Before I get to the weekend, I should give a brief summary of this week at the yardstead. We had a small storm with high winds and hail come through our area on Wednesday. This brought much needed rain but a few problems. Almost every tree in the yard lost a branch or two. Although this is great to get rid of weak limbs before a hurricane might come through...It means a lot of work this weekend for Jason. Also, apparently domesticated turkeys provided with shelter do not always know that when it rains they should enter the shelter. After the storm blew through Jason found three turkeys sprawled in the dirt in front of their shelter barely breathing. I spent at least an hour and a half rubbing and drying the turkeys in front of a heater in the bathroom that night before I was sure I could leave them by themselves to recover. Did I mention that Jason and I are expecting a baby. No pregnant women that is one week from delivery should have to sit with turkeys in front of a heater. But the turkeys are very grateful and have made a full recovery. All of our other feathered friends made it through the storm just fine. Ducks and chickens do not need to be told to run for cover during a hail storm.
This weekend will be full of moving limbs and cleaning up. Some of our garden suffered during the hail and wind and we must decide which plants we should probably pull up. I have started other plants and we will just need to replace the damaged plants that are not likely to survive the heat and insect pressure after the beating they received on Wednesday.
I have fresh ginger to plant in pots and winter melons to put along our fence. I plan to write a story about winter melons and include pictures I took of trellised winter melon at Epcot last year. I will also put a recipe or two for this unique asian vegetable in with the article. We will take many pictures of the ginger during planting and at different stages as it grows. I will go back and add these to our 'growing ginger' article.
As I mentioned before the yardstead could go from a family of three to four any day now. As the months go by we may write some articles on preparing baby food fresh from the garden.