Winter garden

 The Yarnell Community Garden Project decided for the first time to try a winter garden. So we constructed hoop houses to protect the plants.

 Our first winter crop included broccoli and cauliflower, which I planted and brought down to the greenhouse in the garden.

 When they were big enough, we transplanted the seedlings into beds. Roger covered the soil with leaf mulch to preserve moisture. He also painted gallon milk jugs black and filled them with water to absorb heat during the day.

We also had a very nice little crop of lettuce. We picked lettuce every week and had a garden-fresh salad nearly every day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

 Gerald make a list of all the projects that remained undone and tackled the projects one by one. There was a bit of molding in the kitchen to do.

 Which have it a nice, finished look

Road trip!

 In the fall, Gerald's high-school buddy, John Anderson, and his wife, Vicki, came to visit.

 They spent a couple of days at the ranch. Then we took them up to Sedona, where we rented a little cabin on Oak Creek.

 We did the usual things. The drive up Oak Creek Canyon, the visit to Tlaquepaque... It was a lot of fun.

One flue over the cuckoo's nest

 After four-plus years of burning construction scrap and pinyon pine, we thought it would be a good idea to get a chimney sweep out. The only trouble was the apparently only chimney sweep in Yavapai County didn't like the pitch of our roof. We weren't sure what to do.

But the chimney sweep said he'd come out and give the place a look when he was next in the area. He did come, and decided that he could get most of it if he did the job from the inside. I had never seen this done, and found it interesting. They basically took a vacuum-like thing and used it to clean the flue. I was a little worried about soot getting on the floor, but they were very careful, as you can see.

On the beam

With Gerald's manager back to work leaving us more time at home, we, too, got back to work... on the house. One of the projects that has been near and dear to my heart, is to finish the faux beam in the kitchen, so we wouldn't have a hole in our ceiling. We started by installing a 2x6 to cover up the hole.

 Meanwhile, Gerald worked on finishing the beam itself at the shop. It went together in three pieces. One on each side and one at the bottom. We had to use clamps to close the gaps.

 Then Gerald used ring shank nails to hold it together, and voila!