June days on the farm

Cherry pickin' days

Cherry pie nights!

New expanded dog run for Phoenix and Henry.  This is just the north end - the whole east side of the barn is enclosed, too. 

Early Summer Scenes at Home Again Farm

Our "prairie galleons", sailing the wide blue sky of June

Hot dog (literally), cooling himself in the water tank

Bilbo loves to paw the water and make it splash.

I thought I'd put the paddle pool out so the dogs could cool themselves better.  My first two customers were Skip and Dude.

June brings the Gebhard Woods Dulcimer Festival to Morris.  It's a nationally known event for both hammered and mountain dulcimers.  The park was alive with music and music-makers at performances and instructional workshops.  We always used to help by hosting performers in our home but this year I worked at the admissions booth.

June also brought swarming hives that needed to be captured and settled in new hive bodies.  Anne and Kenji jumped into bee suits to help me save the swarms.

 True friends load up their chicken butchering equipment and trailer it over AND help with the whole process!  We butchered 44 broiler chickens in about an hour and a half.  Now they are in the freezer and prepared for good eating.  We KNOW what went into our food when we raise them ourselves.

Kenji maintains the dubious honor of the Chicken Killing Meister.  There's never joy in killing animals but these had a great life on the farm and were quickly and humanely killed when their time came.  

Micah is running the plucker.

Chicken processing crew

Tee's first experience cleaning chickens.  She did great and learned a lot, especially about chicken anatomy!

Micah and Lucas, of their own free will, chose to help with the processing.  Lucas carried birds from the plucker to the processing table and helped wash the cleaned birds.

"Dyed-in-the-bibs" farmers cleaning up at the end of the process.

As you can tell from the photos, Joel, Tee, Micah and Lucas are now living here on the farm with us so we're eight people in the house.  Fortunately there is room for all and communal living has been so fun.  The boys are loving farm life - riding bikes, building dams in the creek, discovering fireflies and the joy of endless space to run and explore.  We're finding that 6 adults to 2 kids is a good ratio for always having someone to keep an eye on them.  They especially love having Auntie Mei-Mei (Anne) play cards with them and that's when things get out-of-control-silly.  They are also her garden apprentices.

Preparing decorations for the big Uno night - this is serious work, getting ready for the fun.