Abundance

This week I'm joining, for the firs time, the Make Your Home Sing link up party over at Mom's the Word. So very excited!

The season for blackberry goodness is upon us again. We have a ridiculous amount of blackberry bushes on one side of our property that have yielded a ridiculous amount of some of the most delicious blackberries I've ever had. In the past two summers that we've lived in our little house (with it's small surrounding jungle) these berries have never tasted so good. Big, juicy, sweet (with that lovely hint of tart) berries that quickly fill our bowls and bellies.

Every other afternoon, the kids and I have been going out and picking berries, setting some aside to make something special. E. is begging for blackberry pie, but I'd love to make this from Cinnamon Girl.

With the blackberries comes the extreme green of summer at our house. Everything is so vibrant and growing so well, but...I don't know what half of it is. And most of the other half are weeds, or there's just a lot of it (it being hosta, bee balm, day lilies, iris, some sort of weird monster plant that grows to enormous heights, and six-foot-tall thistle that I have a love/hate relationship with).

There's one particular part that is abundantly overgrown (pictured just above) for which I have high hopes. For the last two years I've been desperate for a vegetable garden. But our yard is woefully shady in most places, except for this one particular crazy patch of ground that's afloat amidst our lawn. So, while logic might dictate (or at least it does to me, a person with limited gardening experience) that we simply tear up what's there and plant a garden (I realise it's slightly more complicated than all that, but that's the gist of it).

But it can't be that simple, of course. Two reasons: that particular patch is over part of our septic system and those crazy monster plants grow non-stop, no matter what, and, as our neighbour informed us, the only way to really guarantee their demise is to rip them all up (thankfully the pull out easily), put down a layer of newspaper followed by a black tarp and leave that there for upwards of a year.

So, in order to unite my desire to have a veggie garden and to get rid of those crazy plants (all while not using potentially icky, septic-contaminated soil), we've decided to try raised beds over the layers of black tarp and newspaper. Win, win, right?

We're in the midst of phase one right now, which mainly involves me ripping up the crazy amount of weeds, and trying to figure out if I'm capable of ripping out a six foot thistle tree bush. After that we'll put down the newspaper and tarp and settle in for the cooler temperatures. Over the fall and winter I plan on beefing up my gardening knowledge and spending those chilly months being an armchair gardener, hoping to put my new knowledge into use come spring.

We'll see how that goes. Hopefully, come this time next year, we'll have quite the abundance of home grown veggies to fill little and big bellies alike as we do home grown weeds and wild blackberries.

Or I'll have a lone zucchini (possibly from our neighbours garden). Either way, I'll call it good.

Summer Themes: Farm Week

Yee-haw! It's farm week at our house, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite week this summer, if only because I haven't had to do a thing except bring E. to camp at an adorable farm in Scarborough, Maine and then pick her up a few hours later, happily dirt covered and filled with stories and songs all to do with farms.

Besides attending camp, we've also been reading stories about farms, like:

• On the Farm by David Elliot (a fun rhyming tale about all the animals and happenings on a farm)
• Deep Sea Farm by Dahlov Ipcar (a story about a merman who farms on the bottom of the ocean - totally appropriate, I think, since Scarborough is also a coastal town)
• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin(a fun farm setting, and I sort of feel like it introduces the concepts of unions...a little Animal Farmish)
• Brown Cow Farm by Dahlov Ipcar (a farm themed counting book)
• Down on the Farm by Merrily Kutner (a rhyming story that follows a little goat all over his farm) 

To finish out our week, we'll likely visit a local farm (I love Scarborough, but it's farm from local for us) and do some strawberry picking and buy some local produce to do a little cooking project with.

I hope to post some pictures of the farm where E. is going to camp at the end of the week - it's really worth a look (and I can't say enough how much fun it's been to send E. there; I know she's really loving going and this week is going by a mite bit too fast for her liking; if we were closer I would have considered two weeks rather than just one!).

A Little Note (that might turn out to be longer than "little"): You might be wondering why I chose farms as one of my themes for our summer fun. I was a really lucky little girl - my grandparents had a farm. They raised cows for beef (organic, grass fed, way before it was cool) and kept a large veggie garden along with high bush blueberries. Both of my grandparents had grown up on farms. Eating fresh and local wasn't a hip lifestyle choice for them; it was the only choice if their families wanted to survive huge catastrophes, like the Great Depression

For me, their home was a little piece of Eden, where I roamed around, helping my grandpa feed the cows and picked my snacks and lunch from the garden. I even saw baby calves born and got to ride on a great big green John Deere. These experiences shaped me in a very appreciable way. I knew what hard work looked like. I understood where food comes from. I was a very small part of a very old tradition, something that was deep within my family. And, above all, I was doing something very, very fun!

I wanted these experiences for E. While we live a pretty rural area and live right down the road from a farm (we frequently have to drive around escaped cows on our way to town), E. hasn't had the chance to really spend time at a farm and see how it works. I felt that camp and doing some activities at home would help give E. just a little piece of what I was so lucky to grow up with.