We get a CSA delivery of organic vegetables and fruits from Farm Fresh to You every other week. It’s a wonderful service and I highly recommend it. The box of beautiful, delicious food comes to my door. Over the two years we have been customers, we have expanded our palates to include veggies we never ate before. I think this alone is a marvelous gift.

Capay Organics has open-house, farm tour days every month or so, and we decided to visit them yesterday.

We had a little picnic lunch (deli sandwiches we picked up in Woodland) with this as our view.

The farm has a few critters: hens, a sleeping pig, and a couple of goats.

Visitors were invited to choose a pumpkin or two from the pumpkin patch.

It was quite warm but lovely. We rode on a flatbed truck, sitting on hay bales, out to the pumpkin patch. Little Asher opted to wear Daddy’s hat.

Farmer Thaddeus answered questions about the farm, like how they keep down weeds, how they decide what to grow, and where the water comes from.

We saw fruit trees of all types, including these young citrus trees. Lots of figs, olives, and stone fruits. It was great to see where our food is coming from. Asher now says, “This is where we get ALL our food.”

On the way home, I shot photos out my passenger window and we all took turns telling made-up stories. This was my favorite part of the day.

I promise this is my last post about Michaelmas. Maybe I got carried away a bit, but I already mentioned that this festival kind of spoke to me a lot this year.

We had a special dinner on Friday night after the school’s Michaelmas festival. (We have lots of special dinners, but usually Ian cooks them. This one was a joint effort.) As far as I’m concerned, any dinner featuring homemade bread and a first course is special. Anyway, my parents joined us and it was kind of both Michaelmas and a celebration of Ian’s birthday.

I couldn’t get Asher to join in this activity, but Lucas, Daddy and I all enjoyed shaping dragon breads. The bread recipe I used ended up being so wet and sticky I had to keep adding more and more cups of flour. It turned out yummy, but we ended up with far more bread dough than we needed!

We shaped three handsome dragon loaves and were able to send an unbaked loaf home with Grandma and Papa. Here are our dragons before they were baked. They are embellished with almond slices, dried cranberries, and dried mango, which we snipped into pointy plates and scales.

Our Michaelmas table set for dinner outside in the warm autumn evening. That’s Lucas’s sword he made for Michaelmas last year in second grade.

Lucas picked my dragon bread to eat first. He was dumbstruck when I handed him the good bread knife and asked if he would do us the honor of slaying the dragon for us. He did a great job slicing the bread for everyone.

I didn’t take a picture of my red lentil soup, but here’s the main course: dragon (grilled chicken thighs, sauteed spinach scales, sour cream, almond slices for toes, and a carved red bell pepper head.) I have to admit, carving and arranging this was super fun. Seeing the kids’ faces when I brought this out was the best! Thanks for grilling the chicken, Ian!

Okay. That’s it. Now I can start thinking about Halloween.

(My first wet-on-wet watercolor painting in … many years!)

It’s Friday and our son’s school is celebrating Michaelmas today with a festival and dragon play. Lucas’s third-grade class will be the village children and will do a country dance. Tonight our family will have a modest celebratory meal with dragon bread.

This festival is speaking to me more each year. We all face our own demons every day. We strive to subdue or conquer them so we may shine our inner light into our own lives and the lives of those we love. And the world is a brighter place for it.

Saint Michael’s Harvest Song

In autumn Saint Michael with sword and with shield
Passes over meadow and orchard and field.
He’s on the path to battle ‘gainst darkness and strife.
He is the heavenly warrior, protector of life.

The harvest let us gather with Michael’s aid;
The light he sheddeth fails not, nor does it fade.
And when the corn is cut and meadows are bare
We’ll don Saint Michael’s armor and onward will fare.

We are Saint Michael’s warriors with strong heart and mind,
We forge our way through darkness Saint Michael to find.
And there he stands in glory; Saint Michael we pray,
Lead us into battle and show us thy way.

—Anonymous

I knew we were destined for a pizza dinner; Ian was sick and he does most of the cooking around here. The kids love pizza and it’s really easy at the end of a long week to slip into a take-out meal, but who wants to spend $30 on pizza?

The stars were all aligned:

• It was 4:30 and I had a bit of time.
• I had harvested eight gorgeous tomatoes from our family garden the day before.
• I had fresh, organic veggies from our CSA delivery.
• I had bread dough in the fridge, ready to shape and bake.
• I had assorted cheeses and meats on hand.

I’ve never made pizza sauce from scratch before. It’s really very easy. Fresh tomatoes, red chard, onions, garlic, fresh oregano, dried basil, and about 2T organic tomato paste.

We call this “finger salad” at our house. When we don’t have lettuce or spinach, we just pull out all our other salad veggies and serve them with a dollop of dressing for dipping.

