Tomatoes, Chickens, Soaps, Rains

Yesterday, my ripest little tomato looked like this:

Today he looked like this:

Tomorrow he'll be ready to eat! Yippee! I have loads of plants with cherry and full-sized fruit. I can't wait! This particular plant is a Matt's Wild Cherry. So many look like this:

Adam is busy working on a chicken coop. A good friend offered us four young hens if we could make a good, safe place for them. We weren't really planning on chickens just quite yet, but I'm quite excited! The chicken area is this:

 That door opening leads to what will be their coop.
It's on the left end of the barn.

Adam bought a new roll of chicken wire to add new fence and reinforce existing fence.

He also put in two new solid posts.

He's building a new fence so that we don't have to walk through the chicken yard to get into their coop to collect eggs and clean up. He will build a small door for them in the side of the barn that will lead straight into their yard.
The back of the fence has openings too large -- they would go straight through it. So he's layering chicken fencing over it.

inadequate fence

Just having Ned in the barn, on his rope, with his door open, should cut way down on any predators. We've discovered Ned is a mouser and a rat-catcher. We're quite pleased with that!
I mentioned I made a second batch of soap. It turned out so pretty! Look!

lavender, tea tree, sandalwood

 I sprinkled little soap shards I had leftover from the previous batch, all along the top. I love the look.

a long block of lavender soap, ready to be cut

 Close-up view:

And the rains. Hurricane season is beginning, and I'm concerned about the heavy rains we get sometimes. On May 11, our entire house lot was under water, like a lake. We have low areas.

They drain right into a hard black pipe.

It feeds directly into a ditch that has remained absolutely full since May 11. It isn't draining out.

That ditch in turn drains into a larger ditch on the side of the highway ... which is also still full all these weeks. This is the reason the side ditch won't empty.

This ditch is the problem, and it's the responsibility of the department of highways, DOT -- I called today and filed a report with them. Hopefully they'll attend to the drainage before we get another gullywasher.
I'm off to work! I hope your day is going great!

Bailing Out

Update: The rain tapered off for the afternoon, but then returned with a vengeance this evening (Friday). Now we have new big leaks in the living room ceiling. Adam took down the ceiling fan. The leak is coming out of the hole where it was. We have a five-gallon bucket catching the water which is a very fast drip, nearly a constant stream at times. Rain should taper off again tomorrow, but return sometime Sunday with significant rain all day Monday. Not sure what our ceiling will look like after all that.

We've had rain ... oh my! have we had RAIN! The ground was saturated last week. We had the threat of Hurricane Joaquin coming up the coast, and a low pressure system with lots of water stalled right over our heads, unable to shift itself because of the hurricane. Our yard this morning:

Some shots from the front of the house:

A soggy mess. Adam decided to work inside. He removed the cabinets from the laundry room/back porch. They were detaching themselves from the wall.

We carried the whole thing to the front porch where he could repair it.

You can see the bad corner.

He's repaired it and will put it back up this afternoon.

Meanwhile ... as he's wrangling the cabinet, Julia comes out of her room and announces that the roof is leaking. Yeah ... that roof ... the one our contractor supposedly just repaired.

This was all highly distressing, and we all spent an hour hunting up buckets and containers for Adam to put around in the attic. It's quite bad. Some of these rooms had just been drywalled and painted. The contractor quickly offered to come do some more roof repair for free, but we do not want him working on our house again. Thankfully he had not yet been paid for the previous botched job. We have leaks today in spots that had never leaked before!
When the weather is bad, Adam likes to bake:

Those are raspberry turnovers, very  yummy.
The rain has slowed down, thankfully, and seems to be running off down to the river.

Collecting Raindrops

One of Adam's farm projects is making a rain collection system. Initially, he's using these two barrels that were left on the farm by Mr. M.

 They have spigots attached, and you can join them together into one water flow, attaching a hose. Then you spray water on the compost pile or wherever you need it.
These barrels are presently at the barn, collecting water from its roof. But first Adam needed to clean the roof and gutters of debris like pine straw and leaves.

The gutter is along the back side of the barn. And  here they are, raised and catching that rain water.

Later this is the shady, protected area where Adam plans to raise worms, red wigglers. Producing worm casings is actually a thing among natural farmer types. Quite beneficial for one's soil. Adam says, "We're growing soil, not crops." Excellent soil will naturally produce wonderful crops. So he's all about the soil.

The debris from the roof is already on its way to decay.

To be honest, I haven't been back to the barn since I took these photos a few days ago because it's been so rainy! I finally got that photo of the raised barrels just this afternoon :)
Almost as soon as we got the seeds into the winter garden, and I took the clothes off the line, and  Adam got his two barrels hooked up and ready to go ... the rain began.

Here's a photo of Oriental yesterday -- the town where we used to live, right on the Neuse River. When the wind blows strongly into the river, it piles the water up into the creeks and we get flooding. This is called "wind tide." The area on the right of the fence above is usually Raccoon Creek. The area on the left of the fence is usually Hodges St. Not yesterday! I guess we should call it Hodges Creek.
I'll snap a photo of the barrels soon for you. Meanwhile, a very fortuitous thing has occurred. Adam was chatting with our HUD inspector the other day. He happens to have some land and about eight Friesian horses. Adam read that those large animals put out about 100 pounds of manure each day -- per horse! This fellow piles it up and adds wood chips, but would love for Adam to come haul away as much as we'd like to have. Yippee! Well-seasoned horse manure is like gold. With the use of a friend's truck, Adam hopes to collect lots of this farm gold. Another nearby friend has cow manure also. All this wonderful stuff will put us about a year ahead, in our farm plan for growing things.

God is so good. Even though our lives in other areas are sometimes quite stressful, quite difficult, we see repeatedly that God is in this farm pursuit; He is blessing it. What a relief and joy that is! Because we truly don't want to pursue anything that He isn't participating in, with us.