I Love a Good Yard Sale

As I have mentioned before, we are huge Playmobil fans around here! For the longest time the girls were coveting the medical sets. Mayla cut out a picture of the ridiculously expensive hospital ($165!!!) from a catalog and pasted it above her bed the same way teens put up posters of rock stars. It was hospital-this and hospital-that all day long.

But then came the Circus theme, right before Christmas of course!
We indulged in these tightrope walkers and some clowns. But Mayla was eyeballing that fancy circus tent something fierce! The vibrant colors, the eye catching stripes! Still, a hundred dollars is a lot to play for a toy, even a really good one.

So time went on and the Playmobil circus performers took our breaths away with their amazing stunts right out in the open, "topless" so to speak (well Big Top-less). Until...
I found this baby at a yard sale for a dollar fifty. Sure, it's not Playmobil, but the scale is right and so are the colors! It was missing a couple parts, including all the original people and the tightrope, but of course we didn't need those parts. We needed The Big Top.
I had that baby under my arm and paid for in half a second! And, let me tell you, we have been seeing some pretty amazing acts all day out in the yard!

Don't you just love a good yard sale?

The Quail are Multiplying...and so is Ibby

Our quail, purchased only in the last couple months, have started laying beautiful eggs! They are tiny and speckled and pretty darn adorable! I took this picture of a plate of them and then left them on the windowsill for a bit while I worked on other things.
A little while later I heard a sound like clink-clink-clink and wondered what Ibby was up to in the kitchen. I walked in to find that she had pulled a stool up to get her hands on those sweet little eggs (I mean, really, who could resist?) and had then arranged them thusly in our washed out spice containers:
Perfect little sets of four! "Mommy," she said as I approached, "There are four in each of these glasses!" The final egg had been thrown into the sink, poor little "remainder of 1"! What an absolutely lovely way to learn about sets and multiplication, I thought to myself as I checked the eggs for cracks (only 2 eggs sacrificed to my daughter's math skills!). And to think some kids have to use plastic interlocking cubes for this!

First Farmer's Market of the Season

We attended our first Farmer's Market of the season! I can't say it was a huge financial success, but the fact that we sold anything at all on a day filled with rain and 30mph winds is probably a good enough start!

We had a lot of fun trying to set up our tent while the wind tried to turn it inside out. We got to meet all our fellow farmers and artists as we tried to all tie our tents together to form a united front against the weather. There was an energy in the air similar to the opening night of a play. We then all visited each other's booths to chitchat while being pelted with wet gusts of wind. Someone even kindly brought us hot coffee to keep our hands warm!

The kids were charming and full of energy. They escaped to their grandparents for a bit but came back and danced in the rain and puddles and gave everyone's spirits a needed lift! We loved the feeling of community in the air. I could get used to a farmer's market kind of life.
We encouraged the kids to eat a lot of parsley hoping that damp passersby would take note and buy a clump!
The children dutifully devoured a whole bundle and a man ended up buying us out of parsley at the close of the market. Next week we'll hope for better weather and and send the kids out to dance with our beautiful flowers, a great deal at just $10 a bouquet!

Nudity in the Barnyard!

Remember these two cuties we got this past fall?
Well, summer is here and it is time for Bridget and Liesl to lose their beautiful wool. Liesl (the lighter one) is Icelandic and Bridget (the brown one) is Navajo Churro mixed with Icelandic. they are both beautiful.
We hired a man to come by and do the shearing since this sheep thing is all new to us. Let me tell you, he had the knack! Even though our sheep are a little wild (not as tame as the goats by any stretch) he pinned them down and under his firm grasp both Liesl and Bridget relaxed and let him shear their wool and clip their nails. We were pretty impressed with how still they were. This man says he has calmed down and groomed animals that are too wild for their own owners to even handle! He even helps out at zoos. He kept regaling us with stories as he sheared. Mayla, Ibby, my mom and the neighbors stood on the milk stand and watched excitedly.
Each sheep produced a whole trash bag full of wool. He said the darker wool is softer and more desirable than Liesl's lighter wool, which is stringier. Both sets of wool are usable, though. We are looking forward to experimenting with it!

After being the released the sheep looked obviously nervous and embarrassed in their new "naked" bodies! It was hard to get a picture of them because they kept running away! And if I don't look closely, I mix them up with the goats!
Don't worry, ladies, you'll have your fine coats back on in no time! And you'll be a lot more comfortable in the heat of the summer with a little less on!

Working the Land

No, I have not fallen off the face of the earth! I think this is the longest I have gone without posting on our blog, though. The reason why is that I have been working very hard in our garden. Today I'll take you on a quick tour of what we have been up to!

First off, we borrowed a friend's green house in the early spring to start seeding our plants in. We have slowing been bringing these plants home and putting them on our porch...
in our temporary makeshift greenhouse....
or in some cold frames we built by the garden.

We also have a lot in the ground--about 150 large tomato plants, two 60 ft rows of peas and beans, 400-500 flowers, 50 ft rows of carrots, beets and varieties of squash, 25 ft of cucumbers. We have about 100 ft of basil and just as much in pots waiting to be sold as potted herbs.

