it’s me again!
Wow-I’ve been gone from this space for almost three months! I’m not sure where the time went, but our days have been chock-full. I’ll just work my way back here slowly, because if I try to do more than that, I’ll never get anything posted. Or, I’ll end up with a novel. Actually, I might anyway.
First of all, we’re loving our farm, and all the abundance that comes with it–sun, rain, work, play, veggies, flowers, rashy plants, creepy creatures, and this grass that nevvvverrrr stops growing.
We’ve been eating sugar snap peas, brand-new carrots, spicy radishes, and all the leaf lettuce and kale we can chow down. Yesterday we harvested a huge pile of the tallest bolted lettuce I’ve ever seen and hauled it to our neighbors’ pigs. Just look how cute this farmer boy is.
Today we picked our first ripe tomato! Pretty soon we’ll be overrun with more of them than even a born tomato lover can handle.
Cucumbers, zucchini, garlic, onions, potatoes, beets, pumpkins, watermelon, cabbage, and broccoli are growing like weeds, grapes are budding, and blueberries and wild blackberries have begun ripening. Next year we should have elderberries from the canes we planted.
Early in the spring, I planted one of our raised beds with carrots, and now it’s also thick with tomato plants I never planted. We also have mystery potato plants springing up everywhere, and two entire half-barrels of some kind of flowering squash vines which I also did not plant. Things just grow here.
Especially kids! And turtles.
Our pond is home to a giant bumpy old turtle (Zia stepped on it once and got a quick nip in the boot) and countless smooth-shelled turtles that sun themselves on the rocks and slip off when we come near.
The five hens are doing fine and we get 3 or 4 blue eggs every day. We’ve had two large rat snakes curled up in the chicken coop, each with an egg in its belly, and another extra-large one down at the pond.
The great blue heron still makes his visits to the pond, and several groups of Canada geese have stopped to rest for days at a time. We’ve had voles in the garden, guineas and deer running through our fields, and a mystery attacker that crept through one night and snatched a little fawn we spotted earlier in the day–leaving one tiny hind leg lying in the field.
David got a crazy case of poison ivy that lasted a month, and we’ve taught the kids to identify all the poisonous plants we know of on the property. I found a wolf spider crawling in my bed the other night, and caught a tick scuttling up my ribs a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, we haven’t encountered any venomous snakes or spiders yet.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case, it’s more like a golden one. We didn’t have any of these pests in the mountains, but neither could we grow our food. (Especially without seeds:)
Our flowers are blooming so profusely that we catch glimpses of new varieties all the time. We have a row of newly planted lily trees in the garden from bulbs David’s mom sent, which I think will become a high hedge by next year. The magnolias went through their wilty season, are blooming, and new leaves are beginning to pop up among the old ones.
To end this novel, here’s a lovely pic that sums it all up–chickens, grapevines, raised beds, lightning, and a rainbow. Full of promise and unpredictability–like this amazing crazy place we moved to.
