Raised Garden Beds
Week 6 - 9/02/19-09/08/19

Week six is starting out with a lot of raised garden beds coming to the farm. This past Saturday, David had an area here on the farm plowed for gardening. Today, some are on their way so we can start our fall planting.

Seems the thermometer never leaves the 100 degree mark. It actually does. It was 104 the other day but I did not take a photo! Raised garden beds will be started today but it is too hot to plant.

Our Raised Garden Beds

Monday 9/02/19

Our beautiful early Monday morning sunrise was spectacular.

Happy Labor Day! David's Garden Seeds® is closed today so we are staying out on the farm, trying to get things done and to get ready for the arrival of some of our raised garden beds that have been put together this weekend. Usually, David builds his own, but he needs more than 80 and just doesn't have the time to get them set up. Sixteen of them are supposed to arrive at the farm today. Then David can start fall planting.

The raised garden beds arrived this afternoon and were set up. PVC piping was bent to form the outline of a greenhouse with the raised garden beds inside. Dirt is being added to the beds now. Then shade cloth will be added while it is still so hot. If it gets cold this winter (ha ha ha), we will take the shade cloth off and put plastic up.

We went to Devine this evening and got some more drinking water and some dinner. It did not seem at all like a holiday due to our circumstances. Being in the same room constantly, cramped and hot, just sucks the hope out of you. The dogs go out and quickly do their business in the little fenced in yard and rush back in the shed.

I have pretty much given up all hope now to move into our home and live a normal life until the new year. I cannot take anymore disappointment in this miserable heat. I have been spending my spare time working on our business, David's Garden Seeds®.

Tuesday 9/03/19 Another Day of Raised Garden Beds

Kitty telling me to go to the other bed! We had to get two rooms for 4 animals at this hotel so there was plenty of room for everybody to stretch out.

Today was an exhausting day. As we were leaving to go to work, our contractor friends were arriving to build more raised garden beds. They ended up building 44 of them today. They placed them out in the plowed area and then our neighbor with the tractor filled the new raised garden beds with dirt.

We got to work and took care of some business, then wrote paychecks. David made several phone calls to the Palm Harbor Home people to see if we might be able to get into our home any sooner than the beginning of October. He got the same run around that I got last week with the first person.

He then spoke with someone at the factory and she said someone would be out at the farm tomorrow. We are pretty skeptical at this point, but we will see. I am almost positive no one will show up but wouldn't it be amazing if someone did? I am not sure how much more of living in a hot shack I can take.

David also spoke with someone at TXDot to see if we really need concrete on the driveway since none of our neighbors have concrete. We were told we did not need concrete so that will save us a bit of money. The Transport people had said we needed it. We left work around 3:30pm to go back to the farm.

When we got back, I noticed that my ankles are very swollen and hurting. David's legs have been hurting a lot lately. We have been working hard in the 100 plus degree heat with little sleep in the heat box shed. It is hard to sleep in there with three dogs and a cat climbing all over us in the night.

David found an area hotel that takes pets so he made a reservation and we packed up and headed over. I did laundry at the hotel and we are going to enjoy sleeping in cool air all night long in real beds with plenty of room for the animals to have their own space and not sleep on top of us. There is the luxury of a real shower and a real refrigerator and microwave in the room. The real bathroom means I don't have to keep making trips to the portable potty, especially in the dark. It is so nice not to have to deal with the outhouse and the heat for one night.

We are both working on our business on the computers from the hotel, not in a 10 x 16 foot hot shed tonight! I am sitting on a soft cozy bed, not trying to work on a broken couch.

Kitty thought she was royalty getting her own bed at the hotel. She quickly claimed the one I wanted and stayed there almost the whole night!

Wednesday 9/04/19 More Raised Garden Beds

Raised garden beds are being laid in rows of ten for 20 raised garden beds to a PVC greenhouse. Notice how sandy our soil is on the farm.

Good Wednesday morning! We slept good in the hotel and I thought we would go downstairs, get some breakfast and relax watching some TV. David wanted to check out right away so we grabbed a breakfast taco at ChicagoBurger and went back to the shack.

