A Week With A Small Farm Family

Photo dump! 


In case you're as scattered as I am and just want to look at something and not think for a second, I give you:

The week in pictures from a life cultivated and Prairie Heritage Farm...

Morning sun is about all we get in our otherwise, dark, dark, little house in town. Oh, what we wouldn't give to finally live out in the country. To live where we work the land.

We're working on it. But for now, we have all the stresses and risks of running a small farm with few of the perks, like you know, waking up with the sun streaming through the windows, or picking fresh veggies from your backyard for dinner, or playing, whenever you want, in the dirt with your daughter.

Someday, little one, some day.

For now though, we spend a lot of time outside to pretend like we live on a farm. As much as we can, we get outside to the farm itself, and every other waking moment we get outside in the backyard.

(Happy Father's Day, by the way, to this guy. What an awesome Papa he is.)

 

Or, we grab some valuable time at the park.

This is Willa's new "smile." Ask her to smile for the camera and she goes one step too far turning that frown upside down with her hands. 

 Last Wednesday, we hit the road to see Auntie Hannah graduate. Only the cool kids were allowed on the trip.

We met some nice chickens at the Museum of the Rockies, where we wandered through Jacob's favorite museum exhibit of all time: The Living History Farm. He said, at least twice, and wistfully, "I think I was born at the wrong time." 

If this guy had a time travel device, he would so be living on a turn-of-the-century (and I mean last century) farm, wearing suspenders and doing everything by hand. (See the photo in this post as evidence.) Jacob, of course, chatted it up with the farm folks and ended up leaving with some seedlings of an old variety of red orach, a red spinachy-kind of leafy veggie.

 And, the whole family got to practice their Willa smiles.

And finally, Willa and I got some farm time in this week. (We're home a lot these days while Papa toils in the dirt, given my whole online editing job, which you know, requires an Internet connection, which is absent at the farm.) You can almost hear things growing out there. (The weeds too though.)

Willa and I took care of some little bunches of chives that were buried under a mountain of quack grass while we were out there. And, oh, it felt good to dig and pull and smell and talk about what dirt and sun do for plants and which plants are yummy and which ones are yuck. 

It's a dandy thing, hanging out with a kid on a farm.

And, don't tell my husband, but I really miss the whole manual labor side of the farming thing, a lot, even the weeding part.

This is what we'll be doing again this weekend: driving first to Great Falls on Friday to deliver fresh veggies to our awesome customers there and then on to Helena for the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning, where we meet up with more awesome farm share customers and watch Jacob build up his quads using a bike-powered flour mill to get the fine people of Helena freshly-ground, flour from organic, heritage wheat. 

Nothing like it.