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If you’re a farmer (even a small – scale one) you’ll know that spring is the busiest time of the year. Garden patches need tilling, seeds need to be started, coops and run – ins need to be cleaned and aired out for summer, and baby animals need to be prepared for. This year I have felt the busy-ness and anxiety more acutely because we’ve had one of the warmest Marches on record. The bugs have exploded in population and things are sprouting and blooming well in advance of normal.
One of the things keeping me busy (and exhausted) is my new vegetable garden project. I’ve mentioned before I fenced in a plot out front that’s just under 1,000 square feet. Since we have really terrible soil, and since I’ve had issues in the past with too much moisture pooling around the root systems of my plants, I’ve followed the example of Juniper Moon Farm and made raised bed rows to plant in this year. They are raised and rounded so that excess moisture flows off. I have 5 long raised beds to plant in now, thanks to weeks of digging, a load of compost, and a day of tilling.
Right now there are three kinds of onions, Rainbow Chard, two kinds of beets and little finger carrots sprouting out there.
An onion peeking through the straw mulch.
Now that it is April things are getting a little more exciting because it means it is almost our safe window for planting the seedlings we started indoors, such as our tomatoes, squash and herbs.
They’ve had a nice sunny spot in the house waiting to be garden – ready. Soon we’ll be receiving blueberry and raspberry plants that I ordered along with sweet potato and purple potato plants.
If all of this isn’t enough, we’ve got plans for a honeybee hive this spring to help pollinate our plants and increase our vegetable yields, and we have landscapers coming out next week to start clearing our woods for fencing. The goat shed is slowly being cleaned out to be ready for its once and future occupants.
The chickens are in full egg – laying mode and we are seeing about 2 dozen eggs a day now. I’ve been giving eggs away to anyone who’ll take them and even sending dozens off to two local restaurants, and I am still drowning in them. I am thinking I will make a bunch of freezable quiches and cookie doughs one of these days to use up some of the surplus.
Unfortunately we won’t have fresh goat milk this summer – Milkshakes aborted her babies. It turns out she had in fact been bred by the sheep in the fall and was therefore unable to carry the pregnancy. They were tiny, amorphous blobby things that were never meant to live. As I said, goat/sheep crosses aren’t viable.
Most likely I will try to breed her again this fall, for babies and milk next spring.
As you can see it is very busy outside right now in preparation for summer. Once the hot weather hits I hope to be able to spend some time indoors fixing the wallpaper Oona destroyed and touching up paint and other things we’ve been neglecting. But let’s hope the hot doesn’t come around too soon.
Happy first day of spring! I may not be a fan of summer or very-warm weather, but I just adore spring. My sinuses aren’t too thrilled, but that’s another story.
This first of spring is even more exciting and special for me because I am finally seeing the ideas and desires I have held for so long come to fruition. Especially with regards to the new garden.
I’d been wanting to move the vegetable patch closer to the house and make it bigger (with room for a beehive) and so a few weeks back I got outside and started making it happen. I pushed the kids’ giant wooden swingset about 15 feet from where it was (by myself! And yet I wonder why my neck and shoulder is bothering me so much lately??) and started staking out the outline for fencing.
Then I got to work digging. By hand. Again, by myself.
I’d had the idea that we really needed to move things along if I was going to get the early spring seeds and bulbs into the ground. Our only machinery with a tiller attachment is currently down (and ancient). I didn’t have the funds to hire someone to come with a big tractor, so I grabbed a shovel and went to it. The finished area is just under 1,000 square feet.
I decided I wanted rows of raised beds in this garden because I’ve lost so many plants over the years due to excessive moisture pooling at the roots. In a slightly rounded and raised bed the excess runs down the sides and away.
To do that, I started digging furrows, or trenches. I probably made them too wide and too deep (stubborn digging without a plan isn’t the best idea) but there are now 5 long raised beds out there. They still need to be tilled, since the dirt is nearly solid clay. Thankfully I still have a whole shed full of composted llama and goat poo to mix in. Still, I am concerned I may need to order up some dirt due to the extremely poor quality of the soil I dug out of our ground.
The clay is so hard I had to use a mattock to break it up.
There’s space in the shadier back – side of the garden for the bees to go so they have free access to keep our plantings pollinated.
Soon the onions will go into the ground along with the beets and once they are ready, all of the vegetable seedlings that are currently germinating in the dining room.
This is not nearly as impressive as Caroline’s seed selection! But this represents about 2/3 of what we are planting this year. I’ve ordered onions, seed potatoes, and blueberry and raspberry bushes as well. Come fall we’ll do another crop of late summer vegetables and some things to overwinter.
