county fair

Well I am recovering from a week at the county fair- The Eastern Michigan fair to be exact. When I was a girl in 4-H I loved being at the fair- we got to go for a few hours every day to care for our animals but we seldom got to stay the day, because we lived close to the fairgrounds.

I still like the fair but a week of it at my age is a little much. The Master Gardeners in our county have a whole 100 by 60 foot building to develop into an exhibit, which I am in charge of. This year we had some wonderful exhibits, including a moon garden that you had to walk through a darkened corner to see under black lights and a scary poisonous plants garden plus other wonderful gardens. It takes over three days to set all this up so we start early. Then I have to be there each day to open the building and I stay until evening volunteers come in to watch the exhibit until closing. I stay the last day from 10 am to 10 pm. Then we clean up on a Sunday- clean up takes only a few hours thankfully- it’s amazing how fast it comes down.

I had lots of fair food, tastes good going down but keeps you awake later. I also had lots of noise, heat and walking on cement floors. This year we also had an elderly lady run her car into our building, luckily no one was hurt, a hail storm, try listening to that under a metal pole barn roof, and a young girl have a seizure in our building just after I opened one morning. The first few days were almost unbearably hot and humid but the weather cooled down a bit later in the week. Last Sunday when we were packing up it was chilly and a cold rain that looked almost like snow was falling.

The worst thing about all this fair time is I seem to lose all sense of what is happening at home. My routine is gone and it always seems like the animals and the weeds grow like crazy while I’m away. I came home with a new yellow tree rose and a couple new herb plants- and I need to plant out some of the plants I grew in pots for the fair.

While I was gone our new hens started laying and we don’t have nest boxes up yet. I picked up 6 nice brown eggs today of various colors and sizes. No more store bought eggs I guess. The heritage turkeys are flying out of the pen and they ate the back half of each head of cabbage in the garden. They fly right back into the pen if you start toward them. Steve enlarged the inside pen and we are going to get those nest boxes up. Once the hens are laying reliably inside I think I will allow them some free range time outside their pen.

My sweet corn is ripening! It is so good. The bad news is that my tomatoes are succumbing to the disease that is sweeping our area. It blackens the vines and kills them after a few days. I was of the opinion that it was late blight, but our ag agent for vegetables thinks its something else. We sent some samples in to the lab.

I gave the puppies we have here their shots and wormed them today. Three are going to be sold on Sunday to members of the same family. Then we have an ad coming out for the rest. After this litter is gone we are going to gut and remodel that room and get a door to the back yard put in. Three of my female dogs are in heat but we are not going to have any litters for a while. This is the first time Gus, the Jack Russell stud, hasn’t broken out of his kennel when females are in heat. I guess the new kennels, or maybe the neutering- worked!