My Morning

It's a beautiful morning here at Goodness Grows Farm.  After a very late night of fitting goats (that means using a clipper to trim their fur in a way that highlights their positive attributes and hides their flaws - I also view this as trickery and do not think fitting animals should be permitted in shows, but that is an entire different post) and a very late supper, we are off to a semi-slow start this morning.  Well, the children are at least.  Erik was up at 5:30 to get his equipment ready and loaded to travel to South Pointe to work with Western Pennsylvania Geothermal to complete a Geothermal project.  I was up at 6:45 to tend to Whit.

Maggie woke around 8:30.  She laid down on the couch and I put Whitaker next to her and this is what happened:

Then I decided to go outside and pull some of the mint that is growing everywhere in my one flower bed.  I'm not opposed to it running wild as it has - I knew it was a terribly invasive plant, but it's starting to cover the steps leading to the play set, so I wanted to pull some of the stuff covering the steps.  As I reach down to pull some of the mint out,  I see this:

Our friendly (but scary) garter snake.  I know he is good to have around the house - I just don't like seeing him so much!  He's been getting around quite a bit.  I'm not sure I like that so much!

Being out in that flower bed led me to see this:

My dad gave the kids big pumpkins last October for Halloween.  We put them on our stone steps and didn't throw them out before the first snowfall.  After a long winter of massive snowfalls, the pumpkins had rotted and decayed leaving nothing but a large pile of seeds that had started to sprout.  I threw the seeds off to the side - not even scraping up any dirt for them to root into.  A month or so later, here is my pumpkin patch.  I couldn't figure out what those pretty yellow flowers were in that part of the bed - I knew I hadn't planted anything there.  How exciting.  Although, if they grow anything like the last batch of pumpkins I tried to do - Big Max Pumpkins - everyone will be pretty disappointed.  My Big Max's turned out to look more like "little oranges."  

Not even a two year old gets excited about carving a little orange!