Land clearing, car trouble, dentist visits, harvests and ducklings!

Phew! 3 p.m. and I've already made 3 trips to town - not my idea of a fun day. Lunch has finally been accomplished but dishes will wait since Alida and Terah are playing school happily. I can do dishes with kids griping in the background but a blog post is much more challenging with that backdrop! But for now all is happy and peaceful - Kali is with friends this afternoon but Alida is determined to have more fun than Kali is having with her friends so she is having a pretty creative burst of play with Terah, for which I'm grateful...

So we'd been noticing when driving our car around that sometimes we were having to push the clutch in really hard to get the car started or had to try to start it a few times. Jason was thinking something was going bad with the clutch. But it seemed to happen when we were doing a string of errands with lots of stops and starts. Yesterday we were all in town together to do errands and dentist appointments for the whole family. We had the trailer loaded with buckets of scraps and a trunk full of bread for the pigs. We had stopped by my work to deliver eggs and milk. It was at that moment that no amount of trying could get the car started. Ugh! On a hot day, 20 minutes from home with loaded car and trailer and 30 minutes from our dentist appointments. Jason decided to find something to bang on the starter with. I am so glad he was with us and glad he knows car tricks that I don't. It worked and we were off! It started pouring on our way to the dentist, cooling things down enough to allow Jason to remain in the car while Terah napped and poured through a number of our appointments. It had stopped by the time we left and the car started fine after 2 plus hours of cooling off. It also started fine this morning when we took it to the shop and so we were worried maybe it wouldn't act up for them. But around 1 p.m. they called to confirm our diagnosis - it was indeed the starter and it would cost us $0. They had just replaced it last year and saw it looked new, checked and it was still under warranty. Have I mentioned how much we appreciate our mechanics? I still don't quite understand why they didn't charge us anything for labor - as the paperwork to be reimbursed for labor on warranty products is apparently so arduous that they don't even bother. But enough about the car! I'm just grateful it's in working condition before Jason's solo trip to Allegheny Mountain Institute tomorrow to lead his yearly chicken workshop. And I'm glad we didn't get stranded in town with the kids on a hot day, glad we didn't have to reschedule dental appointments, glad Emily and Jonas willingly let us borrow their car for the shuttling back and forth, glad it wasn't a large repair bill etc... Could have been so much worse!

But let me not gloss entirely over the dentist appointments. So for the one or two of you that have been reading our blog for years now, you may remember that Alida's first teeth cleaning was a bit of an ordeal - complete with her refusing to open her mouth! I didn't remember that Alida was 4 going on 5 at the time. Terah is 3 going on 4 and whether it is an age thing or personality difference, she was an absolute delight. I need not have worried. A few days ahead of time she revealed her fears that this was a hurting kind of thing (she was thinking shots) and I was able to reassure her ahead of time that they would be gentle and it might feel funny but it should not hurt. We got to talk through what they would do and by the day of she was mostly excited about it. She got to watch Alida's appointment, which enabled me to talk through what was happening. When it was her turn, she hopped right up in the chair and had her mouth open before her seat was all the way reclined (her two older sisters were also there in the audience - they find her as cute as Jason and I do). She smiled at the hygienist and opened her mouth big and wide the whole time. We left with bouncy balls prizes for the kids and clean bills of dental health for all 5 of us - other than my ongoing implant issues for which there is no good long term solution...

Now on to more exciting topics. This morning Jason shared a quote by May Sarton with me from the most recent Sun magazine. It resonated with both of us: "A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself."

We are getting into our late spring/summer/early fall routine of every other day being "harvest day." Right now, a brief meander around the property can net a beautiful bowl of assorted berries. White raspberries are definitely among the triumphs! In order to get to the various berry patches, we can't avoid taking a peak at the sad looking peppers and the squash patches that are struggling so much this year. I'm not sure if we'll chalk them up to complete losses but they will certainly be places of much learning this year. We are preparing to send in our first soil samples for testing. It seems it is time for some help analyzing what is causing some things to thrive and other things to not. Our observations are good and important, but we are needing some additional assistance!

