Our pomegranates are ripening. I don't know how much jelly we will make this year since our crop is much smaller than in the past.
Our garden is almost done for the season. We have potted our pepper plants, the pumkins are ready (a month earlier than we intended), we have one lonely canteloupe ripening up and a couple of overgrown tomato plants at the end of their productive season.
Here is another picture of that nice big pumpkin in the garden. I haven't measured it, but it is between 18 inches to 2 feet tall. We also have a slightly smaller orange pumpkin and a much smaller white pumpkin.
With the pumpkins ready a month before Halloween, plus the fact that the baby is due about that time. We will probably be cutting these lovely things up for cooking. We got ourselves a real pressure canner to handle canning vegetables. So we plan on trying it out by preserving our pumpkins for later use. The kids love pumpkin muffins and we will be able to make a lot of muffins with these.
Now we haven't just been gardening. After we replaced our livingroom/diningroom floor recently, we were planning to make changes to our kitchen floor next. You see the poor floor has looked nasty since we bought the house, it was discoloring, and we were tired of it. This is one of the few pictures we have taken that shows the old floor.
You can't see much of the floor. It was linoleum that had a white/cream tile print on it. It had at least a couple of deep cuts in it that went all the way down to the cement slab. It had scorch marks on it of all things. It was slowly discoloring to a grayish color and had been for a few years. About a month ago, while we were canning salsa, we were running our dishwasher more frequently than usual to clean canning jars. We noticed that when we did this we had water seeping up from the cuts in our floor. This should not happen. After checking for leaks under the sink (nope) we tried living with out the dishwasher for a few days (everything dried out), then ran the dishwasher (wet again). Yep... we had a dishwasher leak that was seeping under the flooring. Apparently the flooring only went a few inches past the front of the dishwasher then the machine was sitting on the bare concrete slab. When the leak happened, it was dripping on the concrete and seeping under the flooring. This must have been an ongoing leak for some time because I have been noticing the growing grey discoloration for at least a couple of years now. We were growing mold under our floor.
With our intentions of changing out the floor soon already firmly set in our minds, plus the added incentive of a leaking dishwasher, we decided that this was one change that was not going to wait until after the baby was born. So last weekend, Tim and a friend from work moved the appliances so we could do the replacement. We touched up the cabinet paint while we were at it. We also bought a new dishwasher. So our kitchen is back together, it is fully functional again, and the floor looks good for a change. It is relatively inexpensive vinyl sheet, but that is perfect for a kitchen. What do you think?
We are still eyeing the remaining floors. Perhaps we can finish up the floors in the family room and our tile entryway sometime this spring. We will progress as we can afford it. In the meantime some springs in our most heavily used sofa just gave out last night. We will be in the market for a sofa next.
That's probably enough for now. I'll do another post soon giving an update on the pregnancy. I have an appointment on Monday.
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