Ups and downs

We have been home from Calgary a few days now.  Here has been a taste of that time, in the ups and downs:

We had a great drive back! But we came home to the power being out.  But we were prepared with lanterns this time!  We caught a mouse (we thought perhaps we were done with mice - apparently not). We saw northern lights! The squirrel unplugged one of his holes. My tiny tomato plant has grown so much! We tripped over a new pocket gopher hole, and they re-holed and mounded the dirt floor garage. We caught a pocket gopher in the trap Jeff set!

Aphids are eating my beans, and flea beetles are eating my greens. I got to spend a bunch of time on the Internet and I got so much done! We are both fighting nasty colds. But we have extra help with the plumbing! I wanted to paint more canola, but it's done flowering. It is super cold in the house with the cooler weather. I went to a quilt shop with lovely fabrics today (buying fabric may have had something to do with the cold)!

Today my day was largely spent on garden related things - research and on my knees picking aphids off beans and discouraging the flea beetles from my arugula and now my kale too. This is not the first time I have been disappointed in my vegetables. Once I nursed a tomato plant I had started from seed into October just to get a couple fruit off it and feel like my effort was worth something. Last year my carrots were pathetically small, although this year you can barely tell I'm growing carrots at all they're so tiny (it's not looking good). So it's probably not a bad expenditure of time to sit down and do a bunch of research, plus reading is more conducive to my attempts at drowning my cold in endless cups of tea. I'm also learning things about companion planting and already thinking about what next years garden could look like (bigger, for one. Better, for two).

The menfolk are in the basement getting damp and working on plumbing. On the bright side, there is water actually coming through the taps now, although not all the kinks have been worked out yet. Progress!