Love at first sight.

Finally, finally finally. I met my Marius today.
He's still with his biological family on a farm not too far away, and he's going to be in the forest this summer, grazing and socializing with them. Then, in autumn, he'll move out here, to be a part of this family.
He's a year old, and beautiful.
My heart skips a beat when I think about him. Yes, it must have been love at first sight!

Below: Marius in the middle, his mother Vesle-Mari to the left.


Marius (right) and his mother:

So long, beautiful!

A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood.

With these words starts our favorite book/film these days (these months, rather) - The Gruffalo. If you're not yet acquainted with the clever/cunning/brave little brown mouse and his "friends", it's definitely time to do so! (If you have kids, I guess.) The book is quite simple (but sweet!), but the film (and the sequel, The Gruffalo's Child!) is really good. So good, that we know all the words by heart, that we watch it many times a week (it's only half an hour long), and that we've even become the characters.
Here below: The little brown mouse, fittingly on a walk in the deep dark wood. (Photo: The Gruffalo's wife.)

The Indian of the group.

...with a self-made feather crown made out of wooden pearls and chicken feathers. Pretty!

Today:

It seems this heat wave has passed onto greener pastures (!), so again we are left with a bit of cold draft around us. Today still qualified as a summers day, so I ran out into the garden to check the status this morning. And whatdoyouknow - we have seedlings! Proof below.
Also, the greenhouse is up, and shall bring us lustrious tomatoes, herbs and cucumbers this summer too. The joys of being an old school housewife was topped with pegging up the laundry outside, in the breeze. You know that smell, don't you? Heaven.

♥

We've got to get ourselves back to the garden...

...sang Joni Mitchell, and although this isn't exactly Woodstock (which her song is about), it still is a groundbreaking project for us - in literal terms! This last week (my first week of summer break, yay!) has been all about digging up and preparing the soil, sowing the seeds and in general making a good, practical and fertile vegetable patch for our family. So far we have put down seeds for spinach, different salad types, peas, carrots, cucumbers, leeks, turnips, courgettes, different herbs and beautiful flowers. Fingers crossed it will turn out better than last year, which was a disaster because the soil in that garden wasn't soil, but sand. I really don't want to talk about it, haha (still sore).
I'm lucky enough to have little helpers too, so how could it go wrong?

Ps: If you see here and here, you'll see that we have happy experiences with veg farming, too! :)

Scenes of summer.

Last night.

Today:

Summer is here, and we're making the most of it! (Because let's face it, chances are it might leave again soon. Sorry about the pessimism!)
I am officially off work for the summer, so finally the work on a vegetable garden could start! Fashionably late, yes, but we've sown this late before with success, so fingers crossed! And to be fair, we really haven't had anywhere to prepare a garden until now, this being a building site and all. But now! Oh yes, now we're talking. I've dug up quite a bit of land, and Mr. Payne started fencing around it this evening. Because without a fence, no garden - our free range chickens would put a stop to that pronto. So hopefully, seeds will be in the ground tomorrow! Yay!
What else...oh yes. Pancakes. And homework, as always. And homemade bread! My new craze, I can feel it. And at the end of the day, we made the most of it again, with the resources we have anyway, and had a small scale pool party in our tufty back garden.
A lovely summer day!

The apple trees are in bloom and life is good.

A day at the barber's.

Among Mr. Payne's many talents are his hair dressing abilities. The little ladies in the field had a taste of that today, so now we have bags full of wonderful wool, and six naked sheep.

Views.

Some of the scenery on my way to work/town. Twenty minutes of luxury!

Today:

Before having to get dressed and act civilized, we did what we enjoy the most: Farm stuff, together.
Today's chore was putting the potatoes in the ground!