Not enough daylight hours !!

I cannot even remember my last post - every day is spent remodeling, painting, weeding, farming, or researching some new challenge - truly there are not enough daylight hours in each day to get done what we want done 'yesterday'! :-)

Embarrassing confessions:

(1) we don't have anything planted for us (haven't figured out where to till our own gardens and how to fence them from becoming the local salad bar buffet for the deer).

(2) we sometimes don't eat supper until after dark.

(3) sometimes we make popcorn and then fall into bed.

(4) we are still wondering if we should join a new local CSA that makes all meals ready to cook/eat from locally-grown organic food.

(5) a neighbor asks "How DO you keep up two houses?" "Not well at all", I respond with a smile. 

(6) vacuuming?, dusting? - not much but we do laundry every single day because of the abundance of dirty, sweaty clothes and work gloves!

(7) I haven't downloaded photos from my camera for weeks and now I feel overwhelmed with the thought of remembering what things are and taking the time to label them on my computer.

(8) Everything has a learning curve that seems to be straight up. Good thing that my husband and I are "on the same page", work well together and share a common dream.

(9) Should I keep going? :-)

In contrast, here are the highlights of forward motion:

(1) Over 2 inches of rain last night plus a local tornado and our farm house basement is bone dry this morning. Last year a rain of that type would have put 2 inches of water in our basement. Can you hear our sighs of relief, actually tears of happiness?

(2) Garlic scapes are growing and we'll be making our debut at two local farmers markets this week. (Ypsilanti on Tuesday afternoon and Ann Arbor on Wednesday morning) - can you feel our excitement and our panic as nothing is really "ready"?

(3) I have found a dress maker to take over the "project" of dressing me for my younger son's wedding in August. Can you hear me saying "yahoo!" - one less thing for me to "worry about" when I wake up at night. 

(4) I beat back the weeds in just a tiny spot in front of the farm house, put up 3 hummingbird feeders, planted some red salvia, and the hummingbirds were there within an hour, fighting over "rights" to those feeders. Now I'll move some around to the back of the house, too, to help make peace in the neighborhood.  One little spot to call "my own" at the farm.

(5) After "wrestling" with the zoning/planning department in our township, the barn site prep work we had done before we understood that what looks like our backyard is actually considered our front yard (yes, I know - ??????), we can use that site and the barn should go up very soon. In the end, everyone was indeed 'reasonable'. :-) (I have a friend who is starting a new band called Reasonable People - I like that name!)

(6) Our 3 bee hives are thriving and actually producing honey!!

(7) Should I keep going? :-)

Lastly, I am looking forward to having a dietetics student from Michigan State University spend time on our farm this summer as an independent study course. Here is the first thing I am going to have her read, an article written by Michael Pollan in the New York Times, "The Food Movement, Rising".

It's a good review (lengthy, typical of Michael Pollan) that covers where we have been and where we are now as our food and the system that produces it is more (much more) transparent and generating much needed discussion and changes.

Don't try to skim this article or just read the first and last paragraphs. It is a good read and worthy of pondering.  We are having a 16 year old nephew staying with us for 3 weeks this summer. Explaining how we eat and why to him is an interesting process. He visited his first Farmers' Market yesterday. I introduced him to one of our local farmers and told him he was meeting a "rock star".  Our nephew is already asking when the next farmers' market is - I think he is seeing some results of the never-done, hard farm work and might be catching "the fever"!

Signing off to head back out to the farm - it's an inside day so painting, painting, painting and taking breaks on our front porch to look for the hummingbirds. :-)

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD