Laura is a little farm girl through and through. She’s typically the first child awake each morning and she just loves going out with her daddy to do chores. He captured this photo when she was out with him one afternoon. He was working in the attached barn and she was just sitting in this box doodling.
This gal loves books. I love sleeping babies and books.
Beautiful garden harvest. It never gets old.
We started painting our upper kitchen cabinets in early July. We wanted a lighter look for the kitchen. We’re still not sure exactly what we’ll be doing with our lowers but we’re getting started.
We also painted the ‘attached barn’ a barn red color. It’s an awkward attached garage without doors on the house that we haven’t been sure of what it’s purpose is. We’ve called it the basement, garage, lean to and barn in the two years we’ve been here. We’re deciding to go with barn so we decided to set it apart with a visual distinction.
We both have a dream of a white farm house so we probably will be painting the house sometime in the future (maybe far distant when money is a bit more abundant!)
Our sheep started lambing on July 7. Mary was the first one to lamb – she had twins! Unfortunately the adorable little black lamb died a few days later and Mary passed about a week or so later. She was a sweet but older ewe. Her little white male lamb is doing just fine – we’ve named him Captain.
We were able to witness Weston’s ewe, Ginger, give birth to twin baby lambs and the week and a half when the ewes lambed was such fun. Each new arrival was so exciting for us all!
Our kitchen as it looked mid-July after getting all of the uppers painted. We talked about permanently taking off the doors but decided to put them back on. We really like the lighter and brighter look the white gives the kitchen.
Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes! July is one of the best garden months.
Our elderberries ripened in mid-July! We made elderberry jelly, a bit of elderberry syrup and froze most of our berries to make fresh medicinal elderberry syrup throughout the fall and winter.
My little green bean snappers. Several hot afternoons, we’d put on a movie or a show and have a snapping party.
Nursing Laura for one of the last times on July 18th. So thankful for the 2 years and 2 months of nursing this little gal.
First batch of pickled okra. Yum.
I sat a goal to can 150 jars in 2019. I reached that goal by mid-July!!
Since I reached my goal so early and there were lots of green beans, tomatoes and apples to go, I decided to see if I could get 100 more jars for a total of 250!
New pantry shelves. They’re amazing and it’s been such fun to fill them up with fresh canned jars!
We had horrible luck growing corn this year – we planted in several different spots with no success. These two volunteer stalks on the edge of the lower garden did great – we harvested a grand total of 3 ears!
This gal has been such a help with canning green beans.
Tomatoes ready to can.
7 quarts of tomatoes!
De-stemming elderberries to make elderberry jelly.
How I enjoy watching my children play and how play often mimics life. Laura was taking such good care of all of her babies. One was napping and she was feeding the other two.
Another example of play mimic-ing real life. Cecilia organized her play kitchen dishes. She called the arrangement her “set up”. Love.
We found these Calpurnia Tate Girl Vet books at our library and enjoyed them! Calpurnia and her brother Travis are the main characters, they live on a farm and love nature and animals. Nature study is incorporated into these books and we all enjoyed them. (I will add this disclaimer – if you avoid books that mention evolution, these may not be for you. We don’t completely avoid topics that don’t line up with our beliefs – we have discussions about what we do believe and why.)
–Rachel
