Whew, it’s been a rough week around here.  I stayed home from the farm on Wednesday to rest, and Mirin was so kind as to watch Clothilde while Ethan did the chores.  He told me he made her walk all over the farm so she would sleep well!  (She did, too!) The fall greens are…

One rainy evening the big kids thought it was “chilly” (it was about 75F.  We’re still acclimated to 85-90F), and so Mirin built a fire in the fireplace in his pit.  He had extended the roof and made a chimney and everything, so it was very cozy, although too small for us grown-ups to fit…

We got rained out again at the farm on Saturday.  I don’t think I’ve ever been caught in that much rain before. In the five seconds it took to run to the truck and find my hat, I was completely soaked to the skin.  Ethan resorted to making a rain shelter for Clothilde on his…

For months now I’ve been watching the hind-parts of the sows and cows and wondering if they looked pregnant or not, or hoping that Mama Bee really isn’t just that fat.  We’ve all been hoping to go out one day and see new babies. Well, an unexpected thing happened this week.  There were some new…

The fall starts are all safely in the ground and growing, and now it has been time to turn our attention to the winter garden.  The Asian greens I’d started were ready to go in the ground.  This week I planted the bekana, tatsoi, pak choy and Chinese cabbage.  I direct-seeded turnips, a dwarf snap…

This is a version of Chili Rellenos with a home-grown twist.  Home-grown because I used home made chevre cheese to stuff them instead of the oft-called for hard cheese, and they are not the usual kind of pepper.  These were big beautiful Napoleon sweet peppers from the garden.  (The cornmeal was “boughten” cornmeal this time,…

The cool weather from the weekend has worn off.  It was back to hot and sticky (92F yesterday), but it was overcast and some little sprinkling showers helped.  We stopped by a persimmon orchard on the way to the farm yesterday afternoon and picked a bunch of persimmons.  We’ve gotten some from our trees this…

This weekend the weather was perfect.  It was warm but not hot and the air felt pleasantly dry, like a humid day in Southern California, or like Pennsylvania in July.  It did not seem like Florida at all.  For the first time since summer really began, we went out and had a major work weekend…

We have an elderly lady neighbor in town who has lived next door for about two years exactly.  I remember just when Ms. Penny moved in because it was right after Clothilde was born, and she had some kind of sawing/noisy lawn work/construction going on a few feet from our bedroom window from barely daylight…

The Christopherous curriculum we are using this year offers several Norse-inspired poems to memorize.  Mirin loves memorizing dramatic, inspiring poems, even long-winded ones like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Heather Ale” poem. But the poems provided were just not what I thought he would like.  There was one about Thor and Loki that seemed to be the…

Two very different snakes presented themselves recently.  This little guy was hiding under some old rotting wooden pallets we were moving.  We weren’t sure what kind of snake he was, only he didn’t look like the poisonous kind.  I thought maybe he was a small rat snake. This monster was a coachwhip snake that Ethan…

Mirin turned 10 yesterday!  We’re into the double digits now, and that seems impossible.  There are so many September birthdays in our family!  On Wednesday we’re celebrating with my brother, and later in the month is my mother-in-law’s birthday. We had a simple celebration with just family at home.  One of the highlights was receiving…