Sky and Water

Green Lake, Waterloo Recreational Area, Michigan.

How to collect eggs

Two year old Finn shows us how to collect eggs:

Starting with crawling into the nesting box...

...and ending with VERY GENTLY putting the eggs in the carton.

(Finn is one of Terry's grandsons.)

Tree House Retreat

I put the last bit of paint on the tree house today. I am completely loving this little retreat space. After the bed was set up I laid there for an hour watching the sun filter through the leaves. It was so incredibly peaceful. I can so see myself coming home from a long stressful day at work, and just going out there and relaxing. I still need a book shelf and to get some pictures on the walls, but I think the colors turned out well. One thing I will be looking for when I visit thrift shops is a quilt or something for the bed. The bed needs a coverlet that has earth tones to complement the greens. Plus, earth tones will hold up better to the dirty feet of two little boys who will hopefully enjoy using this as a play house when they visit.

I painted the insides of the window frames and the inside door a light yellow. It is amazing the difference a little paint makes. We still have the ugly pink carpet on the floor, but now that the house is painted and furnished, it doesn't bother me quite so much. Terry (and two of his carpenter/contractor friends), tell me it is possible to somehow force the building back into square so a wood or laminate floor could work. (When they described to me the what they wanted to do to get it back into square, I'm picturing cracked walls and roof--but I'm not a contractor or carpenter so what do I know?). But the point is sometime is the future, I may be able to have the floor I really want and to not have to settle for indoor/outdoor carpet.

My first guest will be staying in the tree house tomorrow. One of my brothers is coming to spend three days with us!

Rainy day

Morning Glories

I don't have many flowers blooming right now in my new gardens, which makes these reseeded morning glories which are twining around the front garden fence even more special to me.

The "Welcoming Garden"

If you were to come visit me, you would drive up a long driveway, come through a windrow of trees and catch the first glimpse of the house and this garden. You can see a bit of the house through the trees.

The garden a little closer up...

I find myself missing the flower gardens I left behind much more then I thought I would. It is going to take some time before I have anywhere near the flowers here that I had there. There are several neglected small flower beds throughout the yards. Today I finally got started on weeding. I didn't get as much done as I hoped, but by the time it was dark, this little garden was completely weeded and the few day lily and iris plants in it look like they can now breathe. Hopefully tomorrow I will get a few flowers in.

I certainly have my work cut out for me for the next couple of months!

Terry discovered this little garden cart out in the weeds by the former owner's burn pile, and pulled it out for me. I filled it up several several times today with mountains of weeds.

Monster bug

Neat video here showing the the power of these insects.

Here they come a-running

The thought of food brings the chickens running down the hill to the chicken coop....


Mama and baby (who isn't much of a baby anymore).
Mama lost her tail feathers. I don't know if someone tried to grab her and got a mouth full of feathers, or if they fell out on there own. She doesn't look as elegant without them. I'm sure they will grow back though.

He looks so grown up. All feathers, no more fluff.


He is a stocky little fella (gal?).

Chubbiness really shows from the behind! I'm leaning more toward thinking this little chicken is a hen.

Interior Decorating 101

No, it is not the house, it's the tree house that I am getting ready to fix up. You might remember this from a photo I posted prior to closing our new property:


It will be the guest room/play house/retreat. Honestly, I'm sure once I start working nights (I think working the night shift is probably not too far away in my future), it will the place that I sleep during the day--just to be away from the noises of the house! This is my very first time that I am daring to take some paint and try working with it. I figure I will experiment with the tree house, then get to work on the real house.

Here are some inside pictures:

Those are windows from an RV, when we redo the house windows we will have to put real windows in!

Vaulted ceiling. (Sort of vaulted, anyway!) Yes, those walls are pink.

Ugly pink carpet has to go. My plan was to put in laminate wood flooring, but the building is not square (by a long shot, I am told), and Terry says that because of that, laminate flooring would not work. I'm am going to get a second opinion, but right now am thinking that I will have to settle for a decent looking indoor/outdoor carpet. This tree house was built for a little boy, believe it or not. All I can figure is that either the painter/carpet installer was color blind, or else was hoping for a girl.

Here are my starting colors.

The light green will be for the interior trim--around windows and door and on the baseboard. The dark green is exterior paint for the outside of the door. I am going to start with painting the walls white, since we have a lot of white paint, but would like to paint at least one wall another color. I very much open to ideas! I have never painted any thing any color but white. I want this to have a light airy natural woodsy feeling. A sunny yellow comes to mind or a spring green. Or would that be too much green?

The tree house once it is is furnished and decorated will have a single bed, a book shelf with nature books and some classic children and adult books, some games, a few toys. I'm going to frame some of my more woodsy photos for the walls. I want it to be child friendly, but classy enough for the adult who still has enough child in him or her to want to stay in guest tree house. It has electric and is insulated, so it won't be completely roughing it.

If you were to come visit me and were to stay in this house, what would you like to see in it (in keeping with my theme, of course!)? I'm sure we can get it hooked up with internet. Terry is good at that sort of thing.

The woods behind the tree house.

Nemo trying out the slide escape. He decided it was too scary to slide down and jumped down instead.
I guess he realized the front stairs really aren't in the greatest shape, and avoided them all together. That is something we will have to do something about sooner then later.

Rainbow

Just another perk of living in the country...rainbows!

This is something I've wondered about. In the eight years I lived in town, I never once saw a rainbow where I lived. Do you need the wide open space of the country to be able to see rainbows, or did I live in a bad place for rainbows? Is there such a thing as a bad place for rainbows? I would see rainbows other places and wonder why it was that there were never any rainbows where I lived. Maybe I just needed to get out into the country...

Red barn

The neighbor's red barn.

