June Photo Roundup

It's July already and here's a look back at the adventures we had during June on the farm.

The blackberries are about ready to harvest. They look wild, but they taste quite sweet.

Quincy has been enjoying building towers with his blocks, taking walks in the orchard, and was really happy to build pillow forts with "Pop Pop"

Whitney and I enjoyed a wedding in DC right near the White House (we do clean up nice)

We had a finch determined to get into the house and/or destroy a screen on a window. Both assaults failed.

Garlic scapes are in from the 5 different varieties of hardneck garlic that we planted last fall. Going to replant these again and try to develop a variety of our own lines.

Finally got around to bottling the hard cider that David Timmerman helped me craft late last fall. 1/3 Albemarle Pippin, 1/3 Staymen, and 1/3 Winesap apples with a champagne yeast. We'll call it "Sfumato #1" and see how it tastes when we let it do it's carbonation fermentation thing.

We got eight new chickens to augment our aging flock

and had a big tree down on our eastern paddock fence. While we love the firewood, the location is difficult to get to and the tree is still joined to the fallen trunk about ten feet up next to a stream.

The Japanese beetles have arrived and are wreaking havoc on almost everything:

We had a bunch of big storms roll through, and I caught some cool lightning on the horizon with one of them:

I know it was a big storm by way of my country rain gauge, aka the wheelbarrow left out in the storm

Some more random photos:

Until next time!