Visiting Other Peoples Places

A real cabbage patch!  As someone who was a six year old girl during the cabbage patch doll craze of 1983, there's no way I could visit my parents garden without taking a peak inside the cabbage plants, just to make sure there weren't any baby dolls growing in there.  

No babies yet, but this patch is still young.  The plants were so green and healthy, and growing in nice dark soil.  This garden is already an inspiration.  

And look - strawberries!  These are still green, but already perfectly shaped.   

My parents garden already has tomato plants, grape vines, a blue berry shrub, and various other tiny sprouts from seeds that have been planted.  I predict this to be a good year for their garden.  

Outside the garden fence, the ground near the bee hive is covered in these pretty purple flowers.  I believe this is lyreleaf sage (Salvia lyrata), which is a native perennial wild flower.  

It makes for a beautiful blue meadow for the bee hive to live in, although we never saw a honeybee drinking nectar from one of the blooms.  Maybe the entrance to the flower is too small for honey bees?  

While my parents place was inspiration for the garden, a recent visit to Joe's farm was an inspiration of animals!  Even on the drive there, this family of geese blocked our path as they moseyed down the middle of the road.  

Look at all those fuzzy animals!  Animals with babies even.  I told Joe that I wanted to run through his pasture petting all the animals and he said that if I could get any of them to hold still, I was welcome to it.  So tempting to try.   

I settled for calling to them from the fence, and managed to capture the attention of the donkeys.  

The donkeys seemed to like us back, unlike the cows and sheep which kept their distance.  

Even the baby donkey let us pet her long ears.  Donkey noses are the softest noses, I'm sure.  

Not that the sheep would bring their lambs close enough for me to compare noses.  

Once the donkeys had our attention, they weren't going to share it anyway.  They didn't even want to share with each other!

Joe has hundreds of ducks.  The day we visited he had just taken a whole batch of adult ducks (mamma ducks, as his little boy calls them), which had been out on pasture, to the processor.  He has four hundred more baby ducks in the barn, ready to go out on grass as soon as they are old enough.  Wow.  That's a lot of ducks!  

How many ducks does Rain have?  Zero.  Not fair!