The girls made another attempt at planting a vegetable garden. They pretty much just tried to plant as many of our old seeds as possible before they go bad. So there is a little of everything in there. We'll see how it goes this time, or if only the gophers will profit from their efforts.
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Meanwhile, we met a really nice neighbor through NextDoor that has a large garden and chickens. We've been getting some fresh eggs and garden vegetables from her. We try to help out in her garden when we can, but when she is in town, we are busy and when we have time, she is busy. The kids don't even mind working in her garden because her garden is so neat, and the fact that she lets them eat any ripe strawberries in her strawberry patch while they work, certainly helps.
We brought her a loaf of Christian's crusty rustic bread once when we picked up some eggs and she shared with us some of her sourdough starter. We have made our own sourdough starter through out the years and it has been mostly disappointing in certain ways. Plus, we can't stand the amount of waste involved in creating and maintaining a sourdough culture when you don't bake a loaf of bread everyday. Her starter is super active, much more so than any of ours ever was. It is pretty fantastic. We had one culture that we started from Nappa Valley grapes which tasted superior, but it was never this vigorous. But since we eventually killed it off from neglect, we were not able to perfect it.
So, we are enjoying the sourdough a lot more this time around and I have found all kinds of recipes to use the excess sourdough in which has been both fun and rewarding. We still discard a little bit of it here and there when it gets too sour because we forgot a feeding or something but it has not been very often.
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We went to visit with my mother on Mother's Day. We had a luncheon with my sister and brother's family at my sister's house. We had indulged a little too much on all the food and decided to go take a walk around the local hillsides. There a few trails through the parks in the neighborhood. It wasn't that close though, so we had to drive, and unfortunately, the parking lot was closed on one end due to some rain damage on the trail. We ended up driving down to the other end of the park but by then, it was starting to get late and we were not as enthusiastic for our walk.
When we finally got back, we grazed on some of the leftovers for dinner and the kids helped Aunt Wendy pick peaches from her tree. We ended up getting home a lot later than we had anticipated.
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Caitlyn started her year end state and district tests so she had really weird schedules for most of the month. It was pretty irritating because they would feed Caitlyn lunch about an hour after she had breakfast and then by the time she got home, she was hungry and then I would have to make another trip out to pick up Emily each day since Caitlyn had minimum days.