It would be very easy to focus on the losses and the things not going well (I'm pretty good at that), so for me it is a good discipline to look around for the triumphs and successes. We had a good barley harvest this year and thanks to some help from our trio, it is now all threshed, winnowed and doing its final drying in pans on the racks in the garage. And the straw shed is loaded up with barley straw. I loved getting a peek of Terah out there with Jason the other day using the flail to thresh out barley. I love that for that 3 year old, it was a perfectly normal and fun activity to do with her daddy.

Speaking of her daddy, it's that time of year where one of Kali's quotes early on at our time at Tangly Woods always comes to mind: "He's a hard workin' daddy." We are trying to find good "hot weather work" for the middle of the days as the temps creep up towards 90 this week. But right now there is grass to mow, hay to scythe, dry beans to plant, squash to weed, the June cut back and pruning to accomplish, and the list goes on. This past week, our second patch of potatoes (since we could not find another home for the extra seed potatoes we had purchased) needed to be found among the weeds, so he spend a good chunk of two days hill those. It now looks like a potato patch again! We'll take a bumper crop of potatoes to make up for the squash patches! I'm still getting out regularly to do chores which is my favorite way to start the day when I can get out first thing, but it is the time of year that I'm not so horribly disappointed when I'm needed inside (or at least in the shade) in the hours between about 10-11 a.m. and 4-5 p.m.

I'm sad that peas are coming to an end already (I never feel ready for that season to come to an end), but it's time to get those vines out of there to let the beans enjoy the sunshine and rain without competition. And I can't mourn the peas for too long when there are gorgeous looking beets ready to be pulled and the cucumbers are flowering and red cabbage is forming nice heads. We just enjoyed the last beet chick pea patties from the freezer for lunch today with a fresh dill sauce from the abundance of dill growing in our gardens this year (the lunch menu was another -- successful -- attempt to soften the blow of Kali being away for Alida - we'll have to make a fresh batch soon for Kali to enjoy with us!).

When we ended up having an unplanned evening recently (our colds caused a get together cancellation), we realized it was time to seize the day and harvest the garlic! How encouraging compared to last year. Last year there was more first use garlic (rotted roots) than good storing garlic. This year, again, we had LOTS of water in the patch for a long time. But, due to last year's lessons, Jason had worked hard to have the bed raised higher and it paid off. There was water running out the channels between beds, but for the most part the garlic did not suffer and we have a lot of beautiful garlic on the drying rack in the garage.

It was exciting work for 3/5 of our family for the whole time. The younger two's enthusiasm came and went, but when it went it at least did not detract from us continuing on the harvest. Terah got into taking pictures, so there are a lot of the garlic harvest from her vantage point. Alida also took a turn at photographing the evening. I love that I was so focused on the ground that I didn't even know Terah had noticed a beautiful sky full of clouds above us!

A few other random tidbits before I close with two other major happenings. I'm enjoying watching the bees on flowers all over the place. I wish we were seeing more monarchs. After many last year, Jason has seen two this year and no caterpillars yet. 

The younger girls' popcorn is tasseling. We were feeling so confident we were ahead of the neighbor's GMO corn patch across the road but some of last year's corn re-sprouted for them (the pesticides didn't kill it all) and we saw the first tassel today. It is hard to not feel a lot of strong emotions about the fact that we can't grow corn freely at Tangly Woods without worrying about it crossing with GMO corn. Looks like we might have some extra work ahead of us if we want to try to protect some for seed saving. Sigh! I'll try to think of it as a great homeschool activity - learning out to pollinate corn! It's been a number of years now that we have tried to time our planting either way before or after the field across the road, but to date we haven't gotten it right and maybe will just have to assume that for seed saving we'll have to manage the pollination more carefully. Maybe if the girls learn this year, they can take this on!

