Living Large In Our Little House

At the time I’m writ­ing this post at Our Little House, it is cold and blus­tery and not at all like spring, I’m also unusu­ally tired from the start of Daylight Savings.

So I thought I would have some fun with a post today and hope­fully, give us all some­thing to look for­ward to in The Top 10 Signs Spring is Near:

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Jalepenos and toma­toes they are huge and bushy now

So far, the con­tainer gar­den at Our Little House is flourishing.

The jalapeno pep­pers are dark green and still growing.

Unfortunately, for the pack rats, they are his­tory, taken care of with our rat zap­pers. We have a big rab­bit hop­ping around the yard, we see it because the dogs chase it every morn­ing when they leave the house, but it hasn’t both­ered the tomato plants. I do put up the large dog gate on the party deck, which prob­a­bly helps.

Dale started call­ing the tomato plants our tomato “trees.”

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Our roma tomato plant was as big as this cherry tomato plant

Mother’s Day did not start out well for me.

When I got up, Dale said, “Something got one of the tomato plants last night.”

I went out to the party deck and sure enough, two of the three roma tomato stalks had been sheared off almost at the base.

When I wrote about toma­toes and rats a cou­ple of weeks ago, I was writ­ing a gen­eral update on what was hap­pen­ing on the deck, I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily think the rat would eat at the tomato plants, but now I’m not so sure.

We’ve been won­der­ing what has been attract­ing rats up on our deck since we don’t keep dog food or any­thing else out there.

One night last week, I took Molly and Dakota out for their before bed potty excur­sion and Molly imme­di­ately started chas­ing a rat on the deck.

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This past week­end was a work week­end at Our Little House. We started on that to-do list and Dale had a few unplanned projects, such as replac­ing that heat­ing ele­ment in the hot water tank.

The ser­vice­man came out last Monday, spent all of 10 min­utes on it, declared the solved the prob­lem with­out drain­ing the tank and check­ing the element.

It worked till Wednesday and we couldn’t get them back out here until this Monday, so Dale did it himself.

So much for my praise of extended war­ranties. We’ve decided we will not pur­chase them any­more on things Dale can fix, which is quite a lot.

Everyone knows around here that the well water is extremely hard, mak­ing it hard on heat­ing ele­ments in hot water tanks. Dale decided if the “Yahoo” who came out here didn’t know that much, he didn’t want him back (besides, I was get­ting tired of not hav­ing enough hot water to even shower).

Now we know the tank is cleaned to Dale’s stan­dards and it’s been prop­erly fixed and every­one from here to Chicago (where the store is based) knows we’ll never shop at their store again.

Dale also got the new win­dow air unit installed and we needed it. We’ve had three days now of near 90 degree or over temps and high humidity.

My main job this week­end – in addi­tion to get­ting our paper­work ready for the tax accoun­tant and orga­niz­ing The Belle Writer’s Studio – was plant­ing our deck garden.

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