Hello everyone(anyone?)!  There’s nothing quite like the smell of a new blog!  While this isn’t my first attempt at blogging, it is still fun to make that first post.  And like most of my “first posts”, I’m not sure what to say.  Looking at “Her Version”, it seems as if she covered all the bases pretty well.  So maybe instead of writing too much more, I will work on the blog itself…tweaking and tuning to get it just like we like it.  Since it’s so very hot and so very windy outside, this isn’t a bad way to spend the afternoon.  If my aching back holds out that is.  I think I overdid something this weekend.  Hard to say if it was the spraying of grasshoppers, the ditching of the garden for irrigation, or the weeding.  I must say, thanks to all the help from Never, the garden looks really quite good right now.  Hopefully the hail will stay away from us this summer and we can harvest a lot of food this fall, not to mention eat a lot of fresh stuff this summer.  Well, as I said, I never really know what to say, so instead of just babbling, I’m going to end this post until I have something more interesting to write about!

To celebrate our first Father’s Day we decided to start our first blog together. We are expecting our first, read only, child in October and thought this would help keep friends and family up to date on her as well as our garden, horses, chickens, dogs and every thing else we like to complain about in life. Like our current inundation of grasshoppers. We are engaged in a life or death battle to preserve some small shred of the garden and my poor flowers. The hoards of grasshoppers have eaten them down to the stalks.

We have moved the teenage flock of chickens, all three of them, into the yard. As their cage travels the yard they enthusiastically chase down every little hopper that dares to enter their domain and feast upon them. They are limited to the confines of the cage to protect the garden and so are only as effective as the cage will allow. To supplement them we have been spraying insecticide, not where they can eat of course. I have carefully stayed far away from the sprayed areas with great concern for my rather pregnant belly. I avoided dead heading the flowers and walking barefoot in the grass. Until I bought fly spray for the horses. We went our separate ways through the store and met in the middle with our respective sprays. On the way home we compared labels only to find that the spray I never worry about spraying on my horses and no doubt getting covered in is the same thing in stronger concentrations than the grasshopper killer.