It looks like an all-meat pizza (chicken, salami, and bacon), but the sauce contained lots of fresh veg. Hiding the veggies helps ensure that Asher will eat them. This whole meal was unscripted: The only thing that was hard to guage was how long to bake the pizza for. I had to put it back in for another 12 minutes. Next time I’ll know to bake for about 30 minutes to cook the crust more.

Every slice was eaten up!

Happy Equinox! Happy Mabon! Happy Last Day of Summer!

It was a busy day. I had originally planned to celebrate the equinox on the 23rd, but when I looked closer at the exact time of the equinox, I decided it couldn’t wait till tomorrow. (Tomorrow we can celebrate the First Day of Autumn!)

We’ve been watching for signs of Autumn around here. Mama’s been scoping out all the garden plants with a project in mind….

After a quick, $9 trip to the craft store today, we came home with a flat twig wreath base, some floral picks (wooden picks with a small amount of wire on one end), and some green floral twine, which we ended up not using. We wandered around our front and back yards and clipped little snippets off trees and shrubs, including liquidambar leaves (still green), flowering plum leaves (purple), mallow, Chinese elm, Japanese maple (purple and green), redwood sprigs, pittosporum, and lantana berries, heavenly bamboo fruits, rose hips, lavender flowers, and the spiky flowers from some ornamental grass. We also walked up the street a little ways and gathered fallen bits of live oak leaves.

While the vegetable soup was cooking I tried to get the kids interested in making the wreath with me. At first they couldn’t be bothered because they were too busy chasing around the backyard. But after I got the first layer on the wreath base, it caught Lucas’s eye and he came to help me. He did a great job of adding to the wreath, and especially enjoyed using the floral picks to wire items without strong stems into the wreath.

We pulled some deep orange/bronze seed lanterns off our goldenrain tree, plucked a touch of dusty miller, and added some rosemary from our herb patch. We added in a few acorns we had gathered from the neighborhood yesterday. Basically, if it was interesting and sturdy enough to be stabbed into our wreath, we used it. I’m delighted with all the colors our wreath has! I had feared that not enough foliage had begun to turn fall colors yet, and that it would be bland.

Here is the finished wreath, sans baby toes and with a few sticks we had gathered and displayed last spring. Ian helped us hang our equinox wreath above our nature table (which is really the top of our upright piano) in our great room. Since these plants are largely fresh, our wreath will wither and wilt over time. It may begin to fall apart, which in itself will be symbolic of the seasonal changes. I’m interested to see how well or poorly it lasts. I’ve never made one of these before.

Lucas then chopped our “finger salad,” mere raw zucchini rounds into halves, symbolizing that today the day and night are perfectly equal. While he did, Ian asked him math questions, which was fun.

Our backyard equinox table setting (blue plates for night, yellow plates for day, of course). I didn’t take a photo of our yummy vegetable lentil quinoa soup. (I’m no food photographer!) We ate homemade bread and soup and zucchini halves, and talked about what summer things we were thankful for (swimming lessons, swim team, Waldorf summer camp, play dates, our anniversary trip to Seattle, Burning Man—particularly because we came home with four noses, eight eyes, eight ears, 16 limbs, and 80 digits!).

We finished our celebration with pumpkin pie! Asher helped with making the pie crust and Lucas mixed up the filling and helped me roll out the crust.

And now, the holiday is done and I’m beat! Good night, and may the many blessings of the season be yours.

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Lucas off to camp, Daddy off to work. Me and Asher with all kinds of time for …

chalk drawings on the patio,

inspection of garden flowers,

and the study of sun and shadow, curves and lines and points …

for free-ranging hens, like Avalanche here,

and for growing pumpkins, green and ghostly white,

for purple morning glories, cana seed pods,

and corn in the morning light. How do we know when it’s ripe?

It’s August, so the crepe myrtles are blooming, bursting!

We’re busy, so the playroom needs sweeping. A million precious things scattered a million different places.

And then the blocks simply must come out to play,

and Mommy simply MUST work a tad.

“Bob the Builder” is fun for Asher. Chapter 8 is not so fun for Mommy.

The leftover Ciro’s pizza simply MUST be Lunch.

“I will take my nap on the couch. For ONE minute. And then you wake me up and say, ‘Asher, it’s time to wake up to play!'”

Mia’s Apple Tree

Cameleon Was A Spy

I’ll be damned! He is asleep on the couch, just like he promised.

More of Chapter 8 in the hush of the sleeping preschooler, who,

miracle of miracles!

awakes with a smile and gentle

pat, pat, pat footfalls,

bear in hand.

We fetch Lucas from summer camp, where he wove a tiny rug.

“When can I go to big-boy summer camp?” Asher asks. Again.

