Woooosh!

Check out how fast my legs can run on the treadmill.... NOT!

You might not be able to see them 'wooshing' through the photographs, but they also aren't moving as fast as they once were.

Sometimes, when things are really hard, and you know you should just keep plugging along because the reward in the end is going to be worth it, you still can't seem to muster the motivation to keep yourself moving in that direction.  Well, that is what has happened to me in my quest for speed.  After starting up running at the end of last November, I struggled with running past five minutes and the 4 setting on my treadmill was taking me for one seriously fast ride!!  My endurance has definitely grown as has my speed, but my next challenges came in the form of injuries and pain.  That gets old after a while too, and I suppose that's when I started pushing off my runs.  After Saturday's race, however, I've recommitted.  Since Monday, I've been running for thirty minutes on the treadmill.  I've lost a lot of what I gained already!  A month ago I could run 30 minutes no problem, 40 minutes was my point for running out of steam and 50-60 minutes was doable, but I was really pushing myself to keep a slow and steady pace.  I was running between 5.0 and 5.5.  This week, I hit 20 minutes and am out of steam and I'm running at 5 on the treadmill.  The next 10 minutes is a push, and I can do it, but I have a way of reminding myself during these last 10 minutes how not too long ago the very same 10 minutes used to be sooo easy!! 

So here is a reminder to me.  Don't Stop!!  Just do it!  And be kind to yourself as you continue on your quest!

Seeing Green!

My grape cutting have finally rooted.  Yay!  More grapes = more grape juice!

Did you know that kitty toes grow in the garden?

My squishy squash (AKA zuke and crook neck squash) are growing up near the front door. 

Pumpkins and Marigolds!

Our garden has finally started to lose its sickly yellow color and its greening up nicely!

I did it!!  I did it!  My first artichoke in Missouri!

Our Sunflower and Pumkin 'Island'!

Pretty Glads!

Some of the Rhubarb that I started from seed!  Wow, what a hearty grower!!

Rain! Rain! Go Away!!!

Oooh!  With a bold title like that, I probably just cursed our farm with another several weeks of rain!

The rain has been nearly non-stop this season and it has created several challenges in the orchard!  We've not been able to get out and spray when we need to and as a result we have some pretty serious disease out there.  It looks like we've lost the majority of our Gala, Jonagold and Braeburn crops this year.  The one that hurts the most is the Galas.  They are our biggest producer.  Time will tell, but right now, it isn't very promising.

When the Apple Farmer went out for his last spray, he commented the next morning that he hadn't ever tried to spray in so much water.  He left ruts in places we've never had ruts!

Now, in California, when the earth moves, we all rock and roll!  In Missouri, when the earth moves, it literally picks up and leaves!  Thats exactly what has happened to our drive way, as well as other areas of erosion!  But just down the highway a couple of miles, some neighbors of ours have lost a good percentage of their farm.  This land has gone the way of this little fork of the Grand River!  This picture was taken just a couple of days after they burned the house down.  It'd sure be a problem for our little bridge if the house decided to up and leave too!

You might be able to see in this photo, but the farm was planted in beans and a good portion of those have gone away too!

The Orange pipes are the phone lines since the poles headed south a couple of weeks earlier.  The porch to the house is only a couple of feet from the river's edge now.  Used to be 30-40 feet away.  Used to be lots and lots of tall trees, but you can already guess where they went about a month ago!

We've had quite a bit of dammage along our ditches and seasonal creeks.  Sometime last week this tree went down and as we went to check it out we noticed a half a dozen live trees that had been blown over by the winds when the ground became super saturated!

Problem is, we really need rain since we have no means of irrigating in the orchard, so its hard to be ungrateful after our first three years of sparse rain and dinky little apples in the fall!

Clean up! Clean up! Everybody, Everywhere!!!!

You know something isn't right when you've got a hot chocolate mug in the middle of something rather mechanical looking....

Today we spent the afternoon cleaning out 'winter' from the apple shed.  We are expecting a fieldtrip of teens this next week that are taking a horticulture class at the community college during the summer and they want to see what happens at our place.  I promised them that there wasn't a lot to see since there wasn't anything but a bunch of little apples hanging around in the trees.  They were still OK with that.  Which was fine with me, since it got a nice little fire burning under our feathers to get us moving early on our list of chores before apple season!

The challenge of the day was to move the snowmobile from the apple shed, to the trailer.  After it was loaded on the trailer we needed to move it to the machine shed on the north side of the farm.  Easy peasy lemon squeazy, right?  Wrong!  We live on a farm, and therefore, equipment must always be in need of some sort of repair!  Hence, the cup under the lid of the snowmobile...

and the battery charger on the blazer...

And everyone dragging the beastly bear cat out of his corner because he has no intention of coming out of hibernation...

Aha!  Signs of life!

Up!  Up!  Up!

Turns out, it wasn't a very simple matter to park the trailer in the machine shed.  Since someone stacked a whole green house inside, and parked a couple of tractors inside as well, the machine had to be unloaded and parked back in the farthest corner it could get to!

But hey!  We did manage to make some progress in the apple shed after all of that!

First 5K This Morning

So I did it!  I finally ran my first 5K.  Thats me behind the stroller lady in the pink and gray.  This is the beginning of the race.  You can tell that because I'm not crawling yet...

Well, I never actually crawled, but I certainly wasn't in the shape that I should have been to run!  After nursing foot and back problems, I went to girls camp.  I got a morning of running in there, but was pretty much sleep deprived the rest of the week and into the following with the Attorney's trip to the ER and stitches, and her Royal Highness kicking me all night in my own bed. 

This picture is proof that I finished.  My time was 38:11.  Yay!  I did it under 40 minutes!!!!  Not a bad time for me with several gradual inclines and a couple of niced declines.

This is my friend Chris.  She is really cool because she signed up for the 5K and then ran the route for a second time to get her 10K time.  Go Ultra Mommy!!

Of course, this is her Royal Higness.  She's got to have a drama all her own!  She's a little miffed because we disturbed her beauty rest and woke her up at 6:20 AM to run into town for the Gooseberry Race.

And here I am with my personal fan section... Except Richard and Chris J. aren't in this photo!  They showed up to cheer for us too!  That was such a fun suprise to see you all hollering at the finish line!!  Thanks!  Just in case you were wondering, I'm the sweaty one in the picture.... in the pink and gray...

A Chicken-Tale

Once upon a time, in a flower garden full of flowers,

and weeds,

and flowers,

there was a lost little chick-lette.

She was scared and frightened because she had been found pecking happily away in the tall weeds, AND flowers, of the great and distant garden. 

After she was found, and swept off of her feet by a handsome prince and brought back to the chicken coop to live happily ever after,

The handsome prince promised to cover up little openings in the chicken coop gate so little peepers wouldn't get out and get lost in the giant garden fraught with dangerous weeds.

Then end!

Trade

Today, my neighbor Emma, traded me this beautiful produce from her garden for a bunch of pie cherries from my garden!  Yummmmmmy!