I woke up this morning a little too early, with morning rain rolling in. The kids have been with their grandparents this week, but they are finally due home later today. It’s a mellow week – I work for a few days, then we’re off to the mountains for a bit.
The combination of rain every few days combined with sun means the gardens are growing and everything is lush and beautiful. The chickens are let out most days to perform one of the most critical jobs on the farmlet – eating ticks and other bugs. Deer ticks are a huge problem here in Massachusetts, and chickens are one of the best defenses for our little space. They view them as nothing so much as tasty snacks.
Our CSA started up a few weeks ago, and is supplying us with lots of greens. We are enjoying salads almost nonstop. My current favorite is a little feta, some lettuce and tomatoes, a sliced-up mango, avocado, and toasted pumpkin seeds. It’s a really great combination of savory, sweet and sour, but really any type of salad this time of year will do.
We’ve mostly jettisoned pre-made salad dressing for the simplest and most delicious kind – squeeze one lemon over the salad, add salt, pepper, and olive oil, and toss. I’m never going back to a bottle of dressing. Ever.
We’ve also been getting broccoli and kale in enough volume that it’s time to start blanching and freezing it for the cooler weather. It seems almost ridiculous in June to be planning for winter, but it always comes, and the more food I preserve now, the less we will need then.
The Honey Locust tree is in bloom, dropping waterfalls of beautiful white flowers all over the driveway. The blooms last only a few days, but create the sense that driving up to the house is a Hollywood dream sequence, with flowers wafting over you in slow motion.
The garden is growing beautifully, and other than the rabbits that tunnel under the fence a la Peter in Mr. McGregor’s garden to compete for the bounty, we should have an amazing harvest this year. It’s a late-summer garden, mostly tomatoes and peppers because of the effort to build and finish it, but it’s almost time to add fall greens, and finish the fence and gate. In the middle sits a small fig tree, planted just a few weeks ago, but starting to leaf.
All in all, we planted 5 fruit trees this year – a Cinnamon Spice apple to replace the one that is dying and needs to be removed (it tastes just like it sounds), a Seckel pear, 2 apricots, one an Iranian variety, and one a Japanese Ume type, and the fig tree in the middle of the garden. My dwarf cherry didn’t survive the winter, but I will wait until next year to try again on that. I bought my trees from Trees of Antiquity, started by a preservationist in order to save some of the older, less planted species. Since preservation is part of what is so important to me here, paying a teensy big extra to know that I’m continuing a line of trees that has grown for hundreds of years makes me smile every time I see the tiny leaves growing on what amounted to little more than sticks with roots when they arrived.
One thing that has been critical in building and preserving this land is amending the soil. Last year nearly 16 yards of organic compost went into the new garden, and this year I’m adding more everywhere I plant. The mostly ignored front of the house got some newly-divided daylilies from the Moms, but when I started digging I realized the soil was mostly dust. A few buckets of compost later, the daylilies are preparing to bloom.
I never grow tired of listening to the rain, especially when I can just sit and enjoy it. All too often, I sit on Saturday mornings and make a to-do list. But this morning I decided that despite all the important things that must be done, so too is it important for me to reflect on how far we’ve come since that cold December night when the children and I first arrived. Not even 3 years yet, and we’ve added so much to this place. And it keeps adding to us.
I hope your home brings you as much joy as ours does.
Little House on the Fairy Hill 