Baby blossoms and fruit

It's no accident that babies are so precious.  When I step on the trailing tendril of a watermelon arm, I gasp, "oh, I'm so sorry!"  Watermelon leaves are the prettiest: they have long spotted fingers that match their fruit skins, how very clever.  And tiny pale yellow flowers - no hint of the giant fruit they are crafting inside!

Honeybee is making this cucumber very, very happy right now.  You can tell the honeybees by their honey-colored stripes and their soft buzz.  Wasps and other scary insects have much more aggressive brrrrrr sounds.

 I think it is obvious that God made baby animals and baby plants precious on purpose.  I cringe when I read seed-pack instructions to "thin".  What!?  You want me to destroy the babies?!  I ignore the instructions and give each seed its space.  It is in my guts to protect the babies, I lift them up and set dry straw underneath.  They are little treasures.

The cantaloupe's are winning for largest fruit so far - see the striped ball?  It's pretending to be a watermelon.  It better not be a waterloupe - I am wary of cross-pollinating.

Baby Winter Squash - this plant is a gift from grandma - it says "bonbon" on its tag,  Hmmm, a cross between bonbons and giant squash?!  How can that be? Intriguing.

I planted more zuchinni this year than ever in my life (well, that's true for every plant in the garden - this is biggest-ever gardening).  My childhood memories of zuchinni are four.  First, I hated them, yuck, gross, sliced and stewed with tomatoes and onion, blech.  Second, my sweet Grandma Lucille called them zuchskeeny (sound it out and chuckle like we did) and I adored her.  Third, they were very poky plants that scratched my arms and grew shockingly fast.  Fourth, my charming little brother could take a wagon-full down the block and return from his door-to-door with a winsome grin and empty wagon.  Now I am a grown up and I know the truth: zuchinni are more delicious than butter.  Coincidentally, they are quite tasty IN butter.

These baby zuchinni made me jump for joy.

Last year I learned that there are boy and girl blossoms - they are different!  They are also perfect giant blossoms to dissect for a botany lesson, we did that.  Bitty purple green bean blooms would be no good for dissection.

Today I watered each happy mound: zuchinni, spaghetti squash, cantaloupe, winter squash, blonde cucumber, pickling cucumber, watermelon.  I should count how many, I bet there are 40 mounds.  See three of the lacy watermelon mounds there behind my dirty dog Jenny.  She romped (like a lunatic racing back and forth - she is child-like in her obsession with splashing mud) in the trickle of a creek while I talked to the honeybees.

Granola: the end of store cereal, Part 1

I had been conspiring to end store-cereal at our house.  It is the easy breakfast that costs $4 a box.  It's not that yummy or that healthy, not $4 worth.  So I figured I could get by making eggs (from our chickens), toast and pancakes and waffles (from the ground wheat and oats), or hot and fruity oatmeal (and other yummy grains my Mom delivers from Costco).  And then I discovered granola and our lives were forever changed!  We love granola.  Anna mixes it with her hands (and me, too) and eats it by the handful at every stage.  Ruby prefers it raw.  Peter loves it with fresh yogurt (coming soon in "the end of store cereal, part 2").  We like it hot and cold and stale and in ice cream.  It's awesome.

6 C old fashioned rolled oats
1 C brown sugar
2 C sliced almonds, unsweetened coconut flakes, chia seeds, sunflower seeds
1 t salt
1 t cinnamon (or nutmeg, allspice, whatever)
Combine these dry ingredients with spoon or hands.
2/3 C Oil (coconut or other)
2/3 C Honey (or agave or maple syrup)
Pour these wet ingredients over top, stir well with spoon.
Spread in a large casserole dish or 2 cookie sheets.  Bake at 300 for 10 minutes, stir, 10 minutes, stir, another 10 minutes - be careful not to brown too much or burn outside edges.  Have to watch carefully.

Notes:
I've already cut the sugar in this recipe.  These measurements give a nicely glazed granola with plenty sweetness to eat with plain yogurt.  Less sugar may make it more crumbly, but still YUM.  I prefer un-toasted nuts, so you can mix any nuts into the granola at the end or before the last bake.  This keeps more than a month in air-tight container (good luck hiding it that long from your eaters).  I always double the recipe and bake it in 2 large casseroles, on parchment paper makes clean-up easier.  I bake on 2 oven racks, bc crowding onto one rack makes the outsides burn.  I switch their location (top to bottom) at each stir.  My favorite add-in is fresh fruit and raw pecans.  Dried fruit is best added at end so it doesn't burn.

I'm not a food blogger, so no pictures :)

Goodness of hard work

My heart is full.  We spent today doing lovely together-things.  Like everyone putting away laundry!  And Isaac declaring, "I think the toilet is the most interesting thing in the bathroom to clean".  We uncovered our floors, need only to mop them (haha, as Ruby says, "that's for, like, every 3 months or something, right Mom?" Yes, but don't tell people that.) and then we dove into preparation for a great chicken day.  But that's for another day's telling.  The point is, my heart is full of the goodness of hard work beside the people I love.  

Putting the roof on our new woodshed.

I'm so proud of my husband.  He's the kind of man who works all day, drives down our driveway and almost before we realize he's arrived, he's changed into work boots (and a sleeves-cut-off t-shirt) and he's outside working.  So far this spring he's built an enormous woodshed (2 rooms, one for old wood, one for green), cut our giant sycamore tree completely into firewood, created a ginormous garden with 300 linear feet of deer fence (and way too many hand-dug post holes - evil clay), plowed and planted it (with help from his family crew!) - and this doesn't even count all the animal work he's done.  That's for another blog post.  I'm really proud of him.

Just after dropping the giant (dying) sycamore tree so we can start our new garden.

Playing in the tree - next morning I took the kids to the beach, he had the whole tree cut and stacked before we returned.

See where the tree stump is by the dog house?  The kids are relocating our fire pit and you can see the frame on the right of the pastured-poultry pen he built with the neighbor for the 30 broiler chickens we had in the barn.

Plowed and double-axle load of topsoil delivered.

I sawed these lattice boards and nailed them myself!!  Lettuces, dill, sweet peas and 2 cherry tomatoes inside.  These little boxes are for munching.  My goal with the lattice: peas that climb and protection from the chickens.

Sometimes the workers take a little break.

This is Anna in the tomato patch - we planted more than 50 tomato plants.  She's giving Jenny (the dog) an early morning garden tour.  We hoped dog-smell would make the deer afraid to taste our little green miracles until Daddy got the fence up.  Up there you see Jenny surveying a row of baby lima beans.