From my Kitchen: Road Side Bounty

Double rainbow over the field.

One of the things I love best about this time of year is all the little roadside stands that pop up along the highways and country roads selling yummy fresh fruits and veggies. These people are usually just hardworking "tailgate farmers" who sell their goods at reasonable prices and try to have the freshest products available, sometimes even coming right out of the field with them.

Most weekends we tend to hibernate in order to stay away from all the traffic (especially holidays), but this weekend we took a couple of day trips, one with our bicycles and the other just to do a little sight-seeing in the mountains, and along the way we passed several roadside stands, finally stopping at one on a less-traveled road.

Anyone that knows me knows that my love for sweet corn borders on insanity. I mean, I can plow through a half-a-dozen ears before I have to come up for air. But my love for sweet corn is only rivaled by one other thing- fresh, plump strawberries. I don't waste time when those things are near, I just dive right in and ask questions later.

Since we had Lily with us, I stayed in the car with the air conditioner running while Hubby checked out the goods at this particular stand. He came back to the car with a smile on his face and said,

"They have peaches and cream corn." (My favorite.)

"They also have watermelons." (His favorite.)

Then he said the magic words-

"They also have fresh strawberries by the quart or gallon."

I think I squealed.

No, I know I squealed.

They also had peaches, although they weren't from around here, but I never met a peach I didn't like so he got a small bag of those, too.

This bounty of fresh fruits and veggies pretty much made up our menu for the weekend- the corn and watermelon were perfect with the pork barbecue sandwiches we had Saturday, and the peaches got turned into a cobbler....

And the rest of the strawberries became a pie.

(The "rest" being ones I managed to keep from eating.)

Even the chickens enjoyed our roadside bounty- they got to enjoy the leftover corn cobs and the strawberry cappings.

Lily, however, was a little confused as to why the chickens got a treat and she didn't.

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Summer's Here! (A tad early...)

Lily trying to stay cool in her pool.

I wonder if there's room for me in there, too....

Welp, I'm trying to get back into this bloggie thing again, so bear with me.

While I was taking a break from the computer, Blogger went and changed the looks of everything on me, so now I'm having to figure things out as I go.

*Sigh*

Summer came a bit early for us this year- we've already been having some unusually warm weather and the forecast for this weekend is supposed to be near 90. *Whew* We need rain, too- the ground is drying up and the plants and gardens are needing a drink.

Here's what else is going on around here:

The Buzz from the Hive: 
The honey bee colony that moved into the home we set out for them back in March have been working up a storm.... we've added 3 new supers to the hive in the last month ("supers" are boxes with frames for storing honey) and these little workers have already filled them full of honey!  I did a post last year about the precious little honey bee, and in researching some of my facts I found I came across something that blew my mind- it requires 10,000 worker bees to gather a pound of honey, and they will fly the equivalent of more than twice around the world to gather it. Talk about being "busy as a bee"... that wears me out just thinking about it!

The Scoop from the Coop:
The final count for spring chicks this year was 34- and I've sold all of them but 8. I'm trying to find a home for 4 of them who I'm pretty sure are roosters. (And that's one thing we don't need around here is more roosters...) You would think that after hatching off that many babies, the last thing these crazy little fuzzy-bottomed hens would want to do is sit on more eggs....

Think again.

And if you look close enough at this picture, she almost looks like she's smiling.

Smugly.

From my Sewing Room:
A few months ago I made it a point to try to get my sewing room more organized- and keep it that way. I especially wanted to figure out a way to tame my fabric stash, which can get really out of hand at times. (Not that I have that much fabric, but after I dig through it a few times looking for something it looks like a bomb went off.)

One day I found these cool little organizers on someone's blog-

You just tuck the ends into these little "clips" and wrap the fabric around it and once you're done, it looks like a miniature bolt of fabric.

I wanted to keep two fabrics together for certain projects so I wrapped them on the same bolt.

Now I'm sweet-talking Hubby into building me some beautiful wood shelves to store them on... *Squeeeal*

(If you want more info on these organizers, click here to go to the website.)

Well, that's enough for today I guess... hope I didn't bore you too bad.

Happy Tuesday everyone!

Friday Farm Fotos: What A Wonderful World

 "I see trees of green, red roses too.

I see them bloom for me and you.

   And I think to myself, what a wonderful world."

"I see skies of blue, and clouds of white.

The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world."

Life is finally slowing down (a little bit) for now, computer woes are hopefully fixed, and I'm working on some new posts for next week about what's been going on around here lately. Until then, I'm going to spend my time getting caught up with all my blog friends- I want to see what's been going on in your world!

Happy Friday everyone, and most of all, Happy Mother's Day!