First some very important news…unlike my husband and my youngest child, I don’t seem to be allergic to bees. Today I got my first sting since I was a kid. It was on the tip of my thumb and it burned like crazy. There is very minimal swelling a few hours later. Neil also got stung on his thumb…His entire thumb is now so swollen he can’t bend it properly. Sigh.
Anyways, Memorial Day ushered in summer officially for us and that meant the pool went up and we ate yummy food with family.

We took Layna’s ice cream ball for a spin to make chocolate ice cream and it was the base for our ice cream Sunday bar. But before we got that far, Neil lost his mind and told the girls they could sleep downstairs Sunday night. Since there are only two couches and three girls we ended up with one on a couch, one in a blanket fort and one on my massage table. Don’t ask…it was conflict resolution at its finest.

I tried to get some close ups in addition to the wider views, otherwise our garden and orchard are just a whole lot of green at this point in the season. Except for the bearding bees…thats a whole lot of dark, moving critters. It’s been really hot lately, which our blue corn loves, but the bees have to manage the hive temperature really closely. That means almost daily bearding. There are some flowers adding some color splashes to the green, mostly that I planted for the bees. The zucchini flowers have a constant stream of bumble bee visitors and it’s going to be a good squash year. Tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, watermelon and sunflowers are all growing very well…just not super interesting right now. We’ve been burning a lot of yard waste this year, some in the garden itself, to clear weeds and clean up our lawn. To help with the clean up effort, Neil enlisted the help of two robot minions named MoMo and MiMi. Think a roomba only for mowing your yard. They have kind of a steep learning curve while they (and you) figure out the yard (Neil has to “rescue” them frequently). Once all the kinks got worked out we’ve been thrilled with the results and are loving having a gorgeous lawn all the time. Previously we had a great lawn for the few days after Garyn mowed. The other week and a half it looked sloppy. I’m really happy with how things are moving along and I can’t wait to show you pictures of final harvests.