Busy Weekend

I normally like to do non-techie things on the weekends to decompress my brain.  This weekend was no exception.

My wife volunteered me to grill all the meat for her church dinner.  They were having a "wild game" dinner complete with venison, trout, salmon, deer liver, pheasant, pork, etc.  Not all the meat was grilled but quite a bit was and I was manning two grills at once (one charcoal and one gasser).  I ended up grilling about 50 lbs or so of meat for 120 or so hungry Baptists.

It was kind of humorous because I am Catholic and of course I told them I sprinkled holy water in all the food and they were now all Catholics.  They were mildly amused and the head Pastor said "that's ok, we were planning on taking you upstairs and dunking you in the tank anyway"

They are a good group of people, in general.  Missed mass at my own church though, which is something that kind of bothered me a bit.  Ah well, I was still worshipping, just in a different place!

I visited my God son for the very first time as well.  His mom and dad (my nephew and niece) were exhausted so I didn't get to visit with them much but I got to hold little Jacob while he slept soundly on my chest with his little arms wrapped around my belly.

I also finally got the garden tilled up and all my tomato plants put out.  I've got really hard heavy clay in my garden that I've spent a couple of years trying to break up and am only slowly making progress.  It's pretty tiring bouncing a tiller off of the clay for so long (and believe me, it bounces a lot before the tines finally bite in) but I managed to get it all tilled up and got about 20 heirloom tomatoes planted that I started from seeds two months ago.  They are about 6 inches tall now and are very much ready to go out.

I planted about a dozen big beefsteak plants... half German Pink Beefsteak and half Mortgage Lifter plants.  The Mortage Lifters are a heirloom beefsteak variety as well and run a pound to a pound and a half per fruit so they are huge.  The Pink Beefsteaks are potato leaf so I hope they don't cross with my others.  I don't have any other PL varieties out so I'm hoping it will be ok.  I also planted a couple of cherry tomato plants (Grandpa's Golf Balls and Black Cherry) and then 3 or 4 Black Prince tomatoes for summer eating.  We'll can most of the big tomatoes and eat the others fresh throughout the summer.

The onions are finally coming up in the raised bed and the turnips, beets and radishes are starting to fill out.  I don't have a lot of them planted, I basically just wanted to use some of my new raised bed space in the time gap between now and when my squash and cucumbers will go out so they are more of a test run.

All in all, a busy weekend.  I'm tired today but I feel good knowing I got a lot done.