Blood drive; who would have known it could be so fun!

What special memories are created through an evening like last night!  I arrived at Virginia Blood Services, with one of my colleagues who was donating with us, about 40 minutes into the blood drive due to every road (it seemed) in Harrisonburg being tied up with traffic.  We learned upon arrival that it was due to a major accident on 81.  The accident ended up delaying others and kept at least one donor away.  That, some last minute forgetfulness, and of course the germs floating around kept a handful more away.  But there were a dozen of us who donated and a great cheerleading squad (a few quiet adults and a bunch of rowdy kids that were thrilled with the array of snacks provided).  Whenever I give blood I think about the seeds my dad planted taking me along with him when he donated when I was little. I don't remember much other than being treated special and getting snacks.  At the time, I was quite certain it was never something I would do!  So I was thrilled to have a bunch of kids there having a grand time.  Hopefully, at least a number of them, will be inspired to donate once they are old enough to do so.

It's always particularly exciting to have new donors join us - we had at least 2 last evening, along with some who had not given for a long time.  One of the highlights for me was finally meeting someone who had only been a "virtual friend" for years due to our shared history of both having had to say goodbye to a baby daughter.  While there is nothing wrong with connecting by email and facebook, there is nothing like a real human hug and an in person connection!  And how special to do that at the blood drive...

The highlight of the evening for me was the deciding moment where my hemoglobin was checked.  It had been months since I had been able to give due to low iron. I had been religiously doing everything I could think of to get it up and was hopeful that I had succeeded.  When the machine beeped the nurse said, "you won't believe this."  Not only had I gotten it above the 12.5 threshhold, I was all the way up to 14.2 - plenty to spare!  I told her that I wanted to open the door and shout that I was eligible to give!  She said, "go for it" so I did!

I had felt more nervous about it during the day that I had previously because I was out of practice and I was apprehensive that I would be turned away again (yes, I guess that means that I nervous about doing it and nervous that I wouldn't be able to).  Things that involve needles become much bigger in my head than they need to be.  And over time they only get bigger.  So I'm glad to be back on track and in tune with the reality that it is such a very minor discomfort for something that can hopefully be very helpful to someone else.  And to once again feel the little flood of satisfaction with it going well and with this very small ritual that connects me to Nora and our journey with her in a special way.

Last evening was unique in that only a small percentage of those that joined us ever knew Nora.  Most have become friends of ours since that time or we have reconnected since that time and our lives have intersected in meaningful ways.  It feels like the circle has widened of those who have been impacted by the short time that Nora spent with our family and that means a great deal to me.  I enjoy the opportunities events like last night give me to talk about her.  I don't want the memories to fade, but it seems inevitable that many do over time.  Sharing the stories is one way to keep those memories alive!

Donuts, soccer and more!

Our last few posts have been very word heavy, so here's a little visual entertainment!

We've had a few very full days of family fun, even if some of the fun had to be modified due to lingering colds. Here's Alida trying out eating a donut off a string for the first time. 



Saturday was Kali's final soccer game - maybe she should eat many donuts the eve of all her soccer games.  It was fun to note her improvement over the course of the season.  We even caught a little piece of the action.



We, along with some Benner family members, headed to Vintage Virginia Apples and Albemarle Ciderworks for their Apple Harvest Festival.  We came home with 20+ pounds of delicious apples and have been enjoying them ever since.  We also went on the most thrilling hay ride ever - through beautiful woodland and up and down hills and around some curves that caused the wagon to creak enough that I leaned as far away from the sides as possible.  When we were getting off, the driver was counting us. I asked if we set a record and he said he thought maybe.  We were all so tired of waiting in line that we were piling on the wagon as fast as we could.


From there, we headed to to the Blue Ridge Tunnel in Crozet and enjoyed a candlelit dinner with most of the Benner family.  Quite memorable! It was an odd sensory experience to be hiking through the forest with Papa John's pizza wafting into my nose! 

Wealth Grows on Trees

I, Jason, know money doesn't grow on trees, but all the same I felt rich today while raking leaves.