Woven by a Tiny Weaver

I must admit, I've become a bit fascinated by spiderwebs since moving out to the country. I wake up in the morning to meadows and woods full of many different kinds of spiderwebs, all glistening with dewdrops. It amazes me that the most perfect of all the webs are the ones that are woven by tiny spiders that are hardly bigger then pinheads. If you look very close, you can see the master weaver in the center of this web.

First blackberries!

I picked over a gallon of blackberries this evening and hardly made a dent in the patch. Blackberries with cheesecake and whipped cream for dessert!

Dragonfly

Dragonfly hanging out on a Queen Anne's Lace flower. (For some totally stunning dragon fly pictures check out this blog.)

Sunset

More feathers then fluff...

My little bird has hit the ugly teenager stage. Down is almost gone, adult feathers are on their way in....

Crystal Dawn

Spider web in a Queen Anne's Lace flower stem against the sunrise.

full moon at dawn

View at dawn from our front yard.

Down on the farm...

Terry keeps telling everyone we bought a farm. And telling people to look at my blog for photos of it. So I figured I'd better get some evidence posted that maybe we do have a farm.

If you have a tractor that makes it a farm, right? We bought the cutest little farm tractor. I had no idea that real farm tractors came in the mini size. Here is a friend of ours experimenting with disking up the soil in my future garden plot. Since our soil is so sandy, we figured we might be able to skip plowing (especially since we don't own a plow and would have to buy one if we wanted to plow up the soil.) Digging in this soil is literally like digging in a sandbox. I'm so used to heavy clay soil, where you dig down 6 inches and hit hardpan. In the garden in New York State and the garden I left behind here in MI when we moved, I added sand to the soil to make it lighter. Here I am wishing I had a bit of clay to add. It will be a learning experience to garden in sand. You dig down six inches past the grass roots and hit pure clean soft brown sand. Pretty amazing.

The disking experiment appears to be a success. Rick is going to disk it up again this coming weekend and I will mix in a whole bunch of compost and manure and plant my first crop in a few weeks... a row of garlic to be harvested next July. I am also going to prepare rows for raspberries and strawberries. I need to do some research to see if those are okay to plant in the fall, or if it better to wait until spring. Those are two things I want to get started as soon as I can.

If you are hauling hay, that makes it farm too, right? That hay wagon is really overloaded, isn't it? These bales of hay are for chicken bedding, then when mixed well with manure, will be used to mulch the garlic, raspberries and strawberries and fertilize the soil.

Oh, and all farms need a barn. We have a couple you can chose from.

This is a large metal building. The person who built it, used it to build airplanes in. We decided we are going to call it the garage. It is actually where Terry is going to spend most of his time, because his air compressor and all his important tools are out there. I believe we are going to be parking our cars in there in the winter, too. And keeping the tractor in there. And in case you are wondering, the guy who built this barn, also built an airstrip on the property. The electric wiring for the lights for the runway is all still intact, even though the airstrip is now partly lawn and partly overgrown. So if we decide that farming doesn't work for us, we can always go into the airport/airplane manufacturing business.

We are going to call this long green building the workshop. Rick, the guy on the tractor in the first photo, is going to make part of this building into a wood working workshop. (We are giving him space for a workshop in trade for him mowing our 5 acre or so of lawn on a regular basis. If it means less work for me, I'm all for it!) I will have a corner of the workshop to use as my potting shed and a little workshop for me to keep all my basket making materials and other messy projects in. It is all set up for a woodstove, so it will be warm in the winter. Half the building is open on one side, and right now we are using it for storage space, but eventually I would like to build a few horse stalls in there. That is not going to happen any time soon, but this morning I was impressing on Terry that we can't fill the whole thing up with stuff, because at some point, I need to have room for my horse!

I haven't taken any photos of it yet, but we also have a little barn for animals. It doesn't look like much on the outside, but on the inside, it is cozy and dry and has two stalls that would be perfect for my miniature milk cows (when I get them--which I don't think is going to be any time soon, so don't hold your breath waiting for photos!). It looks like in the rather distant past, goats were kept in this little barn, judging from the goat manure covering the floor. In fact that is what I am off to do right now, go clean out the stalls and spread the manure on the garden, and use the old decayed straw in there for to mulch the tomato plants I planted last weekend. And while I am waiting for the workshop/potting shed to be completed and organized, I am going to use this little barn for my gardening tools and my own personal space. It is the one place Terry hasn't filled up with his tools and stuff, so I have claimed it for myself!

So, you see, we do have a farm. We have a tractor, a haywagon, some barns, a farm cat--now our little farm just needs a name. If anyone has any suggestions we are open to ideas!

Better in Black and White?

It seems to me that spider webs are better photographed in black and white. What do you think?

Introducing....Nemo!

The newest addition to our family...Nemo, the very important farm cat. His job is to keep the mice at bay in the workshop. He is affectionate, but very independent. He goes off and does his own thing most of the day, but every now and then, he wants to be cuddled and petted. Unfortunately, I was the one who went and picked him up from his old home and brought him to our little farm.
Right now he assosiates me with being forced in a cat carrier and made to ride 40 miles in a car. At first he avoided me like the plague and ran everytime he saw me. However, he is starting to realize that I am the person with the food, and is begining to warm up to me a little.


I'm planning on doing a post soon with pictures of house and garden. I haven't done it yet, partly because I have been so busy, and partly because I don't want to post photos of stacks of boxes.

Cutest Frog Ever

Just look at that smile!

This little fellow was sitting under the hood of the propane tank when we went out to read the gauge this morning. We had a big discussion on whether or not it is a toad or a tree frog, and decided after watching him climb all over me that he is a tree frog. He was happy to pose on my shoulder for a portrait.