On Saturday morning I headed out to our soggy garden with much excitement and started snapping pictures. Only this time, it was with a whole new view. In February, when Bracken and I went on our trip to Florida, my sweet sister had a wonderful surprise for me. (This post is lovingly dedicated to you Sam!) Her boss had given her one of his cameras (he’s a professional photographer and had quite a few cameras) and she passed along her previous camera to me. Her previous camera was a huge step up from our point and click, pretty inexpensive camera and I was immensely grateful to her for paying forward the kindness. I needed some things to get it going (an SD card, batteries, a charger, etc.) and was afraid to transport it much until I got a proper case for it because I didn’t want to risk breaking it. Just last week I finally got all the things I needed to get the camera going and Saturday morning I headed out the front door to start taking pictures with it for the first time. I can’t really begin to say what her gift meant to me or how excited I’ve been about it. I’ve felt so limited by our camera for so long. I’ve learned how to work with it and how to (sometimes) take some clear close ups in natural light, but the reaction time from when I pushed the button until when the click sounded and the actual picture was taken was frustrating to say the least. I’d see a beautiful picture opportunity and over and over again it would turn out blurry. And it was hardly possible to take decent indoor pictures. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful for our camera, but I did feel very limited by it and limited by the pictures I could take and share. Holding that new-to-me camera in my hands felt like it was opening up a whole new world before me.  There was potential, possibility, and opportunity all around me, everywhere I looked. When I would see beauty around me and try to capture it with our other camera, it felt like a disservice sometimes when the picture didn’t even come close to capturing it. Of course photography can never fully capture the beauty of nature and people before us, but with this new camera it surely captures the beauty more fully and more clearly. I’ve always loved photography and with this new tool, I’m enjoying it even more.

This is what our very wet garden looked like on Saturday morning.

 Plums. Still green, not ripe yet. (Bracken will tell you, he checks regularly.)

 Rainy days are a good opportunity to find slugs and snails in the garden. They are fed to the ducks and chickens because otherwise they would eat all our garden. Before, our chickens only ate the very small slugs and left the large ones untouched, but lately the chickens have been gobbling up the huge ones which really surprised us. Our theory was that they watched the ducks slurp them up and followed suit, realizing they were on to something.

 The kale and greens have loved all the rain.

 Fennel going to seed.

 Calendula.

 Cilantro. It always bolts quickly, but we eat as much of it as we can while it’s in the garden.

 Concord grapes. Growing completely over the arbor now.

  Red huckleberries in the surrounding mossy woods.

 Cedar berries (seeds) that Bracken and Jeff showed me.

 There are some peaches on the peach tree this year.

 Jeff cut down all the nettles in our nettles patch. Now new growth is popping up and we can enjoy the greens longer. Nettles are probably the most nutritious green we know of and we love eating them regularly.

 Columbines. Growing wild by the peach tree.

 Dill. We’ve been using it in sauerkraut. Jeff planted it with pickles in mind.

 Blueberries. The birds have done so much damage so quickly, that our bird netting efforts were a bit late. That’s alright. Jeff and I have been talking about building permanent posts at the end of each row of blueberries so we can easily cover our blueberries with bird netting each year. We’ll still have some to enjoy this year and next year we’ll be a bit more prepared since we already have some netting.

 Rain covered ferns in the front yard. 

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 This was my first time playing around with the new camera and I had so much fun getting a feel for it. I didn’t really know a thing about it, I guessed which setting was “automatic” and went with that most of the time. I did recognize which setting was for close ups, but that’s about it. I have much to learn, of course, and Jeff just found a very inexpensive book about the camera online and ordered it for me. I have many pictures I’ve taken with our other camera with blog posts in mind and you’ll probably still see pictures from that camera from time to time. But I’m sure most of the time you’ll be seeing pictures here from our new camera. I hope you’ll enjoy the new view.