Zinnias Blooming; Hydrangeas Looking Fabulous; Picking Apricots and Plums; Sewing New Cushions Covers for Outdoor Furniture

We have been busy with a lot of a little of this and that around the farm.

The apricots are ripe and I mean ripe right now!!!  I picked all the lower limbs and up to height after using my orchard ladder of 6'.  Frank picks all the high ones on his 10' orchard ladder.

I got plopped several times with over ripe apricots fall on either my head of shirt, a real mess.  This week, we will be drying them in our out door dryer and make dried apricots, yum yum.

I also picked the pluot/plum tree that is ripe.  I wish I knew the name of it, it was here at the farm when we purchased it.  Sweet on inside but tart skin.

It seems like I blinked and the zinnias started to bloom.  I thought they would grow another foot first, but maybe the heat wave forced the blooms, but it always makes me smile when I see zinnias blooming in the garden.  Loads of color.

The hydrangeas have been pretty fabulous looking too.  I had to water them twice a day during these last few 90+ days.

Frank has been building our outside patio cover for over several months.  We never seem to have the money to just go

buy lumber, so he keeps his eye open at our local Ace Hardware side yard.  They sell lumber and several times a months, they put a stack of wood in their parking lots, called kulled lumber at a reduced rate.  Frank has been checking and buying lumber that he cuts into the widths he needs, stockk piling enough to finall build the patio cover.  After he cut the pieces to build it in modulars, he painted all of them so once they are up, they are painted.

When it came time to put up all the lengths of 2" x 2" xx 16' pieces across the top of the beams, I insisted that Frank not do it by himself and actually I didn't like him to do it at all.  After all, the amazing man is over 70 years old always working like a 30 year old, but up 10 1/2' in the air walking across beams was way too much.  So after saving a little here and there, we hired our neighbor fella, who happens to be a licensed contractor to do just this part of construction.  

He came last week and finished off those top boards which gives us about 50% shade.  That was a nice treat to actually hire someone to do something for us, we always do repairs or building ourselves.  The patio turned out nice.  Frank is painting some touch up spots, wiring for a new fan out there and putting in cute decorative lights all around it.  I will post photos when completely finished,

I took all the cushions off of our old patio furniture and I am making new covers and pillows.

We have some relatives coming to visit in a couple weeks, so our projects have an extra motivation to finish them up so they look nice for company.