The InDeeds of Life: June 2009

Berries

This weekend I got to hang out with a friend from college. Together we had a number of grand adventures. One of which was picking berries. We went to a local u-pick farm and picked all kinds of yummy things.

Blueberries.

Red Raspberries

Black raspberries.

With all those berries (almost 10 pounds of them) we had to do something with them. First, we made pie. It was mostly blueberry pie, but officially triple-berry-yumminess.

We also froze lots. Frozen berries make for yummy smoothies and muffins later. Yum yum yum.

Some we also saved to snack on fresh. Berries galore.

It was a lot of fun! Next week they hope to have peaches ready for picking....and eventually maybe some strawberries (they had one batch, but the rain knocked that batch out quickly).

B&E: Curious

They've only been here a few days, and I already can't get enough of these little fellas.

I visited again recently, and they are a little more curious than before.

Ernie is more curious than Bert.

Ernie is almost ready to be petted.

Love them.

Newbie?

There are many things that happen on the farm that I don't understand. I try and just go with it and not question too much.

But yesterday afternoon when I walked out of my house to see this:

I could not help but be very confused, and somewhat skeptical.
Lots of questions could be asked of this situation, such as:

Why did we buy square hay bales, when we just recently baled up our own round ones?
Why did they move the dumpsters, in order to make room for this hay? Is there not enough other space?
Etc

But perhaps the most perplexing question is:

Was this a farmer-in-training failure, or did they mean to stack it this way? (note that I am using the term "stack" in the loosest sense of the word)

Perhaps it dropped off by a helicopter - so it just kind of fell from the sky. That might explain the messy-ness.
Perhaps they were intending to make some kind of weird hay sculpture with a deeper, artistic, meaning.
Perhaps, there is some real, legit, farming reason that you would stack your hay this way. I wouldn't know.
Or, perhaps there is a Newbie Farm Hand on staff who just couldn't quite figure out the complicated science of hay bale stacking.

Who knows. If I ever get to the bottom of this mess, I will fill you in.

Pretty Lillies

On both front corners of our little farm house we have lilles. White ones on one side, pink ones on the other. They have been racing to bloom for a long time now....

The big blooms getting fatter and fatter every day - waiting to burst open.

The white ones bloomed first.

and boy howdy were there a lot of them!

Last year there may have been half this many....maybe.
I love lillies....and I think the white ones are my favorite.

Update on Bert and Ernie

Just a quick update to say that I talked to the Land Lady today, and yes, it is ok to fall in love with Bert and Ernie. They were abandoned by their mothers, then adoped by our landlady. And even though they are boys (which normally get eaten) these fellas represent the start of our own Petting Zoo! Apparently the landlady wanted goats.....but Bert and Ernie just kind of fell into her lap :-)

Before too long our farm will be a full fledged Bed and Breakfast, Vineyard, AND Petting Zoo. So fun!

Bert and Ernie and the baby bird

Marge and I went for our normal evening walk today - up and down the driveway. There is usually nothing new to see on this walk, so I rarely bring the camera. Today, however, we got as far as the silos before I hurried back and grabbed the camera. This is why:

There are some new critters on the farm, as officially welcomed by this here welcome sign which is hung on the pen by the silos.

This...

I don't know which one is which yet.
They are cute little fellas though.
They are clearly adopted - their tags are different than the ones our farm uses to tag baby cows, and they are in a pen all to themselves. And they are special - they have names. Other than Molly, none of the other cows in the herd have a name.

They are quite skiddish.

And amazingly adorable. Sooooo cute!
I don't know why they are here....but I suspect they will be here for a while (since they have names and everything)

In other baby-farm-animal-news....I found this little guy on the farm today too.

He is not as cute as Bert and Ernie, but definitely a baby. He couldn't quite fly - though he tried really hard. He did manage to make a TON of noise though. Yikes! He wouldnt stop squawking. I think he was talking to his mom - cause some other, unseen bird was also squawking. He was a smart cookie though - when I got too close he immediately ran for the corn field. Its impossible to find anything in that cornfield, and he knew it. So there he hid. Hopefully he figured out how to fly and is now safely exploring the farm from the sky.

