Port Potager

Last week was April school vacation week here in Massachusetts, and we used the time to take a vacation through Pennsylvania and New York. After visiting family over Easter weekend, we headed west to Lancaster County, where we visited the Moravian town of Lititz. The town museum is housed in an old German building made of stone, and behind it is a small public garden, which you enter via a very inviting arbor: The only flowers there right now are some new pansies since it’s still early spring, but you can see some green perennials poking up as well: The centerpiece is this diamond-shaped bed, which for some reason I failed to center in the photo: This is all probably quite lovely in the summer. What you can’t see is that if you keep walking through the garden, you’ll continue down a slope that goes to the small river that runs through town.  The next day we went to the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum , which has original buildings, buildings ...

This past weekend we traveled to Pennsylvania to visit family (and so Kirk could run another triathlon). Kirk's sister's family lives in Lancaster County (which you should really learn to pronounce correctly if you are not a PA native) on an old Mennonite farm. It's hard not to be jealous of something like 30 acres of farmland and woods that even has a small creek. They have a vegetable garden, a flock of chickens, and have also started keeping bees. And sheep. And the kids sure loved the sheep. Above, Jonas is feeding grain to Apple, a Dorset ewe. You can see that he is kind of crouched, bracing himself against her head. This was so he could keep his feet — the sheep are all over their new best friends with food! Here Jonas is (literally) taking a sheep by the horn to keep from getting knocked over. If you are familiar with Jonas at all, you know that this is an absolutely enormous step into being confident around animals. He jumped right into feeding t...