Still here!

Needed a little color pick me up this morning.  Trying to go over colors and flowers for next season.  So many choices.  I know I've been out of the loop here for a while but being camera-less means blogging is less exciting.  We hope to remedy this soon!  We cleared out a section of trees around our house and it looks SO much better.  No more claustrophobic mess of scrubby good for nothing trees.  Now it feels expansive, spacious, and beautiful and gives us some room to landscape.  I went into farming with such naivete about landscaping.  Farmers don't have landscaped houses cause it takes so much freakin' time!  But we will be one of the exceptions.  At some point in time.  We are in the process of planting all of our neglected landscape plants now.....lots of hydrangea (snowflake, snowqueen, alice and a couple limelight--more of those to be planted in the spring for cuts!), a few Japanese snowbells, a couple Stewartia something or other trees, a fringe tree, a kousa dogwood, a few serviceberry trees, some redbuds, five fig trees and three asian persimmons, a mulberry (excellent selection for purple birdshit everywhere!), and several others I can't remember.  Stuart and I have a lot of shoveling to do as it's too wet to get the tractor into the section that just got cleared, so no auger for us.  Let's hope they all live!!!  

So it goes. And goes and goes.

The good: 

-it is fall. officially.  that means frost is soon.  hallelujah. 

-we have sown a very important, big cover crop for overwintering in the new field.  it looks awesome.    

-we did a wedding this past weekend for some good friends, a fella I've known since 6th grade.  celebrating love is so important.  and meaningful.  

-i'm trying some exciting new things in the greenhouse this winter.  I'm prepared to fail, but that tends to be necessary sometimes in order to figure out what the hell i'm doing.  

-we have had a successful season this year, even with having a baby.  wow.

 the bad:

-the weeds got a little out of hand this season and I'm afraid we're going to have to pay for it in seasons to come.

-this is always the hardest time of year for me.  i withdraw, get down and out and question way too many things.  something to work on.

-we lost our camera.  we went to a river house for a few days of vacation and I misplaced it.  It had some special pictures on it I hadn't uploaded yet.  Kinda feels like I lost a friend.  

-our fall garden is not so great.  failure on the brassicas and beets.  

Ruth meets the ocean

Our little one turned 1 on Friday.  Say WHAT???!!!!  We were able to get away for a very very quick trip to the beach, an amazing beach that  was like a time warp, a trip to beach fantasia where the lighting was always at its best, very few people (cause really, who likes people), perfect water temps, a tidal pool for Ruth to play in, and of course the ever present meditative pulse of the ocean, the sound dreams are made of.  Ruth just couldn't believe this new world.  I must say her meeting the ocean and sand has been one of the highlights of parenting. 

Recruitment Begins

Arugula

 Thank you thank you rain for this beautiful patch of arugula.  I vow to eat as much as possible while it's here.

Snippets from Friday

At the Museum, 'into the mist' exhibit

Morning, fog

  I've been trying to read to Ruth while she nurses (an on/off endeavor) and I came across a poem titled 'The Clearing' by Wendell Berry that has stuck with me.  He talks of how vision needs severity at its edge.  Severity against neglect, indifference, weariness.  There is much more to the poem than that, but my mind keeps returning to those points.  I also can't seem to stop thinking about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  In the novel there is a kind of break in the narrative where she takes you to a house that has been neglected for around a decade and has been overrun by nature.  It is a beautiful step back where the mind just observes the scene, a commentary of time going on with or without us.  Nature will run its course.  Our existence is incidental.  Right now our farm feels as if it is sitting in this break in the narrative, slowly being overrun by nature as we watch it happen.  A morning glory plant entirely engulfs a few tomato plants.  The barn is overrun by privet, virginia creeper,  poison ivy, saplings, and honeysuckle.  The insect world becomes more and more evident, more prominent.  Weed seeds drip from the plants.  

Drip.  

Drip. 

 Drip.  

We ordered around 30-40 trees and shrubs earlier this year for some landscaping, maybe in early March, and then got carried away with the season.  They sit root-bound in their pots, cowering together in a semi-circle of questionable hope, wanting a better place to call home.  I had an art professor in college that once told the class that a perfectionist is someone who actually gets the task at hand done in perfect form, not someone who procrastinates with the vision then rushes through it unable to finish in perfect form---using the excuse of being a perfectionist.  Someone who puts off doing things because the only option is perfection and there is not enough time for perfection.  Let's just say the image of myself as a perfectionist was shattered at that point in time.  I still have my vision though and I can dream big dreams with the best of them.   And I will get done what I can and learn to be okay with that.