Certainly many folks regard tree leaves as a nuisance, but we treasure them as a resource.  Forest ecologists could probably talk for a year straight about the cascade of life that tumbles around in the leaf litter layer on the forest floor, nearly completely fueled by the breaking of chemical bonds in, primarily, the cellulose and lignin components of spent leaves.  If your eyes can be little enough, you can pull aside the leaves and see the duffy soil teeming with invertebrates, and netted with fungal hyphae and plant roots.

Chickens' eyes are apparently little enough.  While J (who lives in the in-law quarters and works with me usually two days per week) and I raked leaves, it became time to let the chickens from the composting coop out for their daily frolic.  Janelle came and joined us in the raking for a while and we agreed together:  It is such a pleasure to watch chickens in the woods.  This is their most natural environment and they glory in it (assuming chickens can glory at all, which I assume they sort of can).  Anyone who has ever ranged chickens in a manicured yard can attest to the fact that chickens love nothing more than to pull back the mulch from anywhere it has been tidily applied and discover the treats lurking therebeneath.  A forest floor covered in leaves can be thought of as a vast, uninterrupted mulched bed, and sifting through it hour after hour is their favorite pastime, but it is far from idle for them.  Judging from the number of times they stop their scratching and peck fervently at a spot a few times--sometimes with several chickens crowding around the same spot--they are finding serious goodies.

I can attest to that also since I am the feed dispenser around here most days.  If I haven't been home in the evening to let them out for two days running, I find there is a minor but noticeable uptick in feed consumption (Even on those days, however, their feed consumption is less than my other chickens because of what they gather nicking through the composting litter).  I can also attest to the quality of those goodies, since I eat the eggs.  On the pan, the yolks are orange and perky, standing tall and round while frying.  Scrambled, they glow yellow and have a warm, rich flavor.  I can't eat oak or cherry leaves myself, but I can eat the eggs that come from the chickens that eat the bugs that eat the microbes that eat the leaves.  Cha-ching!

We were raking leaves mainly from an area we've never really done anything with before, but which we are wanting to clear of saplings, young trees, and autumn olive shrubs to make way for an access path for bikes, cars, animal range pens, and people on foot to be able to make easier use of the land in the middle of our property.  Ideally, this ground will grow grass on it so that it can withstand repeated compaction without serious soil damage, excessive muddiness, or erosion from wind or water.  As such, leaves in that area are a liability, just like they are for the lawn grass minded homeowners all over the country who are spending precious hours these weeks firing up their leaf blowers and herding all the pesky leaves from their lots onto the curb to await being forcibly ingested en masse by a large vacuum truck driven by municipal employees, then regurgitated onto giant piles, where eventually people like us drive up and fork great mounds of them onto our pickups or utility trailers, take them home and spread them around in our yards.  So.  Where was I?

Oh, yes, so the leaves were a problem where they were, but we had another problem elsewhere.  In places we have mounded soil in long rows on contour with the slope of the land with the idea of retaining water long enough for it to penetrate the soil surface so we can grow more plants and trees, which will make more leaves...I'm getting ahead of myself.  The problem we had was that the soil on these berms, as we call them, was bare, unless you count the hordes and multitudes of baby wild grass and weed plants that have germinated enthusiastically there.  Nature abhors a vacuum, you understand, and I don't mean the kind driven by municipal employees!  If those little weedlets are allowed to grow up, we will either have a tremendous and frustrating weeding job on our hands next spring or we will have lots of unwanted plants in our productive ground once they complete their life cycle and go to seed themselves.  What to do?

Fortunately, fortunately, my friends, we have leaves!  As J and Janelle and I cleared the leaves from where they laid, allowing the life-giving light in to any grass wishing to grow in that space, we loaded them into wheelbarrows and wheeled them merrily up the slope to the berms and distributed them in a six-inch layer over those hordes of weedlets, effectively cutting off their light.  Cha-ching!

