Monarchs!

Well, one. One monarch. But more are surely coming!  

How could they resist this buffet :-D. 

Last year I planted milkweed seeds in two of the raised beds and my cousin and I transplanted 10 plants from the back field into the lavender garden.  Nine of the 10 plants came back this year with extras on the side and one of the raised beds is so packed with milkweed plants that I haven't even had to weed it all summer.

I've also planted buckwheat and scattered several packets of seed mixes for butterflies, bees and birds.  There are still a few lavender plants left after three years of way too wet winters and a few volunteer sunflowers have popped up as well.  I'm just now seeing some mixed flowers and I can't wait until the whole garden is blooming!

This picture shows how many milkweeds are packed in the raised bed just outside the lavender, now butterflies, birds and bees garden.

This picture maybe better shows how tall they are.

I tried (once again) to plant some vegetables this spring, Victory Garden style, and (once again) in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we're going to be some of the first folks out.  But we'll have lots of pretty flowers ;-).

Here's a new puzzle that ought to keep you busy for awhile.  Enjoy!

Ten More

Random horse shot as they randomly decided to gallop back to the barn.  Hank loves when they do this ;-).

Early this spring I caught a tiny flash of brown dart out of one of the bigger lavender plants.  I quietly walked over to see and sure enough, a tiny baby bird in a teeny tiny nest.  I quietly told the little bird to always be very quiet, especially when there might be a stupid cat around.  

I'd stroll through every day, never doing anything that might attract a cat's attention and watched.  And worried.  And one day I saw a tiny fledgling in the nearby dye garden and the nest was empty.  A tiny success story!

Well, part of a tiny success story.  There remained an unhatched egg.  It's still there, tiny blue in a tiny horse hair lined nest.  So pretty.

There are actually three new puzzles - two with lavender and one with the horses.  I worked the horse puzzle last night and it was a fun one with lots going on.  Click the puzzle to get to my folder of puzzles.  There may be others you haven't worked yet.

Enjoy!

Yarn Along - Better Late Than Never

I tried really pretty hard to get this posted yesterday for the Wednesday Yarn Along.  I've actually taken pictures all the way through this small project, but have managed to hit 10 p.m. on each Wednesday and just given up getting a post up.  

That seems to have been a theme for the summer.  Here it is, the first day of fall (not that summer in almost any way feels to be over :-o) and I'm working on the 2017 (how on earth did it get to by 2017?!?) calendar.  I feared I wouldn't have enough pictures to choose from.

Not only did I not blog very frequently, but I didn't take pictures the way I usually do.  I really don't know why except maybe the extreme heat of this summer just knocked me down.  I worked from sunrise to past sunset and mostly only got farm and animal work done.  

Or I should say I got the farm and animal work mostly done.  You never get it all done.  I made sure the important stuff was done.  Animal care first.  People care second.  Well, move mowing, weed eating and gardening to second and people third (just being honest ;-).  Then housework.  Then Punkin's Patch, followed by knitting.  

Those last two got less than 1% of my energy all summer.  Or maybe 1% for each.  Who the heck prioritizes housework over knitting?  And how do I support my wool family if I don't prioritize my business?  Housework??  Seriously???  A clean house never lasts and all I have to show for it is a half a pair of socks.  Seriously...

But the animals were well cared for during a challenging summer of Way Too Hot for old fat sheep. And the old fat people survived.  And the farm looked good and made us and the animals happy (up until it stopped raining while maintaining the upper 80s).  And surprisingly I have a good stash of calendar quality pictures to choose from.  And a half a pair of socks.  

And that half a pair of socks has actually been pretty fun.  As many know, I am not a sock knitter. And I'm not a color person.  So I'm going to knit colorful socks?  I got swept up in the sock fun on Susan B. Anderson's site.  Miss B set me up to knit them two at a time on a long circular needle so there will be no second sock syndrome here and it has been fun to learn something new.

I've listened to a couple really great books and even read two real books that I've dearly loved.  I mentioned the first Yorkshire Shepherdess book a couple months (!) ago.  The second book is every bit as good and I sure hope she's working on a third and a fourth and...

I listened to Laurence Anthony's The Elephant Whisperer last week and thoroughly enjoyed that.  I think I got prompted for it because I was searching to see if I'd missed any No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books.  I normally wouldn't have been looking for elephant books.  Now I will.  Absolutely fascinating.

This week I am listening to another of his books, Babylon's Ark, about the effort to rescue the animals at the Baghdad Zoo after the invasion.  Some (well, mostly all) horrible stories so far, but the efforts made are inspiring for sure and the situations our soldiers were in, eye opening.  I'm not turned off though and can't wait to "turn the next page".

And even if it doesn't really feel like it, summer is over and now we all get to turn the next page into fall, re-evaluate our priorities and git to knittin'! :-)

Joining in with Ginny...

Everybody Wants To Be A Chicken

The food of choice to steal around the barn is chicken feed, whether it be trying to get into the scratch grains can or knocking over the feeder in the aisleway or gobbling up stale tortilla chips and bread. Dumpster diving into the dredges of garden?  Wow, that's a new low, Baaxter!

"What."

Uninspiring

This is a beautiful collection of sunflowers and zinnias that I am enjoying immensely and want to make sure I repeat the planting next year, but in an even bigger area...and I can't take a decent picture of them to save my life.  

Flat, colorless and uninspiring.

Late summer.  

Sigh...

This Place Sure Is A Lot Of Work

"First we started by weeding the lavender garden."

"This place is a mess!"

"Then we took out all the dead flowers from last year.  Kate helped too, but I think she just wanted to play with the branches."

"I'm having to eat dead flowers because my new mom won't give me enough babas even when I tell her I'm really hungry.  Says it would give me a tummy ache if I ate as much as I wanted to.  Fpppt!"

"Sometimes when I give her my super cute face she caves in ;-)"

"And then we take naps in the yard so I guess this place is okay."

Uff!

"Did you see that huge bee just buzz right by me?!?"

Interestingly, these two lambs are sisters.  The little one on the right was so tiny when she was born that her mother must have thought there was something wrong with her and didn't even clean her up.  Nancy intervened and now she's just fine and, I think, one of the prettiest lambs of the season :-).

I really should bring Lamb Camp to a close and get back to work here.  Well, I've been working here, but you know what I mean.  I have pictures and stories of our "lambs", pictures of stuff I'm getting ready for the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival, stuff in the greenhouse...and an endless supply of sleeping cat pictures.  

I'm not sure why I keep taking those other than the complete disbelief that they don't. do. anything.  

All day.

Sunday Stills - Yellow Flowers

I watched some yellow buds in the dye garden all week, hoping they'd open in time for today's challenge :-).

Yellow cat

Comby will follow me anywhere, even in the rain.

Last night's yellow field.  This must have something to do with the sun coming out after a big rain.  Or maybe it's just that it's been so long since we've seen the sun it seems extra golden ;-).

For more Sunday Stills...

Take A Picture - It Lasts Longer!

Okay, just to nit pick something (else) to death, I just realized that I completely missed taking a picture of the best perennial garden we have.  Sort of takes the fun out of a "Hey, you get a gold star for having pretty much the entire (too big) yard weeded and mulched!" post.  Sigh.

St. Francis (yes, he's in there) has been covered up before. 

I can't figure out how to take an interesting picture of the dye garden.

Back porch

I love this little corner - added in some thyme between the big steps.

It won't last long and it's not garden show ready, but it's not too shabby for a farm yard.  Well, unless it's Skoog Farm.  Weaslie and I are not sure how Lori does it all :-o. Anyway, moving on to the next project.  Ready Weaslie?

Weaslie?

The cats are asleep somewhere, too. 

Sigh.

Another Interesting Development

I don't remember a hotter summer ever.

And I don't remember a frost this early either.  Handy and Hickory from the back porch this morning.

Not surprisingly I remembered to cover my flowers last night...but never gave a thought to the tomatoes. Sigh. Well, I might have eventually thought about them...but at that point couldn't bring myself to crawl out of my warm bed to do the right thing.  Not all were lost, but I should still probably have my gardening license revoked.

New Blooms

Before undertaking any major gardening project, you must first make sure you have a proper cat.



You know the kind. One who'll take a look at what you have planned...



...and give you some honest feedback.

Betsy, we're not done. Betsy? BET-sy. BETSY!

Sigh.

So I planted 42 (so far) lavender plants...by myself.

I've given up vegetable gardening. It's not that I really have anything against vegetables, but slicing up a tomato and putting some salt on it (fits the no more than three ingredient qualification ;-) is about as far as I go cooking.

Putting out and maintaining a vegetable garden is a lot of work. By the middle of the summer (or the first day of spring) I feel like shooting myself. And we don't eat what we're killing ourselves trying to grow. If you can't answer the question "Why do we have a garden?"...why DO you have a garden.



I'm good at flowers. I have flowers in planters, baskets, at the house, on the porch, in front of the wool house, a dye garden behind the wool house, around the green house, over top of the mail box and I even enjoy seeing geranium blooms in the winter in the house. I love flowers. We have a beautiful garden spot. It is now filled with flowers :-).



It took a herculean effort on Saint Tim's part to get the weed patch garden tilled up. Not only were the weeds tall, thick, numerous and well established, the ground was like concrete. After he got it tilled up, I raked the loose dirt into raised rows and planted 11 different varieties of lavender.



Between the rows and around the edges I laid out some weed stopping (hopefully) old moving/shipping boxes, soaked them down with water and Tim covered them with mulch. A lot of mulch.



He hauled mulch and hauled mulch and hauled mulch.



And it looks awesome!




Lavender is a no brainer "crop" for us here. It looks good, the bees will love it, I can dry it for wool sachets...

And besides, the farmer's market is full of poor suckers vegetable producers all summer long ;-).