The plowed area with raised garden beds being installed. You can see all the way up to the back of the farm property in this photo.

The contractors were there building more raised garden beds. I took the things in to unpack and the dogs started going ballistic. I looked outside and there were some men from Alamo Transport. They came to hook together the electric wires. One of them said the wires are not ever marked from the factory. They got them put together and left.

Remember how yesterday we were told that someone from the factory would start the inside trim work today? Good thing I was skeptical because we got an email this morning saying that next Monday, the 9th of September, someone would be here to start.

We called the transport company and they said they will send people over tomorrow to start on the septic tank since we have a tank of water they can use. We asked what they heard from the water company. She said she called them all day yesterday but she always got a busy signal. We drove all the way over there and they told David they are still waiting on a permit from TXDot to install our water meter.

Last week, we bought a third shed. This one is yellow for all of the gardening tools. We got a text today saying it would arrive at 3pm so we need to leave work early today for the farm so we can tell the guy where we want the third shed. We don't want it in the way of the raised garden beds.

We are at work now, briefly, to make sure everything is running smoothly.

The new yellow shed was placed in front of the raised garden beds. In the foreground, black shadecloth is covering Home Sweet Shed to help keep it cooler.

We got a call around 1:30pm saying the shed would be at our place in an hour so we rushed down to the farm from work. The new, yellow shed arrived soon after we got back to Home Sweet Shed. It was placed right in front of the new raised garden beds, blocking my backyard view when I am hanging laundry.

I spent the afternoon doing yet more laundry in my tiny washing machine. Then I hung it out. It got windy and overcast for a bit but we did not get any rain.

We had dinner at Billy Bob's Burgers for the first time last night and it was so good. Then we got gas and ice, headed home, went in the pool which was chilly, watched some Cannon videos, and called it a night.

Thursday 9/05/19

It was very overcast this morning with a tiny bit of pink in the sky at sunrise.

I got up five times in the night to use the orange outhouse. It was a very rough night! The stars were bright and then I got up to the photo above. The clouds have kept the heat down some this morning and the humidity is much lower.

David got up to hunt down some breakfast while I fed and watered the dogs and Kitty. We are staying here today because we are expecting the septic tank to be put in but it is now after 9am and still no one has shown up.

I put my boots on and walked the property. It made my hips hurt a lot, but I did it. David's phone just got an alert that we will be getting rain, but then I don't think they will work on the septic tank. Either way, there is no rain and no person digging a hole where all of the pink flags are.

Here is a raised garden bed closeup with PVC hoops from my morning walk around the farm. Once all of the beds are in place with sand, David will plant and make them into greenhouses.

This is what our home and farm complex looks like from the top edge of our property. It all looks so tiny. I got a "new point of view. Seems a shame to go and waste a life on such tiny tiny things."

Finally, just before 10am, I heard something funny and went outside. The septic tank people were there with two backhoes, digging sand and make huge holes all over next to the raised garden beds. In fact, they told us we had to move them. It started raining. One man was on the phone and finally got permission to go in a different direction so we did not have to move our raised garden beds. They worked out there all day and now there is a septic tank and a lot of pipes, all of which are not buried. They left sometime after 4pm, never letting us know what is going on.

This is what our yard looked like after the septic tank was installed. They left it like this overnight so it could be inspected the next day.

David says it probably has to be inspected. I wonder how long that will take. We have owned the land for well over a month so they had plenty of time to get all of this done.

We still have the pretty blue flags out front; in other words, still no water meter.

I spent the day working on social media posts for David's Garden Seeds®. David spent most of the day on the computer as well. The dogs just laid around and the cat hid behind the couch as it was just too hot to do anything else.

Friday 9/06/19

Early this morning before we left to go to work, the septic tank crew showed up and did some more work in the trenches in our backyard by the raised garden beds and then left again. Lucy was growling a bit. I went out and saw them leave so I called the person in charge to find out why they left without finishing the job. She said they had a little more to do this morning and that it had to be inspected and once that was done, they would cover everything with dirt.

