We are off for a bit to camp and play with friends.
Hope you all have a lovely weekend.

We've been keeping busy over here- gardening,  jumping on the hay bales (and, in the case of two little boys, watching the tractor work with great excitement!), picking and preserving strawberries - after two visits to our friends U-pick we have picked 80 lbs for our winter stores. We are freezing and drying them this year but I haven't made any jam yet, as we find we use most of our berries for smoothies or a quick stovetop fruit sauce or as dried treats. There are currently still 50 lbs of berries in the fridge to deal with though, so jam might still happen!


We have the chickens in a much larger pen this year and they are so happy in there and their egg quality went up substantially. The grass is getting really long though, and we have discovered that they have been laying in the grass, which makes those eggs awfully hard to find- though I can't blame them, those lush green nests do look pretty appealing! Our landmates put their llamas in the pen for a few days to get the grass down a bit, hopefully we'll be able to find our eggs again soon.


We have lots of projects on the go right now, we are aiming to get all our pathways done in the garden, as they are totally overgrown and we are starting to get a slug problem. We are going to put down landscape fabric and sawdust and hope that takes care of the weeds for a good long while. And of course there is the ongoing weeding and mowing and watering and compost shoveling and thistle pulling and chicken chasing (and last night's mission to clip wings to keep them in and away from the neighbourhood dogs,)  and water system priming (poor Perry was at that a bunch this week-) and cooking and food preserving and just general fun and work around the homestead. I have also been obsessing about sorting the house and getting rid of stuff and trying to get things more organized. It is very satisfying hauling out all the bags and boxes to the thrift store and starting to see my home under all the clutter (though there is still a long way to go- I say for anyone who happens to drop by and expect a tidy home- it is rather chaotic right now, but there is an end in sight.). Phew. I need to do this to imagine being able to spend a winter in this little house living and parenting and homeschooling. 


And there has been that too- the home school planning, which has been going really well, I have a basic outline for the year and the first two blocks fleshed out, and Ari and I are both really excited about the start of the year. We will start the year with a Language Arts block (Enki uses a similar block system to Waldorf,) introducing the consonants through stories from around the world, and then the 2nd block will be a Math block, introducing the numbers similarly. Ari seems really ready for this kind of work and I love the Enki curriculum so  very much. There is such richness in it, and I think it is going to be a great fit for him. And Dori will be along for the ride too, of course, so I am making sure there are some places in the day that are for him, some special storybooks and school supplies too- since he is a "pre-kindergartener" after all!   

We ate our first ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse with breakfast. I thought I had lost most of my plants in a windstorm earlier in the summer, but thankfully most of them have come back, though I did have to replant the cucumbers. We don't have the greenhouse space to grow all the tomatoes we need, but we enjoy every ripe gem we get!


I hope you are all summer-ish and happy where you are friends.

Things I am loving right now:


:: this incredible weather we are having. The garden is so happy and so are we. 


:: my little farm boys who love to help and really can be of help now. They are so thrilled when the work that they do is helpful to the family (so long as it is fun too of course!)


:: morning chores. I love going out on these warm, lush mornings and making the rounds around the farm- the pigs, and chickens, the greenhouses to open, the plants to check on, the watering to be done. I love it so.


:: the hammock we finally got to setting up under the willow tree. The kids have been having such fun in there- and with some friends over discovered that 4 kids can swing at the same time! They have been taking turns having their quiet time in the hammock (with the other in a little tent close enough to both hear their stories on the ipod,) and I spent a couple hours yesterday doing some home school planning in there. Bliss!


:: all these new plants we are growing this year- the comfrey which has gone crazy and which the pigs adore, the field peas which are growing well and seem to make the other plants happy, the flowering broccoli that the kids love to munch on and the bees love, the lemon verbana which smells amazing, and all the happy beans that we finally got a cover up to grow them under. The garden makes me happy.


:: the big cooler full of fish from a friend with a boat and the evening with my mom chatting and processing it all. The total satisfaction as the freezer and pantry starts to fill for the winter.


:: having a quiet day to nurse the last of this summer cold that we've all had, while the boys went fishing with Perry and family. And hearing all their excited stories when they returned back home- they didn't catch anything, but they had a lot of fun! (photo credits to Perry for the shots of the little fisherfolk.)


:: eating from the garden. In this heat we all eat lots of salad and greens and I love going out with the basket before every meal to gather what we need.


:: This new cookbook that I have been cracking often to help me figure out all sorts of kitchen questions- like how to cook radish tops and pea vines, forage various wild plants, cut up a chicken, and preserve all sorts of things. I don't look at the dessert section (definitely not GAPS!) but the rest is pure gold.

I hope you are all soaking up the summer, friends.

Woah- I feel like I've been gone from here for months and months, there has been so much going on. I took a last minute trip to the coast (on my own! with no kids!) to attend our friend's memorial and to meet my sister's beautiful new baby girl. 

 I came back and I swear the weeds had doubled in size in those 4 days I was gone. They just love all this rain we've had. But then, the sun came out and we've had some beautiful warm summery weather, which is good because we were getting scared there for a bit that it was going to be another summer like last year and that all us northern folks would have to make a mass exodus for somewhere tropical. But now it is sunny and we remember why we like living where we do. 

So I've been spending these last few days excavating the garden plants from the chickweed, excavating the house from the piles of laundry and toys and enjoying the sunshine.

Oh- and attending a festival,

 playing with friends,

 cheering on the kiddos at the annual Canada Day fun run,

 And generally just loving up these adorable, cuddly little love bugs.

I hope you are all well, friends.