Around here today - Flowers

If you're gonna have dandelions in your yard, you might as well have daisies too. They're in tiny patches here and there. Little habitats. I didn't notice the silky spider threads until I saw this one on the computer. Also, you notice the decapitated stem? That lovely one is in my kitchen.



Hollyhocks. I've tried for three years to get them established outside our barn. A too-mild winter, and ahem... these birds called chickens, took quite a toll. But LOOK! Blooms! Finally, I am getting closer to declaring the hollyhock mission a success. Also? Pink is so not my color, but I'm totally okay with it if that's what it takes.



The cilantro is flowering. Fine by me if it seeds itself again so I don't have to do that next year. A cilantro jungle - that's what we have.



And the dill. I planted it once, like four years ago, and it shows up right on time ever since.







So in conclusion, I probably should have titled this one, "The things that grow all.by.themselves whether I want them to or not, except the stubborn Hollyhocks".

These purple carrots

We're doing a few experiments in our garden again, a collaboration with the NDSU extension. We're nothing special. But we like to think we are, and when I word it like that... it sure sounds like we are. Special, I mean.

This garden just went crazy behind my back these last few weeks. It always does that in July. I figured we had the weeds about 80% under control. And then? July happened.

So I figured we'd better get started taste-testing these odd carrots. They're purple. I guess I told the kids these ones were going to be purple, because they were neither impressed nor surprised. With all the drama we usually have going on around here, I was honestly a bit disappointed.

We picked a few carrots. Carefully. In two bundles as to not get the two varieties mixed up.

'Cause we have to be responsible with this one, you know.


No drama to write home about.

For once.

(Yesterday was a different story... Emergency Room. Stitches. Lots of wailing and snot.)


Oh, and the girl found a very pretty squash. That was after she ate a basil leaf half the size of her head. Now do you think she'd eat a leaf of basil if I handed it to her in the house? No way. These kids always smell very, ummm... culinary(?) after a trip to the garden. One favors the cilantro, and the other two go after the basil, but it has to be foraged completely on their own.

Scratch and sniff: Basil


I'm realizing now these pictures make it look like our garden is on the moon (or Texas?), or mulched with rock, or something. This is actually up on our driveway next to the house. The driveway has weeds too. It keeps the chickens busy. Everything around here has a purpose, people.



Even the squash.

Garden of Summer-past

Goodbye garden. Hello garden-blogging fail.



I'm equal parts thrilled and cringing that October is almost here.

This is my very favorite time of year. Running through crunchy leaves, sipping spiced cider, listening to my chickens sing as they scratch up the last of Summer's bugs, tidying up the garden in perfect hazy afternoon light, hearing combines chewing through the fields surrounding us, constantly sampling bits of whatever is going on or coming off our overworked dehydrator, tripping over the produce that spills out of our entryway and into our home... The whole season is one great big sensory experience, and I love it.

Cringing because, well, these glorious weeks are so fleeting.

And here it is, yes, almost October.


{not snow - cattail seeds}

And I have failed to blog about... anything and everything. But the garden? I barely mentioned it three times. That makes me cringe too. Seedlings in eggshells, harvesting peas, and voluptuous eggplants. That was it.

I did the writing in my head.

Here are handful of abbreviated posts that never made it to press:

1. I neglected far too much of our garden the previous year. The perfect solution to that is obviously to add another fifty square feet and five NDSU home garden variety trials. The observing, learning, comparing, tasting, and ownership the kids had of their trials was a beautiful thing. I wholeheartedly recommend this program to my North Dakota friends!

2. Our pole bean tee-pee was magnificent. I've never grown pole beans before. I underestimated them. It was shocking how the tee-pee went from bare to covered to unrecognizable (in a matter of fourteen days) as the beans went beyond crazy. The cats loved that thing, far too much. They even left offerings exactly in the middle of it. So weird.





3. The younger boy planted sixteen watermelon plants. See variety trials above. See oppressed overworked dehydrator above.



4. Apples! Finally these trees produced enough to justify using the word harvest. And harvest we did. We waited four and a half years for this.


{maybe that one had a bug?}

5. I cannot imagine fall without winter squash. A whole long shelf full. Every one of my seeds rotted in the ground this Spring, and I was irrationally upset about it. Yeah, I know I can get winter squash at the grocery store or the Farmer's Market. It just isn't the same. Then I found a volunteer something among the sunflowers that looked suspiciously gourd-like. Sweet happy day when I realized it was, in fact, winter squash. God does answer insignificant little prayers.

Hello 10th

Hello Kitty. Hello breakfast strawberry.


Hello schoolwork.


Hello snakeskin!


Hello Paw-lee!


Uh. Hello mess.


Hello sensory experience. (are you annoyed with the hello stuff yet?)


BUSTED! Caught shopping in Daddy's stuff.


Hello 14-inch circumference eggplant! (can't help myself - I tried, and anyway, Hello Kitty started it)


Helllllllooooo broody Mimi!


Hello "why am I missing a pic?" Hello whatever.

Hello linky:

Not a unicorn

Accepting my fate of having lost my blogging mojo, with a stocking cap firmly on my head, unaware I was out of hot coca mix... I headed out the door determined to fill a bucket to the brim. Last time it was spinach. This time I was after the peas. A week ago I composed an Ode to the Glory of Home Grown Spinach in my head. But I dare not publish such a thing here lest it make me sound weird.

First, I managed to tangle myself in the no-chickens-allowed-on-the-greener-side fence. I mean like really, the toe of my rain boot got hopelessly caught in one of the square space thingies as I tried to step over it, and the whole wretched thing collapsed with me attached. I'm not a cowgirl (which I guess is obvious when I say "like really" and other hippie phrases) so I have to wear rain boots. But I did buy them from the farm store. So maybe I'm an imposter?

Anyway, that kind of fence doesn't stop adolescent cats. Well, no fence does. But that and the fact that the wild little beasties are almost as destructive in my garden as the goofy feathered rototillers are topics for another day. Okay. So I crashed to the ground, minus a boot (rain, not cow), and was instantly wearing a black and white cat on my hat.

Glory be. I had arrived.

There were the peas.

The belligerent things should have been ready to harvest weeks ago.



I found which way was up and extracted the cat from my head.

And a brisk forty-mile-an-hour fifty-degree North Dakota wind went straight down, as my little girl would say, "mine butt track".

Coincidentally, we washed sand out of hers yesterday.

Likely these new jeans don't fit me around the waist as well as I thought they did. The jeans that have these funny scratches on the thighs that made nervously interrogate the sales lady as to whether they were designed to fray, even though I already knew the answer. She looked me straight in the eye and lied to me. I bought them anyway because even once-a-year clothes shopping is complete ridiculousness and I'd had enough of it... and (I thought) they fit amazingly well - no small victory when you have the figure of Popeye's Olive Oyl.


From Wikipedia

However, that daring blast of wind proved it was much too miraculous to be true. I bet cowgirls don't wear their brand new jeans to the garden. They wear belts too. Don't they? To keep the wind and sand out?

The dog howled.

The cold wind blew.

The peas were harvested.

And then it happened...



Not a unicorn. Let me repeat. Not. A. Unicorn.

And don't any of you leave a comment saying, "Wow. A Monarch!". Not a Monarch. A Viceroy. They're a less celebrated butterfly designed to fool birds, kind of similar to how sales ladies are designed to tell customers exactly what they want to hear.

Now I'm going to make up a new batch of hot cocoa mix, because it's June in North Dakota and I'm cold. I'm going to outwit that sales lady and iron a patch onto the inside of my new Jeans, because I'm clever like that and not a bit stylish. And I'm going to insist the peas are delicious, but the spinach was better.

Love,
Olive

With the wind

Our house shook as the warm wind blew nonstop. Five days, or was it four? Gusting to fifty-five miles an hour.

On these October days, it seemed cruel to keep the kids inside when it was summer-day hot outside. Out our windows, the air swirled thick with what looked like snow. Cattail seeds. The wind drove the unending swarm of them through our yard. Each time I stepped out to collect eggs, or capture runaway sections of duct-work (we're in the midst of a furnace project), or rescue our young apple trees from the protective fences they had become hopelessly tangled in, or chase after whatever else was escaping our yard... the cattail seeds got me. That and the dust from combines busy miles and miles around, they got me. I came back in the house with a scratchy throat, watery eyes, and sneezes that made my little girl giggle.

That last day of brutal wind, the cattail seeds had all blown away. Far away. To Canada, I suppose. And it wasn't quite as dusty. So we ventured out.



The popcorn maze had taken a real beating.

The boys gathered what they could.

Whether it's mature enough to actually pop, we have yet to discover.



If not, the chickens will eat it.

The act of gathering it up, the running back and forth in the warm windy afternoon sunshine after five (or was it four?) days cooped up in the house... Well, it was perfect.





21. Wearing shorts in almost-mid-October in North Dakota, when a cloud of cattail seeds could easily have been snow.
22. My husband taking charge of the little girl so I could just hang with my boys.
23. Exploring every square inch of the tree that crashed down in our backyard.
24. The boys' joy upon discovering a Wood Duck's old nest high in a hole on that tree.
25. Our wonder at the hidden life that quietly surrounds us.
26. Imagining fuzzy ducklings jumping from that nest all the way to the ground, in our backyard, just like they do on our Planet Earth movie.
27. Ripening sunflowers that (mostly) stood despite the pounding wind.
28. A pile of popcorn cobs that one way or another, will not go to waste.
29. Autumn sunshine.
30. Forgetting for a few hours that I had piles of laundry to be folded and spelling words to help the first grader learn and dinner to be made, and instead just completely soaking up that beautiful gusty afternoon with my boys.



First photo for Live Every Moment - Autumn

KinderGARDEN wrap up (all of the above)

Around here, things generally don't go as planned. The garden proved to be no exception.
a. Maybe I was dreaming too big.
b. Maybe the weather was entirely uncooperative.
c. Maybe we just couldn't get our act together.
d. All of the above.



It was a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants Spring.
a. Our bean tunnel became a Morning Glory tunnel, and even that almost wasn't.
b. The pumpkins never had a chance.
c. Our corn maze became a popcorn maze.
d. All of the above.



I believe at one point I even said, "To heck with it all", and
a. Hauled one of the kinders off for an afternoon at our favorite greenhouse
b. Pretended that I had a nice un-swampy garden like the city folks do.
c. Resorted to WalMart as a seed source. May God have mercy on my soul.
d. All of the above.



In moments of temporary insanity, we...
a. Did actually work our butts off in the garden.
b. Decided to just grow stuff in the house instead of in the swamp.
c. Handed over too much camera to a kinder and told him to go crazy with it.
d. All of the above



July was the month things really got exciting.
a. We grew baby birds and watched ants tend herds of aphids.
b. Toys, metal ratchet sprinklers and electric fence posts met the wrath of the lawn mower.
c. We Fed ravenous dinosaurs freshly harvested kale.
d. All of the above.



Miracles happened. We started finding all kinds of treasures:
a. Sweet corn by the arm-full
b. Buckets and buckets of glorious raspberries
c. Sweet juicy little melons.
d. The popcorn maze actually grew. Bigger and bigger and more and more fun.









The crown jewel of our KinderGARDEN was without a doubt the popcorn maze along with it's the Morning Glory tunnel entrance and towering sunflower hallway exit.





a. It was theirs.





b. It was fun.





c. Like, really fun.





d. All of the above.

As much as I tried to fight it... it's true. All good things must come to an end.

Linking up one final time this year with The Inadvertent Farmer's KinderGARDENS