The biggest challenge in all of this?
This:
Keeping these insatiable scratching and digging and eating machines out of the garden. I’ve got the woven wire up: I just need a gate. Paul has a friend coming out to plan out the logistical part of clearing our wooded acres here and fencing it all in. Hopefully giving the poultry a wider ranging area will make the vegetable patch less of a lure for them.
Hopefully by fall you’ll be hearing me say how sick I am of preserving so many fresh veggies!
Remember that quilt top I was working on with Caroline when Lizzy House was at Susan’s?
I finished it.
Just the top. But it’s beyond gorgeous.
I don’t have any wall space where I can hang it for a proper picture right now, so bear with me. This is just a peek. The color is off and I realized it’s also upside – down.
More details and better pics to come.
For now I am back out to digging garden trenches.
Have I mentioned?
We think Milkshakes is expecting again.
She’s still nursing, yet we think she’s expecting again.
It all started when Adelaide and Sophie were about 2 or 3 months old and we brought Solomon the ram to service the ewes. That’s sheep talk. Sheep. Not goats. Solomon was to service the female sheep. There was even a green marker put on a special harness he wore so that once he had serviced a lady you’d be able to see a green spot on her back end.
There were lots of ladies with green butts out there. Lady sheep. Because Solomon was also a sheep.
Yet somehow Milkshakes wound up with a green butt.
Bless her little heart, she just couldn’t control herself.
Don’t worry, she’s not prego by the ram. She honestly can’t be. They’re not the same species. Any fertilization that may occur in such cases ends up in a misfire.
So she started breaking out of the lady pasture and into the pasture with Jack, her stinky one – time beau and baby – daddy to Addie and Sophie. Not that I can blame her, he’s quite handsome. And he was still stinky, which is how the ladies can tell he’s willing and able.
And now lo these many months later, she’s looking quite fat. I’m not sure when she’d be due because we don’t know when exactly she got herself knocked up.
I snapped this picture the other day with my phone. She wouldn’t look at me. Or come near me. Most likely because I had no food on me. If you look closely you can see she’s sticking out her tongue.
Me calling her “Whorey Mc-Shakers” probably didn’t help.
That’s Birdie (Bertie?) in the foreground. She was slightly less willing to give up on the possibility that I had food.
Let me start by saying that if you work with fabrics you should know Lizzy House. Because if you don’t, you are missing out BIG TIME. Lizzy has beautiful prints in beautiful colors – so much so that Susan collects hoardes bundles of it to display in her house. It’s that beautiful.
Lizzy came to the farm this weekend to give a quilting workshop (farm plus BFF’s plus quilting? I was SO in) and I was thrilled to be a part of it. I’ve not done a lot of quilting myself, and what I have done has been mostly frustrating because I never really bothered to figure out how to quilt, so when things went wrong I wasn’t really sure how to fix them. This class was perfect because I am not necessarily a beginner, but I needed to see people properly working a quilt to fill in the knowledge gap. And now that I know what I was doing wrong I realize how kind of simple the fixes were. Quilting is so very much easier than I was assuming it is, and so very much more fun!
Don’t you just love this Hello Kitty machine Virginia is sewing on?? Virginia owns “Gather Here” a beautiful yarn & fabric shop in Cambridge, MA. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop in and check it out. And tell her I said hi!!
The bonus? Aside from spending the weekend sewing at the farm, my dear friend Amanda came down from Boston.
I do not get to see Amanda nearly enough. That has to change.
I collaborated with Caroline and I am pretty sure a new quilting fiend has been born in her – she took right to it and loved it. Don’t be surprised if she’s designing quilts by this time next year!
Lizzy herself is just as beautiful and friendly and fun as her designs.
We were all working on making our own version of the quilt you see behind her – but not just “making” it. She shared a story of personal loss that spurred her to begin quilting, and how it saved her. How all of the emotion and love and sorrow and all of it went into the quilt until it became more than just “a quilt”. This is very familiar to me as a knitter, and to other knitters as well. Our craft is a kind of therapy and I have spent many hours knitting while mulling over whatever is happening in my life at that moment. From then on, that project always reminds me of that moment, like a snapshot. There are knitters I know who will call something their “angry scarf” or their “lucky socks” because that is what they remember most about knitting them. I oddly have a project that makes me think of Niagara Falls because I was listening to a “This American Life” segment about the Falls while I was knitting it.
Lizzy’s fabrics being bundled into a gorgeous stack.
