The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron.

The words above are from Deuteronomy 28:23, but they describe my garden for the last couple of weeks to a "T".  It was impossible trying to pull weeds because the sandy soil in my garden was as hard as concrete.  Even hoeing didn't get the job done.  The sky may as well have been bronze, because no rain came.

And again, the moles got my corn seeds, leaving only 3 tiny plants in one row and 4 in another.  Farmer Ed, whose blog is called Riverbend Journal, suggested Diatomaceous earth, but I forgot about it this last time.  The only corn I have doing well is the corn I planted in hills, and I did use it on those.  So I'll remember next time.  I'll try one more time when the soil is dry enough from the one inch of rain we got today; and if I succeed this time, I may plant more a couple weeks later.  The lack of rain and the abundance of moles has had me in a pouting mood and I had no desire to to a blog entry.  The extreme heat didn't help anything, either.  Not that pouting helps, but that's my go-to behaviour when life gets me down.

Our son from Georgia will arrive next Thursday evening and spend four days with us, along with granddaughter Lyndsay and her daughter, Maelyn.  So we are getting excited about that.

About three times a week the weather-guessers have been telling us we are going to get rain, but evidently Farmer Ed in Iowa got it every  time, because it missed us and went north.  This morning when they once again said rain was coming, I ignored it completely, having lost all my faith and hope, and probably a lot of my love.  So I was thrilled hear the rain falling gently long enough to do some good.  I spent lots of time in the garden pulling weeds this afternoon, happy as a clam.

I did have one bad experience at noon today:  I had a cooked turkey breast in the freezer and decided to get that out and warm it up.  I had a can of cranberry sauce to go with it, made scalloped potatoes, and cooked some broccoli... not from my garden, because I can't get broccoli to do well.  But I buy it often.  I just left everything on or near the stove so we could help ourselves.  Cliff filled his plate, then I moved over near the food.  I put a good amount of everything on my plate, ready to eat.  However, I sat the plate down too near the edge of the counter and it all went splat! on the floor; of course the plate landed upside down.  So that food was wasted, although I did let Gabe have the turkey.  While we were eating, Cliff's sister stopped by; she'd gone to the country vet to buy her dog's prescription dog food, and we we were on her way home.  We told her to get a plate and eat with us, although there was no more broccoli, thanks to me wasting one good serving of it.  We had a good visit.  

As far as how the garden is doing, there are green beans that will be ready to pick in a couple of days.  We've had Harvard beets twice and I pickled some beets that I forgot to set out today.  No canning, just refrigerated.  I have some really big tomatoes coming on, and can hardly wait until they ripen.

I guess that's about all I have.  I have been reading all the blogs while I was pouting, so I didn't forget any of my blogger friends.

Peace to all.