Carrots and Freckles

My internet was down for five days – one of those blessings in disguise. I discovered, while I had a chance to gather my thoughts, that I have a backlog of farm pictures. I’ll post several of them next week. But I’ll start today with these: My son picked carrots in the sweltering heat with his dad, never mind the sweat and grime (or overdue haircut… what... Read More

Word for Wednesday: Déjà vu

We picked mulberries off the trees last week. It reminded me of the huge, old mulberry tree that stood near the front of our house growing up. It was the best climbing tree ever, with large, low, sprawling branches – my favorite place to play. Our feet were stained purple all summer long. I was so sad when my dad cut the tree down. The berries covered the ground by the... Read More

A Boy in the Tulip Patch

One evening last November, my husband and I shivered in the cold and in the glow of truck headlights as we caught up on the overdue task of planting bulbs. Bulb planting is an exercise in delayed gratification. This spring, it was worth it. It probably would have been worth it to trim the grass around the edges of the bed, too… but then, of course, it would just grow back.... Read More

Ruffling Feathers

It has been a fairly quiet few months around this blog, hasn’t it?! I’ve been fighting a deep exhaustion. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising, considering all the changes we’ve made in the past year. While I’ve been buried in a dark cocoon lately, a few other metamorphoses have been brewing… When I was young, someone described me as “complacent”... Read More

Planting Fall Mums (While Cooking Stuffed Pasta Shells)

The last few days I’ve occasionally felt a slight chill in the air! Maybe I’m just imagining it. Either way, it seems to me like sufficient reason for planting fall mums. A couple evenings ago, I started up some stuffed pasta shells, in my new quest to have sit-down family dinners more often. I boiled the shells, browned the onion and ground beef, mixed a pack of cream... Read More

Cowgirl Wins a Prize

This heat is getting to me. It’s getting to the animals, too. It’s getting to the grass that’s turning yellow in their pastures. It’s getting to the grasshoppers that eat the grass that’s turning yellow in their pastures. Actually, it’s not getting to the grasshoppers, but I wish it were. Thursday morning I spied several cattle grazing on our... Read More

The Armadillo Story

Good fences make good neighbors… … as do husbands with rifles… but that’s getting ahead of the story. eHEM…. The Armadillo Story, by Annie Gerber. At first, I thought Jack was digging in the flower beds. Not that I got mad, really, since it was just a couple flowers, but Drew and I thought that chaining him up at night might be a good solution. What... Read More

Spring Garden Tour, Tools, and Tips

Happy National Day of Prayer today! Also, Mother’s Day is this Sunday. Our family has many beloved traditions, one of which is Mother’s Day. Every year, Dad would take us to the local greenhouse and let us each pick out whichever four-packs of annuals we fancied. Then, we would all go home and spend the day planting with Mom. It was a wonderful time of togetherness and... Read More

Covering Compost: Types of Mulch

This week has been a huge learning curve for me. Through a call to my local county extension office, short discussion with my agronomy specialist husband, flipping through lots of indexes for “mulch,” and, of course, trial… and error, I have learned a thing or two about different mulches. Actually, as nerdy as this may sound, mulching isn’t for the amateur. This year’s... Read More

Trimming Roses (But Yet, Not Boring)

It was necessity that forced me to trim our absurdly overgrown roses this year. Drew is painting the house, and if I want him to paint the washhouse also, I was going to have to trim the rose bush that had literally overtaken the entire south side of the shed. Thank goodness roses like to be trimmed. This is like going into the barber for a trim and coming home with a buzz-cut. Sorry... Read More