Schmidt Homestead

Our new home in Woodburn, IL

Monday, June 4, 2007

It's hard to believe that less than a month ago that we had our first asparagus harvest, we hooked up electric and water to the trailer, and had the deck built. Now we can live there.

Our garden is in full force. We’ve had rain here at least every other day for the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t had to do anything but pick weeds and watch it grow. The only problem we’ve had is that our tomatoes haven’t come up. We planted them from seeds, but we can’t tell what’s weeds and what’s tomatoes. We finally decided that they weren’t growing (they’ve been in the ground for 2 weeks), so we bought 12 small tomato plants (3 each of 4 varieties), and planted them yesterday. I’m sure you can guess that today I looked at the garden at lunch, and I believe I see tomatoes poking up. We figured that would happen. I think we’ll be over run with tomatoes this year – at least I hope so! Everything else has sprouted and is growing like crazy – including the green beans that I got from Dad last year and the loofah that Emily brought from South Carolina.

A farmer from down the road came and cut our hay on Thursday. It was waist tall and quite the ‘critter’ habitat. When he was cutting the hay, every dog in the neighborhood was over and the sky was full of birds looking for him to stir up moles, mice, bugs, and who knows what else. He was over yesterday raking it to get it ready to bale. He said the rain has hampered him some, but hopefully he’ll get it baled up this week. He said he’ll probably get about 10 bales, and he offered us $20 per bale! Steve said we’d take $10, as he’s helping us by mowing our front yard.

We’ve really enjoyed sitting out on our deck in the evenings and enjoying our new place. At night, the field is lit up by flashing lightning bugs.

We moved the fish tank yesterday. We drained the water down low in the tank and left the fish in it for the move. It was a bumpy (rather sloshy) ride for them, but so far there haven’t been any casualties. If they make it the next few days, they’ll probably be ok.

The only major things left for us to move are the refrigerator, living room chairs and our bed. We’ll probably leave the living room chairs and our bed for a few weeks, so we can use them when we stay there, and so it looks lived-in.