We made it - September is here!

It's hard to believe it but here we are - September 2nd! We have successfully made it through another August - new student orientation at my work over is through and I pulled cucumber vines this morning! We are still harvesting a large vessel of beans every other day (they just won't let up), but are now enjoying sharing them around as we really can't fit too many more in our freezer! The tomatoes are coming to an end - way before our shelves have all the tomato products I'd like for the winter, but not before I'm about out of steam to deal with more of them! The last crock of dill pickles is fermenting and we used the last of our cabbage for one more round of sauerkraut. All but the clean up remains from last evening's all-CJP potluck with my work colleagues and friends - Kali is upstairs sweeping as I type this! What a lovely evening, with rain welcoming everyone but then it clearing off for a luxurious meander around the property. Cleaning the front windows probably wasn't necessary after all but I'm enjoying the view more now!

I keep wondering if my low energy and some "off feelings" are related to just general stress and busyness or something else. Now that September is here, we'll see what kind of groove we can get into as the main harvests come to a close and we start focusing on getting cover cropping in the ground. Despite having some anxiety about whether something health-related is going on for me, there have been so many lovely wonderful family times of late. And we've laughed together a lot. Whenever we can rope in visitors to play Apples to Apples we do!

The girls have gotten into a Free to be You and Me kick and listening to it brings back many fun memories for me - I've got most of the songs memorized by heart. The other day it was on while Alida and Terah were peeling the LAST round of tomatoes for salsa. They were so intent on the job but then I noticed that Terah's little head was bopping around to the beat. I didn't get her in her prime with it, but you can get a sense of how adorable it was! I didn't peel a single tomato with those two as my assistants!!


Another very fun thing of late is that I've had the privilege of "slopping the pigs" on a few occasions when Jason was otherwise occupied, and I could get hooked. I don't like that my first delivery usually lands on one of their heads but there is no getting them to wait patiently until I can pour some in for them. The chickens have learned that slop time is a good time for them to come around and see what they can snatch before the pigs get to it. The pigs race up and down, grabbing their favorite stuff and shoving each other out of the way. Here's a glimpse of feeding time:


Another big recent happening was potato digging! Our soil IS improving! This is the first year I helped with digging - doing 1 of the 3 rows and again being impressed by my husband's strength and endurance as I was plum tuckered out by then! I was also frustrated with how many potatoes I had speared and sliced in the process. That said, we harvested about 4 bushel of potatoes and nicer, larger more consistent spuds than ever. For that to have happened in our root patch on such a rainy year feels like a huge success and probably a big thanks to the biochar seam we had put in when planting.

Terah and Alida were not that interested in helping with the potato harvesting - Terah dug for a bit and Alida picked up for a bit - but they were both VERY interested in photographing the occasion. So here's potato digging from their vantage point:

 

 And then sometimes they wish to take pictures even when we are not digging potatoes!

Alida has been wanting to make a meal "all by herself" and we finally got that on the calendar for the end of August. She made lunch and was proud that hers was a step up from Kali's first meal for us of peanut butter toast and super sweet fruit juice. Alida was very excited and focused the whole morning on "staying on schedule" and of course garnishing for beautifulness things with mint tea sprigs.

We enjoyed a date night with Ivy this week and the girls really enjoyed coloring together. Alida has taken a strong interest in being the helper with the little gals. It's cute and wonderful to watch her nurturing those skills!

Terah has not lost any of her spunk since the last blog post. This hat has been getting lots of attention these days as Terah and Alida decorate it and prance around modeling it. Alida even roped me into rating her hats the other day with monetary amounts and before I knew it I had somehow agreed to pay her actual coins for her decorated hats. She's a sneaky one. She promised it would go into her co-op fund, probably for chocolate to share around. Sounded like an ok deal to me!

I can't end this very disjointed blog post without mentioning that I once again don't have pictures of this last long stint with my parents in their quarters upstairs! I'll have to snag some from their photos! They made the last two weeks of August not only bearable but enjoyable (especially for our girls). The girls enjoyed three outings with them: to the Luray Zoo, the Grand Caverns and the Green Valley Book Fair. The caverns seemed to be the highlight for them all and Terah was not even scared of the darkness. After they came out she reflected, "I'm grateful I didn't cry." This week Alida has noted that they left a bit too soon as one evening she got to watch a flock of maybe 70 or so night hawks flying over our property and the next day she spotted two pileated woodpeckers in a dead tree in our woods. She's got the birding gene!!

So Jason and I finished our Wendell Berry Sabbath poems this week and have started our next book together. I'll close with one of the poems that has been on my mind and heart a lot in recent days.

But do the Lords of War in fact
hate the world? That would be easy
to bear, if so. If they hated
their children and the flowers
that grow in the warming light,
that would be easy to bear. For then
we could hate the haters
and be right. What is hard
is to imagine the Lords of War
may love the things that they destroy.

Wendell Berry, 2003