3 inches of RAIN in the last couple of days!

I love it when Mother Nature takes care of the watering chores!  All I had to do was pick the garden, process the veggies, weed the beds, and start thinking about transitions.

I harvested most of the pink-eyed purple-hulled peas and cooked them.  There are still a few pods ripening on the plants.  I had space for only two 10' rows this year... not nearly enough to satisfy our love for southern peas.  Next year I'll plan better!

I stemmed a pile of bush beans and picked lots of pole beans and long beans ... they all went into the 'fridge.  I picked the okra and the jalapenos.

I cooked up a counter full of tomatoes (lots of green stripeys), along with onions, peppers, and celery, to make a thick sauce to be used in cooking this week.  While that was simmering, I made another big jar of refrigerator pickles.  We do love those crispy, sweet and sour pickles!

I weeded the bed that had recently been planted in zucchini and prepared it for its new resident ... fava beans.  Fava beans are a cool weather crop.  Where winter temperatures are above 10 degrees F - I hope that describes us this year - they may be seeded in August - September for a spring harvest. Pods may be picked when the green shell beans inside are plump. Or, for dry beans, wait until pods are dry on the plant before harvest.

Tonight we closed off the 'safe zone' from the hen house, forcing all the biddies to roost in the hen house with the more mature hens instead of in the separate smaller coop they've been using.  Several of the biddies have been 'flying the coop' late in the afternoon.  They love to get out into the big yard to run around, scratch for bugs, eat greens and figs and other delicacies.  The more courageous ones learned they could fly over the fence and didn't need to wait for me to come let them out of the chicken yard.  That habit had to be nipped in the bud.  Rouse and I stole into the hen house under cover of night and clipped their wings in the beam of Rouse's headlamp.