Craft Question

I have a question for you folks, my wonderful readers of whom I ask very little.

My question is as follows.

I have recently acquired (for free!) a bunch of small pieces of fabric.

Not much is bigger than a square foot in total - and nothing is square.

I have folded them neatly, so that I can kind of assess what I have, and I feel as though there must be some wonderful use for all this fabric. But I can't put my finger on what that wonderful use is.

What do you suggest I do with all this beautifulness?

The obvious answer would be a quilt....that is an option I suppose. But I am in no particular need of more homemade blankets (I went through a knitting / crocheting phase and have lots of left over blanket-projects to keep me warm)

So, what are your thoughts? Quilt or something else?

Blog-Dead

Blog dead...its like brain dead. It when you can't manage to conjure up anything to blog about. Nothing, nada, you just draw a blank. I guess it hasn't actually been that long since I last posted....but I wrote that post a long time before it actually posted. So, if I haven't actually written a blog post in a while.

The recent lack of blogging is sort of brought to you by a serious shortage of blog worthy life happenings. Just this evening, as I tried to get out of my blog-dead state of mind I thought "well, what shall I blog about...doing laundry....seriously, I haven't even done that recently"

Then it hit me - the fact that I have not done laundry in a long time but am finally doing it, makes laundry a news item. On top of that I have a really sweet washer and dryer, which makes it doubly blog-worthy. All I needed was some pictures, and I could break free from my Blog-Dead state!

So here it goes.

This is my laundry room.

It is also my entryway. It has a concrete floor - good for laundry rooms, bad for welcoming guests. Oh well.
At first glance they seem pretty normal. It's a washer, and a dryer. Nothing fancy.

Then you look more closely.

"Heavy Duty" and "Super Capacity"
Those are good words for a washer.

It doesn't look much bigger than your average washer.

But having come from a much smaller washer, the first time I did laundry in this new machine....I was blown away. You can fit a ton of clothes in this washer. Seriously, it fits a lot of clothes.

With a almost-literal ton-of-clothes in the washer, you then begin to think to yourself: "Self, how will I ever dry all these clothes?

So you look at the dryer

mmmmhhmmmm
"Heavy Duty" "Extra Large Capacity"

Don't ask me why they use different terminology on the dryer, cause I have no idea. But I do know that you can fit the entire ton of clothes you just washed into one dryer load.

It's a beautiful thing.

It makes the ongoing task of laundry just that much more bearable.

When I return to normal sized laundry appliances, I suspect I will be in the depths of house-work-despair for some time.

Until then, I love my industrial size laundry machines.

Canoeing

Last weekend for Mon Amour and I was completely void of obligations (minus the on going obligation of homework, which simply must be ignored sometimes) and the weather was lovely, so we decided to go to a nearby state park and do some canoeing!

The weather was pretty much perfect for canoeing. Warm but not hot, and a little bit overcast - which made for minimal squinting, and lots of cool reflections.

Some parts of the river have a very "lagoon-y" feel. (with cool reflections of course)

Some parts of the river are pretty nearly blocked - for this particular one you had to go straight through the leafy branch part on the far right.

This was just a fabulous reflection.

I like how the sky in this one actually looks more blue in the reflection than it does in the sky.

We saw lots of wildlife - mostly turtles. They were hanging out on branches all over the place.

This one let us get real close before it slipped into the water.

Randomly, along the river, there is this weird abandoned industrial something or other. It looks really sketchy. I am guessing the machines used to pump water out of the river - rather than pumping junk into the river. But really, its all speculation, I have no idea what this stuff is for.

Slightly more adorable than the large quantities of turtles - was this little baby deer that we saw! He was really hidden, you could really only see him because he moved, which meant that taking a still photo made him really hard to see! I have highlighted him here though, so you cant miss him. Isn't he cute?

These were also cute - baby geese! There were lots of goose-families swimming around. They babies were obviously not new borns, cause they were rather sizeable, but they were still really fuzzy and adorable.

