Garden of Plenty

Our garden is coming along splendidly. The peas, spinach and lettuce are all done after a month or so of filling our fridge (and our friends' fridges) with green stuff. Now we've just started harvesting the first carrots and banana peppers. Even with a deer coming in and chomping on a few of the pepper plants they're still doing great, and soon we'll be able to sample our Sante Fe grande, anaheim and red chili peppers. I expect the poblanos, jalepenos and bells will take a few more weeks, though.

See? We can actually grow peppers!

Anaheim peppers

Our first crop of banana peppers.

Yay! Minnesota sweet corn!

Chleo enjoying the shade of our monstrous tomato plants.

Cinco de Mayo! Or is it Maio?

Home on the Range

Yeah, I know...I've been neglecting this blog the past five months or so. But with our new start here in Oregon, I thought I'd revisit it and use it to share some of our adventures living here on the ranch. This will be a pretty quick post, without much explanation, but there will be more to follow in the weeks to come.

One of our blossoming cherry trees. The grassy area directly behind the tree (between it and the next fence) is the proposed garden plot. Sonja's been busy clearing all the pruned branches and various detritus from the area in anticipation of breaking ground in a few days.

The house! This is the front view with one of our little arches. The garden is behind the big tree to the left.

Soon there will be green things galore filling the space behind Sonja. And no, we didn't get a new dog. This is one of our landlord's pups...a really sweet Aussie named Quigley. I think you can see the ranch horse, Ghost, behind the chicken coop in the background.

This is the view of the house from across the John Day River. The white building is the house, the large, red-roofed building to the right of it is the garage/shop, and you can see Ghost munching on his hay to the right of that. Highway 19 passes along the base of the hill behind the house.

This is the bridge across the river that we use to get to our landlord's house. The water is pretty high right now with all the snowmelt, but I expect that it will get much lower as the summer progresses.

And here is Ghost. We are looking forward to exploring the hills around the house on his back. He's a real sweetie without a saddle on, so I'm hoping that he's the same with one.

So there you go, the first batch of photos from our new home in Oregon. We are both totally in love with it and can't wait to start making the house our home and exploring the countryside. I'll be posting more pictures on here and in Facebook in the coming weeks...much more frequently when we finally get internet access.