We are on the steep, downhill side of summer now, which makes me feel wistful when I think about it.  But I try not to think about it and just savor the days, which have been so lovely.  Our lives are a colorful, crazy jumble, sort of like this  chaos in the bee/butterfly/hummingbird garden.

The garden is now providing beans galore, cucumbers, summer squash, greens of every ilk, garlic and the first tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. This was yesterday’s pretty CSA box.

LaFonda’s  sweet little calf, Splotch, has grown so much and is beginning to look like a little steer. The past week he has been having occasional scours (diarrhea) of a type which I believe is caused by gluttony, drinking too much rich, creamy milk.

So, I got these giant pills, called boluses, for simple scours

and I am getting pretty good at making him swallow them.

The boluses must have suppressed his appetite for a couple of days. LaFonda gave me a whopping 6 gallons of milk for those days, twice as much as usual. Her udder was so huge! But everyone is back to normal now, thank goodness.

Our wonderful WWOOFers, Lynette and Jessica, have gotten the garden into great shape, and so with the abundance of milk have been experimenting with making skyr (an Icelandic yogurt made with rennet) and hard cheeses.

Today we tasted Lynette’s first wheel of  manchego ( a cheese which can be eaten fresh or aged.)  Absolutely delicious!

Jessica relaxes for  moment with Orange.

The meat chickens are approaching harvest weight.  Today we nabbed a a big one and weighed him - he was 7 pounds, which will be about 5.5  processed. I made a processing appointment for two weeks from now. These are f really  sweet birds, and I love how they are at the stage when they make kazoo sounds. It will be sad to harvest them.

According to our  cupola which has the year 1914 embossed into it, this is the 100th birthday of our barn.

We think the barn is actually considerably older than that, but we took advantage of the opportunity to  celebrate a centennial birthday and invited neighbors and previous farm owners.

Bg barn birtday cake - red velvet. I am a bit embarrassed it wasn’t homemade, but it was tasty.

It is tomaoto tart season!!

And if that is not enough to make your mouth water, here is the delectable supper Lynette made for us tonight:

Garlic fried eggs, fresh manchego cheese on sourdough rye toasts with gooseberry jam, roasted pepper-olive-walnut tapenade, sliced cucumbers, roasted eggplant. All the ingredients except  the walnuts and kalamata olives came from the farm!

Life is pretty darn good at Squash Blossom Farm.