Honey, blueberries, raspberries and more sweet abundance

So we are thinking about getting into honey bees. Both Steve and I have always been fascinated by them, and we know how important bees are for our survival, since they pollinate our food. Have you ever thought about that? If there are no bees to pollinate your food, there won't be any food. Period. And the honeybees are perishing at an alarming rate. I won't go into all the reasons and politics of all this right now, but I do want to show you some images from our friends' recent honey extraction. We watched (and sampled) as our new bee keeper friend Jerry prepared his top-bar hives for honey harvest. What a fascinating process, and what an incredible, golden end result!

My hope is that bees are so much less maintenance than, say, goats. We could do this!

Talking about sweetness: our lives are filled with blueberries and raspberries at the moment. We are blessed to have Cascadian Farm nearby, with acres and acres of these addictive morsels of flavor (certified organic!). We are taking full advantage of that! It helps to have kids that are old enough to help fill the picking buckets, so picking doesn't take hours and hours. I took the kids picking in the evening the other day, and since we've been suffering through a heat wave and it was still hot even later in the day, I bribed them with ice cream (also sold at Cascadian Farm). They picked well.

The next day we went after raspberries. We gathered a bunch of friends, both adult and kid size, and headed for the field, where we picked, chatted, and caught up with each other.

In the meantime, Steve has been cranking on the addition to our house. He starts early in the morning and ends in the evening. Within five days, he got it all framed with a roof on. What a guy! This will be an amazing addition to our lives, and I am especially excited about the extra bathroom and bathtub with a killer view!

The garden is, of course, blooming and growing and feeding us royally. It not only feeds our bodies, but also our senses with all the gorgeous smells, textures, and sights. Eva loves wandering through the rows of vegetables, snacking on kale that's higher than her. I've been making a lot of carrot salad with our crunchy, sweet carrots. And there's cauliflower cheese soup, naturally, since I have lots of pounds of cheese stored away in my cheese cave.

The week ended with a cheese making class I taught. Eight people attended, and five of them were kids or teenagers. What a joy to teach these young people how to make cheese! They were really into it, and I captured a moment of cutting cheese on my camera. This was one of only two classes I will teach this year, so if you are interested in attending my last class in September (September 20th), please let me know so I can put you on my list! You will get to sample a lot of cheese I make.  More info here.

Perfect life? Ahem.

Last week, the whole family picked U-pick raspberries at Cascadian Farm. As we gorged ourselves on the sweet berries while also managing to put a few in the bucket, surrounded by gorgeous mountain views and our laughing children, Steve mused, “I wonder if the people who read your blog think we have a picture perfect life”. I almost choked on a raspberry, laughing.Us, perfect?  I have wondered the same thing though. Do you read about our sweet farming life and do you look at all my beautiful pictures, thinking our life is perfect?

The Sahlin's are posing with our harvest

The reward for picking pounds and pounds of raspberries in the heat

The view from our ice cream eating spot at Cascadian Farm

I asked Steve, “What would you want my readers to know instead?” He answered, “Tell them about the dog poop on the carpet every morning.” (Yes, it's true. Our old dog Pluto is having problems at the moment, and every morning we wake up to dog puke or dog poop quietly stewing on the carpet.) He also said, “Tell them about mucking out the stinky goat barn.”

So you see, our lives aren't all sunshine and playing at the beach, smelling beautiful flowers, and petting little baby goats and chickies. Many mornings, I stumble out of bed into dog poop. Many days, I swear at the laundry that multiplies exponentially while I sleep. I am often too tired to do dishes in the evening, and then I wake up to an awful mess first thing in the morning. I don't even want to tell you about the times when I turn into a psycho with PMS, and how the sound of Steve chewing his dinner the wrong way makes me want to stab him with a fork. Then there are the days when Steve comes home from work, and I meet him at the door crying, because Eva's three year old behavior makes me want to take the credit card and fly to Mexico. Alone.

Where you see pictures of my beautiful roses and my vegetable garden, there was a lot of blood and sweat going on behind the scenes. Where you see pictures of thriving pigs, there were days spent schlepping feed to them in the pouring rain twice a day, and them biting a hole through my boot in return. Where you see cute little baby goats, there was a long night spent in the barn, agonizing about a difficult birth with stillborn goats.

But here's the thing: Writing my blog and taking pictures for it makes me put my life in perspective. It makes me step back a bit, looking at my life objectively, and realizing how damn good it is. Sharing my life with you in this way is like therapy for me, kind of like knitting. It calms down my hyper, production oriented self, and makes me focus on the beauty in my life, taking stock of what's real.

So let me show you the beauty of my life this week, knowing full well that it is not perfect, although it may look like it.

We received 63 little chicks in the mail to be raised as broilers.  We participated in two different birthday parties for our friends' kids.  And we ate a lot of food from our garden.  I spun yarn under the cherry tree, while being bombarded with cherries falling down.

Eva greeting a chick after drinking her blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry goat milk yogurt smoothie.

Eva's best friend Vija celebrating her birthday with us,  Look at these gorgeous (gluten free) cupcakes, decorated with freshly picked huckleberries and rose petals from the garden.

Lots of fun at a birthday party for the neighbors' grand kids.  Every kid gets a present so nobody feels left out.  Eva got a princess dress!

Garlic scapes - the garlic bulbs are almost ready to harvest

The blueberries will ripen soon

Borage growing by the squash

Larkspur and nasturtiums growing by the beets

Eva eating nasturtiums

A squash blossom waiting to do its thing

If you liked the last sun hat I knitted, and you want one for yourself, you can get it here in my Etsy shop.  This one is cream colored and turned out lovely.

Thirty pounds of strawberries

This morning, my slaves children and me spent an hour on our hands and knees stuffing strawberries into our mouths picking strawberries. We headed to Cascadian Farm, where they not only make the most delicious organic ice cream, but also grow acres and acres of organic blueberries and strawberries. Since we are a cheap kind of family, the concept of U-pick really appeals to us.  You save a considerable amount of money when you crawl around in the dirt, picking your own fruit while sweat runs down your back.  It really puts the lives of farmworkers into perspective - they do this all day long, for months (and get paid minimum wage for it).

We picked over 30 pounds of those sweet red treasures today – enough to eat with whipping cream tonight, and enough to freeze gallons of them for smoothies. The U-pick field is the most idyllic place you can imagine – with mountains rising in the background, blue sky, and thousands and thousands of strawberries nestled among greenery. It's heaven, really. And a place for profound insight, for example Lukas commenting while picking berries, “The redder they are the better they are.” What a wise soul he is.

This week was filled with industrious food making, food growing and food gathering. It started with Saturday's cheese making class, which was absolutely packed. I even had to turn people away! Hopefully, they will sign up for the July13 class. Every time I teach this class, I am so blown away by the amazing people I meet. I swear, I get more out of these classes than they do: I end up with a clean house and all these new friends!

Talking about friends: A couple of days ago, Eva got to spend a day with her bestest, bestest friend. They were fairies together, making a home under the lilac bush, putting flowers into each others' hair, having a picnic on the lawn, attending a graduation party. The fun just didn't stop. And as they were busy entertaining each other, Steve and I worked in the garden (and taking pictures of it). We got our watermelon bed tilled, composted, and planted. Hopefully, we shall feast on watermelons in a few months. Then again, it's a gamble in our climate... but a worthwile gamble.

I will leave you with an image of Eva with the dress I knit her when she was a six month old baby.  Yesterday is the first time she wore it.