Climb the mountain

Today I made it 1/3 of the way to the 8,800 peak behind our house. The average grade was 34%. It took 2 hours, so I'm looking at 6-8 hour trip to get to the peak and back in one day. I'll have to condition all the little stabilizer muscles in my legs more to make the downhill part of the trip safe.

Funerals

May saw two deaths in our family, Chestyn Browning, stillborn to Justin (Jillian's brother) and Erica Browning, and my Cousin, Sammy who overdosed. It has been a source of teaching moments, that some things happen that we cannot control but must learn to deal with, and others can result to some degree from choices. At work, we almost always include depression as a variable. I didn't get to interact with my cousin much (it has been a decade since I last saw her), but I hope I can be sensitive and supportive to those who may need additional support to deal with challenges I have not been called to face.

The boy loves him some peaches

Quinton likes peaches. He can eat a quart of peaches in one sitting.

Yesterday, I found him in the corner with a glass pint of spiced apples, which he obviously thought were peaches. I was in the middle of supervising Payge making pancakes, so I couldn't help him right away. But it was the saddest thing ever - he had a spoon in one hand and was trying check the lid off (there was still a ring on it!). After stabilizing the pancake situation, I turned to look for him, and he was holding the jar up with the saddest "please, sir, I want some more" look on his face. He ate half the jar with some pancakes.

Garden update

Indoor tomatoes and peppers (basil and pumpkins not pictured)

We planted two sugar maples, I'll try to get syrup off of them in a decade.

The berry bed Jillian envisioned (at least I hope I did it right). Currants in the middle, raspberries at the far end, strawberries (mostly yet to be planted) everywhere else. Blueberries (not pictured) are behind me.

The cherry orchard, tart on the left, sweet on the right. The branches all have string on them tying them down to stable objects to train the branches to have better crotch angles.

Payge by a sweet cherry tree. We'll replicate the picture in a decade for comparison.

Our beehive in the north east corner of the (back) yard. Bees arrive in two weeks, we put this up during a wind storm to make sure it held up. I leveled while Zachary, Chayce, and Payge collected the rocks from behind the fence. Jillian and Quinton cheered for us, and by cheer, we mean shivered. It snowed shortly after putting it up while I was planting purple asparagus. To the left you see our grapevines (concord and another purple variety).

The beehive up close.

Our garden now has 12 4x4 raised beds. We decided to segregate the tomatoes with asparagus in between.  The garden is surrounded on two sides by raspberries and blackberries on a third side. Apple and apricot trees in the background. They are pretty worn looking and we'll start replacement trees growing this fall. I want to try multigraft apples that grow three varieties on one trunk. It is hard to see, but the new pecan tree is left-center. The one we bought last year died, but the nursery we purchased it from replaced it.

The children's garden. Zachary has the back row, Chayce the middle, and Payge the front row. I a year or two we'll add a row for Quinton. We'll teach and help guide them, but the success of these 2x2 gardens will be up to the children.

The garlic patch. 

Sod from all the berry and tree plantings. The left side is fashioned into rooms for the children to play in (they built that side). I used the south wall to make compostable compost bins. In theory, the sod, upside down, will compost in a few years. Apple tree in the background. 

The new anjou pear tree with the branches being trained. The  old pear tree (a  concorde we think) is to the left (unpictured). Behind the anjou is an almond tree, and behind that a black walnut. The sod rooms and compost bins are in the background. On the right are red grapevines.

The peach trees with branches being trained. The berry  bed is in the background.

Our chickens. We have a black sex link, gold sex link, rhode island red, ameraucana,  black orpington (we think), and a leghorn (not pictured)

Chickens in the small run attached to the hen house. The run is too small, and we hope to start letting them out in the yard soon. Until they start getting into the garden, we'll let them roam the yard. At some point we hope to divide the east end of the yard by fences, combining the ideas of a chicken moat (in which a fence protects the vegetable garden from the chickens, but the chickens can roam all the way around the the garden to prevent insect invasion), and rotating chicken paddocks (in which you have four or more fenced sections with a 'food forest' growing plants the chickens can eat - you rotate them through the sections, giving plants in the follow three sections a chance to recover; ideally, this will  be around the fruit trees and grapevines so that the chickens can eat insects off the bark).

Update on our children

They keep growing.

Zachary, who should be in 3rd grade, finished 4th grade math and will start fifth grade math next week. He loves our bimonthly chess club with homeschoolers and friends. We have also played Risk, Dominion, Hnefatafl (a viking variant of chess), and legos (when the children get tired of games). Jill started getting the newspaper, which Zachary found has comics, so the paper frequently disappears early.

Chayce keeps pushing through belts in karate, is reading a ton, and loves to take care of our chickens (pictures coming). 

Have you ever watched bad lip reading on youtube? They take movie clips, and watch them with the sound off, and insert random words that fit with the mouth movements. It's like listening to Payge. Payge is 5. She has started reading, and is great help taking care of the fuschias. 

Quinton is walking, says a few words, and likes anything with wheels. Not to ride in them, to push them. He is frustrated that he can move the wagon and wheelbarrow by himself, but he has no desire to ride in them.

His favorite things

Quinton loves his shoes, but recently outgrew them and we replaced them. He found that his old shoe had a hole in it. At first he cried as if losing a good friend (they were his favorite article of clothing). Then he acted betrayed, threw it on the floor, and kicked it twice for good measure.

Seed organization

Finally found a relatively inexpensive way to organize my garden seeds using 3-ring binder zip pouches with seeds separated by planting date. Each pouch can be taken out so the whole binder doesn't need to go to the garden. I chose heavy duty vinyl pouches for durability and water/mud resistance. It is pretty wide though and I may need to move up to a six inch binder. In the front I have a map of the garden with the text of each seed/plant type in color codes corresponding to plant dates. I made this in a spreadsheet program, simply resizing the cells to be square and creating a grid from there. Click here for the spreadsheet.