Picture update for June

 Here's a rather blurry shot of the playhouse when we had just the walls framed. The doorway is to the left. We have one front window spot, one on the right, and two in the back, leaving the north wall without any.

 Here's G putting up the exterior siding (before cutting out the window spots).

 Three years ago I planted three red currant bushes and three blueberry bushes. The blueberries have not faired so well. One of them was accidently incinerated by being too near the fire bowl and the other two are just puny and silly. The red currants however, are going gangbusters! I made a nice loaf of quick bread with currants and strawberries that was pretty good. The kids aren't super crazy about them fresh (they're fairly tart), so I've picked as many as I could and have dehydrated them for future muffins and pancakes and oatmeal.

 A partial shot of the center garden. My pal pointed out how it looked like a quilt this year since it's divided into squares. I liked that. :) It's different every year, just playing with what works best. I mustn't forget to mention that last weekend while weeding, we noticed our beets and greens were annihilated. Looked to be like the work of a ground hog. I set the trap and sure enough, by the next morning, we had a ground hog in the cage. I set it up again the next night to see if we could catch another and was a little surprised to see a big, fluffy skunk! Fortunately, no one got sprayed, although we did release both ground hog and skunk a few miles away. The veg is looking good again.

 So the peach leaf curl that I thought was inflicting my peach tree seems to either not been the case or removing all the affected leaves seems to have helped the tree because now, both the leaves and growing peaches look great. If that's the case, then my only other peach enemy are these dastardly urban squirrels who know just when things are at their peak.

 Potatoes growing by the chickens are doing well. We hilled and super mulched a few weeks ago.

 June means harvesting garlic scapes. After using as much as we could in potato salads, green salads, and sauteeing them with onions as the base for various dishes, we were still left with a ton. So being fairly lazy, I pulsed them in the old Cuisinart and packed them into the ice cube trays for future use, 2 tablespoons at a time. They smell amazing!

 Here's a tray of the red currants before dehydrating them. 

I ended up with four trays.

 And of course, any time you dehydrate a whole bunch of anything, you end up with not quite a pint jar of dried goods! Ha!

 We also dehydrated a whole bunch of strawberries a couple weeks ago too. I just couldn't bear making a bunch of sugary jam this year (partly lazy, partly cringing at the sugar content). The dehydrated berries taste really nice! Will be super good in oatmeal when it's cold again.

Here's the playhouse with walls cut, window spaces cut, exterior painted, door installed... We need to put on the roof, install the windows, make a railing around the deck and build the stairs.

There you go. This is a fairly accurate shot of what we've been doing most of the month! In two days we celebrate E's 7th birthday and I'm waiting for a local mama friend to have her baby. Other than that, our days are filled with trips to the library, the pool, and playground. S is in our local youth theater again, so we've got various rehearsals throughout the week.  Little M is doing great and it's so much fun having her enjoy the outdoors with us this summer! Love it!