We woke up to fog this morning, the first foggy day we have had since we moved here. Everything looked pretty cool. It was a bit cooler for a while. We left to go to work but never made it as we made a few stops along the way.

We have been looking for some trees for the yard. We went to two popular nurseries in the San Antonio area this morning and neither of them had any. One said they won't get a good number of trees until January. I told the lady I thought they had to go into the ground in the fall. She told me January is fall...That is not how I learned seasons when I went to school. So we left both places empty handed. Then we went to get some furniture.

I had no problem finding furniture at all. I picked some out, paid for it and left. I hope it won't be delivered until we are in our new home, whenever that might be.

We stopped at a Bill Miller for lunch on the way home. After numerous attempts at ordering our food through the drive thru, the chick on duty gave us what she decided we ordered which wasn't even close to what we wanted. Honestly! We won't visit that Bill Miller again. She was clueless, even when we told her what we wanted at the window. No apology, no let me correct that for you, just, well this is what I got you.

After that, I received a text from my credit union asking if I authorized spending the money on my new furniture. I responded with YES like the text told me to and they sent back an automatic text saying all was well. I should have known better...

So we made it back home to find all of the piles of dirt in the yard were gone, the septic tank covered over so I guess it passed inspection. Yay.

I spent the rest of the afternoon washing our laundry in my mini washing machine.

Our big generator crew is coming tomorrow to finish installing the big generator that will power the house since the electric company will not hook us up until November. We have been trying to get water and electricity since July.

Our neighbor is supposed to fill some more of our raised garden beds tomorrow as well.

Supposedly the trim out crew is still coming on Monday to start fixing the inside of our home. It is a mess in there and the home has now been out here for three weeks, that is 21 days, today. How can it possibly take 21 days and we are still not in our home, but in a 10 by 16 foot shed?

I will be working more on our business this evening on the computer. David is doing the same.

So at 5:30pm, David and I left to go to town for gasoline, ice, and dinner, plus a few supplies from WalMart. That is about 18 miles one way. Shortly after we left, I got a phone call. It was the FedEx man who had never been to our new home before. I had been expecting him all day and thought he had given up by then. He uses a moving truck to make his deliveries but wears the FedEx uniform.

He asked if we were home. I said no and he said he was stuck in the sand in our yard. (We have a driveway that we paid a lot of money for.) He dropped off the Chewy.com box for our animals that I had ordered and decided to cut across the sand in our front yard. He proceeded to go deeper and deeper into the sand and then called us to pull him out. There is no way our SUV could have pulled a great big Penske moving truck out.

We continued on to town, got our supplies, our gas, our ice, and some food from Taco Bell. Then my phone rang again. This time it was a foreigner from my Credit Union telling me they have been monitoring my account for suspicious activity. I spent $67 at WalMart this evening and then $5.39 for ice at the gas station on my card. So she brought up these two charges. I explained that yes we had just been to WalMart and then I got ice because we are living out of an ice chest. She brought up ten other charges that were small this week, mostly ice and some supplies.

Then she finally brought up my furniture charge from today. We pay cash for things; we don't use credit cards. I confirmed that indeed I bought some new furniture for my brand new house that we still can't get into. She said okay that she would turn my debit card back on so I could use it. I told her that was very generous of her since it is my money. She said thank you. I will be finding a new bank once we get settled. This has happened too many times over the past 15 years.

We got back from town and of course, the Penske truck was still stuck in the sand. A tow truck was trying to pull the huge truck out. We unloaded the SUV and put the ice in the ice chest. Finally, after about 15 minutes, the tow truck pulled the Penske truck to safety. There are deep tire tracks in our front yard where we will be putting grass once the manufactured home people are through with whatever additional torture they are going to bless us with.

The Fed Ex man walked over to us and we told him that he is not the first to get stuck in the sand but that he has to stay on the driveway. Our driveway is torn up in several spots already from workers and visitors who thought they could drive across the sand. So he asked us how we drove across it. Four wheel drive, my brother, four wheel drive!

Deep tracks where the FedEx man got his truck stuck in the sand in our front yard. Stay on the driveway!

