Hello, People!  I've been thoroughly enjoying the country life this past week!  We've had lots of rain, and I finally got my garden planted.  The baby hoed it over after I planted it, so the seeds are probably all in the wrong places now, but I think I'll just wait for them to germinate and then put them where I want them.  Evenings here are magical this time of year.  The humidity holds scent so wonderfully and since the fences around here are covered in honeysuckle, as you mosey along the dirt roads you inhale the perfume of clover and grass and honeysuckle... think the perfume Bluegrass, only more subtle and less flowery!  We've been contemplating housing for our 25 laying hens, as the above houses 12 comfortably.  My husband got a big mower to maintain the grass around here... it's fun to see the "meadow" growing up in feathery grasses, red clover, and daisies, but pastures need to be mowed to keep the good grasses growing, if no animals are doing it for you!  I've been reconsidering goats, as there are portions of our land that are particularly suited to goats, but will need some good fencing first!

My window box on the back of the house is looking really good, I think!  It's supposed to attract hummingbirds, but no luck yet.  We have spotted lots of other birds, though.  We've seen bluebirds, cardinals, and orioles, for example.  Also, we've got a healthy population of fireflies!  Sometimes it looks like you're in the middle of a stadium and it's full of cameras flashing.  I've never see so many at one time in my life!  I know this land hasn't been farmed in at least 10 years, and before that it was a cattle farm, so I don't think pesticides have been used around here for a good long time!  

There are lots of walnut trees on the property, which promises lots of good eating come fall, if only we can get the shells cracked... ever tried to shell a black walnut?  It's super hard, and dyes your hands dark brown in the process!  I saw a special tool that looks like something that belongs in a machine shop in a catalog once, maybe I should try to get that?  I've got a hemp t-shirt finished to show you soon, it's almost finished, and the chicks should be moved to pasture soon, now that it's warmed up around here, so more pics of chickens, too, hopefully on grass, soon!  

Outside

Well, we have a closing date, finally, which gives my life some focus finally!  May 3rd we have a scheduled closing and we move in two weeks... woo hoo!  My FIL mentioned to my husband that he'd like some exterior pics of the house so I got right on it.  We went to the house yesterday and measured rooms so I could plan furniture layouts, and walked the property, and I took some shots of the house and grounds!

Yellow, I love yellow houses!  I'm already seeing the garden!

The "front four" and the long, long driveway, which I have plans to flank with flowering trees, probably fruit trees and arbor day foundation freebies.  Picture: chicken tractors, fiber animals, a milk cow and her calf, and maybe even pigs!

Daddy and five little people.  OK, one is getting awfully big to be called little.  The woods are beyond the road which is the boundary of our property.   

This property is just ideal.  There are neighbors, which is good, but the property really seems private and secluded in many ways, and oh, so beautiful! There is a creek, which in the photo is swollen due to lots of rain, and a fishing hole just a bit down the road.  I can envision puddle playing and a willow tree and paper boat races.  We even met some neighbors, which was just ideal!  Sometimes it's hard to meet your neighbors in the country, OK, sometimes it's hard to get to know your neighbors anywhere nowadays!

I want to pause here to say that I do not deserve this wonderful blessing!  I am so thankful for grace, so needy of mercy, and so very, very undeserving of this!  I have to get a little overt here!  Praise God from whom all blessings flow!  OK, that says it all I think!  (Have you noticed how many exclamation marks I use?  That's just how I speak... I exclaim!)

Maryland Sheep and Wool

OK, so I'm checking in... the farm is getting soaked right now... it's chilly and wet, but I've got some tomatoes in thanks to the Studly Man in my life.

I can't believe it happened, but I forgot to bring my camera to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this past Saturday! ACK! I know!

It was amazing, there was yarn and fiber everywhere, spinning wheels, looms, vintage sock machines, demonstrations, sheep and goats, WONDERFUL!

I did buy yarn, of course! Actually I waited in line for like 45 minutes for some Socks that Rock at The Fold booth. I met some really nice ladies who shared their giant umbrella with me and chatted about yarn (Thanks, Melissa and Mary!).

I bought some locally spun and naturally hand dyed wool worsted yarn... and some locally spun flax, cotton, and rayon fingering weight yarn ($6.50 a pound!).

I went with my friend Lyn from Hunt Country Yarns in The Plains and had fun "checking in" with their booth. I talked to the Ravelry Crew and saw Ysolda Teague (I just admired her while pretending to look at wool behind her) and I had a nice little chat with Claudia of Claudia Hand Painted Yarns (Check out the Linen yarn Desert Dusk colorway... I'll be buying some at Knitting Sisters in Williamsburg when we go at the end of this month). I was like oh, 40 feet away from her and saw this woman sitting on a bench next to one of the barns in this WONDERFUL tiered ruffled skirt knitted in gorgeous hand dyed yarns in these beautiful warm colors. I had to know where to get that pattern and what those yarns were, so, of course, because I'm me, I walked over and politely butted into a conversation and asked her.