So it was a big day on Saturday here at Tangly Woods. After being on an excavator's list for a year or two, he finally admitted to us that he had no idea when our job would be at the top of his list. So Jason contacted others he knew could do the initial clearing job and that happened this past weekend! We've needed to work on the fence row between us and our neighbors. That part of the property has received very little attention and was a thick mix of brushy stuff and large trees. It would have taken weeks of work to do what their machine and about 15 gallons of diesel did in 8 hours or so.

The girls and I went down to check on the project at various points in the day, but mostly heard the machine and the crack of trees being pushed over. To be honest, I wish we had figured out some kind of ritual to do together before the clearing. It felt like such a destructive day. And while I think the end result will hopefully be a net benefit to the land and the creatures that also call Tangly Woods home, it was no doubt a pretty disorienting day for many! I will say that walking around our place is less disorienting for me currently, as we can now walk a loop from driveway up into the woods and Alida is happy that she has a good view to our neighbor's flower patch now from the fence!

This was not only clearing for another travel path but also to dig a test hole for a possible future pond. Before investing time and money into a pond, we wanted to get a sense of our chances of having a pond hold water. We learned that there is clay but it is about 4.5 feet down. So the pond decision is still on the horizon... In the meantime, the girls enjoy exploring down there and were finding little forts in the underbrush that they were eager to check out. Alida had fun using her new knowledge about trees from a book she is reading to tell us things about the stumps we looked at. I was not thrilled by the increase in mosquitoes in the middle of the day down in those areas. We do need a pond for ducks and frogs and other mosquito eating creatures!

 

Ok, I saved the best for last! It's been a number of years since we have had new ducklings around here. Last year Kali had one duck go broody but none of the eggs hatched. This spring, none of her ducks went broody, despite her encouraging them by leaving eggs for days on end for them to sit on. She was collecting hatching eggs just in case and all the while more and more of our chickens are going broody (sometimes more than one hen on a nest). We'd love to have more ducks and Kali wanted to hatch ducklings from her pet duck Duckie. Honestly, if you ever want a little thrill, feed ducks lettuce. So what to do to get some of Duckie's offspring hatched without an incubator and needing to brood them inside?

Well, Jason moved 3 broody chicken hens that were all sharing a nest into one nest box in one half of Kali's duck cook. They stayed put and so he and Kali put 10 duck eggs under the broody chickens. They still stayed put. At two weeks, all three hens were sitting tight and a candling showed that all 10 eggs were fertile. Yesterday morning Kali noticed an egg shell out of the nest. Did an egg break or did a duckling hatch? Despite multiple checks throughout the day, the hens were sitting tight and she didn't want to disturb them so she didn't know what was up (one must think carefully before reaching a hand under a broody hen).

First thing this morning Alida and Kali went to look and came back with the good news of ducklings! Before long all five of us were congregated at the coop, looking at the adorable sight of 3 mama chickens with ducklings poking out in various places! They were still hatching so we don't know the final count, but we know for sure there were 5 plus perky ducklings. So fun! We knew it could be done but also knew it was a bit of a risk. So to have not 1 or 2 but 3 chickens accepting their babies in duck form feels pretty amazing. It will be fun to watch them find their way in co-parenting their brood!

ps. Time to close but for those itching for a video, I'll include three here. The first is of the ducks enjoying the bolting lettuce I took them this morning. They are so fun to watch! The second is blurry but it was the best one I got of Terah's made up song the other evening. Could be a good theme song for the Massanutten Regional Library's summer reading program. :)  And, finally, come visit us and walk the path yourself, but if you can't, here's a little walk through the new woods path. I liked how many birds were singing.

Milestone moment, blueberries and a house concert!

