poppies & kale & other living backyard inhabitants

totally unrelated at all to this post confession: i am not in the habit of posting on here and so i am behind. i'll catch up! it's funny- i'm finding that this week it's been it's hard for me to think of what i want to write about, even though the move back over here was precipitated by the fact that i missed the word part when i was just slapping pictures up on instagram. (which i'm still doing) so i'm bumbling around a bit. 

back to our fairfax-backyard-work-in-progress-urban-farm! we've been logging a lot of backyard time lately: picnic dinners, the girls faux-gymnastics routines, matt gardening, fire pitting at night and lounging around in the sun. usually all i see is what needs to be fixed or what we need to do or clear out.

suddenly we have volunteer poppies in bloom, popping up all around our raised beds for a few days and then shedding their silky petals soon after.

so many of my succulents are blooming, including this teeny tiny cacti that has been quietly growing in the corner of one of my succulent bins. i almost composted this cacti recently because in the two years it's been in this trough it has barely grown or spread a millimeter. then all of a sudden this vermillion flower blooms out of nowhere! how amazing is this small red flower?

an apt reminder that sometimes, even when it looks like absolutely nothing is happening and that things are at a stalemate so might as well give up, that good & beautiful things are potentially growing and about to emerge. i need to keep this in mind when i am working in the studio...or exasperated with my kids...or working out and eating healthy...ok, basically this analogy works across most aspects of my life.

meanwhile, over in our raised beds? a few veggies still going strong as we plant for summer.
check out our rainbow chard (look how vibrant that yellow on green is!):

(also, second confession of my post, but this time related: i really don't like chard. last time i confessed this about lentils, quite a few of you came through with delicious lentil recipes. so this is your prompt to wow me with swiss chard recipes! go!)

and right next to the chard? our ever-producing kale! this is the rock star of our garden. it just keeps on producing, month after month. i always know my girls have been snacking on it when they come in with lips stained green.

our fruit trees (some are one year old, some two or more) are starting to grow itty bitty fruit! we now have pluot, aprium, pear, two apple varietals, nectarine, plum, asian pear, avocado and orange (this one is decades old and is crazy bountiful!) and blackberry bushes and a grapevine. plus along the sideyard we have pomegranate, fig, olive, and lime trees and blueberry bushes.

look how much taller this two year old tree is than i am!

oh, plus our chickens of course! these girls are getting old. you can see them when they were tiny little things here and here , a whole four! years ago. they are not really the greatest egg layers these days, but we still love them. (that is not to say that one or more may not end up on our table for dinner...)

we may have bought some new chicks today! names forthcoming...

lots of fairfax farm is still in a waiting place, seeds or plants not yet planted for summer.
but some of the small veggies are in the ground!

matt is 100% the gardener in our house. my sole role (aside from nurturing the succulents) is harvesting (as in plucking off tomatoes and harvesting them right into my mouth), cooking with them, and taking pretty pictures of the vegetables and fruit in our backyard. but what they teach me, always, is to be patient, to hope, to rejoice, to get a little dirty, to start again, to tidy up and pull out the weeds.

to all of those things, all year long, in our plots of earth however large or small they be, and in our lives. happy sunday, friends.