This quilt project was about that, but in a more “intentional” way. Lizzy tasked us with deciding what we wanted our quilts to be about and to focus on that while working on it. I can tell you my intentions for it were all about my friendships at the farm (both old and new) and my hopes and feelings about finally getting my own farm underway. This will be an intentionally happy and lucky and grateful quilt. And Caroline and I worked on it together! I will remember that every time I see it and it will make me happy.
This is Lisa. Lisa lives locally (YAY!!!) and for all of you who are local, she and her husband own Revolutionary Soup. Right??!!! You can also check out their blog at Red Row Farm.
Caroline and I used a collection by Moda called “Papillon”.
I can’t wait to show off the project when it is all finished. We knocked out 12 of the 18 squares for the top. I’ll be machine quilting it once I’ve gotten the backing fabric and sandwiching material. Nothing fancy – I think the fabric does a knockout job on its own.
If you’re thinking about learning to quilt but are unsure – find a class. I can’t promise it will be as fun as this was, but it will take away much of the fear factor and get you going on the right track (if you live in the greater Boston area, Virginia’s shop is a great place to take classes, and you can use her machines there by the hour).
If Lizzy is going to be in your area giving a class or workshop – DO IT. I can’t speak highly enough of her. And for heaven’s sake if you find some of her fabric GET IT!!!
This is the post where I steal an entire bit from Susan’s blog and pass it on here. She and the crew at JMF are starting magazine. A beautiful, lovely, useful magazine centered around all things done by hand. Cooking, sewing, knitting, building…..you name it. I’m super excited about it (and having a hard time not boasting that I’ve known about it for quite awhile and have seen some of what’s going to go into it…..it’s too exciting to keep to myself!). Here it is in Susan’s words. There’s some lovely prizes to be had for those who can help get it off the ground.
Very Big News!
by Susan on March 2, 2012
So for months now I have been alluding to a big secret I’ve been keeping. I am thrilled that today I can finally share the news with all of you.
Juniper Moon Farm is starting a magazine called By Hand. By Hand will be a lifestyle magazine for people who make, with departments for cooking, crafting, DIY, gardening, and do-gooding, with a bit of travel and profiles of makers every month.
The idea is to celebrate creating things with our hands, and to explore the motivation to make things in a world where there are cheaper and immediate alternatives. It will be both practical (patterns, DIY projects, etc) and thoughtful, with a lovely and gentle aesthetic.
We have lots of amazing contributors and editors on board already, and the first issue is well underway. But before we go any further, we need your help!
We are holding a Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the money we need to make the magazine everything we want it to be. And as an added inducement, we have commissioned so amazing rewards! Our art director Michelle Lukezic has designed posters and t-shirts that are going to be incredibly popular with people who make things with their hands. Here’s a sample:
There are posters and t-shirts for each of the sections in the magazine!
If you like what you see and want to support us, great! If you can help us get the word out about the Kickstarter and the magazine we will be forever in your debt!
What’s going on right now:
- There’s 14 1/2 dozen eggs in my fridge right now. It’s getting dire, people. I am going to start doing egg drops on peoples’ doorsteps.
- I’ve been reading 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C Mann and I am loving it. There’s all kinds of great little – known facts about the impact that contact with the “New World” made globally. Did you know that at Columbus’ time (he was called Cristobal Colon then, btw) people had known for years the earth was round; Columbus (or Colon) insisted it was pear – shaped, with the very top resembling a woman’s nipple? Did you know earthworms were unknown in the Americas before the Europeans arrived? Or that Pocahontas’ name was actually “Mataoka”. The name “Pocahontas” was a nickname which meant “Little Hellion”?
- I’m working furiously on Wicked using the luscious Superfine Alpaca yarn Caroline and I bought from the Montpelier Fiber Festival in the fall. It’s very slow going, and normally I would be ultra bored with it by now, but the yarn is just so wonderful I can’t put it down.
- To assist with all that knitting – we got a new dvd player. Okay, we got it because our old one broke. Paul picked up a new one with all these crazy bells and whistles that I can barely figure out BUT. I can access my Amazon Prime account through the dvd player so that I can watch any of the streaming shows and movies from my online account ON MY TV!!! I know I am so late to the party on this but I am very much enjoying it! Now I don’t have to rely on my laptop to watch Downton Abbey!!! (And goodness, if you haven’t been watching Downton Abbey, please do. It is so very good!)
