Summer at the Farm

In the interest of time, here's a bunch of pictures. I had high hopes of getting them in the right order, and captioning them all, but since it's been a week since I uploaded them and saved this post as a draft, this will have to do. I am heading out of the country in a couple days and I still have a bunch of cherries to can, so I'd better get my behind out of this chair.

The short stories:
The Boise Hot Air Balloon Rally--we ride our bikes along the Boise River to a downtown park at
6 am and watch the balloons launch

We finally got a hold of someone to come cut our hay--it was taller than the kids. I have a pic of it baled, too, but not uploaded to blogger yet. We sold it already, too, which is nice.

I picked a couple gallons of strawberries from my little front-yard strawberry patch.

The next-door neighbor has 2 cherry trees and told us we could pick as many as we wanted. So we did. Twice. I've done 1 pie (probably one of the prettiest pies I've ever made, and it was dee-licious) 15 quarts of pie filling, 7 quarts of plain cherries, 12 dehydrator trays, and I still have a bunch to take care of.

A panoramic picture of the garden. Click on it to make it bigger.

And a hot-air balloon landed in our back yard. Well, not really, but just over the fence of our pasture.

See you later, alligator, after my first trip out of the good ol' U. S of A.