Summer!

Livin' the good life. Ah!

A sandy beach in Maine.

Beauty in motion! Two little bumblebees, a few seconds later we had three!

Three sisters, bug's eye view.

A very, very big spider... my son thinks it could be a Yellow Orb spider.

Glad I am not a bug....

Me and the girls...

taken by our staff photographer.

Our staff photographer/proof reader/editor/resident spell checker (thank goodness).

Progression...

Monday, May 24th, I started mulching with old, bad hay from winter. Tied up the peas with baling twine. Finished the cucumber bed. The carrots, leeks and celery in the patch are from my winter cold frame. Eliot Coleman is right, the carrots are oh, so sweet.

Sunday, May 30th, my neighbor's old tractor.

They tilled up the yard for my "new" garden. Emily is 76 years old and still digging B I G rocks out of the soil with me. Notice all of the rocks I dug up in my border bed? It was part of an old foundation wall and I found lots of treasures in the earth.

Tuesday, June 1st, new garden and new chicken yard is getting closer to being done. The rest of the asparagus is in, lots of seeds. This is the week to plant the seedlings up here in New England.

The old bath tub is a gift from Emily, my neighbor, it is going to be my water feature....

New raised beds. The sawyer cut the boards from local hemlock, they are very sturdy and hold up in the cold winter freeze and thaw.

Progression towards filling our freezer with our own food,

from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m, every day.

I have let everything else go, especially housework! I promised myself I would heed Scott Nearing's advice and take a day off every week. It is raining today, guess I will take that day off today and let the garden grow.

We smelled the fires from Quebec all yesterday morning. It was smokey and hazy... our poor, dear planet earth is fighting to make it with us on her back. We are like viruses spreading out and touching every stream and valley.... I was thinking the other day while digging a deep hole in rocks that there is an easier way to do this without a shovel and sweat but what is the cost? We do use petroleum but we try to use it sparingly, and for big jobs. It is a challenge being post 50 and late 40's doing this hard work alone, no big family of boys or large community willing to barter labor... Re-building a farm infrastructure from scratch is very hard, exhausting and expensive. We try to do our very best every day, in every way, in every decision we make, knowing that we are touching the earth with our "progression".

Life is good.

Raindrops

My lawnmower and manure spreader...

Mullein and melted snow...

Spiral herb garden made for me with love by my love...

Garlic

Over wintered leeks and the very last of the mache, grown and eaten all winter long in an unheated cold frame covered in two extra layers of plastic.

I snapped this picture of two sleeping girls through our wavy, 150 year old window...  looks dreamy.  

Ah, sleeping late is such a guilty pleasure...

Peace.

"All Struggle is Not Loss."

"There is no one who does not have to choose sometime, someway, between giving up and growing stronger as they go along.  And yet if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what the struggle would have given us in the end.  If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by the doing of it.  It is a risk of mammoth proportions.  We dare the development of the self.... Life forges us in struggle... all struggle is not destructive... it is not struggle that defeats us, it is our failure to struggle that depletes the human spirit.... Struggle is part of life.  In fact, struggle is an unavoidable part of life.  It comes with birth and it takes its toll at every stage of development.  In each of them we strive for something new at the price of something gained.  We tussle between the dark and the daylight moments of the soul.  If we stop struggling, we may die.  But if we struggle and lose, we stand to die as well.  So how are we to think of struggle?  Is it loss or is it gain?....    Life itself is the answer..... No other dimension of life can possibly offer it because no other process in life requires so much so deeply of us. Struggle bores down into the deepest part of the human soul.... bringing new life... The problem is that struggle requires the most of us just when we expect it least."

Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope by Joan D. Chittister

A tiny forest, algae and fungus....

A beautiful little forest clinging to a small, dead branch.  It is like a galaxy on to itself; independent, fragile, vulnerable, living out its life on a precarious limb.  

Frog eggs or Newt?

Notophthalmus viridescens - Eastern Newt

We watched their dance, male and female locked in a struggled embrace.

Two were silent.  Quiet, unmoving, still locked in their embrace.  Was the passion too strong?  Did their struggle overwhelm them?  It was sad.  The water did not move while the sun blazed across the surface of the pond.  I stared in silence.  Why this moment?  Another newt glimmered in the corner of my eye and I turned my head to follow him.  

The two dead lovers still haunt me, floating there at the bottom, waiting to complete the circle.....

Erythronium americanum - American Trout Lily or Yellow Adder's Tongue

They stand shoulder to shoulder. 

 Lined up, watching each other.  Small, curious faces reaching up from the forest floor.  It was unnaturally warm here today.  It felt like an intrusion, confusion.  There are no leaves on the trees to shelter us from the burning rays.  I think it was the abnormal humidity, the deep, burning heat that invaded our April...

Kerry's favorite spring wild flower

Two happy faces jump and splash.  It began as a walk on the edge, then off came the shirts, knee deep became head first and then, mud bath.

My long haired boy!
A covered bridge.  New, replacing the old.  The town rebuilt her, nail by nail, the story goes.  A youthful prank burned the old one.  Oxen and men slid this one in place, the old way, in honor of the fallen one.  Every nail, every board, all the effort, the entire town came.  

The ritual still survives; horns blow from the heart of the covered bridge.

Melissa officinalis - Lemon Balm

I have extended my nature journal to include a study of the herbs in my garden.  One by one I am going to draw and describe them in my journal.  I think that by doing the study I will remember the details.

Here is a page from my nature journal.  We laid on the grass in front of the stone wall for hours and talked about lichens until it was too dark to see.  

The little red insects?  Ticks, soft bodied ticks.  I thought they were precious little spiders until I put on my glasses...ticks.  They looked like tiny red skinned potatoes.  I still haven't identified them yet.  Do you know what they are called?