Hot Temps and a Cooooold Freezer

It's super hot here.  We're doing all we can to keep our plants alive....and our chickens alive.  However, this heat is good for something!  Defrosting your freezer!  If you've read the "In the Kitchen"tab, you know that we have a tiny frig/freezer combo.  It's not an auto defroster so the little freezer section froze to a solid ice block.  Since it's tiny, we just wheeled it to the front yard and let it sit in the heat with the door open.  Several hours and a few hammer poundings later...we had a defrosted freezer.
Now, here's the purpose of this post...  We had lots of ice hunks on the sidewalk and we thought, "What could we do with these that would be purposeful and not let them go to waste?"  So we put ice hunks in our flower pots and around trees & bushes.

No matter what you are doing, try to think of ways you can re purpose things...even ice!

Our Garden Tomatoes

Amazingly, in this heat and drought, we have be able to get a few tomatoes out of our garden.

We planted heirloom varieties so they won't get as big as some of the hybrids but they sure are tasty.  You can't buy anything like this from the grocery store!  They are deep red and juicy inside.

Mr. Right is faithful to water them about every other day.  Otherwise, they probably would have scorched by now. 

If you don't normally plant a garden, I would encourage you to plant just a few tomato plants next year.  Homegrown produce is priceless!

Using the Sun instead of Bleach

As you can imagine, cloth diapers get stained really fast.  Mr. Right saw my basket of clean cloth diapers one day and thought they looked terrible because they were so stained.  They were clean, they just didn't look like it.  He told me I should bleach them....well, I had bleached them.  Then I remembered being told (and reading) that the sun would bleach them and disinfect as well.  So that day, I hung a load of cloth diapers out to dry.  Within hours, they were dry and bright white!  It was like magic!

I couldn't believe it.  I never thought the sun would do such a good job.  From now on, if I need to whiten my whites I will hang them outside.  Plus, as a bonus, anything hung outside gets that nice outdoor smell! 

Keep this in mind...the more bleach you use in your washing, the more bleach that gets put in our water system.  The sun is free and non toxic so take advantage!