Canning Pickles!

Last weekend Mom and Dad Bubela came over and showed us how to put up pickles. We did fourteen quarts! Here are a couple of pictures:

Me explaining to Kenan that I was very good at stuffing the jars, thank you very much :)

We are having such a good cucumber crop that Kenan put up 14 more quarts yesterday!

The Bubela Farmers Market

You're probably tired of hearing about the garden, but it's been so amazing that I have to post more pictures of it. We are currently harvesting about a half dozen squash, half dozen cucumbers, and some green beans and carrots every day.

Here's what the garden looked like yesterday

Here is what we harvested yesterday alone

Here's a great picture Kenan shot of a hummingbird at the feeder he put up. They are really loving it and I can keep an eye out for them while I'm in the kitchen

What is it with Snakes?

So we get home from dinner last night, watch a movie, and crawl down into bed. I am hopping in when Kenan jumps back and says "Ummm..." Guess what - there was a SNAKE in our BEDROOM. It was little bitty and he thinks it was a King snake, so it's actually a shame we killed it - they eat venomous snakes. But still - really? A snake in my bedroom? I literally nearly stepped on it. And that's the second close encounter I've had this week. Last Saturday I was walking around the block and I didn't notice a snake until I had almost stepped on him, too - he was making his way very quickly across the road. Kenan and I figured out later that this is what kind it was:

It's a Yellow-Bellied Racer and they are perfectly harmless - they eat rodents and stuff like that. They get fairly big, though, and the one I saw was probably about three and a half or four feet long.

Also, a friend of ours at work who also lives in Boerne found a four foot coral snake (the seriously deadly kind) in one of his plants right next to his house last week.

The moral of the story? I like snakes just fine as long as they're not the kind whose bite will do me harm, and even then I don't wish to see them - especially INSIDE my house.

Sheer Delight

This was just too adorable not to share. Below is what Madison looks like when we take her for a ride on the ATV:

You really can learn a lot from your dog - in this moment, she is perfectly happy. She isn't worried about where her supper is going to take place or what's going to happen tomorrow (tomorrow is a dim and distant future) - she is just delighted to have her face in the breeze and be sitting with her mom and dad. World's best puppy dog!

Even More Garden Progress

We never dreamed our garden would grow so well - now we are experimenting with different kinds of pesticides because while it's growing like wildfire, we have some insect critters that are determined to eat us out of house and home! Here are pictures from last night:

Wow!

Look at those tomatoes!

Our first red strawberry already!

The cilantro has grown into a tree! I picked some the other day and Kenan used it to make me fresh salsa - YUM!

That's a red pepper - we planted both red and green

The onions and garlic are doing very well :)

El Rey (The King of Country)

For Kenan's birthday, I took him to the George Strait concert this past Saturday. It was a wonderful show, and we were so glad that Brad and Erin were able to come with us. Here are a few pictures:

On the way to the concert

I wouldn't mess with those tough girls ;)

At the Alamodome

The birthday boy!

Garden Progress

Wow, are we ever impressed with our garden. While we were on vacation, our plants were hard at work. It has definitely helped that it's rained the last ten days out of ten or something like that - couldn't be better timing.

Such progress!

Look how tall the tomatoes are already! (the plants closest to me in the picture)

OK, so we were a little overzealous in our planting because we weren't sure what to expect in terms of what percentage of the seeds we planted would actually grow - looks like we'll have to thin these carrots out a tad :)

Look at our baby tomatoes! We also have the beginnings of bell peppers and blueberries

Look how well our Iowa potatoes are doing!