Key, Peaches, and Lunchbox

As of today we are the proud owners of our 20 acres in Madison County. The adventure begins! Ryan went and got the key to the gate today, and I am loving this key.

It is so delightfully retro. Here is the gate this goes to, although you can't see the padlock in this picture. 

So now we get to hit reset on the whole farm thing and start over with a blank slate. I'm terrified, excited, anxious, and a host of other things about it. So far the thing we're leaving that I'm going to miss most is our orchard, which will take at least another five years to get anything established again. On that note:

Peaches!! We have them! Huzzah! Finally we had a winter mild enough and more importantly without major temperature swings to yield peaches. Small, beautiful, white fleshed peaches. I was never a huge fan of peaches growing up, canned peaches have always just been slimy and overly squishy to me. Then we moved here to this tree. We will be planting as many of these pits as we possibly can. 

In this picture I grilled some after we had some brats the other night. A mildly successful experiment, but really not the best way to eat them. I didn't get the nice caramelization that would make this worthwhile. I'll be canning this weekend, and I will try to put up as many as I can while I can!

The turkeys are day ranging now, which is where we just put them in a net area for a few days and then move the net later. They look pretty good, and as usual we had more losses than we would like. However, it was nothing like last year so I think we will be OK for turkey sales this year. 

Miss H started preschool this week! I'm not sure which family member is most excited about this, but I know it is great to have her intellectually occupied. She really was bored at home, and Ryan just couldn't keep up with her the way preschool can. I'm already seeing more imagination from her when she is home as well as better language skills in only a week. Her preschool is also fairly diverse culturally, with families from Turkey and the Middle East. I love that, and I love that she will grow up with multiple cultures around her as "normal" from day one. That is often difficult and unusual in Central Iowa. 

I also dug into my fabric stash to make her a lunchbox, and I purchased some Insul-brite to line it with so it's insulated.

I had always intended this fabric for a jar quilt (a quilt with lots of jars full of various things, usually depicted on shelves), but I've recently decided to stop protecting my fabric stash so fiercely. I don't even have much of a stash by most standards, but it's full of fat quarters that will be happier being used than sitting in my plastic organizer boxes. 

My biggest problem now is finding a tiny bit of time and space to run a sewing machine without kidlets literally underfoot! Little Z's fave thing to do right now is put his weight on my sewing machine foot pedal as I'm trying to work, so I have to guard that pedal carefully and often turn the machine off while I pin seams. 

Just keep swimming!