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Hi Everyone,

               When last week began I had one goal in mind—tidy up the gardens for the upcoming Photo Day on the farm. Mom and Papa had one goal too—get the tunnel end walls finished so that we can get the plastic covering over the top before the first frost (which could happen next weekend. So on Monday Mom and Papa spent their day working on the west wall of the first Market Garden tunnel. I headed to the Cottage Garden—aka the raised bed garden. The center section is about the only place that hasn’t been overrun by weeds. I have managed to keep the majority of the weeds at bay, but some of the beds needed some tidying up. Most of those beds reside under the large oak tree, and after Hurricane Helene huffed and puffed and blew all the little twigs and dead grapevines down there was some much needed debris cleanup to be done. A few months ago I did manage to weed the Mexican tarragon bed—but all the weeds were thrown on the concrete section around the fire pit in the middle of the garden. They were now well dried out. Then a few weeks ago when I transplanted the plantain to the garden I grabbed a big broom and pushed all the twigs and sticks out of the walkways onto the concrete pad around the fire pit. It was a quick fix for a littered walkway. I needed the area cleaned up though just in case someone wanted to walk around and take pictures—but the Gravely is in the shop, the tractor is in the shop, and Mom and Papa have all their building tools and supplies in the truck so I really didn’t have a vehicle to take all the garden trash down to the compost pile. So I decided to burn it all! My brother David just happened to be visiting (to show off his new scooter), and when I mentioned that I was heading to the garden to make a fire I didn’t have to coax him to come along. He eagerly joined me and I was glad for his help to get the fire started. With all the dry materials it didn’t take long to get a roaring fire going—but I soon learned that too many leaves smothered the fire. I really enjoyed throwing the sticks and weeds into the fire instead of putting them in feed sacks. When Steve finished washing the milking equipment he joined me in the garden and then progress really happened. Steve could tackle the BIG weeds while I continued to fine tune the walkways and the beds with the smaller weeds. As the work day drew to a close we had a fire problem—it was just smoldering because the mistake was made to pile all the big weeds on top of the fire pit and after a little while the fire was suffocated. We poked and prodded and tried our best to blow some air down into the hot coals. Shortly after Steve left for the day (around 4:30) the flames started to flare up again. Mom and Papa quit working on the end walls around 5:00 so that Papa could get his evening chores done, and Mom came over to tell me it was time to quit for the day—but she found out that I was in a dilemma. There was a three foot high and four foot wide pile of weeds on top of a slightly burning fire—and we couldn’t walk away and leave it because sometime in the night it would probably take off and no one would be watching it. So we stoked the fire until it finally blazed and while Mom managed the fire I kept looking for more woody dry weeds to help keep the flames hot so that they would consume the pile of weeds quicker. It was going on 6:00 when the pile was finally burned down to a small pile that fit inside the fire pit. We still had a pile of leaves and dirt on the outside of the fire pit so we swept them a good three feet away from the fire pit and soaked them down with water. I was pleased with the accomplishments in the garden. I had wanted to clean it up for many weeks, but time was being spent getting the other gardens prepped and ready for the fall planting—and then planting them.

