Summer kitchen

We’ve been keeping busy around here. There is still quite a few things to plant in the garden, but there’s still plenty of time. We’ve set out tomatoes, sweet peppers, sweet potatoes, and broccoli plants and planted some peanuts, squash, cucumbers, and beans. That’s not counting the potatoes, peas, onions, and salad greens we planted earlier. We’ll be planting more squash, summer and winter varieties, more beans, okra, corn, etc. as we’re able. It rained today, so we’ll have to wait for the garden to dry out a bit. I also planted nearly half an acre of corn last evening. Today’s rain should help it germinate quickly.

I have a friend who is coming over here to work on house-building-related things with me a couple of days a week now. That helps to keep me on task so that we can get things done. There are so many different projects to do that it can be difficult to focus specifically on just one. Some things get put off when something else demands attention. With Jon coming over to work, I’m forced to focus my energy and efforts on some specific projects that need completed.

This week we worked on the summer kitchen. We’ve been using the wood cook stove on the porch quite regularly since I set it up a few weeks ago. Our plans were to enclose the porch, making it into a summer kitchen.

We built walls (only needed on two sides) on Monday. On Wednesday, we put on siding, screened window openings, put trim around the window openings on the outside, and reglazed some windows. I have seven windows that a friend gave me two or three years ago that have been stored in the barn that we’re using for the summer kitchen. We hung one window – the others will be installed in the coming week.

With the walls and screen, a lot of bugs will not have easy access. That’s a good thing. I have to do something about the leaks in the roof. The roof has leaked since I put it on when I built the porch a few years ago. I’m pretty sure that most of the leaks originate in the junction between the porch roof and the house roof. The shallow pitch of the roof also has an effect. I’ll attempt to rectify the leak situation soon. With the rain today, we didn’t have rain blow in the windows, just leaks from the roof in a few places, especially when the rain was pouring down hard.

We acquired the sink and cabinet from a friend who removed it from someone else’s house. It’s a single sink with double drain boards and a white metal cabinet. I haven’t hooked up water to it yet, but I’m going to. We’ll run the drain outside and use the water for irrigating Anne’s flower garden.

You can see my clothes hanging up to dry in the last photo. I got soaked doing chores this morning. I had to chase the neighbor’s cows (10 Holsteins and a calf) off of our property (I hope he fixes that fence sometime) while it was pouring down rain. Then, I set up some more paddocks for our cows since I was already wet.

We’re already pleased with our summer kitchen. It’s going to work out quite nice.