Leaves can also provide the carbonaceous foundation for the sanitizing and nutritious litter layer in a composting poultry coop, make an excellent weed-controlling mulch layer (that breaks down into the loveliest and most nourishing organic matter) for tomatoes and other garden plants, and when chopped or partly mouldered make the finest cover material we have yet found for our "humanure" toilets.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!

I said to J as we were raking in the new area that as we begin to open up more of our land to our use, I am going to begin to feel very rich.  The truth is that we are currently using a very small percentage of the eventual available total, and of that part we're using now, only a fraction (if any) is producing at its maximum potential.  If we return to the soil and the forest at least a portion of what we take, I believe we'll see a crescendo of productivity that we can ride like dolphins in the surf.

As I emerged from the woods with the last barrow of leaves to spread on one of the new berms, something caught my eye in my peripheral vision.  I turned my head and nearly caught my breath: The west flank of Massanutten mountain was glowing; billions of oak, maple, poplar, hickory leaves dangling delicately from their twigs shone like gold coins in the evening sun.

Fall musings...

November is here!  Among other things that means it is National Novel Writing Month (http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/) - Kali and I both find ourselves in front of a computer right now, me to do some much needed writing and Kali to get going on her story.  She'll need to write a hundred words a day to meet her goal.  I'm eager to read it!  While we both write, Alida is getting a nap, which hopefully won't be interrupted prematurely by her cough.  While I do love fall (it is probably my favorite time of year) I don't like what seems like the resurgence of viruses floating around.  The girls both have colds, the kind that are just annoying not debilitating.  But enough so that we have gone forward with cancelling this evening's much anticipated fall party with two other families.  Bobbing for apples just didn't seem like the activity for today...  To ease the disappointment in the younger generation of our household (namely the 10 year old), we will go forward with making homemade donuts and I feel hopeful there will be some Tangly Woods members that will happily oblige filling in for some rounds of donut eating off strings!

So now I find myself sitting in our front room looking out at the colorful scene in front of me.  The light on the mountain today is striking (we must be at the peak of the oranges).  On Tuesday on my way in to the house from a nappy walk I felt almost a physical pull towards the hammock. It was the eve of Nora's birthday, right about the time they would have been starting the induction.  But my mind was just swirling with the many, many things I felt I "had" to get done yet that day.  Alida's nap times feel like this precious spot in the day where I sprint to do the things I can't do when she is awake.  I ended up spending most of that nap doing computer work that had to be done and that I felt annoyed about.  Hardly rejuvenating or reflective time, which was what I was craving.  I also felt frustrated with myself for not taking the opportunity as it presented itself to slow up for a bit and create a space in which my emotions could feel safe to emerge.  I never spent much time in our hammock before I went on bedrest with Nora and haven't spent much time there since. I remember watching the mountain change as fall approached and Kali making me "cakes" to eat out of pine needles, leaves, rocks, etc...  I wanted to allow myself a moment to travel back in time and be with who I was then and who our family was, just for a moment. 

In many ways I feel like I've been trying to make up for turning down that opportunity ever since then.  It's been a hard week.  I can never predict what I might want or need on the anniversaries of Nora's birthday and death.  And them sometimes when I finally figure it out, it's a bit late.  As soon as I got to work on Wednesday, I knew that I should have found a way to take a vacation day. I wanted so very much to be at home with my family.  Instead it, along with yesterday, was one of those crazy "work as fast as you can all day long and still feel horribly behind" days. 

The week hasn't been all bad. I treasure the memories from Tuesday evening when we enjoyed some family "huggy lovey" time in bed together before calling it a night. We all snuggled up and looked at and read through the book that Mom made about Nora.  It seems that the start and end of our days are sometimes challenging right now and so I have felt particularly grateful for some smooth and special family bedtimes lately.  May it continue!

