Ice Cream and Farm Life

It's been an exciting week in our neck of the woods! But let's start with food...

Adding dairy back into the diet has gone smoothly. We've also started adding different forms of corn back into our diet and so far so good for tortillas. Fingers crossed that popcorn is nonreactive! With this warmer weather, we've been craving some ice cream something fierce. Since we still can't have most sweeteners, I found a recipe for agave sweetened vanilla ice cream designed specifically for our churn. It turned out so good ya'll! Even made a (very) dark chocolate ganache to top it off. Definitely took some self restraint to have reasonable serving sizes and make it last 3 days...

As promised last week, I have lots of cute photos of baby chicks. They are growing some gorgeous feathers that I tried to capture on camera (see below) and are now tame enough to eat out of our hands. I suspect we may have 2 roosters, but their tentative names for now are Josie, Pearl, and Hazel.

Per usual, sweet Daisy adores the baby chicks and checks up on them periodically. I'm so thankful I was able to raise her with chicks around while she was still a puppy.

Speaking of chickens, ol' Lucy laid a whopper of an egg yesterday. It looks like it hurt to lay. Poor gal!

I was blessed to be able to take 3 days off of work recently to accomplish some projects. First, was continuing to declutter and drastically reduce possessions. I was a very sentimental child and kept just about everything, including all slips of paper. So...it has taken a while to look through all the boxes and let go of most of it. I've been able to eliminate 4 plastic tubs and reduce my sentimental childhood items to just one box (which was my goal). Almost filled up our recycle bin with just paper! Today I've been importing a few CDs to my computer and adding the disks to the donate pile. My second Goodwill trip is coming up this afternoon! I think I have one more round of reducing childhood possessions left as my toys are still stored in my Abuelos basement.

"The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don't...Not every possession is a belonging."

- Joshua Becker -

The next project falls into the life I want to craft. This year we are able to have a 30x25 full-sun plot at the farm to grow vegetables! Did I mention FULL SUN! It's been about 5 years since I've had a non-shady patch of ground to allow crops to thrive. We're sharing the full length garden plot with the Vannette parents and brother/sister-in-law to grow lots of food for the summer and preservation. We'll have corn, drying beans, peppers, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, and hopefully some berries. Saturday was a big work day getting the beds formed spreading weed barrier fabric and planting our tomatoes and blueberry bushes. Monday morning I was also able to spend a few hours there prepping more weed fabric and planting companion herbs/flowers, corn, and strawberries.

We snagged three gorgeous blueberry bushes at the SC Botanical Garden Sale on our way to the farm, but really had to cram them in the nooks and crannies!