high hopes gardens is a living experiment. Can a creative, hard-working family make a living working with nature? Join us on the journey from idea to practice as we revive an Iowa Farmstead.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room!
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Sep | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Sometimes it’s nice to have a boy who likes to climb trees - especially when there are plums to get near the top of a tree that might not hold the weight of a full-grown adult.
You can see Martin’s head peeking out from the middle of the tree. He’s a bit cautious as he wanted to wear his bike helmet.
We’ve been a bit slow getting Martin proficient on a bike - it’s hard to learn on gravel, but it’s time to get him started.
Here he’s swapping the training wheels off one bike and putting them on another. He’s handy enough with the wrenches that he is able to take off, install, and lower and raise the training wheels on his own. There’s a couple of bike options for him - the one he’s pictured with is pink and says “Dream Girl” on the chain guard, and he wasn’t a fan of that, so is moving the training wheels to another bike after Dad said “get over it or change the training wheels yourself.” It’s good to build self-reliance!
Today was honey extraction day.
Martin, GJ, and Linda donned their beekeeper’s suits and robbed the honey. Here Martin helps smoke out the bees before GJ takes off a super.
A beautiful frame full of honey.
The newest addition to the honey extraction process is an electric uncapping knife - it worked spendidly removing the wax tops from the frames.
Emma shows off an uncapped frame, ready for the extractor.
We use a manual extractor, just put in four frames and turn the hand crank, wait for it to stop spinning, flip the frames around and repeat the spin.
Martin’s job is to run the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor to filter the honey through a couple of filters. It’s always a hot job as the room should be 85-95 degrees to allow the honey to flow more freely through the extraction process.
Today was the first day of school for Emma and Martin.
If you ask me, August 18, is too early to go back to school, especially with a school that has some buildings that are not air conditioned and we’ve been let out in August in the past for “heat days.”
We’ve lucked out lately as the weather has turned normal and dry..
The fruity season continues in full swing.
Martin with one haul of peaches.
The plums are so thick they look like grapes. This tree is propped up with many boards to keep the branches from cracking under the weight of the plums.
It was a day to dig up some of the potatoes and garlic.
Unfortunately, the kids were so efficient at cleaning and putting away the garlic in the hayloft, that I was’t even able to get a picture of this year’s garlic crop! Linda is sporting a new potato fork - the old wooden fork broke last fall and was replaced with a new fiberglass model.
Martin is using the fruit picker to harvest the last of the apples from the tree that was laid down on the ground during one of the spring storms.
The tree is literally hanging on by a thread and we’re hoping to get it through this year so we can grab a graft next spring to continue the tree - it’s an old variety that ripens in mid-July and is good for pies and sauce.
On Martin’s special request, yesterday was a gj and Martin at Rieman Gardens in Ames day.
Reiman Gardens are Iowa’s largest public gardens, with 11 themed gardens.
Along with the gardens is a butterfly conservatory, thus the appropriately-themed chair in the garden.
Martin took some photos, including this texture-rich photo of a tropical leaf in the conservatory.
One of the butterflies in the conservatory.
As part of the Costa Rican exchange, after our visit to Costa Rica agricultural sites this past February, the Ticos are now visiting Iowa and it is our turn to reciprocate for the warm welcome we received.
The stage is set for dinner and dancing - it turned out to be a perfect July evening - in the 70’s with a dry north breeze.
Here’s the group that is visting Iowa. Four of the members of the group we met in Costa Rica, the others are new to us.
Here “Lonna and the Pretty Good Band” start the evening off right after a dinner of iowa sweet corn, watermelon, hot dogs, rice and beans, and strawberry, apple, and cherry crisps and cobblers from fruit from the farm.
Lonna, the caller, started us out easy in a circle dance. Despite the language barrier for some dancers, they would quickly catch on the the steps and as music and dancing are a universal language, there was much laughter and levity.
Whoo! The circle comes together!
Annie, our neighborhood piano tuner and musician arranged the band for us.
Lonna did the calling for the dancers.
Swing your partner.
Heel to toe and ’round again. Emma kicks off her shoes and enjoys a dance.
Martin was very popular with the ladies and danced every dance in good form.
As the band played into the evening, the shadows fell as the music went on.
For those of you with Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, you can click the icon above to see 15 seconds of the dancing with Ticos, complete with music!
I thought a seven-year-old boy would appreciate the life in the wetland, so I made it a point to bring Martin over and wax on enthusiastically about the tadpoles and diversity of life in the small exclosure when we were working on the trees in the back pasture.
