The garden is at the stage where you really have to almost swim through it.  The vines have gotten larger than I imagined they would –  the watermelons have filled what I thought was a super generous space and are attacking the cucumbers.  The casaba melons are infiltrating the lima beans.  There’s a pumpkin vine…

The Tess’s Land Race current tomatoes have exploded in fruit.  I really like this tomato.  It looks like someone’s compost tomato they saved seed from.  It is huge, vine-like and aggressive and has really variable fruit – some red, some orange, some yellow, some big, some small.  It’s like planting a whole bunch of different…

With all the rain, mushrooms are appearing everywhere.  There are lots of great edible ones we know and are comfortable eating – chantarelles and the orange milk-caps (Lactarius), but also many other interesting mushrooms, some that we of course can’t identify.  These are some amazing Ganoderma mushrooms fruiting on a stump.  Ganodermas are very medicinal…

The grown-ups have been suffering through an illness, but of course all the little people have been fine and spry as usual – maybe a slight runny nose, but nothing to slow them down.  Still, chores must be done, vegetables must be picked, cows must be milked and moved.  We were busy last week keeping…

I hope you don’t mind this picture.  I thought it would be okay since it is more at the “food” stage than the “animal” stage here.  (Ethan says the worst thing about it is the appalling amount of mildew on the table top.)  I was proud of how nicely I had done the quartering and…

We consolidated the pigs, so Mama Bee and Trespassers William are in with Star and the piglets.  The piglets were always slipping over and hovering around Mama Bee all the time, anyway.  She is very tolerant of them.  Shockingly so, I might add.  She does not have that look to her. One of the piglets…

For years I’ve wanted to celebrate the summer solstice with the children, and always find myself too busy with the garden, or just lying around drooling in the shade because it’s so hot and horrible outside.  This year I managed something! Drawing on an old Rhythm of the Home article (goodness, I miss it so…

This really isn’t what it looks like! No, Clothilde is not locked up on bread and water (and breastmilk). When we got our first batch of pigs years ago, we didn’t have anything to transport them in, so the guy we were buying them from sold us this rusty old cage to bring them home….

With all the rain (FIVE inches last week!!  Well, at least according to our rain gauge) the garden is getting jungley.   I don’t think I will bother companion planting flowers with the melons next year – the pretty cactus rose zinnias look like they’re drowning in melon vines.  The melons didn’t trellis like the cucumbers,…