Life carries on up here on the hill.  Our area of the province, Interior health, had gone, I believe, over a month with only one reported case of covid, and then last week all hell broke loose and there have been over a hundred new cases in the past week.  The city we are close to is Kamloops and I do not think that there have been any cases there, but the city in the other direction, Kelowna is where all of this has occurred.   It all started on the Canada day weekend tourist area of Kelowna.

The long term care facilities in our area, have just this past week opened up to allowing one visitor for each patient. It will be just one designated person or friend.   We will be sending out a new memo this week asking that designated family member visitor to be very cautious with their interactions. I know that few people have a loved one in a nursing home, or even KNOW anyone in a nursing home, but if you do, then you KNOW what a hard time it has been.

I guess we HAD breathed a sigh of relief…. how naive… how naive.  ….sigh!

I thought I would post a couple of lousy pictures of a dreadful weed I have just become acquainted with. I did mention it before, but I FINALLY figured out what it was. YELLOW BURR WEED.

The plant goes along innocent enough, gets to a certain size and has prickles making it harder to pull out…

.. and then the final stage the little green pods shown here turn into brown burrs.  BRRR. GRRR.. So these little Burrs stay dormant in the soil for up to 2 years.  It is so amazing, I have never seen this weed anywhere here… and trying to figure out how it got ONLY into my garden area, the only conclusion I come to is that the equipment that was driving all over the place likely spread the seeds from somewhere.  I also contacted the seed company where I got all of the cover crop seeds, because apparently this burr can affect grain lots.  They never got back to me, and I am sure it is unlikely.

On to the continuing saga of “the house”.  Our garden out front has really worked out well.  I get all the orphaned plants from a friends garden in the city, she is calling it birth control giving all the babies to me.  I guess I have an orphanage for baby flowers.  The Lavender we planted last fall all survived, so by next year it should be nicely filled in.

Tucker has sussed out where his place shall be to watch the world turn from. I am sure THAT is where he is going to LIVE.

There WILL be a patio there.

OH and what’s this….?  To the right of the SeaCan… It appears that the sheds ARE reproducing.   Our refugee village is taking shape.

Actually Ken has built another shed for drying the Garlic, as you can see at THIS stage the shed is no more waterproof than the house.

It is a small shed and so Ken HAD to be creative to be able to hang 5000 garlic, and he did NOT disappoint.

So there is a 2×4  angled down from the wall and a 1×1 going across and that is where he is tying the bundles of 10 garlic plants.

I  thought if I showed a few more pictures it would make more sense… ( like 3000 words).

We have a great system, I pull all the garlic and Ken ties it all up. I love pulling the garlic out of the ground  and would hate the tying up process. It is interesting how we just work into the jobs that best suit us.

Oh and ONE more picture to show that the roof has metal on it. So waterproof now

OH and I DID want to show a picture of our son Dylan, the plumber with his fancy schmancy little troller he scoots around the crawl space working on all the plumbing that goes on under the floor boards, and the crawl space is only 3 feet.   AND that is where all of the plumbing is…. well lots.

Oh and yes there has been MORE rain and more rainbows.

So this is the house with all the plywood on the roof, however it rained a few days later and the water just came in pretty much the same is if the plywood was not there.

This is TODAY and they are applying the “peel and stick” which apparently  makes it waterproof.  This is extremely important because all the stuff that has to get done prior the the pouring  of the concrete floor needs to have a water proof roof.

Things have been quite slow up until now, but 2 weeks from now we will have a somewhat finished floor throughout the house.  The wonders of concrete.  Of course there will be blocks of wood in the floor awaiting our creative time to finish the rock work in the floor.  Our goal is to get the house “to lock up” which means walls windows roof are all in.

Then we can relax and work on things more gradually.

But for now, we are working hard to make use of our garden produce.

With all of the chicken manure out there, the plants all look huge, but not a ton of veggies yet, perhaps too much nitrogen.

but we have great suppers each night,

Much love From Janet, Ken and Tucker, ever watchful Tucker.