It sure seems like my life revolves around the garden. I love to go outside after the kids are in bed and enjoy my garden paradise. Everything is looking so great out there. The bees are busy and happy, the bunnies are staying cool, the chickens are being well fed on table scraps and garden thinnings and I love getting to sit back and watch it all go by.

This is the first year that I have grown Echinacea. I think that the flowers are amazingly beautiful, they may very well be my favorites right now.

Mr. Cyprus is learning to climb and be a monkey. It does bring such a big smile to his face. Here he is being my upside down monkey climber.

I love when I get to capture my baby girl and her daddy together. How sweet is this?

My garden is mostly just herbs, so it was a rarity that I planted something to eat. Melissa helped put the garlic in the ground last fall, and it has grown and was finally ready to be harvested. I enjoyed the delicious garlic scapes during the spring, but I was very much so looking forward to pulling up the heads, braiding them and hanging them to dry. Melissa helped me dig up the garlic, and this was half of it. I laid it out to dry in the sun for a few days and then I braided it up. It now hangs in the kitchen. I look like a proper Italian mama now.

The garlic has now been replaced with 4 wonderful varieties of lavender.

I let Cyprus sit in the car while I wrapped things up in the strawberry fields. He thought it was great fun to be able to be in the car without having to be strapped down.

He spent the whole time standing on his high chair waving out the window at us. It amused him greatly.

We headed out to the strawberry fields again, and Miss Daphne enjoyed carrying the bucket. Unfortunately, the season was drawing quickly to a close. We ended up only getting about a half pound of strawberries. I did, however, get to sit in the field and munch on what delicious morsels I could.

One thing about picking our own food that is locally grown is that we definitely east seasonally. Though I did can, preserve and freeze many, many strawberries this year, nothing is better than the time spent actually out in the middle of a strawberry field eating the sun ripened berries.

We managed to spend the 4th of July putting around the house with the kids, which is special in and of itself. We then headed over to some friend’s house for a birthday party. I like going out to their farm because it is always fun to see what is out growing in the fields. We also got to pick cherries out of the orchard, which was fun. I was working on grabbing some 365 shots of myself that were more exciting, but the battery in my camera died.

I have a picture similar to this when I was a little bit other. I have pigtails in and I have the adorable, fat little cheeks. I see so much of myself in this photo.

She likes that her hair is finally long enough to support pig tails.

I have been making something I call chocolate granola lately. It has oats and peanut butter and chocolate in it, and it is delicious. Naturally, Cyprus agrees with me. He seems to fit it in as a food source as well as the many, many other things he eats. I swear, it would be cheaper to feed a litter of fully grown Saint Bernards than to feed this boy!

Strawberry picking for me really marks the beginning of the canning,/freezing/preserving for the winter season.

It has been a bit of a late year with record rains in June, so the strawberries never really plumped up and became delicious. This is a photo of our last trip out where I ended up bring home less than half a pound (I usually end up with over 1 pounds).

I did enjoy myself just sitting in the field going through and picking and eating the sun warmed strawberries for myself. It was a delicious treat that I hope can last me until next year.