Busy

There's so more succinct way to describe our life right now. Running the farm with a 3 year old and 2 month old (and no daycare anymore) is just a recipe for running in too many directions at once. Overall, it's going as well as (or better than) I expected. Life has been helped immensely by improvement in the weather. It still rains frequently, but not with the extremes of June and early July. I believe we ended up with 14.4 inches of rain in just over 6 weeks. Over the last few weeks we've had a window of better weather that has let us be in the garden more. Some areas we just tilled under and started over. Those that we didn't, we're trying to catch up on weeding. The garden is looking surprisingly good, especially if you don't know that a large area that was supposed to be our corn patch looks like lawn since we mowed down the weeds!

Samuel is growing exponentially, it seems, and is 2 months old tomorrow. He has recently started sleeping through the night. He had been on a 11-1-3-5am wake-up routine which got tiresome quickly. So we decided that Ben would take Samuel down to my aunt and uncle's house, which was conveniently vacant during their vacation. We'd feed him at his first wake-up, and then let him get himself through the rest. We expected major crying with this plan, but he must have known the jig was up, and he started sleeping from 6:30pm to about 5am. Hurray!

Abrahm continues his fascination with all things mechanical. Recently he told me, while pointing to various parts of the engine of a scale-model tractor, that "there are connections between gas tank and the throttle, and between the gas tank and the engine." How does he put this stuff together? He spends hours each day playing with his fleet of machinery (one set for inside, another for outside). Those machines that he doesn't actually have, he imagines. So you might hear him narrating a building project with references to his Hitachi excavator, Caterpillar dozer, Komatsu excavator, Yanmar excavator, and Caterpillar excavator. Though he might have bought or sold more by now.

I'll let the photos say the rest. One of these days I need to do a photo retrospective too, to capture the months that elapsed when we fell off the blog wagon.

Leslie

Will the rain stop?

We're now up to 11.6 inches of rain in 18 days. There's no way to capture in photos the extent of sogginess in the garden (or anywhere else, for that matter). The crops that were well established by the time the rain started seem to be okay, but all the later plantings are gone. We're not quite sure how we'll fill our CSA members' weekly shares.

We've invested in a tiller, with the assumption that at some point (maybe next year) it will be dry enough to actually get it in the field. The photo comparison shows our BCS tiller next to a fairly standard-sized tiller that we had borrowed before we found the BCS. Despite its size, it's very maneuverable, and it can take other attachments.

Abrahm has been perusing heavy machinery brochures, perhaps in hopes of finding us something with which to establish better drainage in the garden. (See photo...)

The boys are both sleeping, and I probably should too.