2016 Farm Highlights

I have been behind on updating our blog this year, so I'm trying to do most of it all at once now that Thanksgiving is almost here.  Farm life for the past year has been busy, productive, wet, and muddy.  The trees loved all the extra rain, but the chickens weren't big fans of it and it was nice to have a few months where the eggs weren't all muddy when the weather eased, but it's definitely better here to have too much rain rather than too little.  Our nobles got a chance to recover somewhat from last years scorching and our young trees are slowly getting closer to a harvestable size.  I think the biggest and best surprise of 2016 is that Tux is still with us.  He is over 16 years old and definitely showing his age, but he is happy and still has lots of good days.  We don't know how much longer he'll be here, but we sure feel lucky that he's still with us.

Tux at the start of 2016:

Kitty stoically ignoring her best friend (the neighbor's cat):

These pop pop flowers have the sweetest smell in spring:

A tiny ladybug recently hatched:

The chickens really enjoy the freshly turned earth in the flower garden.  The flowers don't enjoy the chickens quite as much:

Al and Paco are always so happy when the fresh green grass comes up and the rain abates so they can graze and dry off a bit:

This beetle is big and beautiful and I just learned its name, the Golden Buprestid Beetle:

This mama and her fawn have really made themselves at home here. We see them often in the orchard, in the woods, and even sometimes right outside our kitchen:

A little bit of luck:

We had a tremendous year of hummingbirds:

This was an especially splendid male Anna's hummingbird:

How many alpacas do you see?  Paco is catching some shade now that they are near maximum fluffiness:

Our garden this year was the best ever.  Early crops included strawberries, radishes, and kale that actually had wintered over successfully from the previous year:

Dragonflies are difficult to photograph.  This one stood still long enough for me to focus:

One of many rainbows, always uplifting:

Fresh haircut:

These two butterflies spent a few days here together:

The harvest becomes more of a rainbow as summer arrives:

If you look closely, you can see this hummingbird's tongue:

Tux still going strong, although he prefers cooler weather:

This tiny baby bat fell from its nest in the barn.  We put him back up high where he could climb back to his family.  He started calling and getting very excited when he realized where he was:

Down by the creek:

We found some perfectly intact bobcat prints:

It's hard to tell the size of this frog in the photo, but he was huge, about as big as my fist just hiding under a rock I happened to pick up:

One proud mama hen with her peep:

Around July 4th, a big blimp flew by and confused the alpacas.  It actually came much closer than this to where we could really see how enormous it was:

The Western Tanager always shows up around cherry season, although this year our trees were mostly resting so it didn't have quite as much to eat from our orchard as it usually does:

During peak production we were getting lots of eggs in lots of colors:

This isn't a great photo but this spider was so neat.  I had never seen one that was so white before with brilliant red spots.  It was big too, seen here on the remains of a fig:

We named this frog Tiny.  It was about the size of my thumbnail.  He settled happily in our garden and hopefully grew to be less tiny than he was.  We had a very healthy frog population in there, so we like to think he did well too:

Our garden this year was a labor of love for sure.  Lots of work, lots of wonderful produce, and a nice home for lots of critters:

Just making cider... nothing to see here...  Or you can look up GISHWHES:

Chickens and Storm Troopers, happy together (GISHWHES):

One last GISHWHES photo, defending the farm from a drone wearing my best kitchen accessories:

We had an abundant apple crop this year, particularly from the trees we planted about 3 years ago:

The Queen Anne's Lace is always so lovely and tall when it takes over the fields.  And Tux is still going strong:

This big spider made its home in our garden and ate very well:

I was very excited to make pickles this year using our own cucumbers and our own dill and grape leaves:

By mid-summer we start seeing a lot more squashes and tomatoes in our crop:

This mantis was enjoying its evening atop one of our large pumpkins.  In case you can't tell from the photo, it's a very large mantis too:

This frog is very small.  It was climbing up one of our plant barrels in the garden:

Late summer crops:

I was especially excited that we grew tasty corn this year.  We had tried previously but the only ones who liked it were the chickens.  This was tender and juicy and sweet:

A mantis enjoying the sprinkling:

We were happy to see this great horned owl:

We don't want the snails in the garden, but they are very cute residents on the ferns in the woods, especially ones as tiny as this one:

Craig moving the alpacas out to graze:

Fall crops including late tomatoes, some squash, melon and our first pumpkin:

This last photo is of this volunteer plant that just popped up in our flower garden.  It is big and beautiful with gorgeous purple flowers.  We hope it comes back again next year:

And now with the 2016 holiday season rapidly approaching, and just a few apples and some kale remaining to harvest, it's time for us to start thinking more about turkey, and then about trees.