Oh, here's a little reward for our efforts! We are getting Cosmos blooming every day! We cut them back so that they learn to branch and grow stronger stems! We are selling cut flower bouquets at our farm stand and at two local businesses.
Here's another fruit of our labors--a very happy Ibby picking one of our earliest crops, strawberries! We've been getting so much rain a lot of them are slightly rotten on the bottom, but we get a good bunch to eat every day.
Here are some more to pick!
Peas are vining nicely! Reminds me of a newborn baby holding onto mama's hair.
Here's a quick shot of the flower portion of our garden. Our whole garden is about 60x120 ft. This turned out not to be enough room so Jake's mother graciously offered to let us dig up part of her backyard to put yet more flowers, and we have a grove of cherry tomato plants that will live in pots surrounded by fencing in the side of the yard. Lots of herbs will remain in pots on the porch. I can't tell if we're overdoing it or not. This is the first year we have rented a booth at a Farmer's Market! We are learning.
Believe me, I could put a thousand more pictures up here (I didn't even get a good full shot of the whole garden), but I have to get going! The animals take almost an hour to set up in the morning these days. The quail are full-grown, another batch of chickens is ready to harvest, the goat kids are thriving, the chickens are laying, the rabbits are breeding! We are busy. And we are happy. And we are hoping all this hard work can support us for a few months.

Christina Katerina and the Box

This gem of a book was written before I was even born, and yet it remains a classic, and a definite favorite of Mayla's.
In this book, rough and tumble Christina Katerina and her buddy Fats take a huge box and turn it into a clubhouse, a castle, a race car, you name it.

There is so much to love about this book! First off, Christina Katerina wears some killer cool outfits. Second, she is a strong, busy, resourceful and clever little girl. Third, she is friends with a boy!

I really appreciate books that show boys and girls being friends. Some say that it is a normal development that around 5 kids start preferring to play with kids of the same sex. I find this so sad. Mayla has always had a lot of young male friends and I don't want to say goodbye to them just yet! Even now, at five and a half, I said she could invite 4 friends to a small party and she chose 2 girls and 2 boys. I hate to think that one day she might cross half the class off her list of possible friends because they are boys. And yet, it happens. And I think it happens more to kids who go to school. Kids who are homeschooled don't seem to abide by these barriers as much, or so I've heard. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, you can imagine Mayla's delight when our washer broke (at, let me tell you, a very inconvenient time) and we received this wonderful box! She and Ibby turned it into a clubhouse complete with a flag on top! And feathers!
And, just like in the book, they had a ball with the box until it disintegrated over the course of several weeks and many rainstorms, becoming nothing but a soggy layer of mush that I had to rake off the grass. A good investment that box was! (Not to mention that the washer that came in that box has been steadily cranking through our laundry without ceasing for a good few weeks now!)

Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you could reach into that photo and open up the flap and peek inside, you would discover that Ibby cut the tops off of all the hostas and piled them in the box making a fine carpet! But you probably knew she would try something like that, right? : )

The Old Gray Hair She Ain't What She Used to Be

My sister and I have a rather awful habit. We pluck the gray hairs right out of our heads. And what's more, sometimes we pluck each other's! There's nothing like having a sister who can rush in at the dark hour of desperate need and pull out a row of gray hair that you know is right there on the back of your head but you just can't reach! Ah, sweet sisterhood.

I know what you're thinking: if you pluck it, don't ten more grow in it's place? I haven't really found this to be true. All I know is that I'm not walking around with a giant gray hair sticking up out of my head like an antennae, which is what the situation was the first time I decided to pluck back when I was a young and tender 30 year old. Sure, there are a few more now, but it has been six years. And it surely beats putting bad poisonous chemicals in your hair. I had enough of that in my 20s with the green and purple hairdos I concocted.

The thing about pulling out a bunch of gray hairs is that it feels so satisfying. Seeing a gray patch, panicking, and then one by one plucking each silver strand out with a little pop is so fulfilling. Even better--knowing I got the whole strand and that it didn't break off in the middle! Sweet success!

My husband rolls his eyes when he sees me zeroing in on a questionable hair in front of the mirror. He claims I'll be bald in another year. But maybe not.......

For folks, I am here to report that there is yet another activity I now routinely engage in that is just as satisfying as plucking gray hairs. Hold onto your hats, it's a good one. It is....(drumroll)....weeding my garden!!!!! Yes, I have become a weeding addict!

Every day for what seems like ages now, I have been going outside and pulling out tiny little shoots of beachgrass growing between our fragile little carrot and beet plants. I have been pulling stray flower plants springing out from under our vining peas and beans. And most rewarding of all, so rewarding I actually dream about it more than once, I have been loosening the roots and then gently pulling out the hideous weed Mugwort along with it's white rope-like roots!

I ***heart*** pulling out Mugwort! It is soooo much better than pulling out gray hairs! To see each plant come popping out whole, with an intact root to boot, makes my heart fill with satisfaction and joy! Sometimes I cannot even listen to my dear husband wax on and on about which plants will go where because my beady eye is busy casting around, looking for just one little sprig of Mugwort that I could just ease out of the ground with my trusty little spade. Mmmm, I can feel it now! And then to look down a row of plants and see only the intended few standing uniformly in a line, free of the scraggly wannabes, bliss!

You know, sometimes I get so addicted to that satisfying feeling of plucking weeds that I have to remind myself not to get carried away and in my reverie start accidentally ripping out the intended plants too!

Well, maybe this weeding thing will be good for my head. I can give my gray hair a break for the summer and put my energies into weeding. I'll let you know in August whether I become totally gray myself from lack of plucking!