pixie is the latest addition to our mini herd of nigerian dwarf goats. she will grow up to be our milking goat. she has the sweetest temperament, & we’re absolutely smitten with her!
we picked her up from our friends in cedar, MI, on our way home from camping. it was a bit of a tight squeeze with all our camping gear, but we did it!
poppy evangeline with her floral namesake
in and around the garden : rhubarb, asparagus, mayweed + our neighbor’s wheat, allium, horseradish
the farm God gave us is an organic/permaculture wonderland with tons of perennial plants growing up year-round—swooping swales of fruit and nut trees on the back eight, grape vines, asparagus, rhubarb (and so much comfrey!), thanks to the 20+ years of hard work of the former owners, and we get to reap the perpetual harvest! our farm was the site of summer farm camps for kids, and weekly farm days for the children of the local catholic montessori school, as well as a CSA that fed fifty families. at one point it was also a pumpkin patch, so we still have cars pull up in the fall asking, “where are the pumpkins?!” hmm, now there’s a fun idea!
sometimes gardening from seed to bloom feels like way too much time spent keeping a whole lot of extra things alive (in addition to five kids and twenty four animals!) for way too long. it is totally worth it in the end (for color palette and variety that you can’t find at nurseries or flower shops), but even with my best efforts i’ve lost thousands of seedlings to overwatering, underwatering, damping off, leggy stems, and neglect along the way.
but then there are bulbs! growing tulips and daffodils this year was 100% easy and successful! willow helped me plant the bulbs in crates in november, and blossoms were up just in time for Easter. we just stuck the crates in the hoophouse and watered them a few times. these were color trials for me to see which varieties are our favorites for a permanent place in our landscape. the winners were : narcissus white lion, prosecco, apricot whirl, mount hood, delnashaugh, and acropolis, and tulip finola, avant garde, and, my favorite, apricot beauty.🥰
snow one day, bare feet the next—we’re savoring these liminal days of winter-spring!
teenage girl digs dahlias with red nails, black skinnies, bare feet, and pitchfork ♡
i was flipping the beds in the hoophouse yesterday, pulling out summer’s blooms, when poppy and i stopped, transfixed by the humble beauty of bells of ireland’s dried lacy umbels. we spent the next half hour collecting the best ones for a centerpiece—the “netteds and the cloudies” she called them. while gathering, i heard poppy’s familiar, favorite question, “mama, is this your favorite part of the day?” yes, poppy, it is ♡.
to everyone who joined us on saturday: THANK YOU! what a life-giving time it was for our whole family! josh enjoyed chatting while serving up coffee, i loved hearing bits of all of your stories while creating bouquets with you, and the kids were thrilled to make some new friends (bonus : heron made enough $ selling baked goods to buy a kitten!). i can’t believe our garden provided bouquets for all of you—it was like the loaves and fishes! but the BEST part was seeing all of you make connections with one another. seeing community happen, new friendships being formed, folks exchanging phone numbers...that brought tears to our eyes // i neglected to set out an email list. would each of you, our saturday guests, mind sending a message with your email address so i can keep you in the loop for future events? we are hoping to host more gatherings come spring (and...we may host a farm work party or two in the meantime) p.s. any other local folks who’d like to be on the list, let me know! elle {at} thenewdomestic {dot} org.
it’s our sabbatical year and we’re growing flowers for pleasure, not profit. most of our land is resting, but our hoophouse is in full bloom. join me (michelle) on the front porch of the farmhouse and share in the harvest! tomorrow, saturday, 10am-noon, i’ll have buckets of flowers harvested (a few bouquets ready-to-go, too), and will be on hand if you need any help putting together an arrangement or bouquet. bring your own jar, or i’ll have market bouquet supplies here to get your flowers home easily and hydrated. we have loads of amaranth, celosia, lisianthus, dahlias (café au lait and karma serena), cosmos, nigella, china aster, snapdragons, a little phlox, etc., along with heron’s baked goods (bring cash for those). email for address and rsvp! ♡ michelle // elle [at] thenewdomestic [dot] org
in reality it’s been a story of both love and loss—our introduction to life and death on the farm, of grieving children yelling, “i wish we’d never even gotten chickens!” when we lost five chicks in one week in the brooder in winter, and later found our teenage rooster, rocky, dead in the paddock, decapitated by a hawk. (rocky’d started to attack us, drawing blood from me and the little girls, and josh had threatened to eat him, but he died a hero’s death, laying down his life for the hens. RIP rocky) we’ve got twelve sturdy laying hens now, and a new rooster, too. our remarkable ladies are named jilly, goldie, pearl, lacey, 中文鸡, tansy, millie, pieds moelleux, lady, piper, greta, and queenie. then there’s roger, our $20 craigslist bargain, but you’d never know : he’s a heritage breed, a dominique, and was sold to us by a compassionate homesteader who knew we needed “a hawk killer”, and that he is. he’s a champion, and a gentleman, too (third photo, surrounded by his ladies).
shep’s favorite flower—our first little bunch of “re-dunk-ulus” (as we call it around here) in full bloom today!
picking raspberries on our very own farm // at home in michigan, week 1, safe and sound.
