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Adventures in Burkeland
A little working family on a little hobby farm.
 
 Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Time for some citizens of the farm to get their annual hair cuts... followed quickly by the annual wool-ball fight!

 
5/16/2012 9:30:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Monday, May 14, 2012
Tonight was the first dinner (burgers and sausages) and S'mores by the new fire pit!



Nolan was cold, but we told him he had to come outside to eat a s'more.


5/14/2012 9:30:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Saturday, May 12, 2012
Last summer we blogged about the fun we were having with a make-shift fire pit we put together to burn out a stump. This year we decided to upgrade!
So this weekend was fire pit weekend.

First we had to dig...



Then add some rock...



Then add pavers...



DONE!



Don't believe it's quite that easy? Check out the full picture gallery here.

HUGE THANKS to Mom, Dad, Becky and the boys for all their help over the past days (weeks, months...) prepping and completing this project.

S'Mores anyone?
5/12/2012 10:48:40 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]    |  Trackback
 Tuesday, May 08, 2012
The world is your desk... if you have large enough clipboard. Which we do!

5/8/2012 9:25:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Sunday, May 06, 2012
Sometimes you just need to escape and regroup. With that in mind we pulled out the trailer on Wednesday, loaded it up and headed to Silver Falls Park on Thursday for a couple nights of camping. Ahhh...

OK, to be honest, this was probably one of the wettest camping trips we’ve ever had. It didn’t always rain. Sometimes it hailed. Once I was pretty sure there were snowflakes. I took three coats, two pairs of shoes and four changes of clothes for the boys. By noon on Friday every coat was drenched and the trailer looked like a giant clothes drying station. Still, it was a good mental break from the farm.

Packing up we realized this was actually the first time we had the trailer out for something other than hunting since we moved to the farm. Upon our return we resolved to change that. A couple nights away does us all some good!

A few more pictures posted here.

5/6/2012 9:35:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Tuesday, May 01, 2012

The farm has moods. It’s surreal to read back through posts from the fall (here and here) and remember how much was being produced. After all the work and heat of summer, it took everything we had to keep up. We were tired, but it was alive!

Spring is different. We could spend days outside in the sunlight and dirt. We have endless energy to give the farm, but it gives little in return. (Outside of an enormous amount of grass to mow…)  Seeds that grew quickly and easily last year fail to sprout this year, despite hours of prep work on the garden beds. Wind and rain bring the greenhouse plastic crashing down on newly planted tomatoes, leaving them broken under heavy pools of water. Llamas that were supposed to help protect the lambs strip the bark off some of our favorite trees. Half the chickens are taken out by a raccoon and then this morning, after days this winter working on a lambing pen; we find all three lambs have been taken out. Likely (again) by a local coyote. It’s hard not to feel defeated.

Living here is like having another person in our family that we must consider at all times. They are testy in the spring. Hard to wake up, and harder to put to bed in the fall. Two years is just enough to demonstrate how little we still know about this person, but the experience of two summers has given us a glimpse of what is to come. In just a few short months our energy, and the farm's, will run hand-in-hand with new veggies, new chickens and, yet again, new lambs.

5/1/2012 9:01:36 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]    |  Trackback
 Monday, April 30, 2012

I think eyes are disgusting - I can't even watch Scott put his contacts in.
So why the boys think it's so great to touch Scott's eyeballs while helping to put his contacts in, I will never know.
But they do.
   

4/30/2012 8:50:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Saturday, April 28, 2012
The result of a three-year-old reaching for something underneath a moving treadmill.
It was almost a week before I remembered to take a picture of this - it looks a lot better than it did!

4/28/2012 8:42:08 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Saturday, April 21, 2012
Since Scott and the boys are playing with cousins in Seattle we got yet another work party in on the farm today! (Heavy on work, light on party...)
While Dad made burn piles containing more wood than was left on the trees and Mom worked on a brush fire that wouldn't really take off until late in the day (at which point it burned all night), I charged after one of my garden goals (dreams!) for this year: June tomatoes! Of the ten plants I ordered this year, one will (theoretically) produce in 55 days, so they are in, fertilized and covered in plastic. Clock is ticking!

 
4/21/2012 12:46:36 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
 Friday, April 20, 2012
Love spending time with mom and dad, especially when it looks like this...

 

...and when I need them to help deal with surprises!
4/20/2012 9:12:55 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]    |  Trackback
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