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!

Christmas Dress, Edie's Quilt, & Giant Turnip

I decided to try my hand at making Hazel a Christmas dress this year using a tutorial on The Cottage Home. Success!

Love it.

I'll change a few things if I make this dress again to make it fit better, but overall I'm satisfied. Hazel did a little dancing for me to help show it off.

And some kitty chasing. I admit I did some photoshopping to make the horrendous mess that is my living room less obvious. Forgive me.

Here's the dress by itself. 

And the back. Satin really is a pain to work with! 

I made a little rosette embellishment using the tutorial at Craftaholics Anonymous and french horn button I have kept for at least 13 years. Apparently it was waiting for just this occasion! This embellishment actually pins on so I can wash the dress without the rosettes fraying. 


My next craft o' the month is the quilt for our quilt guild president. Every year the previous president of the guild gathers blocks from guild members and makes a quilt to show appreciation for the current president's service. So now that I've given Edie her quilt, I can show it here!

This is a wall hanging, and I decided to go a little funky on the profile. I'm not sure why, it just struck me as right. All those little inside corners are no fun to bind, though! I'm so glad there is an internet that I could look up how to do it, it wasn't immediately intuitive.

I asked for my guild ladies to give me earth tone blocks to match Edie's decor. I hope she doesn't think the funny profile is too strange!


So now it's quiz question time. What happens if you plant turnips in July, they are pretty happy all summer, and then you forget to harvest them until December?


Answer: You get this!!

Giant turnip! This thing was as big as Hazel's head. Apparently I'm not as horrible at gardening as I think I am.

Hazel was terrified of this thing. We got her to touch it once, but then she went and hid behind Mommy, like it was going to jump out and bite her. 
Killer turnip!

Garden Update & Weathervane Table Topper

At the beginning of the season I said I'd keep you updated on my garden, so here we go. As a reminder, this is what my garden looked like at the beginning of the season.

Cute, huh? Well, I have to preface this next picture by telling you that this is actually a better-looking garden than any I've ever had. Keep that in mind. I took this picture of my garden tonight.

There are wax beans on the left here, and some sage on the bottom right. I think there may also be thyme in here...

This is the end of our broccoli (we actually harvested two little heads of these!). 

This bed was largely spinach. It was yummy, I just didn't really replant it. There's some zucchini in the top left.

There's a stripped out tomato in the back of this one. I think bugs got it. 
So the moral of the story is that I'm just not very good at this gardening thing. But I'm still planning on retrenching. I'm not giving up on gardening yet. Someday I'll be that 60-year-old farm wife with a wonderful garden. I'll let you know when that happens.


I also finished up the little tabletopper that was my giveaway prize for a little giveaway I hosted in March. It will be the design I put on my barn quilt whenever I get that going.

Traditionally I would hang it this way (square), but I'm contemplating hanging it on point, like this:

Do you have thoughts?


Lastly, for those of you who want more pictures of my little girl on this blog (Don, I'm talking to you), here I am reading to her. We do this a lot, and she will grab a book and then climb into my lap and sit down. This particular book is from my childhood and is about moving, but the little girl in it has a little gray cat on almost every page. Therefore, my daughter has decided that this is the "find the kitty" book and she finds that little gray cat on every page of the book.

Gardening & Heavenly Scent

My quest to actually have and maintain a decent garden this year continues! 

So my square foot gardens are going OK, some stuff is even growing. About 80% of my transplants died, so we purchased some more at Theisen's today. The spinach toward the center of the view is from seed, though!

This is the same one of the gardens, I picked it because it looks the best of the four I have planted! Top right has some snap peas, the nice stuff toward the middle is the spinach, top left is zucchini and brussels sprouts, and bottom left is broccoli. I think it's going OK so far!


It is also my absolute favorite time of year for flowers. It has not been a great year for lilacs and the ones I do have are actually fairly dismal. Some day I'll buck it up and order some truly awesome varieties online. 

I do have a few and they are blooming now! Mixed with the lilies-of-the-valley, I wish I could just bottle this scent and keep it forever. Yes, I know they make perfumes that try. But they all fail. 

I also love putting arrangements in those old-fashioned glass coca-cola bottles. They are just the right size and I think they make charming vases.

With spring comes activity & 181 fluffballs

It is definitely spring around here. My favorite tree the flowering crabapple is blooming, some day perhaps I'll have a dozen of those or so in my yard.

Some of my most recent heritage bulbs are coming up, including this cute little pink hyacinth called "Double Hollyhock" also from Old House Gardens.

Ryan has been in a flurry of activity with the spring, too. Here he is treating boards with linseed oil to help them last. He also re-mulched our swampy rhubarb patch and filled in some holes in the rhubarb where chickens had beaten up rhubarb plants. Perhaps those plants were buggy and they were doing us a favor... The one thing I have learned here is that chickens love mulch. Love it. It is a nest, it is a food source, it is a place of dust baths. Mulch seldom lasts well around our farm, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is cheap (free!) because I work at Vermeer, maker of many brush chippers; and because it is a chemical-free way to keep weeds down. Not to mention, if chickens are tearing up my mulch they are ignoring my strawberries. Layer chickens are smarter than the broiler chickens, but they do still only have the capacity to focus on one thing at a time. They are just not born multitaskers.

This week we also received our first 181 little yellow fluffballs. The question I keep getting here is: Why 181? Well, we ordered 175. But in the interest of customer satisfaction, the hatchery always throws in a random number of extra chicks in case some don't survive shipping. In our case, I don't think we've ever lost many (if any) in transit, but this way if we do the hatchery hasn't upset us by shorting us chicks. So now we have 181, and they will be this cute for about a week before they start growing and get a lot less cute.

Excelsior & Green Beans

Green bean season (and wax bean season, that's the yellow ones) is in full swing, and Ryan's love of planting them has really led to a lot of them! I've frozen about 6 or 7 quart-sized ziploc bags of them, and of course we've eaten some. I haven't canned any because I haven't gotten over the whole pressure-canner hump. Mine needs a new gasket and a new gauge and I just haven't gotten to doing that. I need to though....

My heritage lilies continue to amaze me, this one is Excelsior. It's like a stargazer on steroids and smells awesome! I think it's my new favorite lily. The weather this year continues to be beautiful, we just finished a record cool July with an average temp of 68 degrees or so. Makes the Iowa summer that much more pleasant!