Me: "Excuse me for interrupting, but I saw that skirt from waaaay over there and I think it is absolutely gorgeous. Where did you get that pattern? And those yarns, oh my, look at those beautiful warm colors!"

Claudia: "Well, this is a Louet Sales pattern, but actually, I'm Claudia of Claudia Hand Painted Yarns and these are my yarns."

Me: "Wow, these are gorgeous! You're like a walking advertisement! Who sells these?"

Claudia: "I don't think anyone here is selling them...."

I got her card, because it was a work of art. I want one for me. Bad. I can't believe I forgot my camera!

Birthday Presents

Here at Contentment, February means three kid birthdays. We are kind of anti-birthday party around here. We have a big day, of course! We give the birthday child the choice of every meal that we eat, cake choice, we take the day off of school and give the birthday kid the choice of what we do all day, and of course, we give a few gifts. But we kind of nixed the Birthday Party circuit a few years ago. This year, we went a step further, and kind of nixed the giving of more stuff. We have waaaaay too much stuff already and I'm sure the extended family will give us a few more wonderful and unique gifts for each child, so I decided to do something a bit more... entreprenureal. Now, all my kids are interested in gardening. They all get their own little patch, a la Little Men, and we buy the produce the kids harvest from them. This year, my oldest daughter decided she didn't want to grow veggies, because she doesn't want to eat them... she's not a fan. But she loves herbs, so she requested the permission to grow lavender and sage and thyme and then we decided she'd grow medicinal herbs and start researching old remedies for aches and pains. It's still a contribution to the family that is worth paying her for, and hopefully she'll enjoy the educational aspect of the project. I just had the kids go through the catalogs and circle and initial stuff they thought they'd like to have.... my middle daughter took the White Flower Farm catalog, looked through it, told me she couldn't possibly choose, as she wanted everything, put the glossy pages on the table and drew a metaphorical circle around the whole catalog with her finger... she's so cute!

Soooo, for my middle son, we purchased a round strawberry bed with 50 strawberry plants and plastic cover and netting to protect them from the chickens... for my oldest boy, two dwarf fruit trees, for my middle daughter, a couple of rose bushes, potato and onion sets, and we ordered for my oldest daughter a set of medicinal herb seeds and book on using them, plus 10 lavender plants. I couldn't resist ordering something for me, too... I ordered a David Austen rose (Carding Mill) and a blue hydrangea (Endless Summer). It's sort of a birthday/Mother's Day gift for myself! It's perhaps a bit untraditional to buy your children plants for their birthday gifts, but I think they'll enjoy them a lot. Now, on to negotiating produce prices!

A Winter's Walk

Well, I'm finding that this farm is just as wonderfully beautiful in winter as in summer and fall. I'm smitten with this place. It so often reminds me of the farm I lived on in Upstate New York when a girl. I hope my children experience that kinship with nature as I did growing up. I always felt as if I could almost feel things growing, like I could sit on a big, old rock and almost hear it telling me the story of the land, of glaciers and floods, of plows and boys in overalls planting trees, of seedlings and flax crops. I think I've lost some of my imagination, but I can see it alive in my children. They roam the farm and name all the little places they like. There is a group of rocks arranged in a large circle that they call "The Cathedral", a little bit of clear ground overhung by an arch of branches from trees that just happened to grow in two rows that they call "Trinity Church." Grand Grove, the Treehouse, and Muddy Bottom are all places that my children have named and inhabited as their own. They don't have the waterfall and mill and apple orchard and ancient graveyard of my youth, but they have magical places of their own, and sometimes they let me in.

Yesterday we took a hike since deer season is over. We sort of were looking for nuts, as we've been studying the wild foods that Native Americans ate before Europeans came here, but of course the squirrels have hidden them all away in their larders. Instead we found a turtle shell right next to a hole in the ground. A freshly dug, neat little hole into some animals winter home. Maybe a fox or badger? We've been reading Wind in the Willows so the children imagined all sorts of wonderful little furniture and comforts in there, but realized that the turtle probably met an unfortunate end in it's dealings with the inhabitant.

Grow, Baby, Grow!

