Backyard Farmgals

Peach season is upon us!  Praise the heavens for peaches, they are here!  I have been the queen of peaches this year.  I get to harvest them day after day, and believe me, I love it.  The perk of the job is that I get to eat a few tree ripened peachy orbs of flavor every day, and it's glorious!  Juice dripping down your arm and chin, life doesn't get any more perfect. MONSTER PEACH!  1.1 lbs or 18 oz of peachy goodness that I picked at the Research Farm. I had a little reason to celebrate today.  A second paper of mine is being published.  Nothing huge, just a reference for home gardeners on how to grow currants.  Still a reason to celebrate, and I needed something to celebrate with, preferably something peachy!  My boss passed a recipe to me earlier in the week and it seemed perfect: a creamy, peachy, almost no-bake cheesecake.  I cleaned it up a bit, took out a lot of the sugar and the whipped topping and added some good stuff, mainly cream and vanilla bean.  It tur

Early morning berry patch A view of the mountains from the berry patch The raspberry patch is one of my favorite places on the Research Farm.  It is peaceful there.  I have spent several mornings there working away, watching the sun rise, usually listening to opera or some other beautiful piece of music.  It smells glorious, and it tastes even better, but don't tell anyone because I am not supposed to eat the berries, just count and weigh them! Harvesting with new harvesting crates Part of my job is learning about raspberry harvest here at the farm.  When I first heard about it, I thought to myself that it couldn't be that hard.  First wrong thought.  Harvesting raspberries consumes more time here than anything else that I have seen.  Peach harvest is a close second.  It's not just harvesting raspberries, it's also taking data (sugar percentage, counting, and weighing), packaging, sorting, and selling the berries. My first day of harvest didn&

Tucked away in the vegetable cover crop study was a sweet little something.  No fluff, no sticks or twigs, just a depression in the soil.  At first two speckled eggs and a crazy neurotic bird screeching and playing dead simultaneously (still not sure how she did that).  Long legs and a cute little run.  Mama killdeer ( Charadrius vociferous ) did everything to distract me as I approached her little clutch.   A week later, I braved the shrieking to find four eggs, all tucked together, bits of dried grass tucked around the eggs.  Softness.  This time, a much more crazy bird, flapping furiously while she laid on her side.  Like she was dying and she knew I was soft hearted and I would help.  Silly bird, instead of running to her, I snapped a photo of her soon-to-be family.   Buckwheat growing up all around the depression, each time I peeked it became more difficult to find as the plant cover grew taller and taller.  Then one day, three naked and helpless babies.  Egg

I have taken a hiatus from life, so it seems.  Blog, farm, life all tossed aside for the last three and a bit more months.  Why?  To learn.  A marvelous opportunity came my way; a chance to learn from some wonderfully intelligent people about how to farm with both vegetables and fruits.  I look back to three months ago, watching myself walk away in slow motion, especially from my nursing job.  Many of you know that I am an operating room nurse.  I have worked with some of the most well known and respected surgeons in the country.  I have worked trauma, seeing everything imaginable; some sights and smells that I wish I could forget, other things, miraculous, that are still like dreams to me.  It's not that I didn't love that life, it's just that I couldn't handle the stress of it anymore.  Handing instruments with my hands covered in someone else's blood and putting amputated feet in boxes became too much for me.  Nurses have a burnout zone, and thirteen years into m