June ~ Eight Weeks in Seven Days

During April and May, here in Dexter, Michigan, it rained for what seemed like 8 weeks. I say 'seemed', but I'm pretty sure it rained almost every day and night. At the end of May, there were ducks in yards and rivers where we had never expected them to materialize. Lo and behold, the clouds parted and the rains stopped. Eight weeks behind on planting our corn and soybeans, the mainstay of our farm, we are running around like chickens with their heads cut off (pardon the term, but we 'do' look like this right now) trying to 'fit' fields, plant seeds, haul manure to the field before we plant, move pastured animals, make sure we have food for next year by dropping seeds in rows in the huge garden, and a billion other small details.

Did I mention that the hens decided to have an egg laying marathon? ha.

Work. I am never bored.

I just wanted to say hello to all my blogeautiful friends out there and to tell you that I have not abandoned writing. No no no. In fact, I have more writing projects going on than you can shake a rain soaked stick at! (:

As soon as all our precious and crunchi-licious non-GMO veggies are tucked safely in the garden, and the last flower is artfully placed in the front yard, I will settle down here with a huge mason jar of iced sweet tea and tell you all about it, for June is my favorite month. (Did I ever tell you that I am a vegetable-a-holic? Yes, I am. And, I don't want to be cured. I'm not a vegetarian, I do eat meat. Yes, a true vegetable-a-holic in which I had my first addiction brought on by a drought of vegetables when I was an undergraduate.

But, back to June. Non non No! That doesn't do her justice, since June is the pinnacle of my year. Let me try that again...June is my FAVORITE month!!! Yes, I love the roses, the fresh plants and birds and insects. I love the butterflies and the bursting forth of life in full 3D touching all five senses.

In June I decorate the house with roses. Fresh roses, dried roses, rose bundles. And, we have tea. Not just afternoon tea, but June Tea. Sweet tea with little cakes decorated with blossoms and frosted violet leaves. For June is the month of sweetness and romance. June is the month I was born. June is the Summer Solstice and the month of ripe full moons hanging low and perfume-y in the sky.

Yes, I will sit down and write to you all...just as soon as those hens decide to call it quits to the iron-chicken triathlon....

Rainmilk, Sticks and Stones and When I Was Young

I grew up in the suburbs. A city girl for all intents and purposes, but we gardened and canned food, went camping and took vacations at Lake Michigan. So, I was no stranger to getting my hands dirty.

My mother and step-father retired to 'Up-North'. We built a pine 'vacation/retirement' home complete with new wood stove and five acres adjacent to state land. We had pet rabbits, a pig named Petunia and some geese that followed my mom around everywhere, honking as they went. So, it came as an utter bewilderment, really, when I was asked to babysit for our Mennonite dairy farmer neighbors down the road from our 'retirement' home, and found their farmhouse, um, messy. Not just one day messy or, we haven't had time to tidy up messy, but really really, unfathomable to me at the young age of 15 kind-of-messy. This family milked an entire barn of dairy cows and it was the finest quality cow's milk. Creamy and fresh. They also piped classical music into the barn for their cows day and night to keep them happy and calm. This from a simple midwestern farm family in a white farm house of modest means.

Flash forward to today. Here I am living in a simple midwestern white farm house of modest means. When the wind blows from the north, we can distinctly smell the barns in the house and, though I don't have Vivaldi and Mozart in the stalls and pens, I do now own a milk goat and some sheep in addition to our farm's cattle, pigs, chickens and honeybees (I wonder how bees would like classical music???). But, the most succinct message I am trying to get across to you today??? My house is 'Mennonite Dairy Farm' messy! There are piles of clean clothes on the floor, just as the Mennonite family had. There are clean mason jars covering the counter year round, just as the Mennonite family had. There are bags of lamb's milk replacer on the kitchen floor and baby lamb bottles and herbal goat toner and milk pails and filters and bowls of slightly over-ripe bananas and sourdough starter and drying herbs and sometimes unmade beds (something you would have NEVER ever caught me doing, and still....still...this is a life or death only thing), and boots with mud and muck scattered hither and yon. Sometimes the cat bowl is empty and sometimes the canary chirps his special chirp for 'feed me, my bowl is empty'. Yes, I now understand, in full glorious surround-sound dolby enhanced color realization, just EXACTLY what was going on in that lovely Mennonite farmhouse from my past. Exactly.

Amelia, the goat, has been nibbling on banana peels, as she is doing here (yes one of the slightly over-ripe ones from the bowl in the kitchen).

And I have been turning creamy sweet goatsmilk into feta cheese,

and homemade pizzas with chevre, garlic, fresh tomatoes and onions,

and Amanda has been foraging at the creek with her daddy for wild asparagus (almost bigger than her),

On another note, we endured approximately 9 days of cold rainy weather, of which I had the pleasure of milking Amelia the goat, outside. After I finish milking her, I set the pail of milk outside of the gates of the pen to take in to the house. I noticed, last week that there were quite a few raindrops added to the milk. Rainmilk.

While spending so much time outside these past few weeks, I have come to see that getting rained on and dried by the sun or wind, and having twigs and hay and straw in my hair, and mud on my legs, amongst other things, is not so bad. In fact, I think we could all use a lot more time outside. A lot. I have never felt healthier or more relaxed. I have even paid more attention to the beauty of the sticks that fall from the tree limbs,

and the stones that dot my way. I have made time, though I didn't have any left to make, to take my children fishing in the pond near where the cattle are pastured. We didn't catch any large mouth bass or bluegills, but the dried grasses around the perimeter of the water were warm and soft from the sun, the poplar tree overhead clicked its leaves in a soothing rhythm and the water was sparkling while the birds sang out their warnings to the new young, that intruders were nearby.
The large 'stick' pictured here is a Witch Hazel tree from our woods. It seems we have an abundance of them and my husband brought me an entire tree so I could try my hand at making homemade Witch Hazel astringent.

When I called my sister on the phone and told her that the farmer had hauled home a Witch Hazel tree from the woods she laughed and promptly recited, in very thick Medieval English, "M'Lady! I've brought you a Witch Hazel tree from the wood. Be ye so kind as to accept my gift and turn these branches into a fine medicinal?" I love this image. Can't you just hear the sparse Cantata music playing?

I stripped the fresh bark with a pocket knife and snipped the small branches with pruning shears into 1 inch sections. Then I filled a kettle and covered it all with distilled water and boiled, then simmered it all for 8 hours. I then filtered it, added distillers alcohol to preserve and bottled it. I ended up with over two gallons of beautiful astringent to which I plan on adding Attar of Rose and Lavender.

Sticks and stones didn't break my bones, they healed me. May your day be full of natural beauty, relaxing thankfulness and maybe a glass of magical rainmilk.