A Father Indeed

Happy Father's Day!

Let Us Be Men

This is for all the men in my life who so lovingly sacrifice for their family and especially for Dan who taught me how me about true love and sacrifice. This is for my Dad who somehow managed with his busy work schedule to be at almost all my games and events. Now that I am an adult I realize how difficult it can be to give of one's time. You amaze me Dad.

berry pickers

Yes, those are beautiful, luscious strawberries and they smell and taste as good as they look. We were surprised at the amount that we pulled out of the patch. There are too much to eat right off so we are freezing them for one of our favorite snacks, smoothies.

Harvesting food out of our own garden (well almost our own) was quite fullfilling and cleaning up these strawberries, even with all their imperfections, was more enjoyable than the store bought kind. Least you imagine a too picturesque of an image of a happy family blissfully picking plump, juicy berries let me tell you about all the slug foam that was everywhere. It was really gross having it all over my hands and arms, but fortunately the little slimers left most of the strawberries alone.

Yesterday was a memorable day for it was the first day that we planted a family garden on our own property. Well, it technically is not our property yet, but the people that we are buying our house from asked us if we wanted to get a head start on the garden since we won't close on the house until June 30th. Don and Janet, the current owners, are incredible people. Janet was out in the garden most of the day with us eager to help out whenever she saw we needed help. Indeed, it was good that she was there to give us tips on how they had layed out their garden with the drip irrigation and how to work the different watering zones with the computerized timer. Whew. Such a system will save hours in watering time as well as water for it only waters where a small drip hole is in the watering line. Hopefully this leads to less weeds.This is a view of the garden behind the house. On the left side you can see a bit of the orchard that is three years old. We planted five rows of corn, tomatoes, beets, carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, various peppers, peas, melons, various squashes and of course pumpkins. We still have three and a half empty rows in which to plant more. The kids had a fun time driving the tractor to till up the soil and planting the seeds and plants, though hauling out rocks wasn't their favorite thing of the day.

Between Zayne and the barn is the perennial garden area, in which we have blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, currents, grapes, rhubarb and asparagus.