For years now I had thought that all the little holes we saw every where were from mice, but we recently discovered that they are actually toad holes.  That must be how they stay cool and hydrated during the hot day. One evening when we were out finishing the chores around dusk, one little toad…

 There’s been so much rain lately, the pig’s wallow is twice the usual size.  You can see the high-water mark on Bee.  The wallow is pretty deep.  The pastures are growing back so well right now with all the rain, but it makes it hard to get the chores done and not be sopping wet…

Having older kids and then a new baby, it was hard to remember what it was like with child-proofing.  I don’t know that I even did any childproofing.  I didn’t need to.  All the fragile knick-knacks were put away, but that was it. So childproofing was far from my mind when I moved my herb…

This is our cat Teasel, and she loves to sleep on the speed hump on hot days.  We call this her “Roadkill Impression.”  Ethan always jokes that we should put up a sign saying, “Dear Earthskillers, please do not take our cat.  She is not dead yet.”  The rumor was that they were going to…

 I keep getting these ridiculous calls from my mother next door. “Mirin’s so bored he’s crying,” she’ll say.  “Can I please put a video on for him?” “No!” I reply.  “Make him go outside to play!”  My dad even came over the other night to tell us he’s worried Mirin will grow up deprived if…

I hardly got any Roma beans this year.  Between the mosaic virus they got and the melon vines strangling them out, they were just not very happy.  I will replant them in the fall, and see what happens. But we’ve been getting a lot of long beans lately!  I’ve had to scramble to think of…

 Now that we are bringing the goats down to be milked again, we have been having some trouble with Twilight Sparkle.  She has turned out to be one of those animals that can’t figure out the whole gate thing.  It seems like there’s always at least one.  One evening I was finished with the milking…

 I found these four little mushrooms on a rotting piece of old pallet in the milking paddock.  They look like they’re singing a song!  Interestingly, they didn’t have gills, they had netted-looking pores.  Of course I’m not sure at all what kind they are –  the LBM type I would guess (little brown mushroom). This…

We had a busy weekend, but somehow we didn’t get anything done again.  That always seems to happen!  There was a birthday party at a neighbor’s house, and then it rained torrentially the rest of the time.  Our plans for fixing things up at the farm and working in the garden were dashed, so I…

Only two more months before Clothilde’s second birthday…. I just got out some of Rose’s old clothes for her, and put away most of the old little baby stuff that she will not be needing now! She is speaking so clearly now, and helps so much (more than the big kids, I might add).  Every…

For so long now, the corn has seemed so small, and I’ve watched it not really growing with some concern.  Were the seeds too old?  I have dreams of passing many seeds on to other interested growers so we can keep this rare, local heirloom corn from extinction. But suddenly it is huge, towering over…

Ethan has been tromping around in a swamp doing wetland delineation for work.  Not exactly the best season for it, of course, but there were some beautiful plants he found.  Of course this is all going to be drained and developed, because apparently we need more of that sort of thing…you know, it might create…