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Hi Everyone,

                It is almost 8:00—a little late for starting my journal, but I have spent the last two hours entertaining my niece and nephew. At 6:00 I was going to start my journal but I realized that I didn’t have a picture for it—so I asked my 8 year old niece, Makenna, to go to the garden with me to take a picture. Before we got to the garden we took a detour to see a newborn calf—and it is so tiny and cute. As soon as we got to the garden we realized that Papa was having problems separating the calves for they wanted to run all over the field. We went over to help, and between the three of us we got the calves out of the field. We then headed back to the garden and I got a picture of the new flower bed. Makenna wanted to take pictures in the garden maze (that is what she calls the raised bed garden). While looking at the flowers we also found sugar snap peas and celery to snack on—of which Makenna thought was the best meal she had ever had and deemed eating in the garden to be much better than fixing a meal inside. We then headed over to the carrot patch to pick some fresh carrots, and along the way we grabbed a head of lettuce, some collards and a nice big Vidalia onion. With all the food in hand Makenna was determined to come inside and cook something with it all—so we made a salad. Josiah determined that he wanted a kefir smoothie, and Makenna agreed. I put the salad on hold while I fixed them a kefir smoothie with kefir, frozen strawberries and bananas and some honey. In the meantime, we had also picked a handful of lemon balm in the garden so I boiled some water and made us a nice cup of fresh lemon balm tea. The mess is now cleaned up in the kitchen and they are playing with the toys while Grandma and their Mom look through school books.

                This afternoon as I was sitting on the porch swing eating a bowl of chocolate pudding—did you know that there is never enough chocolate pudding in the bowl? Anyway, as I was swinging and looking around the farm I realized that we have owned this farm for 25 years. A lot happened in our family that year. We had been looking for property—but couldn’t find any in our price range. One day Mom called a lady to ask her if we could breed our milk cow to her bull, and the lady asked if we were still interested in her property. We told her we couldn’t afford it, but she told us that someone had talked her down in price but that they wanted to put trailers all over the 58 acres—and she would rather look at cows. So, if we would offer her $500 more than the other guy we could have it—but we had to sign the contract that night. My parents headed over and made the deal, but before the final papers could be signed my Great-Grandma Street who was 100 years old and living with us got sick and hospitalized and my Mom had a heart attack. We owned the property for a whole year before Mom was strong enough to do anything with it—and the first thing we did was plant over 500 chestnut trees. We spent days marking rows, and using a can of spray paint to mark where each tree was to be planted. More days were spent putting in a sprinkler system, drilling holes for each tree, planting them, putting growth cones around them, and fertilizing them. How well I remember those fertilizer days. All seven of us had a bucket full of organic fertilizer and we were supposed to go up a row and pour a scoop around each tree. I had one sister who was very young and always ended up going off diagonally instead of straight. She would circle around the tree and then get confused as to which direction her row went—and since all the rows were 20 feet apart and all the trees were 20 feet apart, they made a perfectly straight line no matter which way you looked.

                The next thing we did was build a barn for the hay, and fence in some pastures to hold our horses and sheep. It was two years before our house was finished and we were able to move in. When we moved here we had one milk cow, a few beef cows, about 50 sheep, and some chickens. As the years went by everything has multiplied and many animals have come and gone. When we lost our first milk cow, Pet, we purchased some Dexter cows—a dual purpose cow. It wasn’t long before we had the largest herd of dun colored Dexter cattle in the southeast. When I was thirty we sold the whole herd and bought some Murray grey beef cows and started our herd of Jersey milk cows. Fifteen years later we are milking close to 20 cows. For the first few years we constantly had to buy more Jersey cows, but now our herd is big enough that we can actually sell Jersey cows to others who want their own family milk cow. When we got our first milk cow we tied her to a tree, put a bucket of food in front of her and set down beside her and milked her by hand. When we moved to this farm, we would tie her to a fence post—because we had no trees, and we would go to whatever field she was in and milk her there. When we got the Dexter cows we built a portable milking parlor that had two stalls. We used that method until we got the Jerseys and Mom said that they would give too much milk to milk by hand. When we bought the milking machines our parlor became stationary—well kind of. For a little while it was in a field beside the house and we ran an electrical cord through the yard and through my bedroom window. When a hurricane was approaching, the parlor was moved to the back yard, then when the yard started to get muddy we moved it onto the concrete in front of our garage. When we had the milk house and freezer/cooler built we moved the parlor to our recent location. The old parlor finally rotted—after about ten years, and then we built a double parlor where we could milk four cows at a time. The new lumber does not last very long, and our new parlor started rotting in four years. Seven years later our floor was totally rotten and the walls were rotting too—we were doing our best to not put any wild cows into the parlor where they just might knock the walls down and bring down the roof. So back in February our old parlor was dismantled and a new parlor was built out of metal pipes and put on a large concrete pad. It is so beautiful, so airy, so refreshing, so clean, so safe, and we are really enjoying it.

                The parlor is not the only thing that has gone through changes over the years—the garden has too. Our garden used to be wide open and we would till it under with the tractor or the big walk behind tiller. Then we would plant rows and rows of corn and rows of green beans, and whatever else we could grow. Slowly flowers began to be incorporated into the design, and then as allergies began to show their ugly face we no longer grew corn or green beans. When my brothers left home—the weeds got the better of us girls. We would try our best to find time to plant a garden, but we were so busy with all the other farm chores and house chores that it would be a month before we would make it back to the garden and by then the weeds had swallowed up our garden. One year Papa decided that he wanted us to have a really nice garden and we built a Potager/English Cottage garden. The raised beds were initially designed to be used for square foot gardening, but we soon realized that we just couldn’t grow enough to preserve for the year. Therefore, we put in six long row sections—known as the market gardens, and the raised beds turned into a place to grow perennial vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruit. I was prone to grow more kale and collards than we could possibly eat, so one year I decided to try selling the extra to our customers. That was a success, and we grew more and more each year and have even bought two caterpillar tunnels in order to grow the greens under shelter so that we could protect them from the winter freezes that do not kill the plants but burn the leaves so that you have to feed them to the chickens instead of selling them. We love growing flowers, and this year we decided that we would love to share our love of fresh garden flower bouquets with others. We turned one whole bed into a cut flower garden and for the last few weeks we have worked long hours covering the weeds with cardboard, and covering the cardboard with compost in the rows and woodchips in the walkways. The rows were covered with weed cloth and this week Papa and Mom burned the holes in the cloth so that on Thursday Mom and I could transplant the 400+ plants out of the greenhouse into the freshly made garden beds. If all goes well there will be sunflowers, cosmos, gomphrena, zinnias, amaranth, celosia and balsam. Right now we have sweet peas growing and they are just breath taking. We have decided that next year we shall have to have 100 feet of them instead of six plants. The gladiolas are starting to bloom also, and while I thought 100 bulbs was a lot I have come to realize that if you want to make bouquets for sale you need about 1000 bulbs instead. I will say though that crawling around on your hands and knees planting over 400 plants and close to 100 seeds can be pretty hard on the body. I do not know how people plant two acres of flowers.

                There is always something to do around here, and Mom and I are always dreaming up new ideas, so I must head to bed now so that I am rested up for this week’s adventures.

Serving you with Gladness,

Tiare