The farm is looking pretty stupendous, if I do say so myself, but not without a Herculean effort from all of us!
We had so much to do to prepare for last weekend's wedding and first Summer Sunday pizza & music event, that we decided to try a technique Rog uses at work, a Scrum Board. We pulled down the big movie screen and used post-it notes to organize our tasks. Jobs were color-coded (pink= buildings, green = garden & yard work, etc) in three columns (Backlog, In-Process and Done) and posted under each of our names (Blue post-its) as we tackled them. This was the chart when we started- I wish I had a photo at the end of the week- the third column became a dense mosaic of post-it notes.
Many rolls of sod were laid, as well as truckloads of gravel and mulch.
The stockpile of plants on the patio got planted.
Our Food Forest planting session got interrupted by an injured fawn - which we patched up as best we could and released back into the woods for his mother to find. (Mae got to check "rescue baby fawn" off her bucket list!)
Six loads of cardboard were retrieved from Menards for deep mulching of the veggie garden.
The embarrassingly overgrown Granary Garden was weeded and mulched and made beautiful. Much harder than it sounds because a dense mat of mint had invaded the entire garden. (But it smelled great to weed.)
So much mowing and trimming. And cleaning up of cow pies from the pasture.And windows washed, rugs shampooed, barns vacuumed, sticks picked up, trim painted, patios power-washed, a section of fence replaced, junk hauled away, decks stained...
and the burn pile was burned. (And then we foolishly all stayed up past midnight singing around the fire.)
I installed blue-tinted lights in the fish gazebo pond for a romantic glow at night.
The aquaponics green wall obliged by blooming enthusiastically for the wedding.
Of course we still had to harvest and pack the CSA boxes
And bake breads and pastries for market (Mae is getting to be a master of these apple rose tarts!)
I found a luna moth in the yard one morning! I haven't see one of these in many years, but this poor battered moth had a torn wing and could not fly.
I found some instructions on a Monarch Butterfly website for repairing a butterfly wing, so I attempted moth surgery. The results were not very elegant, but the moth was able to fly away. (This task was not on the scrum board, but one must have one's priorities!)
The night before the wedding while Rog was baking, Mae and I attended an art opening of women's works in which I had this painting, titled "Embrace." Nothing like a deadline to help you actually accomplish art-making!
The wedding day arrived with crazy weather and intermitttent thunderstorms, which made for uncertain celebration plans, but beautiful lighting for photos.
A downpour at the start of the ceremony had everyone scrambling for the tent, but the rain ceased a few minutes later, we dried off the chairs, and the wedding commenced beautifully.
Tori and Izaak were successfully wed!
Such a sweet couple.
One of the delectable dessert tables.
After the wedding ceremony, the couple was treated to a lovely rainbow --that has to be a good omen for starting a marriage!
A gigantic THANK YOU to Mae and Ira, our delightful WWOOFers and to our assistant Ruth, who all worked so hard and with such good nature to whip this farm into shape!
Now we have head start for the next two weddings this month!
