swoon, swoon, swoon

my favorite, good ol' queen anne's lace is everywhere. makes me swoon.
so much so that i had it carved into my skin. this is one of the only pics i have from my road trip to vermont.

goose neck loose strife- also a dear love of mine.

this is a volunteer melon in the (now) old compost pit. i have no clue where it came from. i'm going to have to make it a little sling and tie it to the fence so it can have some support.

the other bear.

new compost area freshly layered up with sawdust, leaf mulch, cow manure, and chicken shit straw. repeat, repeat, repeat. yum.

i am loving the new compost area. i kept planting more and more flowers around the old compost area until it was fairly inaccessible.
it is about to become part of the kitchen garden, which as i have stated, is about my favorite spot to hang out.

the old compost area is through that red gate, soon to be awesome new entrance to the k. garden.

the old chicken area is becoming a rocking perennial bed, just like that. most of these plants were lovingly divided for me by my dear friend in vermont and i packed them into the cab of my truck around me and tooted them home. nothing is better than sharing and receiving plants from friend's garden. i love that.
my ladies this morning. thanks for the poop and the eggs- keep up the good work.


drying herbs.

making plant medicine (and granola).

onion harvest from yesterday.

mullein.

i just feel really lazy

i am back in kakalaki and i don't feel like doing much. it is hot. but the house is cool, so i am staying indoors and playing with my new vacuum (thanks ma and pa!) and goofing off with my husband. i am officially ushering in the dog days of summer and what are you supposed to do in the dog days of summer but sit on the porch and bullshit with your pals.

after going on a serious rant at a fourth of july bar-be-que about taking a weedwacker to my chickens to try and scare an egg out them (they were technically old enough to lay two weeks ago and nada) i got my first egg! maybe they were waiting for me to come home.

so much yummy food.

some of the men picking blueberries.

matty insisted i take a picture of him with his giant mountain dew, apparently it would have looked too wholesome otherwise.

we have gallons and gallons of blueberries in the freezer and many more too pick and many friends that have come to pick. these bushes are amazing.


this...

became this. delicious pickled beets. i hope they turned out well.

i'm not sure if you can eat them right away or have to wait a certain amount of time for them to be pickled? anyone?

and i'm off.

i am off tomorrow towards the wilds of vermont. best friend duty calls. luckily my sister and her man are a good half-way point in ol' Pittsburgh pa. and i get to see my in-laws and isobabe will be visiting her parents a town away and my best friend from junior high also lives in the area so i am about to go a'visiting. haven't take a solo road trip in a long time. i'm am excited and nervous. this is one of the few times i wish i had a cell phone.
it also means i spent the past few days mulching, weeding, trellising, harvesting, planting, etc... everything in my yard. this is the first time all spring/summer that everything that is in a pot and needing to go in the ground is planted. alright, i'm outta here.





i really need to invest in a sald spinner. this is currently how i dry my freshly washed lettuce and greens.

i love my kitchen garden.

the field is weeded and mulched. don't mind the weeds in between the rows, i don't.



the peppers are about to procreate like crazy.

oh, the solstice

what have we been up to?
eating really good food gathered from the yard.

lounging with the creatures.
making our first tincture with the guidance of our friend tansy- who is an herbalist and all around awesome indiviual. you can check out her blog on my link list.
it's a motherwort tincture as you can clearly see from this picture.
chopstick dude was there.
asher went all the way to tennessee to buy me a bottle of $3.59 vodka, seeing as we live in a dry county.
he's a good one, that one he is. we all walked down to his garage spot yesterday and dreamed little dreams about what to do with that bottom land. it's such a wonderful spot- totally different from the cove with a huge marsh and i am so glad that asher will be down there as steward because we simply could not have gotten to it with all that we are doing up here. so instead of divide and conquer, it's divide and care for.


making labels.

matty chopping it up.