We had a very short lived momentous change in our home this past week! Alida has been loving weekly playdates with another local homeschooling friend and this past week the time together expanded to include a sleepover (I think the hope is that that will become a regular occurrence!). As bedtime neared, Terah declared she was going to sleep in her bed. She has said that before, so I didn't take it all that seriously but sure enough she crawled right in, accepted a kiss and a tuck in and said goodnight. The giggling above her didn't induce immediate sleep, but on one of my check ins she sleepily told me that when I next came to check on her I could turn out the light. She was asleep soon thereafter and I headed to our bed that now seemed rather large. Jason and I concur that we could quickly get used to sleeping next to each other on a regular basis again, but also have to admit how odd it feels after many years of co-sleeping. Realizing that that may be coming to a close also highlights the sweetness of how much snuggling and closeness we have shared with our children at night! It was about 4 a.m. when I woke to Terah crying, having been woken by a bad dream. Bummer! She hasn't done another night in her bed since but she'll tell us when she's ready to give it a go again!

So the pictures above (not to mention the title of this post), lets you know what season we are entering: blueberry picking season!! It's one we welcome with great joy and anticipation each year. I pulled the last gallon bag of blueberries from the freezer a week or two ago as it felt like it was time to enjoy the last of last year's bounty before restocking for the coming year. Each year the first tastes of blueberries and red raspberries transport me back to the little patches of both on Barclay Road at my Grandma and Grandpa Myers' home. It's a warm and comforting memory that I'm happy to recount each spring!

Up until last evening, we had just done two exploratory treks to the back patch to check on the ripening bushes. With some effort, we came home each time with a bucket of berries. Not so last night! My folks joined us in the front patch and in a little over an hour (but what felt like 30 minutes or so), the girls and I had picked 3 full buckets of luscious, ripe, large blueberries! The warmer weather is encouraging ripening and a lot are coming ripe fast. Alida had volunteered to be a "blueberry poster child" for Hickory Hill's marketing and so I brought the camera along to get some photos of her with berries.

Who would have thought that the idea of having one's picture taken with berries could inspire such speedy and cheerful picking! Alida chattered nonstop in the patch and kept checking to see if she was outpacing Kali's picking, which she did. We had joked that she had to fill her own bucket before I took her photo, but it wasn't long before determination had set in and she was not leaving that patch until her bucket was full. To say she was proud holding her full bucket of berries would be a gross understatement. Even with rain drops starting to fall, she had to be coaxed out of the patch. Let's hope the willing blueberry picking help will continue for the next few weeks. Like Kali did last year and is again this year, Alida and Terah are both talking about joining the picking crew when they are old enough. They are getting some good practice in the interim and helping to fill our freezer!

Some of us seem to work a lot harder at Tangly Woods than others. I believe we were on our way back from the patch one day recently and found the pigs in their house with noses burrowed under the hay snoozing. They are amazing nappers and they do a lot of it! Jason is paying very close attention to the cycles of our two female pigs and keeps giving me the reports of the absence of any signs of heat. He now chuckles at me as he knows that he is not going to get me excited about the prospects of piglets just yet! I've gone down that road before and the disappointment was bad due to my heightened expectations! So this time, I'll believe it when I see it! 

The summer reading program is underway and this year we have three readers (or two readers and one excellent memorizer!). Like last year it is a pretty major motivator for Alida - which is kind of funny since we didn't use the free pool passes and may take advantage of one of the free Friday activities with their wrist bands and often only use a percentage of the things from the prize packs. Regardless, it always seems to inspire an uptick in reading for all but Kali, who is decidedly not motivated by external factors and is so honest that she will not put down any 15 minute checks for reading unless she checked the time before/after - even if she was up in her bed reading for hours before sleeping!

The highlight for me this year was finding another section of Mo Willems books at the library. Terah practically has them all memorized and is happy to read them to us, which is so entertaining! What a great author! It's so nice to find books that we enjoy reading too. These are a very different genre than Patricia Polacco for sure, but great when you need some pure silliness! And could there be anything sweeter than a 3 year old surrounded by sisters and friends, all giving her their full attention. She was in heaven!

The other day she was reading to me while I stripped dill off the stems. Yes, that is a bucket of dill beside her. It is to go down in history that dill has officially seeded itself in at Tangly Woods and is growing in vast quantities all over the place. We are tickled!! And what does that inspire? Experimentation! So this weeks' experiments included: dill pesto (delicious) and dill cheddar (ask us in two months but it looks and smells amazing already). I have been so grateful to friends and neighbors that have shared their excess dill with us over the last number of years and I'm happy to think that we may soon be able to return the favor! 

This past week also marked another temporary but very welcome change: June 11 was my last official day in the office until August. I'll be going in weekly to do various tasks that I can't do from home but otherwise am mostly "staycationing" through the end of this month and then working from home in July. So far I haven't really gotten into any kind of "staycation" mode as there have been lots of loose ends to tie up and I have yet to mark some "no email" days in my calendar but I'm determined to select a few throughout my time at home or else I will never feel truly off!

There hasn't been a lot of extra time since this past weekend was the last of a major string of hosting/planning events - first the two surprise anniversary events, then the blood drive earlier this month and on Saturday we had a lovely outdoor house concert with the Clymer Kurtz band! We've done it yearly for many years now and have normally had to go back and forth up until the last minute about whether we can risk being outdoors or need to do it inside. We've seldom been able to confidently set up outside - this year we couldn't have put in a better order for weather if we had tried! It was partly cloudy with a nice breeze, not buggy, dry and a gorgeous rising moon as a perfect culmination to a beautiful evening. And, of course, there was the great music we all got to enjoy while relaxing with friends on the lawn while watching kids run hither and yon. Everyone seemed to have a good time, the snacks were all devoured, and we are already looking forward to the next one! We don't have a final count on guests that joined us by my attempt at counting has me guessing it was somewhere between 80 and 100.

An added bonus to the weekend was my sister, boyfriend and his grandkids joining us! It was so fun to get to know two new little people, who were fun and engaging to be with! They spent Sunday morning with us and got in on some blueberry picking before enjoying brunch together before they headed back north to PA. Terah is really into little people her age and during the concert she commented to someone that she thinks she made a new friend that evening. The granddaughter was just a bit older than her and they got along well. I think Terah is used to often tagging along when Kali or Alida have friends over so it was a bit of a novelty to have the kids visiting be closer to her in age than her sisters.

I'll close with two other tidbits - one unfortunate and one exciting!

So the only bummer about the house concert was Alida having an experience no one has had yet during our time living at Tangly Woods. Kali, Alida and I were standing towards the back of the crowd listening to the band when a walnut fell from the tree and landed squarely on Alida's head. It happened fast (falling from very high) and her hand quickly went to her head while the tears started to fall. Kali found the offending walnut and I tried to comfort her while encouraging her to keep her cries to a volume less than the band (which wasn't too hard!). Of course, I found myself looking around wondering if the same thing would happen to someone else that night - but surely not when it hadn't happened in the 13 years prior! Thankfully no other incidents to report and Alida has fully recovered (did within minutes in fact).

One of our concert guests was a potter friend who Jason had passed some of the clay he found on our property. The friend had made a little bowl, fired it and it worked! He brought it to the concert and gave it to us and it is beautiful! I love the color! So another future dream - that there will be more bowls and such crafted from that clay, hopefully by members of our family who are eager for such an opportunity! That will have to remain in the future dreams category for the time being, but the prospects are exciting.

I think that's as good a place to stop as any and I've got a little prep to do for two committee meetings today. I guess I'm not done planning things but the two upcoming things are both with me joining others in the planning which is both fun and I think makes for better events. The first is for a family reunion in August and, while hard for me to believe, new student orientation planning for CJP in August is also underway. But I'm not wishing for August just yet...

Braces off and more...

October 17, 2017 Kali got braces on. 

June 6, 2019 they came off! 

 

Lest you think that's all I'm going to say about it, read on if you wish! We aren't done with trips to Dr. Kray's office, with one next week to get her retainer, but we are nearing the end. It may come as a surprise to hear me say that I'll miss those treks, but they have mostly been quite pleasant and with an added and unexpected perk. Of course it's never fun to pass over 1/5 of one's yearly income at one shot for something like braces, especially when there are still lingering doubts as to whether it was "essential" for Kali's long term jaw and teeth health. But once the payment was done, we could just focus on the process, which turned out to be much easier than expected. 