Some of the "bumps in the road" have definitely been more challenging due to my own lack of extra reserves.  I don't feel very emotionally resilient and have found myself struggling with a higher amount of anxiety and tension.  While there are multiple factors (at least 16 based on the list I created last week in my one stint of journaling - the first in 4 months or so), but I haven't felt that my reaction to those stressors has been what I would like it to be.  So I finally took the step, thanks to a good friend's nudging, to get started on another round of counseling.  I've always found it helpful but it was feeling daunting to try to fit in yet another thing.  I'm glad that I fit it in - it's such a unique hour in my week to sit uninterrupted with someone whose only job is to listen to me talk, ask questions and offer an outside perspective when it seems appropriate. There are a number of things that have been sticking with me since but one in particular. 

I've felt, more at this stage of my life than any other, that many of the things that I love most about my life are also the things that can make me feel like I'm going completely crazy.  It's like two sides of the same coin.  I often feel like I need figure out what to let go of, but approaching it that way feels so unsatisfactory to me.  I was grateful for a new way to think about the stress that I carry, much of which related to things that energize me a great deal.  She shared the analogy of holding a cup of water.  If you hold a cup of water for a minute you probably won't even notice it, several minutes and you still probably won't think too much of it, an hour and your arm might start to feel very tired or even start to fall asleep, and if you tried to do it for a full day your arm would probably start to twitch and hurt or you may not be able to do it at all.  She talked about stress being like that - noting that it is important for all of us to find time to set that "cup" down and shake out our arm, do something else for a while and then pick it back up.  Same with the things that create stress. 

So I'm thinking about that a lot.  How do I take just a few moments here and there (like the break in the hammock) to truly set aside the busyness of the day, the relationships that I ponder and analyze and hope for changes in, my sense of inadequacy being a mom, etc... and be present to the moment, the world around me, the beauty within me...  I was grateful she didn't suggest any new routine that would take an hour or so daily.  She seemed to "get it" pretty quickly that I don't sit still very often, nor do I wish to.  But I feel ready to find and create little spaces in my day to be more in tune with what is happening inside of me and to also be open to observing what is happening around me.  On the nappy walk today my mind was churning as it often is.  All of a sudden I looked up and in the pasture right next to me was a whole herd of baby cows.  They were cute, but it wasn't their cuteness that struck me, it was the fact that I almost completely missed them.  How many things do I miss completely because I'm not paying attention (because I'm so absorbed in my racing thoughts or, in the case of a nappy walk, worrying that Alida won't fall asleep and then the rest of the day will be more challenging...).  I find that slowing my mind or altering my thoughts patterns is one of the biggest challenges in my life.  But I have a strong motivation to keep working at it!  I don't want to miss all the beauty around me.

If you have stayed with me on this post, congratulations!   I recognize this is a bit more of a "journal entry" than a blog post, but I think of this blog as mostly for us and if anyone out there wishes for a glimpse of the life we are creating here in our little part of the world, I'd like it to at least be a semi-accurate one. 

This past month was our month for lot of hosting and the upcoming month is one with more travel. We enjoyed visits with friends from PA and Canada and enjoyed a whole week with Jason's brother around, who was helping Emily and Jonas on their home renovation project (which we are happy to see moving along for their sakes, but are not ready to have them move out!).

Things on the home front keep plugging along with new and different projects as the seasons shift:  all the cover crops are in, the strawberries are weeded, thinned and mulched, the first big freeze came and so the main garden produce still growing is the carrots, beets, lettuce, spinach, dill and tea, Jason is working on various digging projects and chipping up brush piles created by the clearing the goats are motivating us to do (and helping with), and we got our next humanure composting outdoor station set up.  We also enjoyed some leaf raking together, both here and at a neighbor's who was happy to have us rake their leaves (and take them)!  It's fun to see us finally accumulating lots of mulch materials and extra organic matter.  I can't quite imagine how much food this little plot of land is going to produce if we continue to improve our soil at the current rate. Pretty exciting to think about, and a tad bit daunting!

There are some big things coming up.  Kali's last soccer game is tomorrow (she's very sad to see the season end, while I'm happy for a break and easing up of the weekly schedule).  We have a weekend of fun with family members on both sides of our family planned, and then the blood drive for Nora on Monday. Jason and I are both very much hoping that we are symptom free and can donate.  Kali heads to WV for the week with my folks and then we'll join her for a weekend with my parents and some friends.  Going to WV is definitely one of the "set the stress down" activities that I look forward to!

