Dahlias, slippers, and steak fry

The attempt to revive my blog continues! 

Fall is always a busy time on the farm, Ryan took two cows to the locker this last week and we have a batch of chickens out on the pasture along with our Thanksgiving turkeys. Weather has been good this fall for all of them; honestly with climate change it's getting harder and harder to raise poultry in the summer. June is hot more often than not anymore. 

I'm literally watching this little guy out my window as I type this up, as he wobbles around on new legs from being born this morning. It's a rainy day to enter the world, little calf!

The dahlias have been awesome this year, we ordered some bulbs from Old House Gardens and they've done beautifully. Dahlias are annuals here, although you can try to dig them up and replant them. I know Ryan will try. In the meantime, I've ordered some for next year already. ;-)

Under my needle this last week I finished a pair of slippers for H, which she's been begging for since July and I haven't wanted to tackle. I used this pattern, which was ok. I shortened it by 1.5" in both pieces to change it to a size 4 for her.

I lined them in minky, which makes them super soft inside, but I think is part of why I had trouble getting them to fit together. The minky is so thick I probably should make the top piece a bit larger to accommodate the bulk. The pattern is also a bit wonky, but is nice for how well it finishes seams. I'm also continuing to quilt the lake-and-sky quilt, which is super slow going. 

As it's early fall now, the kids had an impromptu dance session on the driveway while I sat in an Adirondack chair and watched the sunset. Simply lovely.

I also took the following pic when some friends and their kids were over Saturday afternoon last weekend:

I adore this picture because those three boys are sons of these three (oh so young-looking!) handsome guys:

Can you match the kid to the dad? None of the three are actually in the same order in both pictures! This is something I never had growing up - lifelong friends starting in elementary school, and I think it's completely awesome. 

Yesterday Ryan and I went to the Polk County Democrat Steak Fry. I've heard there were over 12,000 people there, and I believe it. It was crazy. I think all of the major democratic presidential candidates were there, as well as most of the "minor" ones. 

If you look closely, you might be able to see a podium in the background of that photo, in front of the giant Iowa flag! I don't have a candidate I'm supporting at this point, I really haven't made up my mind. There were a couple candidates (minor ones) that I'm definitely not supporting after hearing them yesterday. A couple were a total mess! Those ominous-looking rain clouds you see definitely did open up and pour right at the end of the event and on the last candidate speaking - poor guy. Based on the crowd reaction, I think the caucus in Iowa will come down to between Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, but we will see. Iowa's famous for last-minute momentum. 

The steak was surprisingly good, even if it didn't come from our farm!

End-of-summer gardens, creatures, and outings

It has been a fairly dry summer at the farm, much to Ryan's chagrin. Pretty much every storm that has come through has petered out right at our farm and then fired back up once it's past us. For example, last night there was heavy flooding about 10 miles east of us in Des Moines, but we got 0.3" of rain, which is amazing! Farmers really do live and die by rainfall amounts, we pretty much never miss the weather on the 10:00 evening news! There have been some truly lovely sunsets, though.

There have also been a couple of nice rainbows.

We had a turkey that didn't get out of some of the rain a couple of weeks ago, and a cold wet turkey is not likely to survive. So we brought it into the garage to warm up and dry off. This is almost the only thing my hair dryer ever does!

The turkey made a full recovery once we had her dried off and we were able to take her back to the flock.

I also told you I would update you on my garden, so I took a picture of my garden this morning. "Horribly neglected" is somehow insufficient as a description...

The yellow cherry tomatoes decided to go nuts, and I did a bad job of harvesting my radishes (they are off to the left of the picture, out of sight). It's still a more successful garden than any I've ever had, so I will continue to get better at this garden thing. 

My morning glories did grow well up my back porch, this is the first year that some of the variegated variety have shown up!

I took a picture of a very large garden spider hanging out by our pumpkins (which are not in the garden)--she's a beauty, but didn't feel like posing for me.

Also in critter news we adopted a puppy. This is our fifth attempt at a dog since starting a farm (with varying types of failure), but is our first attempt at a puppy. She's a border collie mix, we think mixed with rat terrier since she is not shaggy enough to be pure border collie. She's very smart, but also very puppy-like and we've been working on house training and getting her to not herd the children around. 

We took the kids to Living History Farms a couple of weeks ago, where they got to see some of how people used to farm. They aren't quite old enough to really make the connections and see how things are the same and how they are different from those farms to ours. 

At the fair this year the kids were old enough to start playing more, including the tunnel of squash (?) that they put up near the agriculture building. Here they are running out of the tunnel:

I'm biased, but I think those are pretty good pictures of both of them!

H and I just got back from our annual trip to Clearwater Camp's family camp, where we had a great time! The weather was just perfect.

We did some fishing, here I caught H right at the moment she had touched the fish and is currently saying "Eww!"

And we also tried archery for the first time, with some help from a counselor.

'Til next year, beautiful North Woods!

