It’s that time of year where looking at my calendar gives me anxiety with all that is going on, but if I don’t look at it daily, there are going to be some major repercussions. My children aren’t even involved with that much, so my suffering is minimal compared to most, but it’s our lifestyle that is picking up as well. The garden calls to me all day, every day. It says it’s currently needing the rest of its seeds in the ground and that it’s growing some nice little weeds pretty much everywhere. I was actually folding laundry, the first time in two weeks, up on the couch this week. I folded a bit and was putting it away in between and suddenly just stopped, and I sat there thinking “what am I doing, I need to be in the garden”. The laundry isn’t going to feed us the entire summer, so I picked my priority. I find that laundry is never, ever my priority, no matter the season and it seems the bigger the garden, the more canning there is, the more animals there are, and so on…the bigger the laundry pile.
Besides the garden, we’ve been doing other planting as well. We try to plant two to three trees every year. Drought and the random ice storms have been hard on what we do have, so we like to get something new going when we can. Trees take a bit of dedication to watering, especially in the dry years, but thankfully this year and last year’s trees are doing wonderfully with the much-needed moisture we’ve received over winter and recently. My 3-yearold lilacs, on the other hand, are determined to be disappointments, at least half of them anyway. I planted a row of lilacs the spring after my mom passed, then received no moisture from the skies. I was consistent with watering and fertilizing, but the heat, wind, and lack of rain was hard on them. Last year some of them finally bushed up and out a bit and this year a good handful of them look quite promising, but my impatience with them had me ordering several more to exchange the itty-bitty bushes with more established bushes. I planted a variety of other bushes and perennials as well. If I see something I like, especially on sale, they tend to come home with me and the longer they sit in the pot waiting on me to be planted, the more weighed down I feel, but oh do I love all the spring planting.
I aged another year this past week, still in my thirties for now. It’s such a blessed thing to grow older, but I do have to admit it is a hard thing to do without your parents here on earth at my age. My kids make all the difference though, they keep me going, along with the husband I chose and suckered into a life of milk cows and chickens. It’s a rewarding life being able to teach my kids self-sustaining life skills and it’s even more rewarding when they put those skills to use to celebrate you. I usually know what is going on in my kitchen, but the kids are all so comfortable in it as well, they can sometimes get away with making something without me knowing. My oldest came home from school on my birthday and took advantage of every moment I was not in the kitchen to make a cake. This cake though, it wasn’t just any cake. It was a made from scratch, down to milling the flour…cake. She really did some digging for this recipe and boy it could have intimidated a kid after looking at its list of ingredients, but not her, she’s been baking for half her years. This cake was comprised of so many things we produced, including our hand churned butter, homemade vanilla, yogurt made from our clabber culture, farm fresh eggs, raw milk, and freshly milled flour. The product was probably the most amazing chocolate cake I’ve had, and the fact I didn’t bake it myself, and that it had fresh, nutritional, quality ingredients made it all the more exceptional. The real gift was, that cake being a sign of skills being passed on to another generation, skills that have been lost with life’s busyness and conveniences. There isn’t a greater gift for me as a mother than knowing that values and life skills have been instilled in my children.