The one event of the upcoming week that has brought on some additional anticipatory grief is that, after much thought and deliberating, we will be reducing our goat flock from 3 to 2.  This is not even an easy thing for me to write about - but again I'm not interested in painting a picture of our lives without the angst and challenge that comes with trying to be intimately involved with our food.  Eating meat continues to be one of those things that I feel fits with the way I envision our lives here a and sometimes it is very hard for me!  I also continue to feel a compulsion within myself to be involved in butchering and processing meat, if I'm going to eat it.  It causes discomfort, but I want to allow myself the freedom to feel that discomfort and not shy away from it.  I know that I can be a vegetarian without too much trouble (I did it for years).  Many of my favorite meals are meatless and while we eat more meat now that I ever have in my life, it is still not a daily occurrence by any means.  But I know that I'd still be part of killing things if I only ate vegetables (my potato mulching experience where I unearthed a little mouse nest was clear proof of that).  So I feel more inclined to try to include animals into our farm (and diet) in respectful ways and to be grateful for the source of nourishment they provide.  But I haven't sorted out all my feelings about it, and there is no doubt in my mind that the challenge will be taken to a new level this week. Kali is feeling very sad but clearly adjusting slowly to the idea (or readjusting since this was always the plan from the beginning).  We don't fault her for any feelings she has about it - and are grateful when she is able to identify the source of her sadness (it has provided opportunities to process emotions a bit which I'm very glad about).  We've made the plan for butchering to be while she is in WV, as she feels that will be easier and we agree. 

We'll be keeping the twins (the smaller of the 3 goats) for the foreseeable future and my guess is that they will graduate to "pet" status.  We still need to all talk about it to make sure that is the shared expectation.  I think we'll learn some things from this stint of goat raising.  For one, it is harder not to get attached to mammals and in this case I feel a strong drive to meet their needs immediately (since these particular mammals have a baby-like cry - it's no wonder they call them "kids").  All of us probably need to think about how we approach our "farm animals."  What level of involvement works for each of us individually in instances where we know the final plan is that we will eat them? My learning curve on this one is quite steep and I haven't settled out at a comfortable place.  I'm not positive that I ever will, but I do feel good about the journey we are on together as a family.  The tears are okay and the conversations feel like important ones to have together.  I think we are learning more about each other and ourselves in the process.

...I now have a little gal on my lap, in the process of fully waking up from her nap.  Let me close with a few pictures of fun new things.  The captions will explain them:

Harvesting and drying saffron.

Saffron flowers

Opening up the mason bee tubes, what we will find?

Cocoons!  Here we are washing them - made of silk so water proof.

Using an old toothbrush to get the bee poop, mites, etc... off.

Here they are drying. The small ones are male the large female. They are now safely tucked in the crisper drawer of the fridge until spring.  I bought 10 and now have 70-80 cocoons.

We'll end with a picture from my hike to the lake with a good friend last weekend (and Alida sacked out in the jogger).  The hike followed an amazing picnic lunch that we all enjoyed together provided by the same friend - I was cashing in a half birthday coupon and I can honestly say without doubt that it was the best half birthday present I've ever received!

Fall is here!

Today was a tried and true rainy, cool, fall day!  We closed the high window in the front room and I even felt half tempted to get the wood stove going. All the sweet potatoes and peanuts have been dug and Jason is getting in cover crops at every available opportunity and many are already sprouting thanks to the recent rains.  I'm enjoying helping to "tuck in" the gardens for winter, chopping up the dead vines and allowing them to compost in place.  There are still some peppers hanging on, hull peas, spinach, and lettuce in abundance! 

Kitchen garden with a few sugar snaps and plenty of hot peppers to go around!

Main garden with a bed full of lettuce and carrots near the top.

Cutting down the cornstalks which will hopefully be chipped up for cover material for the composting toilet (if they ever can dry out!)

