding!