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.

Raspberry Hunting & Poll Ending

Yesterday Ryan mentioned to me that there was a small patch of raspberries in the pasture that he had the sheep graze around that might be ready for picking. His directions to find it went like this: "You know that one big soft maple with the overhanging branch that's about to fall off? Follow that branch and it's the next tree west of there."

After a couple of clarifying phone calls to Ryan, I found the small patch.

I had the baby on my back in her Chicco carrier for a little outdoor adventure.

This picture's actually a little out of date, but it's the one I have on file.


Anyway, we got to the raspberry patch and found a very unsurprising surprise: Poison Ivy. It's all over the place on our farm. So now it's time for a little game! Can you spot the poison ivy vs. the raspberry plant? Hint: the poison ivy has a 3 leaf pattern. Oh, wait. So does the raspberry plant.

Well? How did you do?


Here's the raspberry leaves:

And here's the poison ivy.

So the poison ivy and the raspberry and I played a game of "touch this, not that," only complicated by the whole "raspberries have thorns" thing. Everything good is worth working for!

A meager harvest, but completely delicious. There weren't enough to make anything with them, so I just ate them. Perhaps in the future our patch will be big enough to make jam!


On a separate note, my poll ends tonight and so far it looks like my readers want to know more about my farm and home life. I definitely think people who read this blog at this point generally know me personally, so they are more interested in my daughter than I thought people might be. I will try to adjust accordingly. In the meantime, thanks for reading!

Lily Season Begins & Poll

It's my second favorite time of year for flowers: Lily Season! I love lilies, but they are second to lilacs. Most of my heirloom bulbs will bloom a little later (they are budding now), but the "cheaper" bulbs are working it right now!

This lovely red-orange specimen was elected to adorn my kitchen island. Just one stem and a few hosta leaves and I have an arrangement. 


Side note: if you've never tapped your hostas as a source for arrangements, you are missing out. They add wonderful texture, last forever, and it's hard to feel guilty about taking a few choice leaves because there are so many!


Also, because I can't stay on one topic for too long, I thought I'd note that Ryan and Jim and Michael C. got another wall of the building up this Sunday. Yay!

I didn't help this time. Sorry boys. I'm kind of a mess with a hammer anyway (my motto the last time I helped was: "Whoops. Is this close enough?" Answer: No. Pretty much never.)


Last point today: I've put a poll on my blog off to the right, it will close at midnight on the 4th of July. You can put in multiple answers (you don't just have to pick one) and the question I'm asking is: What do you like to read about on this blog? I'm just kind of curious if there are things I should focus on. I think about blog thoughts a lot, but sometimes I second guess myself and decide not to post because I don't think you'll be interested. So please be honest and I'll work on posting more of the things people who read this thing want to read. If what you like best isn't on there, just leave me a comment on this post.


Those of you who read with a reader (like Google), please please please go to my blog and fill in the poll. If you're reading this, I want to know what you like no matter who you are. 


Side note again: Google has a cool "next" button you can add to your browser that lets you see new blogs on their home blog page. It's in the options somewhere and I have discovered I love it far better than RSSs because I get to see people's actual blog. 


Ok, before I side note again, ta ta for now!

June Exchange & Another Quilt Relish

I signed up for a June Craft gift exchange thing this year, from the Craftaholics Anonymous blog. Not quite sure what possessed me, but I thought it would be fun. Anyway, it's in the mail now, my gifting partner was someone who likes all the owl patterns that are hot right now and is also a Scentsy dealer. So I made her a candle mat from an original pattern.

The owls are appliqued with button eyes, the rest is all free motion quilted in.

I also finished another one of the Modern Quilt Relish patterns, like the one in my cubicle quilt. I have to say, these patterns are very well written. I did cut the size in half, however, just because I didn't really want anything bigger. There is a pencil in the picture to give a sense of scale.

To anyone who is looking for farm news, I apologize for no update on that front! It continues to be a very rough year here. Our energizer is back from the manufacturer and we now have fewer sheep, but we're still having chicken problems like crazy. Our broilers just aren't growing like they should and the layers are falling prey to clever raccoons and foxes. My co-workers are telling me that we should just set traps for the coons. This is funny. Ryan actually tied the bait to the trigger and the next morning the bait was gone and the trap was still untriggered.
Crazy coons.

Barn Raising & Cubicle Quilt

Let me start by saying that people are awesome. I expressed a plea at work in our Friday morning staff meeting for help with framing our building, and lo and behold two of my co-workers were game! One brought his fiancé and we also had Jim out to help. Our farm would not run without that man and this was yet one more thing where he knew all sorts of useful things!!

Barn Raising! Greg is in the gray, Drew is in the orange, Melanie is in the green, Ryan is on the left in the blue and Jim is on the right in the blue.

By the end of the day we now have the front and back walls up, which is awesome. We also learned a bunch about how to do this in the future, which was super valuable. Knowing how to frame is another one of those skills that we city kids just don't know.

Ok, so it's not truly a barn but is a 20 ft x 30 ft chicken building to be a layer house and brooder. We're using a blueprint written by Kasco poultry in 1943. We went back to that old blueprint because it's from a time when people did something closer to what we do.


A couple of weeks ago I also finished a small quilt for a wall hanging, and when I started it I was planning to use it to start on Christmas gifts, etc. Instead I liked it so much that I decided to hang it in my cubicle at work, at least for a little while. I refuse to feel guilty about that because, well, I just do. The one that was there had been there for almost 2 years already.

 It's a pattern from two ladies in Ames who write modern quilt patterns and it was super fun to make! The pattern is Modern Pickle Relish and their pattern shop can be found here. I will also note that it was a very well-written pattern, and I loved that it still has a very modern feel to it even though I used civil war reproduction fabrics. 

Chinese Balance Quilt & Escape Artist Sheep

I finished another small quilt today, it's intended to be a baby quilt for my next baby (no, I'm not expecting yet. I'm just a plan ahead type person). 

With my first baby, I found that a quilt that was about 27" by 33" is just right for a "traveling" quilt. It fits my carseat, is the right size for a changing table, and fits in a grocery cart seat (if I don't just leave the baby in the carseat). This is my daughter's traveling quilt:

But back to the topic at hand. I'm calling this newest quilt "Chinese Balance" because the focus fabric is this awesome rainbow phoenix fabric that I found in Madison, WI a couple years ago at Gayfeather Fabrics. Then I hand quilted it with dragons. In the Chinese culture phoenix represent a feminine aspect and dragons are masculine. 

Then in each of the 4 squares I quilted a different Chinese character, meaning Phoenix (male), Phoenix (female), Dragon (common form), Dragon (royal form). Hopefully someone who really knows their Mandarin won't see it and totally laugh, but I really like the way it turned out! 


On the farm front, the sheep are currently getting out daily. Our good energizer is back at the manufacturer (broken), so the backup energizer is... well... less than intimidating. Here the sheep are snacking on my front yard.

I think Ryan might be ready to just shoot the lot of 'em!

Weaning

So Ryan has been trying to sort sheep in our new animal handling system. See below.

However, as he himself said in reaction to this picture, "What you can't see here is the swearing." 

He's not kidding.

Luckily my daughter can't hear him either.

 But she likes to watch him.

She actually watched him mow the lawn for 45 minutes without moving. Pretty good for a year-old child. 
But back to my story. 


Ryan got the sheep sorted out (mostly) and into different areas of the farm (also mostly). In the "keep" herd were a couple of lambs who are big enough to be weaned, but their mamas haven't forced the issue yet. We usually let them make that decision, but not today.
So in his infinite wisdom, Ryan put the "keep" herd next to our house.
Right next to our house.
As in, one wall of the fence is practically the wall to our house.

Did I mention it was super hot out last night so I had the windows open? Those crazy lambs cried all night long.


Word to the wise: freshly weaned lambs do not belong 10 feet from the open window of a house on a summer night.