It was a wonderfully relaxing morning - which we wrapped up by stopping to get snow cones! Yummy. All in all, a lovely adventure.

Frogs

Every spring here on the farm, lots of wildlife that returns that we have not seen in a long time.

One creature in particular that comes out in full force round about early June, is the frogs. There is a pond on the property - and if you walk over there, the closer you get, the more frogs you will see. And the smaller the frogs will get - the baby frogs (tadpoles) live in the pond, then the toddler frogs hobble around the edges of the pond, then the full grown frogs hop all the way to our house.

For the most part they are harmless. You hit a few with your car, you step on a few with your shoes, and Marge eats a few, but you try not to feel too bad, cause we have enough frogs to rival that Egyptian plague.

But, the other day - they apparently decided that they had had enough; one in particular was determined to get into the house...

Yes, it is on our bay window. You can't tell from the picture - but little Mr. Frog is actually about 6 feet off the ground. Yikes.

The wildlife out here is ridiculous.

Weeds

Before leaving for vacation, I knew that I would need to prep the garden so that it would not completely go to waster while I was away (weeds grow ridiculously fast around these parts).

So the weekend before we left, I recruited the help of a friend, and we pulled up a lot of weeds.

My friend was a very enthusiastic weed puller. She was hugely helpful!

When all was said and done, the garden looked fabulous.

No weeds, a few cute lettuce sprouts, the beginnings of some sunflower plants, and even some mulch around the most troublesome edges. Beautiful.

We came home to this:

This kind of garden prompts questions like "Why are you growing sunflowers and lettuce in the middle of your lawn?"
Good question.
The simple answer: a vacation, pure laziness and some very hardy grass/lettuce/sunflowers.

I have weeded since we got back, but I fear there is much more work to be done if I actually want to harvest anything significant this year.

Reconnecting

As much as Europe was wonderful, Mon Amour and I were both very glad to return home; we were happy to get back to the farm, and happy to reconnect with friends.

Not too long after our return we were able to indulge both our love of farm life and our desire to catch up with friends. We had thought of them while looking for some locally made wine in Switerland - apparently Merlot is a popular variety in the area of Switerland that we were in, and these particular friends had once told us of the wonderful-ness of White Merlot.

And we found this:

So we bought it - with them in mind.
As providence would have it - while we were away, our friends found out that they had been unexpectedly blessed with a little one who will make his/her arrival some time early next year!
So exciting!
But, it did make us feel lame about our choice of gift. Haha.

After dinner and reconnecting with friends, we went on a walk, and reconnected with the farm.
Ahhh, the farm.

Nice barn.

Sweet sunset.

Farm walks are the best.

On that walk, we saw one of these:

Both sides of it in fact. You couldn't see the middle/top part of it so much. But it was a most impressive rainbow, a sign of God's promises - how appropriate.

Marge Baby

We have had Marge for just over a year now.

She was a tiny nervous thing when we first got her.

She has grown up a lot since we first got her.

She is definitely my puppy-child. My baby for the present time.

We spend a lot of time together. I missed her when we went on vacation.
No one knows how to push my buttons quite like she does. No one knows so well when its time to employ her heart warming puppy eyes. All the things that a good baby does to a mother.

In summary - Marge, you are up there with one of the best spontaneous decisions we have ever made.

June Wedding

This past weekend Mon Amour and I attended the wedding of one of my best friends (our mom's were friends, so we have "been friends since before we were born")

This wedding, like many, was filled with lovely moments.

Like this one.

The bride has been hiding all day long. Sneaking around so the groom doesn't see her. Hiding from her guests - such that she has no idea who has and has not actually come to the wedding. And then finally you get to catch a glimpse of that aisle and you must remind yourself to breathe as you wait for your cue.

Then off you go.

Such a wonderful moment.

Glowing.

This would be the moment where you finally stop wondering if you are making the right choice, if you are doing the right thing. Cause suddenly it doesn't matter, cause you are doing it, and its just right.