               Mom and Papa had a dentist appointment in Clearwater on Tuesday, which meant we had to head straight out to milk the cows when we got up at 6:00. Papa got his chores done while Mom and I milked the cows. When Steve arrived at work it was time to bottle the milk. He would have to do his chores in reverse order—filter and bottle milk and wash the milking equipment before he headed out to pasture to feed the chickens, heifers, turkeys and bulls. The chickens, heifers and bulls could easily wait a few hours without any problem—but the turkeys would kill each other if left locked up too long. I tried to get Papa’s attention while he was still out doing his chores to tell him to let the turkeys out—but I never could. So I had to walk out there and let them out myself, and I found out that 9:30 in the morning is too late for this farm girl to be eating breakfast. We usually eat a nice large breakfast every morning at 7:30—so by 9:00 my energy was running on empty. When breakfast was over Mom and Papa left and I headed over to the milk house to bottle kefir, but first I had to clean up a mess in the walk-in cooler. When I went to pack an ice chest for my parents lunch the bag of ice tore and spilt ice all over the cooler floor. Once the mess was cleaned up I was ready to bottle kefir—but the phone rang. A friend called for some cheering up and so I was delayed. When I finally got around to bottling the kefir, Steve was almost done cleaning up the milking equipment. Steve headed out to do his chores and I stuck around to wash up all the kefir jars and utensils. Then I headed back inside to do the breakfast dishes. I rested for a little bit and then I headed to the greenhouse where I potted up some mullein. I also cleaned up about a hundred little plant pots that I hadn’t had a chance to rinse clean after transplanting all the plants out to the gardens. I started to fill up the seed trays to start some onion seeds in—but then I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be planting onions I was supposed to be planting lettuce. I went ahead and finished filling up the onion seed trays and then I set them inside my dirt barrel—I will use them tomorrow to plant my onion seeds (hey, half the work is already done). I got the seed tray filled with dirt for the lettuce, but before I could plant the seeds Steve was done with his lunch break and it was time for us to package the eggs. We were not having a big egg party because there were not enough eggs to call in the crew—so Steve and I had to package the eggs by ourselves. There was only four buckets—and they were only about half way full, so it didn’t take us longer than an hour. While we were doing the eggs Steve came across an egg that he swore was cracked—and I swore that it was just wrinkled. I squeezed on it a little and it was just fine. Then I proceeded to show him that it was not cracked and just as I was starting to say, “See it is not cracked” the egg blew up in my face. Steve said that all he saw was a big yellow explosion. What a mess! We did have some good laughs though. Steve told us that a few weeks ago he cracked an extra-large egg open in his pan and he heard a clunk. There in the skillet was an egg yolk and egg white—and another small egg in its shell. That large egg had not only the normal egg yolk and egg white; it also had another egg inside of it! Speaking of little eggs—Tuesday Steve found the first egg from the new laying hens. Yeah!!

               Once the eggs were all packaged Steve headed out to gather the eggs and I planted the lettuce seeds in the seed tray in the greenhouse. Then we headed out to separate the calves for the night. Thankfully it went easy! I noticed that two of the turkeys were on the wrong side of the fence, but since it was going on 5:00 I chose to let Steve go on home and I was going to hope that in the next hour those two turkeys would find their way home. For the next hour I answered emails—for once again I had procrastinated until Tuesday night in order to have more time to work outside. At 5:45 I headed back outside to lock up the turkeys, ducks, and goose and to turn off the garden water. The first trouble I had was that the ducks were missing. I searched and searched until I finally found them sleeping under the Meyers lemon tree in the courtyard. It took a lot of chasing here and there to get them to go to bed. By then it was getting darker by the minute, and I still needed to lock up the turkeys. I headed out to pasture in the golf-cart but as I made my way around the barn the golf-cart came to an abrupt stop. Every time I tried to get it to go forward it was like the brakes would immediately engage. I managed to get it to go backwards a little, then I would try to go forward—to only come to an abrupt stop again. There were no three steps forward and two steps backward, it was all three feet backward and no feet forward. I finally managed to get the golf-cart backed up to the barn which allowed me to abandon the golf-cart and go for the truck. At first I couldn’t get the truck because the golf-cart was blocking the drive lane through the gate. I finally made it to the turkeys and it was dark—and to my dismay the two turkeys had bedded down on the wrong side of the fence. My knee was hurting and I did not want to walk all the way to the end of the fence then back down to the turkeys and then back down to the other end of the fence and back up to the turkey houses. I stood on the other side of the fence looking at the turkeys, wondering how to get over the fence. The fence could be hot—or it could not be hot. I didn’t have a hot wire tester with me, and the only other way to test it was with my hand. I tried to stick a piece of metal to it to see if it would spark—but it didn’t spark. I still wasn’t sure, and I really didn’t feel like getting shocked—but I really didn’t want to walk the whole length of the pasture twice over. I finally reached out and touched the fence and found out that it was off—so I stepped over the fence and caught up the turkey’s one at a time and pushed them through the opening on the fence (they are big openings) and then I stepped back over the fence. Now I had to put all the turkeys to bed and they seemed pretty content to sleep under the stars. Round and round we went, but in the end they all went to bed. My fifteen to thirty minute chore had turned into a forty-five minute ordeal and I was afraid that the dinner that I had popped into the oven right before I headed outside was going to burn up before I got back inside. Thankfully it didn’t.