so once we had made the tincture we realized we needed a place to keep it. somewhere dark and tucked out of the way where it could do it's thing in peace. enter the new hangout. we have a secret room (should i even be saying this?) in the mud room that we did not realize is actually quite spacious and awesome. enter the _____ room. we don't have a cool name for it yet. up here is where there can be a little work bench (with cutting board, knife, pens, paper, tape and whooseewhats) just tall enough to sit at with a cushion and shelves on the wall for all the various tinctures and beams for the herbs to dry on and a place for all the wine i have shoved in the back of the closet to perculate and all of the herb books. i will show the progress over time but it is going to be sweet.
action shot of the new bath mat.

our lovely home.






joe keeps it real for the rest of us.

oh and just for a tease we're going to make a pool deck. we need a place to cool off and take a dunk. more on that this week.

what a difference a day makes.

the coop is basically completed. i am going to pick up the last few things we need today. you can see there is a nice big covered area so they can hang out in the rain and the hot sun and be comfortable. i scored all the tin from the dump.

it has a little window with a sill that i will put plexi glass in this fall.


we need to build the door. i think it should be red.

the run is all ready to be fenced in, i'll do that when i get home this afternoon. hopefully, this will be a chicken fortress, no dogs allowed.

where the chickens are now is slotted for a perennial bed on the left, a cherry tree in the center and strawberry beds in a u-shape around that.

so can you see that there are twenty-five high bush blueberries in this swath of grass? neither can i. i've been avoiding weed wacking because of poison ivy and have been determined to mulch them since we moved here. that item has continually moved from to-do list to the next to-do list for about four years. time to cross that bitch off the list! i've got about a week until they are ripe and i want to pick peacefully tip toeing through the mulch, not wading through tall grass and rubbng up against poison ivy. today i am getting the first load of mulch.

almost ripe.

i got hubby a banana plant at that plant sale. it's supposed to get ten feet tall.
so far, so good. time to start a new week.

our kitchen is starting to look like a mad scientist lives here- between me and my herbs and dodge and his bacteria.we've been making lots and lots of sun tea with herbs from the yard. i've been drinking about a gallon a day.
yum.
asher says, "take a picture of me doing this". well, alright.
i was tipped of about a giant clearance sale at a wholesale greenhouse. i got lady's mantle, columbine, lupine, liatris, hydrangea, lots of wonderful things for one and two dollars for gallon pots. it was a steal.
happy hive kicking ass.
not so happy hive just got re-queened on friday. hope they start kicking ass soon.
wife to husband, "so, how many different combinations of you slack asses is it going to take until i get a chicken coop?"
husband to wife, "i don't know... several?"
it looks like it will be done today, i think. it's close.
thanks to all for your lovely comments. it makes me want to post when i get comments!

making the honey wine was so unbelievably simple. it was just one part honey to three parts water- stir it all up and leave it on on your counter for several days (with an old t-shirt or something over it to keep out the bugs) so wild yeast can get in it. when i made the last batch our house was so new that there wasn't much yeast in the air so i added a splash of kombucha. i waited until it was kind of frothy/smelled fermented, stirring often. then i put it in a gallon glass jar with an air lock and put it in a dark place. then about five months later it was done. but looking back at the recipe i used it said you can start tasting it at one month and it will develop many different flavors over time. mine tasted kind of like a honey-shine- amazing. the longer you let it sit the drier it will taste, more like a mead. i'm hooked, i want to make all kinds of wine now. thanks for the tip about the blueberries, dana. i am going to try that.

another lovely day in the mountains

crasher's friends arrived late last night and stayed for the day. they are all off to a concert tonight and will back again tomorrow. it is nice to have people from outside our sphere come to visit because they make us remember how special and spectacular this place is. instead of just looking at all that need/wants to get done. they were very appreciative of the place.
after the rain storms late this afternoon. you couldn't ask for better weather.

these guys are friends.

this guy is my friend (he will probably hate this picture).

and i am his. (i don' t like this picture either, but hey, it's who we are).

i tried my honey wine tonight. i made it back in january and stuck it in the back of a closet. and it is deee-licious. it came out down right bad-ass. i just started a new vat of it on the counter. i am wanting to make elderberry wine when the berries come in, which is soon, so i am trying to gather all the stuff i need. anyone have any tips or suggestions?
it looks like i am drinking a huge glass of it but that is actually kombucha. for real.