Loving the backyard life

We are a week into summer here in New Zealand and this How to Dad video totally sums up how it's been. Five minutes after I took the photos for this blog post, it started raining so heavily, I thought it was hailing.

My garden seems happy about all the rain though. Everything is shooting up and producing fruit. We enjoyed a lovely morning tea of strawberries, asparagus and carrots yesterday, and a homegrown salad with dinner last night. A lot of produce still needs to ripen before we can eat it though, so I'm exercising my patience.

Tomatoes.

Potatoes and spinach.

Cucumbers, lettuce, kale and marigolds. 

Blueberries.

Peaches.

Plums. 

Broccoli gone to seed. 

I let this broccoli plant go to seed, because I had already harvested several heads off it and now I'm hoping to collect its seeds and recreate the same broccoli abundance in the future.

The enjoyment I get from seeing my plants grow is only surpassed by the joy I get from watching my children play outside. They are always up to something out there, when the weather allows it.

L checking for eggs. 

A couple of days ago, our neighbour gave us a 25KG bag of organic wheat she wasn't able to use for her wheat-pack business because it had wheat weevils in it. She thought my chickens might enjoy it, and she was right.

The chickens are loving the wheat and I've been experimenting with soaking it first to make it more digestible for them. My kids like taking turns spooning the wet wheat into the chicken run, like real farmers.

My kids have always liked climbing our Titoki tree, but recently they've set it up as their base of operations. S rigged up a swing out of an old hose, which she hung from one of the branches. She tied a piece of wood to it and, now the kids take turns swinging and chatting away to each other about kid stuff.

Another outdoor area the kids gravitate to is the mud table that J's godfather built J for his birthday. My children mainly use it as a potion creation centre or a construction workbench. We placed the mud table near the fairy table, so the kids hop between the two and use that whole area of the garden like an outdoor home.

J's other favourite outdoor game at the moment is trampoline soccer/football. He kicks the ball against the net and works out all kinds of trick, chatting away to himself the whole time.

I love that my children are making our backyard their own now, connecting to it and the place that so much of our food comes from. We are setting down roots here, and it feels good.