Happy Saturday friends!
Let's start with my silly ponies and donkeys! I sent the video above to my fellow TBAH (Touched By A Horse) coaches, many of us have these heavy foam filled cubes for our coaching work. The cube lives under that pavilion and lately I've been finding it all around the lower pasture:
I figured one of the horses or donkeys had to be doing it, probably the donkeys since they are so playful and enjoy carrying toys around. Never could catch them until this week!
And then, not to be outdone in funny naughtiness, the ponies (probably Tori) decided to pull hay out of the storage area. Half a loose bale and then an entire bale with it's strings on. They drug it like 12 feet out!:
Brad had forgotten to close the gate the night before. Tori was like, "What?":
It's garden bed building time again! Except this time it's at sunrise :-) This one will be called the "balloon bed" because I'm painting a hot air balloon garden pole and it will go in this bed. This one will have a ton of native plants in it and is the biggest so far: 50'x12' but it has to be to have American Holly as a back layer. Actually I'm not sure it's deep enough, but I'll start here!
I talked Brad into helping me and we started last Saturday morning, you can see the sun just peeking up:
I'm building a hugelkulture bed again, starting with logs (absorb rain like a sponge and then release it slowly), then sticks and leaves (that I scooped out of the forest), dirt, wood chips. This creates a bed that needs less watering and with the logs, sticks, leaves, creates a compost rich bed over time all on its own. Because these logs were not decaying yet, I drilled holes into the biggest to help speed that along. I wasn't sure about taking the grass up, would the logs roll around if we didn't? Decided to do it (fairly quick work with a tractor) but wouldn't do it again—more work, and I think the logs would have been fine.
When you use a backhoe, this is the way it's set up, the front bucket (or forks in this case) on the ground as a stabilizer, the rear stabilizing backhoe legs down, and then the tractor is hoisted into the air. It made me laugh a little. It's floating!:
As always, lots of steps:
The logs came from pine trees that Brad cut down in the spring. They were growing on the dam and it's not safe to have trees growing like that. If there is a storm and they go down, they could leave a hole in the dam. Now they are being repurposed:
While Brad was scooping logs and dropping them into the bed he found a copperhead hiding away in a solar panel:
And this skin which looks really long but, from owning snakes in the past, I know their shed skin does tend to stretch a bit as they slide out of it:
I got to this point:
And then the next time I went out, the tractor battery was dead, argh:
And then it started to rain for several days and that was the end of that for now. NOT complaining!
Last week I shared this pic of the edge of the pond:
But with the several days of rain we've had/are still having (looks like about 4" so far), this same area now looks like this:
A couple of feet of shore is back under water! Yay! That feels so hopeful!
We harvested 59 pumpkins from our volunteer pumpkin bed. It's very early for them, but being volunteers, they got an early start. So, they are in the lower garage curing (hardening up their skin) for now.
Next year I'm going to grow, or attempt to grow Rouge Vif D'Etampes. If you're a lover of pumpkin pie and you're local, I'll probably be giving away a bunch of them. Years ago, we belonged to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and they gave us one of these delicious pumpkins. Brad and I still talk about it! We made pumpkin creme brulée for Thanksgiving that year and it was incredible. Did I mention this before? Probably. That's how yummy it was.
ODDS AND ENDS
The rain is bringing a bunch of mushrooms :-)
I love the way new canna leaves come out:
Look closely, do you see the deer?
Got up late on Thursday morning because of the dark clouds, nothing woke me up :-) I walked across the bridge that goes from my bonus room bedroom to the stairs and this is how dark it was at 9am, sooo much rain, lovely:
Everyone getting in their electrolytes :-)
Paused my garden pole painting to make myself some plant markers, aren't they fun!
I'm really loving the catmint, the deer stay away from it and they are such nicely mounding plants!
And finally...you will laugh...but that's ok, it makes me laugh too:
The search for my childhood spoon is finally over! When my brother and I were babies, my parents had several "baby spoons" that they used to feed us. As we grew up, these were our favorite spoons to eat ice cream with. When we left the house, they were still with Mom and Dad but somewhere over the years, they disappeared and Michael and I were bummed. A couple of years ago I searched for them online but only ran across short fat ones (ew) or plastic ones (double ew). But this week! OMG! I found them here, they are called "Oneida feeder spoons" and they look EXACTLY like the ones we had growing up. I also bought these little 8oz bowls to use with my baby spoons and was ridiculously happy this morning when I had my yogurt and granola!
HOW TO WORK WITH ME
Equine Partnered Coaching! With horses (early morning appointments in the summer), without horses, or online, your choice.
Neurofeedback Train your brain to calm and ease. The most common response I hear about neurofeedback is, "I'm so much less reactive in my life!" It really does smooth out the sharp spikes. Super helpful if your world feels harsh and spiky right now.
Reiki Another way to facilitate relaxation, calm, healing. If the weather is nice, you can choose outside, or outside in the herd (this is an early morning appointment) and of course in my office is always available :-)
And Women's Circles! I've updated my website yet again so read up and then contact me if you want to talk about joining my Women's Circles!
Wednesday Women's Circle has a waiting list, I will add you to it if you'd like. Newer people do indeed get in occasionally, as sometimes the people higher on the list end up with upcoming vacations, too busy at work, or just life is life-ing.
Tuesday Women's Circle, runs 11am—1pm, Aug 4—Sept 8, the 6 weeks is $210, contact me if you're interested, there is one more spot left!
Monday online art class via Zoom. Ongoing, every Monday, 7:30-9pmET. $35 There isn't a public link for this one but you can contact me for the supply list and link here. I teach you something fun in watercolor or mixed media. It's a low key, jammies kind of class. Right now it's small so you get more one on one instruction if you want it.
This coming week 7/27, we paint a little 5x7" koi:
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Hope you all have a great week!
Thank you for reading :-)
All of my art and writing is made with human intelligence!
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