Kali didn't seem to have any extreme pain throughout, just discomfort after each tightening. And she is a trooper and not one to complain so we didn't hear about it much. Additionally, it was really nice to work with an office full of people who seemed to enjoy their jobs, seemed to have playful and respectful relationships with each other, and were kind and competent with all of us who came through their doors. It was a smooth running operation with never much of a wait at all and the staff was great from the front door folks to the technicians and Dr. Kray herself. I'd recommend them based on our experience to anyone.

The hardest thing for me is the amount of waste that seems to be part of so many businesses that I just wonder if there is a way around. Single use toothbrushes. New gloves every time you do something new. Instruments in packaging for each patient. And the list could go on and on. But I'm pretty sure that would be the same at any orthodontist, so I'm very glad with the one we went to, because I haven't even mentioned the biggest perk: dog therapy!!!!

I talked with Dr. Kray this week to let her know that we felt like we got both braces and dog therapy out of our payment and how grateful we are for Hank and Wally. By this final appointment, Alida and Terah both walked confidently into the office, went looking for the dogs, were sitting or laying on the floor with them, Terah was putting her face right in front of them, petting and giving them belly scratches, etc... Yep, nothing short of a miracle - or the result of almost two years of repeat positive experiences. Now if only we can get those experiences to translate to some improvement in other settings with other four legged creatures! 

Kali now just has a little wire keeping her front bottom 6 teeth where they want them. That will stay on indefinitely. She had lots of x-rays done and was fitted for a retainer that they will make and give to her next week. For awhile it sounds like she will need to wear it all the time and then just at night (but flossing is already easier, giving her a few more minutes of nighttime reading)! So I probably won't have as great an opportunity for crazy photos of Kali for awhile. That is, unless she has to get her wisdom teeth out, which sounds like it might be on the horizon.

Terah was saying this week that she hopes to get braces some day. Her mother feels differently about it, and Kali tried to articulate to her the downsides of them. But for Terah it was mostly all fun: cute and friendly dogs that became pals, free pens of different colors, other treats occasionally, people who were kind and fun, and dress up clothes for post-braces photos! There would be much cheaper ways to accomplish all of those things so I won't be at all disappointed if Alida and Terah are spared the experience, along with our bank account. Time will tell!

The way we celebrated the occasion was picking up a bag of organic apples from the co-op so that Kali could crunch into a whole apple rather than having it cut in small slices. Oh the luxury!! 

So that's the main news and the rest of this post is just an update on the outdoor growing things. With lots of rain in the forecast, I left my camera inside a lot recently as we tried to get as many seeds in the ground as we could and as many weeds pulled before they grew event bigger. We've had poor germination on a number of crops this year so it's been a stretch to seed once and then have to go back and fill in. Not sure where in the process we are having failures, but it's been a little discouraging. But the pictures below will try to highlight some of the successes, as I'm great at looking at what is not going as well. So things to celebrate:

Pea shelling has commenced and I forgot how much our kids love it. Bright moment last evening: Terah shelling peas and chattering with Alida providing background music!

Alida's flower garden is starting to provide splashes of color outside our side door.

Goumis - yum! And the bush is tall enough that the chickens haven't gotten all of them!

Our kitchen garden soil knows how to grow sugar snap peas!!!

We have to divvy them out carefully at this point, but hopefully there will be lots soon!

The potatoes are hilled (thanks to Jason's hard hard work!) and there are black beans and watermelon planted with them.

Main barley crop harvested and today Jason is harvesting some in the pig paddocks but giving most of the rest to the chickens (we are just out of time!); in the foreground is Kali's garden with eggplant, popcorn, spaghetti and PA dutch squash - beans will go in once the corn gets a head start.

Alida and Terah's popcorn patch is now taller than her!

The chickens left a few red currants that were up high but not many!

And I'll end with a flower from each of our daughters' gardens. The gardens are full of beauty, just like the girls the gardens were created for/with!

Terah's garden

Alida's garden

Nora's garden

Kali's garden