Digging sweet potatoes - not quite like last year but two large baskets of delicious looking food!

And a little mess of peanuts to enjoy (or probably mostly for next year's seed so we can expand our planting!)

So since the gardening has slowed down, why not tackle some of the big things that have been looming...like buy a car!  Yes, we finally went for it - we are now the owners (though it is not yet on the Tangly Woods homestead) of a Toyota Matrix.  Since I have never seen it, it's not quite feeling like a reality yet.  Jason and the girls drove all the way to Manassas yesterday to take a look at what looked like a pretty ideal vehicle for us (at least on the screen).  What a taxing day for all of us - actually the girls seemed to fair much better than their parents.  Hopefully our decision to "go for it" wasn't too swayed by our sheer exhaustion in the process.  It checked out well and should meet our vehicle needs for the foreseeable future, we just both just wish we didn't need a car at all!

It feels a little crazy to me that our car only cost about double what we recently spent on my one dental implant.  But I better not write too much about that experience as I'm working to come to peace with the whole thing.  It's "over" (it was nearly a year-long process) but I'm not happy with it and really wish I had never gone this route.  So I guess if we are to live and learn, I'll have this experience to refer back to when my other baby tooth with no adult tooth underneath decides its time in my mouth has come to an end.  I'm rooting (no pun intended) for it to hang in there a few more decades.

On to more brighter topics - our kiddos!  I'm not sure either of them fully recognize how good they have it, but Alida definitely can't possibly know what a grand big sister she has.  Kali is so sweet with her and has been taking more and more interest in caring for Alida.  She's been taking Alida on nappy walks on days when Jason is home with them - and Kali is the only one out of the three of us that has never failed to get Alida down for a nap.  Well, the other night they cuddled up in Kali's bed.  Here they are:



Minutes later I heard Kali stop reading.  I peaked into the room and Kali was quietly closing the book.  Here's what I saw:



Alida has her own little nurturing bug these days too.  Today she wanted to bring Big Bear downstairs to play with.  Before long she was pretending to put a diaper on him.  Then she needed to take him potty.   When I walked into the bathroom, I couldn't help but chuckle.  This is the scene I came upon.

Now speaking of kiddos, their bath water is probably cool by now, so I had better go help them finish up...

Celebrating life!

Alida sacked out while nursing, so a nappy walk was unnecessary (even if I was looking forward to it).  Instead, I'm trying to complete a few tasks that require screen time (tasks that I put off partly because I'm tired of being in front of a computer after my days at work and because they are nearly impossible to do with Alida's little fingers anywhere nearby).  I just taught Kali how to balance a checkbook since she is now the proud owner of her very own checking account (which she hopes to use to deposit duck egg money and purchase duck feed, if she can find anyone that wishes to purchase duck eggs from her).   Now she is off to harvest the last of her popcorn, since cutting down the corn stalks to dry is on the list for today.  You may wonder why we are drying corn stalks - after chopping them up in the chipper they should make great cover material for the composting toilets.  Yes, we are still pretty excited about that system!

Before diving into my computer "tasks" I did a quick peruse on facebook and got well educated on the shut down of our federal government.  Thinking about that and some of the people near and dear to me who are undergoing very difficult times, it's hard to write a post that focuses on the joy and celebration that has been part of recent days for us.  It seems that life is almost always a complex mixture of joys and sorrows, celebrating and grieving, life and death.  As we were sitting around the fire on my birthday evening, Jason and I were asked to share some of the highlights of our year.  My mind went blank initially and even upon further reflection very few major things came to mind - the kinds of things one might expect to share as highlights.  Instead what flooded my mind were all the simple joys that are part of our everyday life here on Fruit Farm Lane.  I could list hundreds but here are just a sampling since I last posted:

Canning many quarts of applesauce on our porch!

Digging sweet potatoes with both girls and making rolls with the vines.

Grinding our home grown corn and using that cornmeal in pizza dough

The dough was also enhanced with lots of pureed stinging nettles and our chicken eggs then topped with various kinds of pesto, homemade sauce chock full of Tangly Woods produce, kale and zucchini from friends and neighbors...

