We’ve been blessed this year. I’ll show you some pictures of our summer.

As you can see from the leaves on the trees, most of these pictures are from at least a month ago.

Here’s a summer shot of Adoniram taking a break from digging carrots. (Or was he just borrowing my fork for a leaning post?) You can see our unfinished vegetable washing shed beyond the grapevine.  On the right is one of the shelter wagons that the boys had just built for the free-range turkeys to roost on for the night. They provide shade during the day as well.

Here’s a picture Caleb took from the top of one of our new grain bins. This was a few weeks ago before we brought the cows into the barn. You can see the chicken shelters in the background. The dirt piles in the centre are from the beginnings of our new pond.

View of the market garden showing a row of young fruit trees and perennials on the left.

The garden grew very well all summer with the unusually regular rains we had. Finally, frost ended much of it, but we still have some root vegetables out there. The boys enjoyed cutting down our super tall sunflowers with a Belizean machete. They piled the stalks to be used as mulch in a perennial patch later.

A view of some of our cows. Because of the rains they had good grass all summer, even though there were some areas where the soil needed a fertility boost. Now, after a season of moving our poultry over the pastures, the grasses’ root systems will be much better prepared in case of a dry spell next summer.

The pond on the left of this picture is not finished yet. We began digging it this summer when the waterway began drying up, but we couldn’t finish it because of a tractor breakdown. It rained that night and never dried off again. So, the pond will wait until next summer.

The other day we anchored down the laying hens’ shelters, closed off the open ends for the winter, and put a deep layer of wood chips inside to keep them high and dry. 

The cows are in the barn, eating hay…and wishing for green pastures again. In this rainy weather they are definitely more comfortable in the barn, though.

The pigs are still in the woods, but we’ll move them to their winter paddocks soon and pack their little huts with piles of hay for them to tunnel into in the winter.

And we are much more prepared for winter than we were at this time last year, when we had just landed at this farm!