around the farm

i’m enjoying all of the farm and garden posts i’ve been following along with on various blogs, and one of the most beautiful is sure to be farmama. she started doing “around the farm” posts on thursdays, and i realized i could easily join in with this, with the excessive photos i take of my garden. and since my garden really wants to be a farm, and this mama really wants to be a farmer when she grows up, i’m just going with the title as is. 🙂

meet the farmer (photo by quinn)

and her garden elf

part of the garden, wide angle so you can see another important member of the cast of characters- giant sitka spruce tree. gardening in the shade is fun!

one of my favorite flowers is in bloom- columbine, grown from seed, which means i’ve waited two whole years to see these blossoms! i’m very excited.

with lovely green spruce boughs in the background…

a pleasant surprise- ultra early tomato! i bought this plant… but the 20 i raised from seed are starting to flower, too!

many of them are growing in buckets. you never know when you might need to pick up your tomatoes and head for the hills. (i’m not really allowed to dig up the whole backyard… landlords are picky sometimes. but a girl’s gotta have her tomatoes.) here you can also see some comfrey plants, a volunteer some-sort-of-fruit-maybe-plum tree, a nice big lavender plant next to an heirloom brandywine tomato (also one i purchased).

the potatoes seem to be thriving in the shade of the spruce… with lots of straw that i keep piling onto them. behind them you can see critical snake habitat (piled up cardboard). i have been trying to attract snakes (they are a natural predator of my nemesis, slugs) by piling up rocks, but the cardboard is where i finally had my first snake sighting! hurray yelled the (not shown, nearly leafless) bean plants!

our blackberry patch is producing salmonberries, i get the feeling there is some trace mineral in them that pacific northwest kids need to eat in late spring. i pile as many of them as i can into this boy.

more potatoes, going into our community garden bed to be donated to food share in the fall. quinn has been pretty impressive lately, with all he knows how to do around the “farm”.

our cultivated strawberries are still in flower, with some green berries forming, but our wild lawn strawberry patch is bursting with flavor right now!

and finally, this very morning, i helped my friend milk her goat for the first time. some of you know i grew up on a dairy farm, and i have to say, the muscle memory is quite intact. i had no idea, really, i trusted i’d still know what to do, but i also kind of figured it would be easy for my friend. it turns out, it’s pretty hard to put it into words, just exactly how to use your hands to do this job. just how you manage not to yank or pull, not to rub or be abrasive, but to get your fingers to roll down (only two fingers in this little goat’s case) and get the milk out. it’s apparently not as easy if you didn’t grow up doing it. 🙂 i had fun. we also got to try to teach the babies how to bottle feed, with some success for their first practice run. it’s nice to feel useful!