Retirement...again, and picts around the farm

It's all I can do NOT to begin these blog posts in a Keillor-esque manner..."It's been a quiet week in Lake...," and while I think it, so far I haven't actually done it.  But during most weeks, it actually is REALLY quiet!  Several of our recent guests have commented on it--quiet, serene, restful--so if that's the product we're selling, I guess we're doing our job!

Today we had the privilege of celebrating the [second] retirement of our friend and mechanic, Carri, down at the Town Hall with all of her friends.  Carri retired several years ago from teaching auto mechanics at two of the area technical colleges, and since that retirement has gone on to be our go-to person for ALL engine repairs--cars, boats, mowers, ATVs, whatever you've got, she can repair it!  

A year ago at this time, she announced that she was retiring from doing repairs; she even put an announcement in the newspaper.  She wanted to spend more time with the things and people she loves--daughters, granddaughters, friends, and airplanes! That was last year, but why was her yard still full of everyone's cars, boats, etc. etc?  (The word "no" is missing from her vocabulary!)

So THIS TIME her daughters held a surprise retirement party for her, hoping that will help make this retirement thing stick the second time around.  It was a great celebration with lots of her loyal friends from town, and we feel blessed to be a part of that group.  Of course, I pulled my phone/camera out of my pocket and it was dead, so I'm borrowing her Facebook picture.  Hope she doesn't mind!

Carri in the cockpit of an airplane - what she wants to do more of!

And on the homefront, we've been celebrating August with our gardens.  Yesterday for the Saturday Market we had beans, three kinds of onions, basil, parsley, kale, and carrots!  Really nice carrots!

This garden is on the south side of our red shed where we cook off maple syrup in the winter.  Look at those cute sunflowers!  Also in this bed, tomatoes & Roma tomatoes, yellow squash, and onions.  It's starting to look kind of wild now...hard to get through the rows to find the produce!

This vine with the pretty white blossom is growing out of one of our compost bins.  The leaves and stems are so soft compared to those prickly cucumber vines, and we didn't know what it might be that was growing from something that had been composted!  But now that we saw the first little object growing, we know...birdhouse gourds from when Leann was making birdhouses and had reamed out all the seeds and fibers from inside the dried gourds.  Unfortunately we don't have a growing season long enough to fully ripen these gourds, so we'll settle for vines!

This are our new raised beds--tomatoes in the back left, cucumbers and carrots back right, beets, peppers, eggplant (still with no sign of an eggplant) and carrots bottom left and a jungle of green beans bottom right.

This is me, scissors in hand, trying to get control of our giant tomato plants!  I'm trying to clear away a little green so the tomatoes can show through!  Finally our first red-(dish) tomato is almost ready.

And here is our silo pit garden with more jungly tomatoes and our monarch waystation flowers--milkweed, zinnias, others I've forgotten the names--and cucumbers.  We also have a bunch of volunteer petunias growing that came from seeds from last summer's petunias!  Leann dumped the old pots in there last fall and they sprouted from seeds this summer.  Now, if you planned for that to happen, it never would have worked!

August is such fun...maybe even September, too, as long as the frost stays away!