Wordless Wednesday: Midsommer

Wordless Wednesday: Baby Birds, Big Blooms, Wonderful WWOOFers

How Hot Is It?

It is so hot and humid today that LaFonda is spending the entire afternoon cooling her hooves in the  kiddie pool.

It is so hot today that even the  chickens are contemplating a swim.

It is so hot today that the tropical hibiscus tree looks native.I

It is so hot today that when I came back from getting a quick bite of lunch the  big bowl of bread dough I had set out to rise in the barn kitchen had overflowed as if in an I Love Lucy episode,

It is so hot today that building a 500*F fire doesn't really seem to make the kitchen any hotter.

 Nothing more inviting than wood-fire smoke pouring out of the barn a on a sultry day.

It is so hot that my health-nut WWOOFers are enjoying decadent ice cream sandwiches.

Come get some of our wood-fired breads and delectable pastries at the Farmers Market tomorrow! We bake yummy stuff so you don't have to!

The Big Wedding Scrum

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!

Time Flies When You Are Having Oodles of Fun!

The past 6 weeks have been a blur of spring activity, and I have not had time to  do my morning camera walks around the farm. Worse yet, I have totally missed taking photos at many significant events.  But here are a bunch of photos, in no particular order, to catch you up on spring at Squash Blossom Farm.  This is my very favorite season, green and blossoming and burgeoning.

The honeybees arrived early, have been successfully installed in their hives and are already hard at work. I have two Langstroth hives and  a top bar hive this year. Plus, our farm assistant Ruth will be keeping a fourth hive at the farm.

It is peak dandelion and creeping charlie bloom for the bees right now,

and the apple trees are blossoming.

Mae, one of our wonderful WWOOFers from last summer, arrived to  intern with us for the  entire summer this year. That makes all of us, two- and four-footed critters alike, extremely happy.

The Northern Lights magnolia in bloom behind the Willys truck.

Abundant  blossoms on the Service Berries (aka Saskatoon or June Berries.)

We have been harvesting rhubarb for a few weeks.

The garden was tilled a few weeks ago and we have begun planting.

Our first veggie bed is going to have a fun, curvy layout of rows of greens, cabbages and marigolds. Here is the "before" photo - stay tuned for the "after." We are so lucky to have Mae as our intern, a gardener with an artist's eye, happy to tackle these crazy ideas.

I have been searching for "Contender" peaches for several years, a variety of peach that will grow in Zone 4, but no local nurseries carry them.  This spring I found a few trees at Walmart, of all places, and planted two at the edge of the garden!  I do not always have the  best luck with fruit trees, but I am going to baby these trees so tenderly.

We took off the walls enclosing the fish gazebo and opened it up for summer.  All of the goldfish and  koi survived the winter and are looking fat and sassy. We are still deciding whether to add  tilapia or channel catfish this year.

Ruth, our farm assistant,  replaced the drip irrigation lines in the  aquaponic system with hard pvc pipes (to reduce clogging from algae) and we planted the pond towers with pansies, lettuces and strawberries, which are beginning to really grow now.

The green wall is planted with nasturtiums, parsley and lettuces and  will be connected to the pond as soon as we can get to it.

We have been  blessed with some great spring rains to boost the  growing. Also some pretty fierce winds.

 

The silly garden decor bicycle got a new coat of turquoise paint. Magenta baskets to come.

The little yellow magnolia bloomed seriously and gloriously for the first time.

The waxy, fragrant blossom were about ten inches across when open!  Pretty exotic for Minnesota.

The cows finally got to go into the  pasture. The first few days I only let them in for a few hours, but now they have full access and the grass has become tall and lush. They are so happy.

 Our first event of the season was the ReBlossom Boutique, for EarthFest, the last weekend of April.  Ten vendors  sold their  recycled, upcycled, vintage and garden wares, plus we had live music, wood-fired pizza and kettle corn.  I took this photo when our first vendor to arrive, Teri, started setting up her stuff, and never had a chance to pick up my camera again!  More than a thousand people came on Saturday, exceeding our wildest expectations, and we had hundreds more on Sunday despite the rain, What a glorious, fun weekend.

Rog and I are serious Ted Talk fans, so we were honored to be asked to host the TedX Zumbro River speakers for dinner the night before the big event in Rochester last week!

 We also baked 1200 (!) savory and fruit turnovers for the audience at TedX event.  I really did not have a very strong sense of what we were getting ourselves into - it turns out that 1200 is a LOT of hand-made turnovers. To give you an idea, there are 134 turnovers in this photo.We  formed, half-baked and froze turnovers for 4 days, then thawed, baked and packaged them all the  night before.

At 5 a.m., Mae was actually still smiling as we finished  packaging the last batch of turnovers for delivery a couple hours later.  Ruth was also here baking turnovers until the wee hours of the morning. We are so fortunate, and so grateful, for Mae and Ruth's invaluable help.

Our season has barely begun... we are just planting the gardens now, we will be at the  Farmers Market beginning next weekend, the CSA starts  in 2 weeks, we are planting a Food Forest at the end of May, and in June we will open for Summer Sundays at Squash Blossom and host three weddings! We have a fire in our belly - it is going to be a crazy, fabulous summer!