But Most Times it IS Sunshine, Rainbows, and Unicorns

The deer quite like my spaghetti squash. They've eaten 4 so far. You're welcome Mr. Bambi.

Call me insanely optimistic, but I always think that when things get really, really bad there is something really good on its way. Yes, last week was a bad week for us, but this week has seemed like there were little miracles waiting around every corner.

 Yes, the deer have been enjoying my beloved spaghetti squash, but I managed to pick two like this one. Yum. Paleo spaghetti here we come.

The tomatoes are putting on like crazy and we've been able to start picking them! Let me tell you, it's absolutely true that there is nothing like a homegrown tomato. Store bought doesn't even begin to compare.

Eating farm/garden straight to the table is am amazing thing. Who needs a recipe? I just chopped up some heirloom white cucumber, some of our amazing tomatoes, drizzled a little olive oil on, and sprinkled with a little sea salt and basil. Best. Thing. Ever.

Do you remember that flowered tree we found last spring? OK, you probably don't. There was a tree at the far back corner of our property, half hidden by willows and chokecherries, with blooms on it last spring. We had never noticed that tree before. To our knowledge there were only chokecherries, willows, and cottonwoods back there.

We hadn't been going back to the second creek where this tree is because bears had been enjoying the chokecherries back there. Call me crazy, but I was going to let them help themselves! 

The chokecherries have been all eaten for a couple of weeks. Saturday we decided to go check "the tree". I walked back there and saw something bright and red.

My little miracle tree.

It's an apple tree! We'd suspected it might be a crab apple. Those are common around here. But if it is it's like no crab apple I've ever seen. The apples are bigger than a crab apple and are slightly tart, but tasty. Crab apples are generally very bitter/sour.

It's right next to a small pond and the second creek, so I'm sure the roots are drinking well. They must be, because even with the crazy dry year we've had the tree was filled with little yummy apples! 

It took a lot of work to cut the willows and chokecherries away to get to the tree, but we were so excited we made quick work of it. You'd have thought we'd found gold.

Ellie and Fiona were great help picking apples.

We've done better than expected financially this summer and have started working on the house again. (You have no idea how amazing this is, we haven't been financially able to work on the house in YEARS). We painted it and will be putting new counter tops in the kitchen soon! I'll do a full post on our house soon, it has a very cool story.

We've also had lots of purple beans, green beans, peas, zucchini, yellow squash, and eggs of course. Oh yes, and Red is happy as ever.

It's been a good week. Life is amazing. Tough times come, but tough times always go. We are grateful.

Totally Worth It

As Darran and I lay in an exhausted heap on the living room floor last night I asked him what I should post about on 4 Acres this week. He said, "I don't know." I said, well what do you remember about this week. He said, "zzzzzzz." Well, not really zzzzz, but he'd nodded off. That really did answer my question though.

This last week has been a whole lot of hard work. 

We've been pumping water with a hand pump and bailing buckets into a pipe system to water the garden. Every day, sometimes twice a day. FYI: water is heavy.

This is a VERY old pump, it breaks almost daily. It's a dang good thing Darran has skillz.

We've been weeding like mad and hauling the weeds to the goats and chickens. (We try not to waste anything around here). Not to brag, but one thing I'm highly skilled at growing is weeds. Oh, and FYI: weeds, when in sufficient amounts, are heavy.

Darran has been building Fort Knox back by the creek. Goatopia is getting an entire other layer of wire on top of the wire there now. These two tiny goats require quite the pen to be kept IN.

Goatopia.

I made laundry soap. I've got it down to 20 minutes flat.

On top of those things, I've begun preparing for our homeschool year. We start in a week. Oh yes, and I've begun training for a 5k...

Yes, it's been a week of reminding us how hard this lifestyle really can be. But it's also been a week of reminding us how rewarding this lifestyle can be.

Yep, totally worth it.

Not Licked Yet

After feeling like our little experiment this year was a big fat flop (other than the eggs that we have in abundance) I was looking toward next year. Taking my lessons from this year's failures and making plans for doing better next year. I had really just about given up on this year; when we went on vacation we didn't even bother having anyone water the garden because we thought it was too far gone.

But lo and behold plants are amazing, resilient things and I am flat out amazed that this year will yield far and beyond what we'd originally thought. We returned from vacation and realized that many of these amazing heirloom varieties were holding on for dear life and would likely produce. Since then we've hauled water like crazy and had some rain recently (that made all the difference, there's just nothing like actual RAIN). I went out to the garden yesterday and was exceedingly excited to find:

Several little baby yellow squash.

An entire row of purple beans are doing well and flowering!
Darran informed me that purple beans turn green when you cook them.
I informed him that we would eat them raw then, because we are eating purple beans!

We picked this, our first zucchini ever on 4 Acres. I sort of felt it needed
memorialized somehow. Can you bronze a zucchini? Guess we'll just eat it.

THIS I was most excited to find. Like, just won the lottery excited. Really.
Our first ever spaghetti squash. I've never even heard of anyone growing spaghetti
squash around here. Maybe they do? I've never seen it though. We love spaghetti squash.
Ya, this little thing right here was nothing short of miraculous to me. Guess you had to be there?

Will we grow most of our own food for the winter ahead as we'd hoped? No. But we are grateful that through this far from perfect, hectic, hot and dry, crazy summer we will have a pretty good first harvest here at 4 Acres.

Mostly, we are grateful for the priceless family time and the adventures we've had while trying. And... 

Summer's not over and we're not licked yet!

A First Harvest?

How about another edition of "What I've Managed Not to Kill So Far!"? OK, OK, since the mass execution of the heirloom seeds I haven't really killed...much. But because of it we got the garden started much later than we'd hoped (we're talking the first and second week of June) and started most everything from seeds instead of seedlings. Best laid plans I guess...


With our short growing season (at just above 7,000 feet it's really more like 3 seconds) it's a toss up as to whether we'll wind up with much of a harvest this year...here's hoping for a late frost? Indian summer?


This summer has also been exceptionally hot and dry. We've watered the best we can, but we can't afford to just turn the hose on (we tried in June and our bill was $70 higher!). Mostly we have been hauling water in buckets from the creek. Talk about a workout! 


Between the late planting and the hot/dry weather I had almost completely given up hope, but the last week or two things are starting to come around. While not everything has exactly thrived this hot dry summer, we've done the best we could and I'm pleasantly surprised by what is doing well!

The corn is in a race against the frost...will it have time to mature before it turns cold???

Our first zucchini! Considering how zucchini generally goes gangbusters around here we should do well here.

There's about a half a row of beets doing well. Before we got the electric fence put up around the garden the deer munched their tops off, but they came back!

We planted several varieties of cucumber, but so far the only ones looking promising are these pickling cucumbers.

The strawberry patch is doing amazing (in spite of the vampire pumpkin plant trying to snuff it out). I just picked 4 to 6 of these thumb-sized strawberries from each plant!

Speaking of the monster pumpkin plant...the pumpkins on it are growing like crazy.

Just that one pumpkin plant already has 6 to 8  fair sized pumpkins on it!

The tomato plants along the north fence are putting on like crazy.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse however only have a few.  Any idea why they're not putting on more tomatoes?!

We're even still getting a few blueberries.

There are also lots of beans, peas, and lettuce I didn't take pictures of. 


It looks like the broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, onions, and a few other things are just plain not going to make it, but we may just pull this thing out and have a decent first harvest after all! 


Cross your fingers.