Hearth and Garden Growth

On Father's Day, Ryan pulled Father's Day privilege and insisted I work on a house project that wasn't on my priority list but was on his. So I worked on the hearth in our living room. We purchased the slate a couple months ago and sorted it for the pieces we liked best.

Here it is after putting on the cementboard:

And we discovered that the hearth was just a little larger than would be an even distribution with the tiles, so Ryan came up with another pattern. I like it better than just a standard grid!

It's still waiting for grout, but I'll get there soon. It's also waiting for our custom dragon tile, which will be here in a couple months.

My garden is looking well. I planted all of the seeds we had of varying ages, so of course all of the rows next to eachother came up instead of something logical, like every other row. But the rows that came up look pretty good! Here it is a couple weeks ago:

And here it is tonight, the watermelon is growing nicely on the left. And yes, the radish on the right has totally gone to seed. I don't like to eat radishes, they're just satisfying to plant because they grow so quickly. The chickens are also looking at me through the garden fence, can you spot them?

It's lily season, so my new double tiger lilies are blooming. Aren't these cool?

Also a plant (but not in the garden), we're indefinitely babysitting my mom's jasmine plant. If she ever decides to reclaim it, I'm going to have to get my own. This thing smells divine and is super happy in my house. It had almost 200 blooms on it a couple days ago (the blooms only last one day)!

In farm news, on the way home from the locker we stopped to eat dinner. I took a picture because this is a classic farmer park job. Five spots for the win!

And here the kids are "helping" daddy with the morning chores.

And Daddy and Z are surveying the landscape:

Until next time, enjoy the summer!

Spring goings on, bird quilt, and Christmas Lone Star quilt

Things are going well in our neck of the woods, it has been much warmer out, after a very long, cool, dry spring. When I was working on staining the windows to our bedroom, this was my view. I had the window open (because of the fumes) and I'm pretty sure the cows were trying to figure out what I was doing:

The new calves have also been chasing one another around the farm, here the four youngest played their own version of cow tag:

Back in March, Ryan spent a lot of time chainsawing the scrubby timber out of our pastures and spent most of that month burning piles. Our pastures are now starting to look like someone cares about them again after more than ten years of neglect.

Ryan's also been trying to run a water line past our building, which means digging in the cow's area. The one in this picture is watching him dig raptly.

It's been a rough spring for chickens, we had an illness or bad ventilation or something and we lost about half of them. They are also growing very slowly, so we are going to have to miss our June deliveries. :-( Hopefully we'll be back on track soon.

Taking a walk the other day, I also took a picture of our house from the back side, so I thought I would post that too. The fence in the foreground between the trees marks the eastern edge of our property line.

The garden is also filling in nicely, here are our lilies and roses next to some violas. Ryan has done a very good job of starting and cultivating the garden, it looks great.

I also got a garden planted, here is what it looked like on May 15th. It now has a few things growing in it, but a raccoon got into it and seems to have eaten all the carrots. Many of the seeds were also very old, so were not viable (which I expected). 

In quilting news, one of the nice things about posting infrequently is that I get more done in the interim. 

I call this one Murmuration Minuend. A murmuration is a group of starlings, and a minuend is a quantity from which another is subtracted (so in 5-2=3, 5 is a minuend). 

It was not inspired by the poem "Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, but that poem does capture my thoughts very well. This is a modern quilt style and I have entered it in quilt shows and hope to find out soon if it makes it in. 

I also finished my Christmas lone star quilt, which I started when I was pregnant with Z. I named it Christmas Star-light after a starlight mint.

The construction on this quilt is not amazing, but it will do. I think a Lone Star quilt is on the bucket list of many quilters, myself included, but I can now say I've attempted one. I might try to do another someday and do the construction more carefully, we'll see. In the meantime, I'll hang this one at Christmastime.

Recently my 18-year-old sewing machine has been showing signs of dying, piece by piece. So my father gave me an early Birthday/Christmas present and bought me a new one. It's a Bernina and I'm thrilled with it. It has a lot of features I've been drooling over for a while, but it also feels almost exactly like my old Bernina to sew with. I haven't decided what I'm doing with the old one; perhaps I'll pull it out when H is ready to sew. 

Speaking of H sewing, she and I actually had a little sewing session earlier this spring.

She made a small blanket and pillows out of couple fat quarters and loved it.

H also insisted that we participate in Earth Day this year, so we did so by going and collecting garbage out of our ditches. 

H has also started losing teeth, but so far she just lost the one. No other loose ones yet!

One of Z's favorite activities recently is making cookies with daddy. They do it about once a week, although I think in this picture he may have been helping make a cake for the birthday of a friend of ours instead.

Ryan and I have been dancing at the Red Friar's Dance Club in Ames as a monthly date night; it's been very helpful for us to have a night out once a month through the winter. I bought the dress I'm wearing in this picture when I took a trip to Singapore in February to visit my Dad, who is a professor there for a couple of years.

I'll leave you with these pictures of H, this is her on Friday at her last day of school:

As a point of comparison, here she is on the first day again: