i missed week one because i couldn't pull together a meal with strawberries and asparagus - the only two things in season right now! week two will be published at farm to philly. stay tuned for more delicious meal ideas!

so i did more searching and purchasing this week. i splurged and went with local meat sold at a local family farm. i'm also leaning on their strawberries this week as we'll probably be picking and freezing some from another local u-pick farm later in the week for our fall and winter months.

i'm turning this meal into a lunch as this is so up the boys' alley for lunchtime goodness.

we've had several days in the 90s. i'm LOVING it.

the first really hot day was thursday, and i basked in the warmth. by the second day (friday), i finally let kenny put the air conditioning on (i think it was the kids yelling over the monitor when i put them down for bed on thursday saying, "mommy, i'm sweaty!" a thousand times that did it for me).

we broke out a new wading pool (a frog!), kenny bought a new slip and slide, and by last night, the slip and slide fed into the wading pool. it's rowan and sawyer's new favorite thing to do.

our garden is popping up all over the place. all the beans popped, so far we have an 85% percent corn sproutings, and the other plants haven't burned up in all the heat. when the plants get a little bigger, i'll get a pictrure posted. now it just looks like black mounds and hay (similar to last year's garden, minus the chickens and the groundhog troubles, plus a big fence that kenny and my brothers put up last week).

and today, kenny purchased this book. are we crazy yet? :)

we're thisclose to getting the plans for our summer garden in. we've extended it by several feet this year and we're still planning which plants and seeds go where.

it's also that time of year to sign up for a very cool summer challenge - one local summer. so all you foodies and gardeners out there...go sign yourselves up and start planning! i'm already thinking of the local farm stands i'll visit and the recipes we'll be making with our own garden produce.

we recently cheated and bought strawberries at the grocery store...but the boys were in dire need of something other than apples and pears - our winter fruits of choice. i'm eager to get to the local berry farm and pick all the berries we can eat. we got a little sick of strawberries last year with the amount that we picked that i still haven't used the ones that we froze! there is just something so perfect about a warm, sweet freshly picked strawberry that one frozen 10 months ago can't match.

we've been spending the majority of our days on the outside of the house lately. it feels great to not need a coat, and to roam the yard again without heavy boots and deep snow keeping us from walking easily.

maybe it's because this yard has so much more foliage and life beneath the ground than our old yard did...but this year again, i'm surprised (by joy, of course) at the new buds forming on the otherwise dead-looking tree branches, and the bright green shoots sticking up out of the earth after a long hibernation. even though we're expecting it, it's always surprising that life returns after such a long, cold, dead winter.

i spent the day in the city on saturday. my friend serina and i (and her 5-month-old son, asher!) headed out bright and early to the salvation army fabric fair. we didn't realize just how nuts the fair actually is until we tried to maneuver our way through the crowds. i tried two or three times to browse through the patterns/book table, but the ladies wouldn't budge. these women meant business. we did score on some great new fabirc (cheap!) but made our way through as carefully as we could without getting hurt. :)

that afternoon, i met kenny and the boys (and my mom) at our old church for the shape note workshop i was so excited about. it was a lot of fun to sing in a group again (i rarely get this opportunity anymore since i'm not the singer in the family), and it was interesting learning a bit more about it. but kenny and i made the same observation about the actual singing: at this point, we'd much rather listen to it sung (by those who sing it a lot!) than to sing it ourselves. there was a huge need to pay attention to the line of music that you'd sing, and i honestly can't remember actually hearing the music being sung because i was too intent on getting the notes right. so i keep listening to the pieces from the Awake My Soul web site to get my fix.

in the warmth of the afternoon sun on sunday, we labored in the garden. now i know that this is (an example of) the type of work that God requires us to abstain from on the 7th day of the week...but seriously, is it work when it's so enjoyable? when it's all you've been wanting to do for the past three months of frozen temperatures? because it felt great to see the ground again, and to see the garden getting ready to be a bed of growth again. the boys helped us with their garden tools while adam napped. we breathed in the earth, the sun, the tractor diesel fumes....  if there is one thing i'd like to do away with, it's the tractor diesel. i wish there were such a thing as an affordable, green tractor that would make all the rest of our organic gardening and earth-keeping worth it. perhaps one day, the barn will be fixed up enough to house a few goats and sheep. because they're the perfect earth-friendly tractors around.

AND...we lost another chicken today. it was one of the black and white ones (silver laced wyandottes) - the ones i call george washington (they look just like him!). we believe she was hit by a car as she was lying, wings sprawled, in our rock/shrub garden. we're not sure it was a natural landing that put her there, or if someone put here there after doing the damage. she's had a proper burial and yes, we told the boys. and this after we were just telling someone how we've never lost a chicken to traffic, even though they freely walk in the street on a daily basis (cars normally slow down, honk, or stop). this puts our daily egg count down to about 10-11. thank goodness for friends who readily take eggs off our hands.

our garden continues to be munched on by a particular small, grey rodent of sorts...some things are surviving, but i'm afraid that our pole beans will not produce beans this year. the lima bean plants look really good, however, as do the green pepper, celery, and one lone cucumber plant. and our tomatoes? they're going crazy. i'm afriad all the green globes that are forming will turn red on the same day and i'm going to have to can and make salsa within a 24-hour time slot. yikes! at least the boys will eat the cherry tomatoes off the plants.

i've been following (but not participating in, sadly) a great project/blog called One Local Summer. the jist of the project is to make one meal a week of all local ingredients. if you haven't already done so, go to your farmer's markets and get some locally grown fruit and vegetables. you may even be able to find baked goods made from locally grown flours/grains. the other night, we had steamed green beans from the garden of kenny's colleague. they were so sweet and delicious, i'm sure they would have been great raw. i'm afraid it's what we're missing in our own garden, thanks to mr. groundhog (did you notice, in that list of groundhog characteristics that a groundhog is "is a herbivore, or vegetarian, eating a wide variety of wild plants, clover and alfalfa, and garden vegetables if available.)

tonight's dinner is the closest i've come yet:
grilled chicken with homamde BBQ sauce (made with local honey)
corn on the cob (grown in slippery rock)
green beans (grown in slippery rock)

the only thing not "local" is the chicken. hopefully by next year, we'll be eating locally-grown, preferably pasture-raised, chicken and beef. and pork. and the occasional lamb. and turkey.

"we set our hopes high so that we can grow wings and learn to fly."
 - i have no idea who coined that phrase

kenny should really be the one writing this post, but he gave up blogging for Lent a while back and just never got back into it (actually, it was around the time sawyer was born, 2004, when he gave up on blogging).

he's the mastermind behind our next big project, which kicked off officially today: beekeeping.  we spent the morning making sweet and sour meatballs to take with us to the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association's Summer Picnic/Potluck. we were expecting there to be perhaps 10-15 folks there sharing our meatballs, perhaps a few bags of chips, some warm soda, and maybe a cake in the shape of a honeybee complete with "honey" icing while the beekeepers chatted about their hives.

fortunately, it was nothing of the sort. we were one of 50 families (maybe more)...totalling a few hundred people with hot dogs and a TON more food to share. there were activities for the kids (the boys made "kite" honeybees and tree-branch name plates) while kenny listened to a few of the experts talk about the recent bee colony collapses. he also got to "schmooze" or "network" with several beekeepers in our area (one lives just down the street!).

these beekepers know how to throw a family party.

they do get a bit corny with their "Honey Queen" contest where they nominate some floozy woman as the "Honey Queen" for a year. as i was passing her wearing her tiara and sash, i asked her just what she did to received this title (yes, okay, i was taking notes so I COULD BE THE NEXT HONEY QUEEN)...and i made the mistake of referring to her as the "queen bee." she corrected me immediately and told me that she wrote an essay on the health benefits of honey and the judges interviewed her. she said she won based on the combination of her interviewing/speaking skills and the uniqueness of her essay. i was hoping it was a baking contest so i at least had a chance for next year. but speaking skills? writing an essay? PUL-EASE.

our neighbors donated their old beekeeping equipment to us complete with bee suits for kenny and i and a little-itty-bitty child's suit for the boys. rowan and sawyer tried theirs on this morning.

i'm now really excited about this: the benefits of local honey (i mean, a few yards away local!), honeybees for our garden and our neighbors' gardens, and learning the incredibly complex ways of the honeybee are just a few of the things i'm excited about. we order our bees sometime in january and we'll receive them late spring, 2008.

i want to wish all the dads in my life a very happy father's day. we had a fantastic day except for the...devastation.

here is another picture from the series of photos i took in the garden JUST LAST NIGHT (by the way, that's mud on adam's rear in the previous post...not chicken poop. there seemed to have been a bit of confusion amongst some of my readers - ha!). this is a photo of the row of lettuce and broccoli (the broccoli is toward the back...all you can see is big, beautiful leafy greens). they were my favorite plants in the garden: a blue-ish green leaf; thick stalks and growing up as well as out.
 

this photo is 10 minutes old. taken just 25 hours after the photo above. the lettuce in the front is gone...the lettuce in the middle is mowed, and the broccoli? sticks. broken sticks. the gorgeous leaves now being digested in the belly or bellies of the three groundhogs that live in our yard.



lets take a closer look at the lack of broccoli in our garden:



they've also munched on our beans and cucumbers.

i know you are all shaking your heads as you read this thinking, "why haven't you gotten that fence we ALL told you to put up as soon as humanly possible?" why didn't we listen to all your advice? because...because...we have no excuse. we're still researching the most effective and cost-efficient (that's my new phrase) fence. and our garden is being eaten from under our noses by the burly little hogs that i have no sympathy for anymore.

another reason we haven't put up a fence yet is because the previous owner, who still lives near us, swears up and down she never needed a fence. they grew tomatoes and other veggies and never had a fence. we believed her. now we're not so sure.

i'll leave you with an image from happier times earlier today. what a great dad kenny is: he hardly got a chance to use his father's day present (a 30-year anniversary edition shakespeare ugly stick, for those readers who are also fishers) today since the two older boys seemed to want to do all the fishing. after the fishing, we ate our grilled burgers and then swam in the lake. all three boys are fishes. we couldn't get them out of the water.



HAPPY FATHER'S DAY, DADS!

since i post a lot about the gardens and gardening that we have, i get asked a lot, "how do you garden with three little boys?" first, a disclaimer: our gardening isn't extravagant. remember those perrenial gardens i post a lot about? they're mostly weeds with a few gorgeous flowers here and there. we just don't have time to weed those beds. at least not this year. we do put time into the vegetable garden.  the day we put in the garden, we worked while adam napped. the older two boys love to help us, or walk around the yard making sure all the chickens are still alive (rowan especially), or play in the sandbox. so it's easy to work with them. it wasn't so easy with a baby who wanted to be held constantly. but recently, he's learned to crawl, has taken a few steps and all he wants to do is be on the ground moving around himself.

so before baths tonight, we decided to do a bit of weeding and watering since it hadn't rained in a few days. we also spread some straw around the tomato plants and caged the rest of them. we continue to harvest leaves from the lettuce bed nearly every night for salad. the leaves seem to grow overnight from a harvesting. everything else is still growing, getting flowers or small buds of fruit.

here's our little helper. he "weeded" (or picked newly sprouted lima plants - oops!):


...and was very helpful chasing the chickens out of the garden:


and for the record...i'm the only one around here that doesn't go outside without shoes. i slip on my crocs every time i leave the house. the chickens are everywhere. and so is their poop. nobody seems to mind this but me. i love those chickens. i don't love their excrement.

our summer vegetable garden was growing by leaps and bounds. and then...just like THAT...90% of our beans disappeared. we noticed a few of the leaves chopped off on monday, and by tuesday morning, we had ten left of the forty-some plants that had grown to three inches tall.

yesterday, we noticed one of our beautiful broccoli plants was eaten to a stalk...and then i stumbled upon something else growing in our garden: a nest of five itty, bitty baby bunnies. they must be one or two days old now, and they sit nestled under our three strongest lima bean plants. *sigh*

what do i do with my need-to-save-the-baby-bunnies heart, and my newfound love of all things gardening and growing our own food? folks out here would tell us to drown the babes without thinking twice...they're mama could be the culprit of our missing beans plants! however, we've spotted three groundhogs on the premises over the past few days, and they're more likely to eat beans and broccoli than rabbits. apparently. and we couldn't care less for the groundhogs.

kenny sprinkled cayenne powder over most of the plants last night, and nothing disappeared overnight. so the bunnies are staying put for now. until we give in and decide we are growing food, not bunnies.

in other farming news...does anyone have any experience growing rhubarb? i picked some up at our local farm stand a few weeks ago and made rhubarb sauce, which i love. kenny never had it before. i guess it's a taste that one needs to acquire? i'd like to grow it...but don't want to wait years and years to harvest. does anyone know if i could get a splitting from a plant and would it transplant well for a harvest as early as next year?

* THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE: the baby bunnies are gone as of this morning. it looks as though the mother took them to a safer place...or the neighbor's cat had a really nice breakfast. *

i don't know what it is about the evenings that kenny isn't here for the kids' bedtime...but they pretty much suck the big one.

today, however, was fabulous. kenny sent me out first thing in the morning to "do whatever i wanted" so i discovered new roads as i drove, listening to my favorite radio station. then i happened upon the best nursery i've ever been to. rows and rows of perennials, annuals, HUGE hanging baskets, herbs, and vegetable plants (heirloom!). if our garden hadn't already been planted, i'd have walked away with a lot more than i did. i only walked away with $19 worth of annuals - ivy, petunias, impatiens, and a GORGEOUS begonia plant that i just kept potted in our hallway. i want to look upon its glory every single morning as i stumble downstairs for my first cup of coffee.

we had a great rest of the day (except for the fact that we're in the thick of the really big, bad whining stage with the two older boys. perhaps this is subject for a different post altogether, but kenny and i are so over the whineys. when do kids grow out of it? and please, no smart remarks like, "liz, you're 34 and you're still whiney!" i already know that.) and then kenny headed off to bible study. at which point, momma is alone against three boys.

tonight, the two older boys decided that they were dying of thirst. just two minutes after they each had a cup of milk. they were so thirsty that rowan told me, "i'm so sad that you won't give me a drink." i told him that if he didn't whine about it for five minutes, i'd get him a cup of water before i turned out the lights. he succeeded, and he had his water. then he told me that the water made him even thirstier. when i said, "no more water, rowan" he told me that he was sick. and then sawyer said that his back hurt. and then adam decided it was his turn to cry. i gathered them altogether and brought them downstairs. i changed adam's diaper (he was...um...smelly), and told the boys to put on their rain boots. so we all traipsed outside to feed and water the chickens for the night.

at least the chickens have learned that bedtime means bedtime. we headed out to the coop with 15 chickens following us (waddling! they waddle like ducks!) to the squeals of joy from the boys. i put their food and water in the coop and half of them hopped up in. the rest followed us back to the house.

"take two" of boys' bedtime. the older two were alseep within minutes of me leaving the room for the second time but adam wasn't going to have any part of this sleeping thing. and he let me know by his wails. so i did what dr. ferber teaches parents NOT to do...i went and picked him up and brought him downstairs. we sat on the front stoop and chatted for a while with the chickens. then i sang him a few songs, and after 15 minutes, put him back in his crib. he protested all of 2 minutes and was asleep soon after.

at this point, it is about an hour and a half AFTER the boys' normal bedtime. i go outside to check the chickens and they're all huddled in the corner of their coop like good little girls. i lock them in for the night and head back to the house for a relaxing evening hour before my own bedtime.

five minutes pass, and sawyer starts to cry. i go to him, find him alseep and rolling about in bed. i tuck him under his sheet, give him a kiss, reassure him of our love for him (even when they sleep, i tell them i love them...can't hurt, right?) and come back downstairs. five minutes later, another sawyer episode. fifteen minutes later, another one, but this time, he's awake and telling me he needs a drink. i rub his back and he's asleep in minutes.

that was five minutes ago. i'm just waiting for yet another cry from the room. maybe we should skip the soft serve ice cream after dinner from now on?

as i predicted, the warm air and sunnier skies have kept me (and the entire family) outside instead of inside reading and writing. and i find myself having a hard time finding something to blog about. so...do i leave the blog alone for a while and let it grow cobwebs until the cooler air returns, or do i just write about what has been keeping us busy? because what has been keeping us busy is basically what i've been blogging about for...oh...the past five entries.

are you sick of hearing about the gardens and the chickens and my boys? if you are, you are invited to read the next highlighted blog in your bloglines account. because this entry will be no different than the past few. if you're still around, i'm flattered.

last friday afternoon, friends of ours from pittsburgh took time out of their busy lives to come to our home and help us figure out just what we have growing in our gardens. the perennial gardens just have us perplexed. our friends gave us amazing advice on how to treat and relish and enjoy our bushes, gardens, and trees, and identified many of the gorgeous flowers growing in our beds. we feel so much more confident in our ability to keep our grounds watered, fed, and beautiful in the years to come now that we know what we're housing in our soil.

several colors of foxglove, purple miniature iris, white iris, lupin, poppy, and jack-in-the-pulpits are our strongest plants, and are becoming my favorites. i'm waiting for the poppy to break open its bloom...but everything else is opening up. i honestly don't remember half of these flowers in the garden last year.

and our row of peonies? there are literally hundreds of bulbs bending their stems over to the ground, covered in ants. i read that you can cut them when their bloom is full, but not-yet-opened, so i cut and brought a few inside (after is hook out all the ants). they smell incredible. and they are slowly opening up now that they're in a vase.

what an exciting day at the homestead.

it's a little earlier than we had hoped, but due to circumstances out of our control, our 5-week-old chickens are now free range. after rounding them up for the 27th time on sunday and yesterday, we just decided to let them have at it. their little makeshift pen wasn't doing it for them anymore, and since they've now got tail feathers, they're about twice as big as they were last week...they need the extra room.

and they love it. they wander around and around and under the coop, eating grass, pecking at bugs. they go hide when rowan and sawyer come running, but come when the adults find them with hands full of food. eventually, rowan and sawyer will treat them with respect, right?

also this morning, our baby robins were dumped out of their nest. at first we thought it was an accident, but my mom, who was visiting, assured us that this is what mama robins do with thei babies, and it's completely natural. BUT THEY'RE ONLY ONE WEEK OLD!!! apparently, she was right. we found two of the three babies hopping around the garden (i held off on watering for about half an hour until they were out of the garden) and mama and papa hopping around the yard chirping at them to follow them into the woods across the street (and at us to stay the heck away from their babies!). i guess papa robin spent the past two weeks looking for their new home, since this is the first i've seen him.

at one point, one of the babies was stuck in the middle of the road. you can imagine that at one week old, they're not walking very fast. kenny actually stopped traffic (all of the one car that past our house in that half hour period) to keep the baby robin safe. we think the other robin made it across the road since there is no evidence on the road of its demise, and it is not in our yard any more.

then we looked up and saw two hawks flying overhead. for the first time since fall. we ran over to the chicken coop and left the boys there to play with the chickens. perhaps hawks won't swoop where there are children at play.

as i was walking back i happened to look down under the grapevine where the original robin's nest was and noticed a black coiled stripey "rope" that happened to be a snake. i ran in the house, pulled kenny away from his work yet again to tell him about it. i knew he want to show the boys. he tried to grab it, but it slithered away into some tall grass. or our peonies.

we're wondering if the garter snake is the reason behind the mysterious absence of the third baby robin. does anyone know for sure if garters eat baby birds?

