August Already!?

So here we are in August and the garden is really taking over the yard!!Seems like the last few weeks all the greenery has exploded! I have tomatoes sprawling everywhere, The broccoli is trying to take over and the volunteer mystery plants (squash, pumpkin, or cucumber, I'm not sure yet) is creeping out of the boxes and sprawling all over the yard!! It's great!!! There are lots of green tomatoes promising to turn ripe soon and my little plant of sungolds is producing tasty sweet tomatoes regularly now. I even found a surprise when I was watering the other day, a fist sized cantaloupe growing under the leaves, yipee! I might have a melon by the end of the season, how exciting!!!

Russ and I did something really fun today. We met up with a friend of ours to go on a horse back riding adventure. It is called a trail trial and it was put on by the Oregon Equestrian Trails group. It's basically a trail ride through cow pastures but along the way there are all kinds of horse obstacles; maneuvering through "the car wash", dragging logs, walking over logs, moving around balls, approaching mailboxes, navigating through a course of balloons, etc... Kimberly, our pal, has a youngster that needed some exposure to new obstacles and she happened to have an extra horse to ride if Russ wanted to ride too. So we hauled Warren down to a ranch along the Columbia River and went for a ride. We encountered all sorts of fun obstacles, Warren bravely stuck his nose on most of them, Jubee, the youngster was doing good to just see them from a distance and Dodge (how appropriate I was riding Dodge!!) was a pro at opening the mail box (though the instructions were to side pass to the mailbox allowing the rider to be close enough to open it to retrieve the Tootsie rolls) Dodge thought it was way more fun to walk up to the mail box and open it himself! It was a really fun day all the way around!

Back on the homestead; I have managed to find a way to keep the girls in their pen, they aren't too thrilled with it, but Fern has gone past just laying eggs in random places in the yard. She was jumping the fence and hanging out in the neighbor's yard. That is not okay! So now the chickens are confined we aren't home and they let me know exactly how they feel about it, too! burrawk cluck cluck brrraaawk sqwaaak squaaaak.....