Mulberry bread & mowing the lawn

We have a friend who comes and works on our farm in exchange for eggs, chickens, turkeys, etc. He is my very favorite person most days because he keeps Ryan working and motivated! Anyway, he has a myriad of food allergies that make it very hard to cook lunch for him. He is lactose intolerant and also allergic to soy, tomatoes, fish, and pesticide residue. This means honey and sugar are also out because of the residue unless they are organic and even then they are to be used sparingly. So here is what I made for him as a special treat: mulberry bread!

It may be the ugliest thing I ever baked. It looked like a purple-black miasma of goo when I was done with it, but it was surprisingly edible. I followed my A-to-Z bread recipe, which a similar recipe can be found here. I cut out all the sugar, though, and wouldn't advise that for anyone making this recipe. I thought the mulberries would add some sweetness, but the bread badly needed some sweetener when it was done. Ryan put honey on it and ate it anyway, but the man is a human vacuum so that doesn't surprise me.

One of my favorite reasons for living out in the country is that I don't have to mow the lawn all the time. There are no city ordinances or neighbors or anything. So I can let my lawn start to look like this:

This is particularly handy when we have 3 (not one, not two, but three) mowers on this farm and only the non-power-assist-push-mower-that-kicks-my-butt works.

But eventually Ryan decides that he cares how our lawn looks, so here it is after I mowed it with the mower deck all the way up:

This was made possible by Ryan's wonderful grandmother who took pity on our poor lawn and let us have her riding mower. Yay for the people in our lives who help us!!!