We finally went into our shack, ate our sort of cool Taco Bell food and then went swimming before getting ready for another night of uncomfortable and often interrupted sleep.

Saturday 9/07/19

Today was quite the busy day after some fairly decent sleep for once. Around 6:45am, I let the dogs out into our little fenced yard to do their morning routine. The gate we have is secured with a chain. It is easy to let the gap between gate and post be too open if you don't pull the chain enough. Ethel, our smallest dog, is a runner and she loves to explore. She took off while I was using the outhouse. I came out, washed my hands, and let the dogs in, noting that Ethel was not out in the yard and she was not in the shed/shack.

I took off, heading for the road since that is where I found her the last time she escaped last Sunday. I was walking up the driveway to the main gate, calling her name and whistling. All of a sudden, she came running from the neighbor's property across the highway. (Did I mention we live on a highway with frequent traffic from the sand mine?)

Ethel looking for a way to get out of the temporary small yard gate that we have at the shack for now. If the chain is not stretched out enough, she runs right out of the gap.

Surprisingly, she ran right to me. I told her, "Let's go get treats." She took off ahead of me for the shed/shack.

I started out washing a few loads of laundry and hanging them to dry. David worked outside setting more things up. Then our neighbor showed up with his tractor to put sand into more of our raised garden beds. We now have 60 raised garden beds out there which means they will soon be three greenhouses.

We went to town for lunch, came back and got a text saying the generator team was working on the generator platform and other things and would install it this evening. They showed up around 5pm and finally got the generator and a propane tank installed. They worked well into the evening and left around 9pm. They said they would be back tomorrow to finish up.

Around the same time the generator team showed up, our contractor showed up with his family to show them around and to see what is needed when he shows up for work on Monday morning to build more raised garden beds. I had a good visit with his wife since we are friends at church. It was nice to have someone to talk to for a few minutes. A little while later, our neighbor showed up with the fencing materials. He and David decided to split the cost for the fence between our two properties.

My ankles have been swelling a lot in the heat and, of course, without refrigeration, we can't eat anything decent. I guess all of the fast food is giving me too much salt intake. I swam and then spent time of the couch with my feet up while working and watching the last two Masterchef episodes that I missed while we were out here in No TV Land.

The neighbor started putting up the fence on the top of the hill. Once this is complete, our entire property will be fenced and if we close our gate at night, we won't have to worry about Ethel running off again.

Once everyone was gone for the evening, I went out to the camping shower in our yard and washed my hair and showered and went to bed. David did the same.

Sunday 9/08/19

Sunday started off early. I woke up at 5am to see my husband up and working with a light on in our shed shack. I was so tired but had to use the outhouse. I got up and let the dogs out. I saw that David had parked the SUV out in the front in sand to be out of the way of the generator team last night. The SUV was glowing. I walked all the way over to it and saw that he got the driver seat belt caught so the door did not close all the way last night when he went out with Lucy and Annabelle to find us dinner. I fixed the problem. Hopefully, the battery is not dead.

I was hoping to sleep until 7am. Lucy was hobbling around on three legs instead of four. She has arthritis in her right knee but refuses to take her pills out on the farm. I have no peanut butter here in the shed shack. She will eat the pills if they are dipped in peanut butter. When we go into San Antonio for church this morning, I will try to remember to get some for her. We got her to eat one pill with a tortilla and some jerky. I put the other one in her dish, but so far she has not eaten it.

We actually dozed off and got up again around 7am. We got ready to go to church, stopped at Burger King to pick up breakfast and stopped by work to take care of a few things. Then we went to church, stopped by Walmart on the way home to pick up some peanut butter and some cobb salads and made it home.

New fencing with T posts has begun.

Our neighbor started work on the fence between our yards. He has been putting up T posts and put up the first 100 feet of the fence from the top down.

The generator team still has not been here yet today. We texted him and he said it was his day of rest....

We finally took off for a hotel to give ourselves another break from the heat and the cramped conditions at the shed. The contractors will be here in the morning to start inside the house and to continue work on the raised garden beds. There are forty more raised garden beds to go.

Kitty again taking over the room she shared with me.

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