Fame for our homestead - and a wedding!!!

Will you look at this daliah?  Does your heart rate speed up when you gaze at it?  This flower is one of hundreds my friend Brandie and I picked for her wedding.  I have an amazing, generous friend who is a flower farmer, and she let us cut as many Daliahs as we wanted.  We were giddy.  We picked, with our hearts pounding out of our chests.  We kept screaming at each other, "Can you believe this???"  And then, with my minivan stuffed to the max with flowers, we drove to our homestead, where we got ready for the wedding.

I'm still feeling high from the experience with the flowers, the wedding, the 70 people celebrating this love at our homestead...  I won't publish any pictures of the bride and groom to give them their privacy, but I will show you some of the going-ons, like dancing to our own neighborhood band (Jumbled Pie), dressing up in a fancy dress and leading the goats to pasture, posing with my friend Andrea (we sang at the ceremony), enlisting the help of young guests to collect duck eggs...

The wedding and party were a rousing success!  Steve and I felt honored to host this event, and although it was a lot of work to get ready, we didn't feel stressed out at all.  In fact, the day before the wedding, many friends showed up to pitch in with whatever we needed help with.  Several ladies marched into my vegetable garden (the backdrop for the band) and weeded it.  They weeded it!!!  And not only did they weed it, they also looked gorgeous and cheerful doing it!!!  I kept staring at them, shaking my head in disbelief. 

And then, just like that, the wedding was over.  The aftermath of the party was cleaned up, the tables and chairs returned, the flowers slowly moving towards their demise.  And life returned to normal.  It felt bittersweet, that.  Going from glamour, noise and fun to... digging in the dirt, milking goats, shoveling manure, harvesting produce.  But there's nothing more grounding and soothing than doing just that, and so we started feeling our rhythm as a family again.  The kids helped with the onion and potato harvest.  They also helped pick apples and pounds and pounds of figs.  They harvested carrots for dinner, basil for pesto, and blackberries for dessert.

I will leave you with a shout-out for our Homestead.  We got published in Grow Northwest Magazine!  There's a two page article about us and our offerings, and you can check it out here.