Work Hard and Play Hard at Cold Comfort

I'm sure you've heard the old saying, "Hurry up, daylight is burning!" Well, that is the mantra here in the early summer.  We have four full seasons here but summer has a short growing season, so everyone is in a rush to get their gardens, veggie and flower, in and growing.  We still had a few light frosts during the end of May, so June 1 is the start of our "in the ground" growing season.  Most folks have small green houses so they can get a head start with their planting.  But once the garden is in, there is room for play time and visiting.  Here are some of the before, and after videos of our garden.

We FINALLY have our garden in - we have a strawberry patch, blueberry bushes, current bushes, two cherry trees, and veggies.  I'm experimenting with planting in bales so we have five rows of planting bales and 20 in-ground planting beds (we'll see how it goes).  Our onions, beets, tomatoes, garlic, squash, potatoes, lettuce, spinach and herbs are all up and growing.  I LOVE to watch the seeds germinate and stick their little green heads above the ground!  There is just something about it that makes me smile!

Now that the garden is planted, I'll be working for about two hours a day, watering and weeding until harvest time - then the fall will be filled with canning, freezing, and preserving. It will be so nice to eat our home grown food as we did when we did in our early marriage. Then we had a half-acre garden and it sustained us well.

We can't say that we've done this totally by ourselves.  We've had a visitor staying with us and boy has she been a help!  Marti, Mark's sister, came for a visit and has been helping carrying the load of living on a farm.  She's helped with cooking, dishes, cheese making, yard cleanup, and even the animals.  She says she is now a farm girl because she has helped with feeding the stock (rabbits) and rang the dinner bell to call Mark in for lunch - hehehe.

So now that the garden is in and the hard work is done, we get to play hard.  Houghton's Bridgefest, Bridgefest web site, is this weekend and it's the place to eat and play - so at 5pm the rakes, shovels and hoses were put away for some FUN time.  There were bands, crowds, dinner, beer and wine, and lots of time to sit and visit with friends and do the best people watching - see the videos below: 

You can even hear Mark in the background talking - being funny. After dinner, we wanted ice cream so we tried a new ice cream shop to top off the evening.  Bridgefest continues tomorrow at noon with fireworks at dusk...and it's not even the 4th yet.  They will have fireworks again then...as I said, UP here we work hard but play hard too.