carmelajune: Tulip Festival 2013

We are very lucky to live in such a farm-y state. With strawberries in early summer (pretty soon!), all sorts of vegetables and farmers markets all summer, apples in late summer, and pumpkins in the fall, we are surrounded by good examples of where our food comes from and what farmers and farm equipment look like. For some reason, we just hadn't made it up to see the tulip festival, though. Mama's not sure why -- maybe because it can be very muddy, and fields and fields of flowers that you can't pick just seemed like a recipe for a meltdown.

In any case, we finally went, and it was such fun! Oh sure, Carmela got muddy, muddy, muddy, but it was great fun, and she was an age that she understood not to pick the flowers in the fields. Even better, after the muddy fields, we got to go to the gardens, and they were beautiful! They were bursting with with colors and shapes, and there was even a windmill! Ela got to take a few pictures, and then we had a hot dog and some fudge. And, of course, we bought some cut tulips. It was so much fun that Miss Ela snoozed all the way home!

Beautiful gardens:

Muddy fields:

Muddy fields of tulips. Red, purple, red, and yellow.

Carmela shows how crazy the mud was!

So much mud.

Miss Carmela June. What a great kid!

Mama loves the way the light played on this row of tulips. Ela loved how there was one orange tulip in a row of purple.

Multi-colored orange and yellow.

The windmill on the garden side of the farm. Mama read somewhere that the family who owns and operates the farm is of Dutch origin, and used to grow and sell tulips in Holland in the 1700s. Today, the farm is owned and operated by the five Roozen brothers. They sell a bajillion tulips a year, and also have a bulb catalog a bajillion varieties of tulips, plus irises, daffodils, and hyacinths.