A bit later, he was helping mulch some trees and ran out of things to do, so he asked if he could go look at the swamp, as he refers to it. I watched from a distance as he first climbed part way up the fence, peering in. I made a bet with myself that it wouldn’t be long before he crawled over the fence and went inside to look. Sure enough, the pull was too strong and he crawled over the fence.
A few minutes later he came running at full speed towards me, face red with heat in the 90 degree day “Dad, there’s a turtle in the swamp!” He shaped his hands about as big as a dinner plate and retold the story of the turtle siting. As I went back to see if I could spy the turtle he turned to me and said “Dad, the farm is getting a lot bigger now.” I asked him what he meant and he said “Now we have a swamp, we have a baby forest, and a wind turbine.” Even though you can’t buy that comment with MasterCard, I still thought it was priceless.
An important component to vacation is adapting to life on the dock.
The dock is a great place to be as it is a good place to watch the world go by - it’s usually a bit breezier (less buggy), and a place to watch bobber and read a book. Over the years, there has been a steady escalation in discovery and procurement of the ultimate dock chairs.
The trade-offs are portability vs ability of chair to withstand wind and not blow into the lake. This chair is firmly anchored to the dock!
One day when the younger girls and moms were out on an overnight, we looked at our map and decided we’d try to get to a location up a series of rapids and pools to another lake. There was not a trail or portage between these lakes, which is rare - we thought “how bad can it be?” and especially if we weren’t in a hurry or had a lot of gear, we could find our way over land or water and find the remote fishing hole that receives few, if, any visitors. Here Martin catches his breath after we bushwhack over the first group of rapids, paddle over a short pool and try to plot the next rapids, whether it would be better to drag the canoes up the rapids, or make a path over land.
The water path was not very feasible - long stretches of inches-deep water flowing over a bed of boulders. The over land path was not much better - stretches of mud interrupted by steep rocky ledges all along a winding stream with thick growth. We tried for an hour or so before resigning ourselves to the obvious fact that there was a perfectly good reason there was not a portage trail between these two lakes in this location.
We brought some gorp (good old raisins and peanuts) along for a snack which the kids enjoyed on the adventure.
Another popular vacation pastime is fishing.
This year we added a minnow seine to our list of stuff to drag up to the cabin. By all accounts it was a wildly successful venture as we were able to catch as many minnows as we needed. In past years, if we wanted minnows after the first 2-3 days, we’d have to fetch them in town, 23 miles away, so we often went without.
Marty and I quickly got the hang of the seine net and scooped up no where near our limit of 24 dozen! It made catching the bait almost as much fun as catching the fish.
Not all the fish are this big! Here is a tough decision between taking off a fish or eating a smore!
One evening we paddled out to a rocky, treeless island and fished in the middle of the lake. One of Martin’s new lures gave him a thrill - he bought some impregnatedfishysmellingrubber crawdads and had the pleasure of a small pike jump out of the water to get his lure as he was lifting the crawdad out of the water. I decided the rubbery crayfish was the perfect 7-year-old bait as it is equally alluring being reeled in or lying on the bottom when attention wanes.
Here I am modeling my new line of “Fidel Wear” as I realized all my clothes that day were olive green and brown, unofficial colors of the revloution. Fishing was not great - probably caught about a dozen keepers. We found that a snapping turtle found the docks to be an open buffet.
One day we caught some fish in the morning and a few hours later, all that was left were the fish heads on the stringer. The next day, on a deeper dock and with us gone for just an hour for dinner, the turtle got another meal. So, on the annual mid-week shopping run to Ely, I got one of the old fashioned collapsable steel mesh baskets to keep the fish in and officially closed the all you can eat buffet.
Yesterday was a big travel day - 10 hours in the van to Kawishiwi Lodge only a few miles south of Canada, literally at the end of the road near Ely, MN. We like the place as it is the only resort that sits on a BWCA Wilderness lake and therefore are no motorboats, jet skis, or even air traffic over the area. The kids can swim in the lake and canoe without worrying about propellers or wakes.
Everyone thought the minivan is as sporty as it can look with the black canoe up on top.
Emma is eager with anticipation as she helps unload the canoe from the top of the van.
Here’s home for most of the week.
Cabin 10 has been our home the past few years since the kids grew up and it was harder to share a cabin with another family.
Linda unpacks the food inside the cabin. Most of the lumber is cut and sawn right at the resort at the resort’s own sawmill.
Martin recently celebrated his 7th birthday. Happy Birthday Martin!
Here he is with a toy barn and silo Nana gave him. Linda a Claire went above and beyond the call of duty and took Martin and 4 other boys to the science center to see the dinosaur exhibit and IMAX dinosaur film!
