Strawberry season & the pond

Summer is in full swing now, it's downright hot today. I learned how to use my new ice cream maker (Christmas present) and have been really happy with it! (It's a KitchenAid and is all electric, with the freezable insert) Way better than the whole ice and salt combo in the hand churn bucket. Those kind of suck. Our strawberries have been producing already, I almost have too many to know what to do with (but not quite!!). And our blueberries have little blueberries on them now! I think we'll get a total of about a dozen berries on them this year, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

We're putting test hours on one of Vermeer's skid loader prototypes this weekend, it's quite a handy little machine. So Ryan built us a "pond" at the end of all of our water drain line, which he keeps calling a scrape. Considering the thing's about 4-5 ft deep at the water line, I'm not calling it a scrape. It gets to be a pond. I was pretty impressed he built it so well and so quickly! It already is forming an ecosystem, 2 days later. We have dragonflies and other little critters in the process of moving in. We're really hoping this will help us with our water management issues, because with all of our sand and sloped hills we have water problems like crazy!