hawks, snakes, and wild cars on the road...the real culprits of small farm animal deaths.

it's all about veggies.

we've had a long few weeks of warm, sunny weather and our arms and faces carry the tanned shadows of our full days outside. the boys were so happy to be outside, and they all slept the whole night long, so tired from running, climbing, digging, and playing..

we planted our garden over the weekend. here's what we're hoping to harvest through the late summer, into early fall:


it doesn't seem like a whole lot when you're out looking at the garden, but looking at that list - wow - it seems as though we're setting up our very own garden stand.

here's the garden, chock-full of plants and seeds, waiting for the rain to come (it did a few hours after this picture was taken):

right behind the garden (where the boys are standing in the photo above) is a huge grapevine that yields lots of sour grapes. but this season, we found a robin nest inside:

mama sat dutifully on her eggs until they hatched yesterday morning (mama has since returned to the nest after i took these pictures):

and she's there all the time now that the weather has turned cooler. what a good mama robin. fortunately, mama robin picked prime location in the grapevine as our garden is right next to her nest, and she has first dibs on all morning worms. smart woman.

also, since the weather has been cooler, kenny had to hook up an extension cord from the barn into the chicken coop to put a light on them last night. by the winter, they'll be fully feathered-out, but they still have those bald spots on their necks and heads, so we don't know how warm they actually are. it's supposed to warm up in a few days.

it's regurgitating its young!

doesn't this...

...look eerily similar to the alien in Alien?

it better end up being a pretty little plant, or i'm packing up and leaving this joint.

last night, i pulled weeds. it was totally by choice, and it was a fabulous way to spend an hour or so in the evening. kenny and the boys were just over the hill walking the grounds and playing on the jungle gym, so i could hear the fun they were having even over the music playing on my ipod.

as i stated before, we inherited three larger-than-life flower gardens. if you'll remember, i was rather pregnant when we moved into this house a year ago, and then spent the summer with a newborn attached to me, staying in the shade. so gardening was the least of my priorities. but those flower beds grew and grew. the weeds overtook the flowers and we were left with huge weedy messes by fall. i vowed not to let that happen this year. so we're already starting. a bit late...but we're weeding!

by chance, the previous owner stopped by today and i asked her about a few of the flowers that are popping up already and what i should expect. i was hoping she wouldn't notice that i spent some time already digging up all the tulip bulbs that haven't produced a flower for the past two springs...and the daffodil bunches that also didn't bloom. i guess some bulbs get old? this seasons' weather wasn't much of a help either. but tthe cold and rain/snow didn't stop the weeds!

as i was happily weeding in the bed between the house and garage (something tha ti can see from teh kitchen window, so it willb e nice to have something lovely to look at this year!), i came across something very odd. i knew that moving to the country would increase our chance of seeing wildlife, but i never imagined i'd see something straight out of star trek.  i unearthed the most unearthly-looking things. kenny assures me they are merely perennials called "jack in the pulpits." here is what they look like right now:

here is a closer, more freakish look at these perennials:


i pulled all the surrounding weeds to allow sunshine and rain to water down on these alien horns. 

i pulled and scraped and raked and weeded some more and then i realized that i could be pulling out the beginnings of flowers and plants that i thought were weeds. i'm a novice gardener. (mom, if you're reading, please come up and help me soon.)

so i need to find some perennials to fill in what i might have pulled up. any suggestions? i love perennials. all you need to do is keep the weeds away and no replanting each spring and summer. here is our row of peonies that pop up without me doing anything (except plowing over them in the fall with the lawn tractor). and they're gorgeous. in a few weeks, they'll be full and green with light and dark pink flowers:


i am told this is primrose. whatever it is, i want more of it in this garden and less of what is growing around it. the color is not captured in this picture...they're stunning.

so...fill me in on what is in your perennial gardens. i know of a few...like the easy-peasy hostas and lily-of-the-vally. but i'd like to fill in these beds with color. so...hit me with your best suggestions, please!