I can show you a picture of my gardens completely planted, but you know, it's not very interesting, because I mostly planted seeds! I just walk out there in the mornings to water them and tell them to,”Grow, grow, grow! Make my food!” Yes, I talk to plants, but only when no one over three years old is around!
I've planted tomatoes, basil, cilantro, peppers, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers (a first for me!), carrots, lettuce, spinach, okra (another first), parsley, lemon balm, green beans, butternut squash, watermelon, and sweet corn. I'm trying the “three sisters” approach for the corn. Planting them with beans and squash. The idea is that the corn is a trellis for the beans to climb, and the squash provides shade for the roots of the corn. The beans do the nitrogen fixing for the corn, and the squash and beans growing together supposedly confuse pests... we'll see! It's the sort of companion planting that's been done for thousands of years by Native Americans... except I left out the dead fish under every corn seed, not having any fish at hand. Plus, in theory, all those roots and leaves help deter soil erosion which is a problem with corn. A benefit to raising your own food by hand instead of letting big farms with big machines do it, perhaps?
Gardening inspires a lot of the same emotions in me that having a new baby does. I murmur and pet and fuss over each emerging sprout like it's my new baby. Yeah, OK, that's kind of weird. But there's a lot of satisfaction and warm fuzzies that can be derived from “raising” stuff. Hard work resulting in a good harvest is very good for the soul. In the square foot gardening method, you prune your vining plants to one main stem, which is really hard to do, because you think: more stems, more food. Supposedly, pruning those stems to one, and weaving that one stem up and down a trellis allows you to get a lot more food from a lot less space. Then, when the season winds to a close, you cut off the end of that one stem and it's supposed to help the fruit to ripen in a timely manner. I've no experience with this, however, it's all stuff from books I've read, and probably confused in my mind! All this pruning reminds me of training children to behave well! One does a lot of nipping behavior in the bud, hoping it will help the child “bear better fruit” later. Of course, the raising of children takes much longer than tomatoes, so one must just have faith that those that have done it before know what they're talking about.
Grow, baby, grow! Make good fruit! Be healthy! Grow tall and strong! Be productive!
Gardeners and mothers have a lot in common.

A Zoo, Sort Of

I'm a bit mad at myself today. I'm back from Chicago (had a LOVELY time!), but just not in the groove. Too relaxed, perhaps? I've had these really great photo opportunities recently, and I just wasn't fast enough to get good pictures! We have some sort of bird's nest outside our back door, pasted up in a corner under our eaves. At first you could see Mama Bird building her nest on top of another, older one. Not too much later you could hear little peeps coming from it, as long as you didn't step out the door. They were very obedient little birds and were completely silent when they saw danger. A little later you could look at them peeking over the edge of the nest, waiting to be fed, quietly watching us go about our business. Yesterday, they were gone, and there was a black rat snake on the ground four feet long to entertain us instead. The four baby birds were in our front yard, lined up on a tree branch, getting their flying lessons, and just in time, for those black snakes are really good climbers. I know, I looked it up online! My daughter saw the snake, and we all ran out to look at it, while I was yelling at them to, “Go back inside till I figure out what kind of snake it is!” I Googled Black Snake and found a picture that looked just like the one we saw: a shiny black snake, all kinked up, perfectly still. My kids wanted to kill it. I decided not... we've found plenty of evidence of rodents and I decided a little bit of natural predation was a good thing. Later that day, we heard five gunshots come from the neighbor's hen house. I was disturbed at the gunshots. After all, any kind of killing disturbs a woman like me. The three neighbor men had found two black snakes munching their eggs, and, well, when it comes to food, a man must protect his interests above the serpent's, naturally. One day I believe the lion will lie down with the lamb, but not yet!

Measuring

We went to the farmhouse today to measure rooms and windows and most especially the laundry room. I really would like to find a way to put my big front load washers in there. The landlord is awesome. He was trying to help us figure out how to cut a bigger hole in the cabinet space for the machines in case they don't quite fit... even with all that figuring I forgot to measure the door opening!!!! Maybe we'll go back tomorrow. Aaaaaanyway, we planned for the raised beds for the garden, and talked about the chicken house. I want something pretty and portable and safe for the chickens. Hubby wouldn't mind it being those things, but he wants it cheap! I finally got a picture of the front of the house.





The rental we're in now has gobs of spring bulbs, which makes for a beautiful and fragrant spring yard. My husband and I were getting into bed one night and he mentions that he'd like me to "Plant lots of those purple and yellow flowers that smell really good so that we can smell them when the windows are open at the farmhouse." He's such a sap! I'm totally on board with that! Come fall I'll get me a spade and a few big bags of bulbs and go to it!

See how pretty it is! This is the back of the house, I don't know why I didn't take a pic of the front, but it has a screened porch.




Here is the road, that runs past the house. It's a private road which means lots of bicycle fun for the kids.

Here is the Springhouse. I just love stone buildings! It's like they're part of the land, not just corruptible wood, but the bones of the fields themselves, somehow. These photos were taken in early April, and you can see the way the air seems to hold an aura of possibility.