berry season

Ahhhh, berry season, my favorite! I'm just waiting for the wild blackberries around our property to ripen...yum! We recently went berry picking with a playgroup at Swanton Berry Farm . If you are ever on the coast north of Santa Cruz, please go there. I didn't get pictures of there farm stand, but we go there often. Its a sweet set-up. Lots of homemade treats and coffee, tables, chairs, couches, wooden toys, old school wooden games and books. Outside of the farm stand they usually have some kind of play area with hay bales set up. The staff is great and I recently bought 3 jam flats of berries for cheap:) Organic of coarse! We LOVE it there.

We had never picked there before, but we picked strawberries and olallieberries. It was so beautiful, a perfect cool coastal farm. The boys had so much fun! Sorry the pictures arn't too great. It seems that if I take less then 500 pictures of the same thing I don't get great ones:)

serious berry picker

strawberry fields

now that's how to plant strawberries!

Bugs keep eating mine, I think we will have to make some raised rows and transplant ours!

I do wish I could find a blueberry farm around here:( No wonder they cost so much!

I made a small batch of strawberry jam last week. I have been freezing them as I get them, so I'm hoping to get them all canned up in the next week or so:)

Happy berrying!

Evie turned 2!

My sweet little Everest turned two years old on June 7th.
Your life started with a beautiful and quick home birth in a birthing tub.

You were an easy, mellow, agreeable baby.

Learned to keep up with your brother quickly.
An early riser, you seem to love 5am, and as tired and worn out as I may feel,

your face is always like a beaming ray of sunlight,

bright and beautiful,

ready to meet the day.

Through sleepy eyes I always smile and am lifted by your brightness.

Much stronger willed these days, I will never forget the fit the you threw because you

"want to ride a dolphin"

Beautiful boy, thank you for choosing me as your mommy.