Category Archives: Reflections

Catching Up-Farm Update

Apples, Blueberries, Chickens, Chicks, Flowers, garden, Gardening, Grapes, Pond, Reflections, The Farm, Wild Flowers

To get caught up on my posts I’ll start with a look around the farm These pictures were actually from last week so I’m still a bit behind. 🙂

Chickens

Our youngest chick hatched on June 29th.

My husband named her or him (it’s still too early to tell if this is a hen or rooster) Strawberry because when he took the flock some strawberry tops that I had trimmed she grabbed one and gobbled it up. Strawberry was probably less than two weeks old at the time. He or she still sticks close to momma, not necessarily because it is still being trained or cared for by momma, but it doesn’t have anyone its own age to hang out with.

These are 2 of the chicks that hatched on May 12. They are beginning to look more like adult chickens and we are certain that one is a rooster. My husband even heard him try to crow one day.

Rex is our roo from last year. He is the daddy of all the chicks that hatched this year. He is a bit of an odd bird. He does the normal crowing sound of a rooster (Ur Ur Ur Ur URRRRR!) but also makes a loud cawing sound (Arrrr!) that I have never heard a rooster (or any chicken) make before.

What’s Blooming

Hibiscus in bloom.

Cosmos.

Wild flowers

The Pond

On some of these hot days I’ve found a dip in the pond quite refreshing and a pleasant way to get in a workout.

Garden News

Keeping the gardens alive has been a huge challenge this year. The weather has not been kind. Both June and July were very wet and all of the plants have been stressed at best. My husband has spent many hours weeding and fertilizing. Doing anything he could think of to keep things alive and growing.

I think he’s done an amazing job. I really thought we would have more crop loss than we have.

Acorn Squash

Another type of winter squash.

Sweet corn and Melons

Tomatoes (they may be small but they taste great!)

Sunflowers

Cucumbers and Eggplant

Green beans and Beets

Fruits

We had an amazing blueberry crop this year. We began picking in June and just finished picking last week. I lost track of how many we harvested as we were eating them fresh, freezing some and having friends and family pick and take what they wanted.

We have some apples that are looking good and if we can keep the birds away, we should have a decent harvest.

We also have a lot of grapes that are looking good.

We have put netting over them to try to save as many as possible for us. Homemade grape juice is one of our favorites!

Thanks for visiting.

Monthly Inspiration

Reflections

Hello and Welcome. August is well underway, and I am way behind in writing. I do hope to do some catching up over the next couple weeks, but I’ll start off with our monthly inspiration.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

This quoted is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but according to this Quote Investigator article “Quote Investigator: QI has found no substantive evidence that Benjamin Franklin employed this adage.”

I selected this quote because over the last 4-6 weeks we have experiences several system failures: electrical outages, internet outages, poor cell phone signals, a water main break which resulted in water shut off during repairs, and flooding in our community. Thankfully they were mostly short-term issues that didn’t have much negative impact on us, except for how flooding has affected our gardens this year. More about that in a future post.

All this has made me think about how well we are prepared if any of these things or another type of emergency were to happen long term. I find it scary how dependent we are on systems that so easily can fail us, and I always like to have a backup plan. Today I decided to revisit three posts that I previously published about preparedness.

Perhaps they will inspire you to look at how prepared you are for various types of system failures or other emergency situations.

Ready or Not…
When The Power Was Out
When Technology Fails

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Now Who’s Eating Our Cherries?

Cherries, Reflections, Wildlife

A couple weeks ago when the cherries first started to ripen we noticed the robins stealing them, so my husband brought the big (fake) owl out of the barn, and we put it near the cherry tree to ward off the robins.

I’m not sure how well it worked because I still saw a robin now and then swoop into the tree or one on the lawn eating a cherry.

Thursday evening I picked about 3 quarts of cherries and decided that along with the seven or so quarts that are already in the freezer that I had picked enough, so my husband took the owl back to the barn. The birds can now have all the cherries they want.

But who invited this guy?

In case you can’t tell that is a baby racoon staring at me from the cherry tree.

I hope it enjoyed its meal.

An Explosion of Color

Flowers, Prayer Garrden, Reflections

Suddenly our prayer garden is busting with color.

I suspect the hot days we are having have something to do with it.

Pink and red rose bushes. Sorry I can’t give their formal names. My husband rescued these from a nursery he was working at a few years back. They had been left to die.

Evening primrose. Again, I’m not sure of the variety because a lady who my husband worked for when he was doing landscaping dug some up and gave them to him. I do know that they are a variety that blossom during the day and now that the deer are no longer eating them they are very prolific.

Roses in the foreground backed by lavender, and Asiatic Lilies in the distant background.

These Asiatic Lilies were planted 8 or 10 years ago. Each year they would send up green shoots, then form a bud, but before they even got a chance to open a deer would come along and bite the top off, so we had never seen them flower until this year.

The fence that my husband put up last year, which encloses our entire property, is a deer deterrent. The deer can certainly jump the 4-foot fence but mostly they don’t. We don’t have nearly as much deer damage as we used to.

Another Asiatic Lily that we have never seen flower before.

I had to add at least one new plant this year. This Foxglove was my choice.

My husband came home yesterday and told me that we need to add a white flowering perennial to the prayer garden.

He says we need to go shop for it today. Who am I to argue? 🙂

Thanks for visiting.

Giving Credit

Reflections

I mentioned in my most recent Monthly Inspiration post that I like to give credit where credit is due so when I came across this article identifying the author of the Rainbow Bridge poem, that I have shared on my blog several times over the past few years, I knew I needed to share this as well.

I do hope you take the time to read the above, well written article/interview but for those who don’t I will tell you that the poem was originally written in 1959 by 19-year-old Edna Clyne of Inverness, Scotland, the day after her Labrador Retriever, Major, died.

I also wanted to share with you this paragraph where Edna, now in her 80’s, answers the question ‘what advice she would give to those grieving the loss of a pet’. “nothing took her aback as when I asked if she has any advice to share for people suffering from the loss of a pet—because she, is after all, the world’s greatest expert on animal mourning. She asked if I really thought that was true, to which I could only respond, “Well you wrote the Rainbow Bridge, didn’t you?” Her response was then immediate—get another pet. We discussed it, how the relationship with a new pet will never be the same as the relationship with the old one, but it can be equally special and loving in different ways. There’s no reason to deny yourself or another animal that love, your previous pet certainly wouldn’t have wanted you to live without it.” I wholeheartedly agree with Edna’s advice. It has certainly helped us 🙂

Thanks for visiting.