Little Buddy, hail storm, 22nd anniversary, and a few garden updates

Another week is drawing to a close, with yet another starting on its heels! It seems two weeks is about as long as I can go before feeling like the amount to catch up on is going to make for a LONG scrapbook entry. And I'll admit that I'm starting this entry already overly tired, so I will let the pictures do most of the talking on this one!!

The weather has been delightful! And today's hike with Emily and Jonas was a special one for the kiddos who stayed behind to play. With all of us but Terah and Alida fully vaccinated, we have been able to loosen a few restrictions here and there. Ivy was THRILLED to be allowed to come inside our home (with the unvaccinated kids all masked) to play while the adults went for a hike. This was her first time in our home since last March. She didn't waste any time getting warmed back up, hardly said hi to me on her way past me, and made a bee line for the back kitchen where she started searching for the "bread box" - which turned out to be Kali's wooden triangular lunch box Jason made for her over a decade ago. Very cute!!

Speaking of hikes, Kali enjoyed a hike with Grandma and Grandpa this week. She even got out of bed at 7 a.m. in order to go with them. Very impressive for her, and I took the opportunity to hint that I would not mind if she chose to get up that early to be with us some morning. :) She did make a very good point when we were talking about it while gardening the other day that it is not so much that she likes to sleep in but that she enjoys staying up late - and a major factor in that might be that she enjoys a quiet house with time alone where there are not other things going on. Here was their view from one point along the ridge trail. She wasn't quite able to see her ducks waddling around!

The last two weeks have had some rough patches on the home front. While we have so very much to be grateful for and while all of our basic needs are met in abundance, there have been some losses that we have felt, surrounding things we care about. Alida had to say goodbye to a pet and dearly loved chicken. We knew Little Buddy was not likely to have a long life, and his life came to an end. 

I'm glad he got into our April Fool's Day family photo. He was really an odd chicken (some kind of developmental difference seemed to be at play for him) but one that brought a lot of joy to the younger girls especially.

We had a little family burial in the compost pile, where Little Buddy was joined by a few chicks that didn't make it through a recent hatch. There were plenty of tears the morning when he was very ill and probably having seizures. No one wanted to see him suffer long, and we are glad that he didn't. It hasn't seemed like a lot of additional processing has been needed since, and both Alida and Terah are pouring their chicken-care into their other coops of chickens that they are tending. Little Buddy's coop has been repurposed as a coop for one hen at a time, through use of which Jason is trying to figure out which of Terah's chickens is laying the "odd" egg - so he doesn't include her in a breeding pen down the line!

The other loss involved plants! On Friday, May 7, Jason did the afternoon errand run to pick up pig scraps, deliver eggs, etc... since I was occupied with graduation responsibilities. I was co-facilitating something with our graduates in the afternoon when a big storm rolled in. I was just imagining the power going out right in the middle of the major Zoom event but it didn't. Yay! I was done the event when Jason got home and was wrapping up some work things when he came upstairs where I was working and asked if I had seen the hail. Nope! I Completely missed it, and I have no idea how! When Jason got home, there were still piles of it around here and there.

It was a pretty depressing sight to look at all the trays of seedlings that we had been tending so carefully for weeks and weeks. The hail came in the few hours out of the whole month that Jason was not at Tangly Woods to pull the plants in before they got hammered. Sigh! They were shredded! We had no way of knowing if they would pull through, and in some ways still don't know the full extent of the damage. The sweet potatoes seemed to suffer the least damage and the basil and tomatoes the worst. As we walked around our land in the subsequent days, you could just see leaves with holes everywhere.

Even some flower petals were badly damaged!

Once again, I wonder so much how career or true subsistence farmers come through these kinds of losses when the stakes are so much higher. It is very sad for us to see our hard work literally shredded in 5 minutes, but we don't have to worry that that means we will not have enough food to feed our children. We have an abundance of options. That said, we still needed some time to feel the sting of it and to recalibrate. The first spinach picking afterwards was sad with all the shredded leaves, but it tastes just as good! 

The rhubarb wasn't damaged and Terah helped me harvest and chop it for a crisp. We still don't seem able to grow lovely rhubarb, but we got enough to enjoy one rhubarb crisp with vanilla ice cream on Mother's Day.

Thankfully this next thing doesn't end up being a loss but was still an unusual experience. We decided to try putting up some netting that was my parents to see if we might keep more of the strawberries in our patch from the birds. It was a surprise for Jason to find a little screech owl inside the netting the next morning with its foot caught. That was not the intention of the netting at all, but it did allow for a very close up encounter with a beautiful screech owl before Jason and my dad got it free and then released it!

In garden news, the main summer garden crops are mostly in. There's a list of some additional things Jason hopes to get in the ground this week, but we spent our 22nd anniversary in the gardens together and that was a lovely way to spend the day. We planted out some pretty pathetic looking plants and we will do our best to tend them and support their growth. We'll see what time and water and sunshine and soil do for them. Here's what I can remember of what we planted Saturday: okra, sweet potatoes, cherry/slicer/cooking tomatoes, sweet/hot peppers, lovage, the girls' flowers, sunflowers, marigolds, basil, yellow pole wax beans, and another kind of bean Jason is breeding (a purple fillet pole bean). We also filled in gaps in our onion patch with red onions I picked up at Rocking R. I'm probably forgetting something. Earlier in the week, we had seeded cucumbers, carrots, cantaloupes, watermelon and some other things that my brain is also not remembering at the moment. In summary: we planted a bunch of stuff!

We had such good help, especially with my Mom helping the girls plant their flowers and Kali and Tala pitching in on a bunch of things. It was when they were in the sweet pepper patch that we made our first acquaintance with "Fidel" (the name we have given them). Tala was immediately ready for a different job when she knew she was sharing the patch with a snake. The girls and I watched the snake for a while and then it decided it didn't want our attention and started to exit the garden. But this got Fidel MORE attention as they made a straight line for the arch coop where Alida's chickens, complete with chicks of all ages live. Suffice it to say, those were not the best 5 minutes of our gardening day as kids were anxious, their mother was a bit too, and the father was not thrilled to be called to catch the snake (now under the coop) and remove it. But Jason finally got the snake (all 5 feet of it) out from under the coop, where surprisingly the chickens did not seem alarmed. He walked it down to the end of the lane and sent it for a swim in the stream. He came back up noting that we might have about a 1/2 day without it. We got back to gardening and less than 2 hours later, we saw Fidel slither through our blueberry patch, through the asparagus, into the inner garden and, wouldn't you know it, right back to the same exact section of the pepper patch where we first found it. Welcome home! And may you feast on voles, NOT chickens!

After a full day of gardening, we were all treated to a delicious dinner of Pad Thai Noodles. Tala treated us to this feast in honor of Jason's and my 22nd wedding anniversary. It was worth waiting for, and we enjoyed it on the deck in the cool of a glorious spring evening!

Later in the evening we welcomed 22 new chicks from the most recent hatch. 

And then still later that evening, we got stuck watching the 20th anniversary concert I surprised Jason with two years ago. Tala hadn't gotten to hear it before, so it was fun to share it with her and rekindle fond memories of that celebration.

I think that's all I've got in me for tonight! Tomorrow officially starts my 3 weeks with reduced office hours (hoping to work more like 20 hours/week rather than the 45+ it has been the last several). And maybe by the time I next write, I will offically have taken off one of my many hats and put my "CJP hat" on the shelf for 2 months. I'll be off June 7 - August 7, focusing on family and farm and starting my birth doula certification process and working really hard to not fill the time full such that healing, rejuvenation, and discernment can be given the time and attention they need!