Family gardening times!

We've been chomping at the bit to get our hands in the soil recently! Hosting graduation parties and house concerts along with the fear of frost kept us away from the main summer garden planting for a time. And then the rain just didn't want to let up for awhile. But now we've been enjoying sunshine in abundance and this family is getting stuff in the ground! AND loving it... Ok, so we have our moments - Jason's "hope for the day" at breakfast was that he would not lose his patience today with his family while we gardened together. :) I think he has done pretty well thus far, though Terah wanting to tear into the 6-packs of tomatoes without help was tempting him to lose his cool! She is so cute wanting to be right in the thick of it (cute when not actually being destructive or picking off our white strawberries or plucking the going to seed asparagus). She was mighty cute carrying the tomatoes down to the garden and hollering "daddy" at the top of her lungs so he would notice what a big girls she was being!

We kicked off the first family gardening day on Mother's Day! The day was made extra special when our former Tangly Woods' member, Jonathan, called up and asked to join us for a few hours. It was a treat to have someone join us who 1. the girls love having around (Terah was even holding his hand and sitting on his lap and Alida was doing her best to distract him from gardening!), 2. we love having around, and 3. knows our place very intimately and can celebrate with us the many changes/transformations that have taken place especially the last few years. I can't quite imagine anyone other than us who would get as excited about the bin of duff (collected from under a brush pile after a biochar burn) we are mixing with our humanure compost right now to spread on garden beds before planting. The stuff is amazing!!!

Our first family gardening day was focused on getting seeds in the ground. We had gotten our corn in earlier (as we were feeling determined to beat the folks across the road who plant GMO corn and make it very hard for us to be able to save seed). On mother's day we seeded cilantro, cucumbers, cantalope, costata romanesca, sweet dumpling squash, spaghetti squash, trombone squash, delicata squash, buckwheat and okra (and probably some things I'm forgetting!). We followed up the evening of our 18th wedding anniversary planting a field of lentils/oats with our two youngest while Kali was at a birthday sleepover!

Today the focus was on getting plants in the ground. Now tucked into the ground with an ample supply of compost are lots of tomatoes, hot/sweet peppers and basil plants. It looks like the sweet potatoes and regular potatoes will wait for the next opportunity (along with our watermelon, sunflowers, beans and some other things not in yet). I don't know how to articulate how amazing it is for us to see our soil improve year after year - the organic matter is increasing and the rock load decreasing! And we have compost! Enough of it!!! In addition to our soils improving the other exciting thing is that our ability to work together outside is only going to keep increasing. That is a very exciting prospect especially for the parents in this household! I actually got to spread compost, clear beds for planting and water lots of stuff in today - with relatively happy, content and even sometimes helpful children hanging around! The shady fire ring and watering cans and the  hydrant are our main life savers for extending work time all together outside (for the two youngest - Kali pretty much sticks with us the whole time at this point!).

It's a hot day today so we were all glad for our break a little before noon. We gathered at the picnic table (which we moved into the shade) and guzzled a gallon of mint tea while also enjoying homemade vanilla pudding, soaked/dehydrated pecans and sliced fresh strawberries (along with Alida's invention of adding mint leaves to the combo - she's on a peppermint craze, picking enough to make peppermint pesto the other night and then donating her mint dark chocolate bar for melting/coating!). No, the berries are not our own strawberries - we just learned of an organic pick-your-own place in Broadway and happened to be right by it after our marathon of dentist appointments yesterday so checked it out. The berries are large and abundant - not succulent like home grown varieties that don't hold up for market, but good!

Well clearly the morning work wore Terah out as she is on her 3rd hour of her afternoon nap! Time to get her up for a little more outside time and then soccer practice/games this evening (finally won't be rained out). I'll close with one of my favorite sites of late - these beautiful three snuggled up together at night! And then of one of the many flowers bursting forth with color in Nora's garden!