Author: Cabincrafted1

     Today would have been my Mother’s 89th birthday had she lived beyond the age of 64.  I am older than she was when she died.  Today was not a typical celebration of the 4th of July for us.  There was no cookout, though we do have our eldest son and eldest grandson here and we rushed into town late this evening and found a parking spot about 6 blocks from the fireworks, found an uncrowded spot in the grass on the highest part of the park above where they were fired.  It was a good show, we arrived around 9:15 pm, very hungry because of how we spent the rest of the day.
     The morning started with grandson’s guitar practice and his daily assignments of doing a writing exercise and a math exercise, followed by lunch in town and a few errands and purchases that were needed back at the farm.  The afternoon was a marathon of harvesting the meat birds and rooster culls that have been providing us with a morning serenade of crowing challenges between several birds.  Tomorrow will be silent.  The only chickens left are my egg layers and today, we got our first two pullet eggs.

     On Sunday afternoon, the car pointed northeast for a few days of me helping out in Northern Virginia with the eldest son’s family.  As both adults are working this summer, grandson needs coverage, he is only 8 and certainly not ready to be a latchkey kid in any sense of the meaning.  He is in a lot of summer activities, but they require his Dad to get him there without a car by 8:30 or 9 and pick him up by 3:30 or 4, depending on which week of activities are schedued.  They want to come back to the farm for a few days and to do so means longer hours at work for son, so Grandmom to the rescue.  There are a few times a year when school or work schedules just don’t work out and the trips to help are scheduled.  Sometimes, grandson and I spend all day together, others like this trip, my time is unencumbered from the beginning of day camp until the camp day is over.  It is a good time to enjoy some alone time.  On my agenda was to trek over to Old Town Alexandria and spend some time visiting some of the shops, but the June rains have carried over to July and walking around wet streets in sandals with an umbrella didn’t appeal.
     This has allowed time to knit and read, to venture a mile down the road to Whole Foods and avail myself of their diverse salad bar for lunch.
     While here, I try to help with household chores and designate myself as dinner cook.  They have a local nursery and produce stand right across the 4 lane street from their house and if you are brave enough to test Northern Virginia traffic on foot, local veggies are handy.
     Tomorrow after camp and work, we will make the drive back south west to the farm for awork session and visit.

     While the west is sweltering, we are summer hot, but staying mostly in the mid 80’s and cooling to wonderful sleeping weather at night.
      While many areas of the country are arid and into years of drought, we are getting rain.  The garden is thriving, including the weeds, but what are weeds, just wildflowers growing where you don’t want them.
      Our children are pushing on with their lives as adults with families of their own.  Dealing with their own issues and sometimes coming to us for advice.  One is working on a PhD, one is just finishing a MBA, one has just bought a first house.  It pleases us that they are all strong and independent, loving and generous with their children for us to love.
      Grateful for the beautiful spot of Mother Nature that we found, bought, and built on.  Every day brings us glimpses of deer, turkeys, red tailed hawks, bunnies, chipmunks and more.  Wildflowers abound in the yard and ditches, changing with the months that pass.

One of my favorites is Moth Mullein, shooting spikes of white, pink or yellow blossoms toward the sky.
     Thankful for acres to grow gardens and chickens, for dogs to run and maybe someday horses and beef cattle.
      Life is good.

This week we have seen a lot of this…

gray and steamy, thunder, lightening and today steady cooler rain.

These guys are being fattened up for next week’s trip to freezer camp…

which also means bringing out the brooder and getting set up for the next round of meat chicks due later in the summer…

The rain and warmth are responsible for the lush growth in the flower beds and the garden…

including the rapid growth of weeds that will require another couple of intense days removing them and another too soon mowing.

Hoping that we will soon be able to refill the near barren pantry shelves and empty freezer…

The produce so far has been garlic scapes, a couple of jalapenos and some greens.  The pullets are now nearly 16 weeks old and we are hoping for eggs soon.

The wet weather has given time for some spinning and knitting, socializing with the Clicks and Sticks Knitting night group last night and the Spunsters spinning group today.

     Today we are enjoying summer afternoon thunderstorms.  Since the farm work is caught up, the house is dusted and vacuumed, I am enjoying some crafting time.

On the spinning wheel I’m spinning the wine part of a wine and roses yarn.  The dark wine color will be plied with the rose colored merino to make what I hope is worsted weight yarn.

On the needles is homespun by Kirsten of Echo Valley Finnsheep.  It is called Licorice with Vanilla.  These two yarns along with the Jamica that I spun recently are being knit into little stuffed bunnies from a pattern Henry’s Rabbits on Ravelry.  They will be given to our granddaughters and our daughter and son-in-laws new nephew.
     It seemed time to finally start knitting some of my homespun yarn and since most of my homespun are too little yardage to knit much but hats and scarves, toys are a good use for the fiber goodness.

     Summer arrived with a vengeance.  It is hot and humid, reminds me of when we lived in Virginia Beach.  It is cooling at night, fortunately and our log home heats slowly during the day and cools well at night, so we haven’t had to turn on the A/C, but it is near 90 today and the air is so thick you drink it instead of breathing it.
     Two days ago, the tractor and brush hog were brought out for the first time since they were haying and a little mow was done.  We have the area that we consider the lawn that covers maybe a couple of acres and it gets mowed fairly regularly.  A medium mow includes the area from the “lawn” to the barn and west beyond a row of pines we planted to the edge of the woods, maybe another couple of acres.  That gets mowed 4 or 5 times a summer.  The big mow are the hayfields that get hayed by neighbors in the spring and mowed by us in the fall.  Our farm is 30 acres and only about 5 are woods or too rocky to mow.
     When we moved from Virginia Beach, we brought with us a riding mower that was going to be used around the house.  It was stored in the barn until the house was complete and the grass and clover planted around the house had come up.  Unfortunately, by then, the mice had found it a good place to nest and it wouldn’t run.  At that time, I was still working at the high school and the school had a small engines repair class, so I took it to them to try to get it functional again.  It had some funky kind of carburetor that the instructor had never seen before, but he didn’t realize it until he had allowed some students to start working on it and they managed to get rodent nest and other unmentionables into the carburetor and fuel lines.  The mower ended up at the local fix it shop, twice, many dollars later, it still would not run.  We also had a push mower, but it was a flatland version with little tires and a chore to push up and down the irregular yard and then it too quit working.
     About this time, eldest son and I made a trip to the local small equipment store and bought this monster…

a commercial grade Stihl edger with harness and he used it to keep enough yard mowed for us to get in an out and around the house.  That led to the purchase of the John Deere and brush hog, but it just doesn’t get close enough safely to the house to really do the job.  When eldest was here in May, he weedwacked a 5 to 6′ path around the house out to where I could mow with the tractor and after I weedwacked around the outside of the orchard, he took over and did around the garden, the coop and the trees.  Since then, I have done the path around the house, the entire orchard, garden area and it nearly wore me out.  That was about 2 weeks ago and with the rain, the orchard was again nearly a foot tall.  We started discussing what to do, hubby still can’t do that type of work, his knee hasn’t healed enough and then he broke a toe on the same side, so he is still hobbling.  I didn’t think I could manage the Stihl again for that much, and though the chickens in the chicken tractor do this to a patch in about 2 days

the area is too big for the 4 X 8′ chicken tractor to be moved enough to keep it mowed for us.
     The solution we decided was not another riding mower, but a push mower with larger tires.

Though the task is still not easy, set on the tallest mow setting and working back and forth across the slope, the job is done.  The area the tractor won’t mow and the orchard are now about 4″ instead of a foot tall.  Perhaps I have a couple of weeks before it must be done again. 

     Summer has arrived, though a much rainier summer so far than we are accustomed to having.  Between showers, the porch umbrella and chair cushions were brought out in hope of dinners on the deck, the deck planters are filling in with geraniums and lantana, the herb pots filled and growing.  In the garden, two half barrels were started with potatoes, to be filled a bit more every few days as the sprouts reach for the sun in hopes that the season will end with two full barrels of fresh potatoes for the winter.  The beds of the garden were weeded and mulched, the winter squash has it’s first blossom, the cucumbers and pumpkins getting secondary leaves.  There are pea pods and a good stand of young bush beans.
     The young roosters are getting vocal, three of them challenging each other to see who can be the loudest and most annoying, beginning at 5 a.m. and continuing through the daylight hours if they see me out in the orchard or garden.  Moving their ark/tractor every couple of days is reducing the area that has to be mowed in the orchard.  The pullets (young hens) are reaching the time where we may start seeing eggs, so their coop was thoroughly cleaned and bedded with fresh hay and the nesting boxes seeded with fake eggs (golf balls) to encourage them to use the nesting boxes instead of the run or main coop when they finally figure it out.  It is about time to rearrange their run again to give them more fresh grass, but the rest of the compost beside their run still needs to be moved and a 100′ roll of 6 ‘ fencing purchased along with a few more posts so that their run can be set up along two sides of the garden in a 4 to 5’ wide expanded run for them.

*This idea borrowed from SouleMama, a delightful blog of a young homesteading family in Maine.

     There are mountains beyond those trees in both directions, so unless we are in Oz, I think we are socked in.  At least it is not raining.

     Like so many parts of the country, we have had a series of years that have had some level of drought.  Not so this year, it is again raining.  Normally by the time the hay is mowed, the rains stop and the yard and fields get a parched look to them.  Mowing is reduced to every two or three weeks and the fields are slow to grow to a height that requires a late summer/fall mowing, if it weren’t for the invasive stickweed.  Our mowing of as much of the land as possible and then allowing haying in the spring for the past 2 years has reduced this pest, but as we can’t mow all of the acreage, there are patches of it that persist and it comes up in the hayfields by fall.  This spring and summer have produced many inches of rain above normal.  Hardly a week goes by that the region doesn’t get a flood watch for the creeks and rivers.  The grass continues to grow, thick and tall and it seems we have to pick a semi dry day each week to mow at least around the house and garden.
     I know farm work isn’t always pleasant, but dealing with morning chores in the rain is an unpleasant start to the day.  Today we are looking at 100% chance of rain.  The chickens barreled out of their coop this morning and looked at me like I was responsible for it again being wet.  Some returned immediately to the inside of the coop, others huddled underneath.
     In the past couple of days between storms, I did get the upper hand on the nut and wire grass in the garden beds, put down weed mat and a heavy mulch of hay on the grape bed, mulched the beds of squash, cukes, okra, peppers and tomatoes.  On the positive side, I’m not having to water.

     On the next semi dry day, I still have a section of path that never got a layer of newspaper, weed mat or plastic that needs some work and I have a free source of year old wood chips that I am going to haul to the garden to put in the paths and hope to win the battle of wire grass there too. 

     The mountain laurel is blooming in Pandapas Pond park, hubby’s knee has healed enough for the pups to get a walk and they were happy about it.  The hayfields are mowed, the hay baled, making the property look neat for a month or so, the garden is thriving, and I added two tomato plants from the farmer’s market to replace two that didn’t survive.  The pullets and cockrells are growing, getting close to time to start seeing eggs and time to harvest the rest of the culls.  We have had a great week, survived the summer storm with only a few hours without power, the start of produce from the garden and  good weather for the most part.