“Buckle up, boys. We’re going to the library,”

where they cannot see the books for the computer that has kid games and a candy-colored keyboard.

But the Carmichael Library is newly remodeled and lovely, as is evident in the rotunda. Mommy wants to take more pictures, but then feels too much like a weirdo.

There’s also too much bickering between Asher and Lucas over the computer, so Mommy decides to check out.

Three books for boys, three books for Daddy.

We visit Great-Grandma and Great-Aunt, who are fine and old and loving and mysterious and bored until we arrive.

They don’t believe we have chickens.

Home again, we collect the day’s eggs. The green ones are lucky, don’t ya know.

And “Toy City” grows and grows some more.

For dinner, tasty snapper, spinach, snap peas, garden tomatoes, à la Daddy.

Sundown.

There’s still time for chicken ranging, feeding, and holding,

for watering the garden,

for watering the boys, giddy and nekkid, screeching and laughing.

“MY FOOT! I stepped in chicken poop!”

Shivering.

Shower. Teeth. Jammies. Stories. Lotion for eczema. Songs. Cuddles.

“You check on us?”

“Oh yes.”

Some blessings for counting:

1. Organic strawberries with lunch
2. Air conditioning
3. Hobbies and art to enliven and enrich life
4. Potty-training successes—finally!
5. Blueberry flavored iced-tea
6. Automatic chicken watering devices (like a drinking fountain for chickens)
7. A bumper crop of giant green tomatoes
8. Doors that begin opening as soon as others start closing
9. My brilliant, loving husband
10. Spiders sitting smack in the middle of their webs

After a great deal of hot, exhausting, sweaty work—done mostly by my intrepid and valiant husband in 100-degree weather—we now have a working coop and chicken run and chickens to put in them! We spent today putting on some finishing touches, like installing the roost, filling in holes with dirt, etc. Ian built the person-size door to the chicken run today, even though we got the chickens last night and fenced them in. Putting all that chicken wire on was a big job and we worked right up until the deadline at 4 p.m., when had to go get the hens …

… which was a funny sort of adventure in that they had to be caught and put in a big cardboard box. They were hiding from the heat under a deck when we arrived and we had to coax them out. Fortunately their confident, courageous (former) owner caught them for us and then we put our box of hens into the back of the car. Chickens in a box. Weird. I’ve had chickens in grocery bags before, but never in a box!

The boys were and are pretty excited! Lucas wants to be very near them. He held one of them today for a few moments. The hens were a bit skittish yesterday evening, but they seem to be settling in.

We have four chicken breeds: clockwise from lower left, we have a Black Sussex, a Rhode Island Red, two Leghorns, and an Araucana at the bottom right. Good gracious, it’s hard to get good chicken pictures! They’re always moving!

We have some disagreement over their names, however. It seems we Wilsons are an opinionated bunch. Let me show you how:

Probably, we’ll end up using Lucas’s names most of the time. Although, I’m pretty sure the girls don’t care, so maybe we can each maintain our own pet names for them.

See how my Ian has suffered this week. He’s a prince among chicken-coup builders! Oh, and extremely tough, super macho, and manly.

Here’s Henrietta/Posh/Sunrise/Chicken 1.

Mid-morning today we got two eggs, laid in the same little hollow in the leaf litter. This afternoon, we got three more eggs, including a green-shelled one from Henrietta/Posh/Sunrise/Chicken 1, our Araucana.

I think we’re going to have a bit of trouble at first telling the two white birds apart. We’ve noticed that one has a little scar on top of her comb and they have different combs (in their shape and in the direction the fall). But I’m pretty sure Lucas has switched their names on me a couple of times already. One of them, Sporty, of course, was the hardest to catch and get into the box for transport yesterday.

The chicken run we (Ian) built (I helped with the wire!) is an area far bigger than our five hens need, but we think we want to get more birds. Also, I’m not sure how hard they are going to be on our garden and landscaping when we let them out to range, and if they start doing major damage, I may want to keep them confined in their big-enough run most of the time. Some friends let their chickens out every evening for “happy hour.”

The hens are fascinating so far, and I LOVE the sounds they make. We’ve been feeding them kitchen scraps today and they’ve devoured everything we’ve given them. We’ve also sacrificed some of our worms from our worm farm to feed our hens. We want our girls to be well nourished and also to associate their new home with yummy food.

What an adventure we’ve embarked upon! Crazy-weird and exciting. We’re chicken farmers!

“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.”   —Ada Louise Huxtable

Makeshift leaf bandage, fashioned by Lucas to heal his little brother’s hurt knee

Pumpkin vines and roses love hot, hot days

Morning glory heart-shaped leaves are as precious as the flowers

A surprise magnolia blossom on my tulip tree

Asher’s interpretive dance with Mardi Gras beads and stick

Blueberries for pie!