Watching the girls cuddled up reading together and hearing Kali try to teach Alida to read.

It's the simple pleasures that stem from the cycles and seasons of our life here that create a sense of being overwhelmed by the abundance all around me - the abundance of food, the abundance of cuteness, the abundance of friendships and meaningful interactions with those who live with and near us, the abundance of beauty... 

I love that each season brings different things that we anticipate and look forward to. And since each new season brings new things to enjoy, it's hard to feel very sad about the ending of the previous one - and sometimes it's downright easy to celebrate.  I ate our very last fresh tomato today with absolutely no feelings of regret as I chopped up the vines in an effort to get a start on the fall garden cleanup.  On may way to the garden I popped a ripe sweet persimmon into my mouth - one season ending, another just getting started! 

The cool mornings and evenings bring a sense of anticipation for the first fire in the woodstove, but it would be a little ridiculous to do one just yet!  We have taken advantage of some cool evenings to enjoy building fires in our outdoor fire ring.  Family and Tangly Woods' folks joined us on my birthday evening for pizza pockets over the fire.  I never get tired of that meal - and am always full before I wish to be.  The following evening, Jason and his birthday party attendees (about a dozen men!) enjoyed eating supper around the fire - which was sandwiched in between starting to dig our "pond" and several hours of serious ping pong playing!

 So September has come and gone and October is upon us.  The large batch of green tomato salsa cooling in the fridge will give me reason to be creative with making meals in the near future that are enhanced by salsa!  The canning shelves are full, the freezers are requiring increased creativity to fit more into and the root cellar is filling with squashes, potatoes, and onions.  I'm hoping that the lessening of food processing and preservation will not only open up more spaces for family walks or game playing or reading stories, but also tackling some of the piles of various things that have accumulated around the house during the intense season of planting, weeding, harvesting and putting up for the winter.  We'll see if our girls are as excited about house cleaning and organizing as they are gardening together.  I won't blame them if they aren't...

Potatoes, soccer, haircuts and more...

It's been another fun and somewhat monumental week and once again time for bed so this will be another quickie!  This past weekend we dug all our potatoes!  Very exciting and fun (other than feeling bummed to need to compost a good number of green ones since learning that any green on a potato means it is best not to eat any of it!).  Then Jason and I got an impromptu date night when Jonathan and Rachelle took the kiddos to the Carnival de Resistance and we took advantage of the time not only to enjoy a jog into Emily and Jonas' place to see the house progress but also to cut a foot off of Jason's hair, which I sent off to Wigs 4 Kids today. We also fit in being part of the Kali's fan club at her very first soccer game of the season and of course some food preparation experiments.  The most recent ones include drying ground cherries (yay for a found raisin alternative!), ground cherry salsa (made twice already) and autumn olive berry jam (somewhat time intensive but worth it!). I probably shouldn't even put this in writing but I feel pretty certain that I put the last tomato products in canning jars this morning.  The plants are about toast at this point, other than a few hardy sungold plants still putting out delicious morsels.  Here's some visuals of the above items and more:

Our very first home grown roasted peanuts (these were dug by accident and now is is very hard to wait to dig the rest!)

Ground cherry salsa - highly recommended!

Dried ground cherries and autumn olive berry jam.

My little helper - on our way to pull out green bean plants that were eaten by bean beetles before we got any beans!

Kali in action at her first soccer game.  She actually kicked it a good number of times with clear improvement from the start of the game to the finish.  I'm still a loud spectator!

Could she be much cuter?  Here she is in the potato patch "helping."

Kali, Jonathan and Buttercup all doing their jobs.

Role reversal!  Little sister brushing big brother's hair.

Silky smooth - blow dried for the first time :)

The big cut!

Emily fixing my chop job...

Ready to send! So Jason's hair is shorter than mine for the first time in years and will likely stay that way until it is his turn to chop a foot off mine - I've got a ways to go!