New for dangerous girls and daring boys

New since the beginning of the month is The Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls – “inspired by The Dangerous Book for Boys and the upcoming The Daring Book for Girls” but “not connected in any way to the authors or publishers of those books”. Rather, the new blog is brought to you [...]

The still-lie down

Our beautiful, loyal 12-year-old German Shepherd, mistress of all she surveyed on the farm, died last week.
While she was older and ailing, she was nevertheless coping wonderfully and enjoying all the usual summer activities — chasing chickens, getting to know the new bull, playing and dozing with the cats, gulping down treats left over from [...]

Country fair time!

The latest Country Fair of Homeschooling is up and ready to go. Meg is hosting this month — thank you, Meg!
And I’m a day late with the news because I’ve been busy with our real life country fair, now celebrating its 101st year. The kids and I were at the work bee on Saturday, [...]

Poetry Friday: Gardening and grammar, with Guy Wetmore Carryl

Two poems from Guy Wetmore Carryl’s Grimm Tales Made Gay (1903):
How a Girl Was Too Reckless of Grammar by Farby Guy Wetmore Carryl (1873-1904)
Matilda Maud MackenzieFrankly hadn’t any chin,Her hands were rough, her feet sheTurned invariably in;Her general form was German,By which I mean that youHer waist could not determineTo within a foot or two:And [...]

Poetry Friday: A very sad sonnet

We’re in the third day of what’s supposed to be a five-day heat wave, with temperatures over 30 Celsius (in the 90s F). We don’t have an air conditioner or even a ceiling fan, so the trick here is to close all the windows and pull the shades and curtains around 10 a.m. before the [...]

Still in the garden

The raised bed flower garden behind the house, back in May.

Same raised bed flower garden behind the house, in the last week. Columbines at far right, poppies to their left, tall things in the center are monkshood. I’m happiest when the cows and calves stay on their side of the barbed wire fence (in the [...]

In the garden and around the farm

The kids’ frog farm, with tadpoles and baby frogs found in the ditch by the house. Tom says he’s never seen as many frogs as we have this year because of all the rains. Odd to think as children that I did more tadpole hunting, albeit at the Bronx and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, than my [...]

More from the garden

Eggs from the duck nest in the backyard, not 10 feet from the house. We watched over the duck and her nest for almost a month, mostly from a distance and not too often, and despite the nearby marauding magpies, the duck managed to hatch out all 10 eggs. We checked on the nest on [...]

Mary Mary quite contrary

And Becky, too. Recent snaps from the garden. I’ll post more as Blogger and dial-up will let me.

Columbines

More columbines. They’ve been blooming for almost a month, show no signs of giving up any time soon, and their shapes and colors make me happy.

This is cheating a bit. This is the Dropmore honeysuckle, above, [...]

Miraculous blog post round-up

Suzanne at Adventures in Daily Living enjoyed the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle so much that she’s decided to start an AVM Blog Post Round-up.
Suzanne is also very talented at making nifty buttons to dress things up, as you can see above. Thanks, Suzanne!

Little Heathens and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in The Christian Science Monitor

From today’s Christian Science Monitor, from Marilyn Gardner’s column, “A harvest of virtues as well as sustenance”, with the subtitle, “Two new books remind readers how closely most Americans used to be connected to the land”:
If spring is the season when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love, summer is the time when [...]

More from Millie Kalish

From “‘Grandma, tell me a farm story’…and boy, did she ever” by Susan L. Rife for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Florida, where Mildred Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression — now winging its way to me — lived with her husband in retirement [...]

Semicolon’s Saturday Review of Books

Or, turnabout is fair play.
Sherry at Semicolon was kind enough to submit a poem to yesterday’s Poetry Friday, so since I find I have a reviewish post this week and some computer time this morning, I sent the post to Sherry’s weekly roundup, the Saturday Review Books.
If you discount my initial goof, where my finger [...]

Poetry Friday: Fireflies and a round-up

Button courtesy of the very kind Suzanne at Adventures in [...]

Food, Family, Fellowship: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver is as good a farmer as she is a writer. Or maybe that should be the other way around. And her nonfiction is a delight.
I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life over the long weekend, and enjoyed it very much. It’s warm, funny, and includes recipes, including one [...]

Words to remember, words to live by

A Creed for Americans (1942)by Stephen Vincent Benét
We believe in the dignity of man and the worth and value of every living soul, no matter in what body housed, no matter whether born in comfort or born in poverty, no matter to what stock he belongs, what creed he professes, what job he holds.
We believe [...]

Gosh all hemlock!

I’m enough of a Luddite that I found it more than a bit disconcerting earlier today, when bringing up the Amazon website to look at a book, to find the main page welcoming me with “Science Picks for Becky”. But disconcertedness turned to intrigue when the first cover’s illustration, and then its title, caught my [...]