               Wednesday was more of an inside day as I made kombucha, started making some salves (put the herbs in the oil), and got some ironing done, but come Thursday we were back outside. I had spent Monday cleaning up the Cottage Garden, and I spent Thursday cleaning up the Courtyard. I mowed it and weeded it and trimmed up some roses. Moved rocks around and planted some plants that had been in pots too long. Mom and Papa worked more on the tunnel walls. Steve picked up some grass that Mom had mowed in the front yard. She is working on it little by little—for it has not been mowed all summer and is very much knee-high. Then Steve put the last batch of chicks out to pasture and cleaned up the piles of dirt and leaves that we left around the fire pit.

               I planned on weeding around the Market Gardens on Friday, but after spending a few hours there I found the task a little bit more than I could accomplish by myself—or at least that day. So after lunch I went back to the courtyard to give Miss Jane Crow a new look. I had last dressed her up for spring, and her clothes were covered in mildew and her hat and hair had blown off with Hurricane Helene. She was looking quite sad. I ditched her old wardrobe, but before I could dress her up I got sidetracked with the grass that was overgrown on the courtyard fence. Since the front yard had not been mowed, that also meant that the grass on the fence was allowed to get out of control and it was encroaching into the flower beds. So I grabbed a shovel and dug out all the grass down the fence line, and then I dressed Miss Jane Crow in a navy blue knit jumper and a red checked long sleeve blouse. I grabbed an old straw hat that was being used as a spider hotel and cleaned it up and put it on her head after I reattached her long yellow braids to her head. I tied the hat on with a star spangled scarf. Then I added some garden gloves for her hands and tied a solar lantern to one hand. I leaned an old plow up next to her and she was ready to work. By then it was after 5:00 and Mom and Papa were still working on the tunnel end wall—and Papa needed to get feed, I needed to start dinner, the grass needed to be cleaned up from the front yard, Mom needed to finish screwing in some screws, the calves needed to be separated, and the laundry needed to be washed—somehow. The washing machine broke Thursday morning—and we were too busy Thursday to go to town to wash laundry, and now it was going on 6:00 Friday night and we still hadn’t gone to town to wash laundry. We only have a two day supply of cow towels and we needed to get them washed. Mom decided to use our washing machine—because the only part that is broken is the agitating part. So she fills it up with water and soap and then agitates it herself with a broom handle. Then she rinses and spins a few times and then they are ready for the dryer. I think that we will be getting a washing machine on loan tomorrow from my brother-in-law who owns three of them. That will be very helpful because we just do not have time to go to town to do laundry.

               Saturday dawned bright and early. I was up getting ready for the day at 5:45. It was our Photo Day on the farm and people were welcome to arrive at 6:30 in order to catch the sunrise. No one else caught the sunrise on camera—but I did. I do not usually carry a camera with me but I did on Saturday. As the day progressed I took pictures of the animals, the flowers, the gardens, the sunset, and in the end the moonrise. We didn’t have anyone show up with their cameras, but that was okay. I was grateful for the chance to take a lot of pictures myself—and it helped me to keep focused on seeing the moon rise which is something I seem to miss more than I get to see it. We had a nice relaxing day in the end, and we also picked the first batch of green beans. I think that we shall be canning green beans this week. You can check out a sample of my photos that I took on our Facebook page.

Serving you with Gladness,

Tiare