- I started working out every day back in January. I’ve been alternating between a strength – training Pilates program with resistance bands and an “Ease into 5K” program on the elliptical. I also gave up soda completely and have replaced it with green tea. My favorite is The Republic of Tea’s Blueberry Green Tea. I’m feeling pretty good. My goal is to run on the beach this August during my book club beach weekend. My super – fit friend Beth runs every morning while we are there, and this year I plan to join her.
- Today I got my spinach and broccoli planted. As last year, I am using all heritage non – GMO seeds from Baker Creek. We’ve expanded the vegetable garden site and I am excited for all the fresh veg we’ll have this year!
- Last but not least, I bought supplies to take to Juniper Moon Farm this weekend where I will get to meet Lizzy House! She’s giving a quilting workshop and I get to go sew with some of my favorite people (and meet Lizzy House!!!!!!)
What are you up to this week????
Well, we knew this day would come. It was a quiet fall and winter, we had a huge hatch – out of chicks last August and not one of those idiots will remain in the penned areas where it’s safe. We have a large-ish group that free – ranges all over (even into our neighbor Jack’s yard – good thing he likes them) and I am always worried those dummies are going to get eaten by something. I freely admit we get far too attached to them, and when they get snatched it’s sad and traumatic.
Fortunately, we have Tevye.
I’d been noticing that his rooster-ish behavior has been much like our dear departed Big Jim – unlike our other roosters who hog all the food to themselves and run at the first sign of trouble (or beat up on each other as well as us humans). By this I mean that he is an exemplary roo – he makes sweet clucking noises when we bring out the food to tell his ladies to come eat. He keeps them around him when they’re all free – ranging. The few times I’ve noticed a hawk circling fairly low I’ve seen Tevye gather all the hens into the underbrush and wooded areas to keep them safe.
He’s also pretty darn friendly to us. In other words, the perfect rooster.
Today he’s proved himself again.
Today the foxes came back.
We were alerted by the sound of probably all 40 or so of our chickens clucking in unison and when I looked out the window I could see a fox departing across the creek and away, a chicken clearly in its mouth.
Emily and I ran out and I heard a loud “squawk”, and then the fox dropped the chicken and ran. It was Tevye, and he came bounding back to us.
A check through the yard proved no one was missing. Tevye clearly gave the fox a good fight and kept the other chickens safe. He’s got some rather nasty wounds right now, but they could have been much, much worse. I doused him with Blue Kote, gave him some treats and sent him happily back to his girls, where he crowed loudly and triumphantly. My fingers are crossed they heal up quickly and don’t fester.
I think somebody deserves a bag of meal worms, don’t you?
Even though the weather is NOT cooperating (as in, we’re having fall followed by spring) I am still trying to enjoy all the goodness that winter has to offer.
Cozy handknits, warm fires, hot tea…….citrus fruits.
Yup, citrus fruits are in season now, and we have plenty of my favorites: clementines and Meyer lemons. I’ve never actually been able to find Meyer lemons locally before, so I was surprised to find them at (of all places) our local WalMart. (I know….I am not a WalMart fan. But…..when they carry Concord grapes and Meyer lemons, how can you resist?)
Last week I made a lovely Shaker Lemon Pie, and we’ve been snacking steadily on clementines, but as of this morning I still had plenty of both.
So I rooted around a bit on Pinterest until I found what fit the bill for some lovely citrusy fare: recipes for Chinese Orange Chicken and Meyer Lemon Pudding.
Oh yeah.
Neither one was particularly difficult to make, and the results were outstanding. Seriously.
Paul declared the chicken “The best orange chicken I’ve ever had”. That’s saying something, because we are quite fond of Chinese food and we’ve tried quite a lot of it. It was fresh, bold and bright, with a strong orange flavor. If you like orange chicken, you HAVE to try this recipe. The only change I made was when frying the chicken, I simply coated the raw chicken pieces in cornstarch (I didn’t use the egg or flours at all). This was due to simple laziness. The sauce I made no changes to.
We followed the chicken with the Meyer Lemon pudding served on a slice of pound cake (which Paul picked up from the grocery – I didn’t feel like baking any).
After all of this it is a very good thing that I have been following a workout routine for the last week. SO MANY CALORIES!!!
Yesterday I was treated to being able to get out of the house a bit (Paul is almost fully recovered, aside from restrictions on lifting) and see Susan, who was home for literally ONE day between trips, and also to see my animals, who I’ve been missing terribly.
We’re making headway in our efforts to bring them home, though. Trees are coming down, cleaning up is underway, plans are in process. It’s very exciting! I can’t wait to be able to look out the window again and see my flock.
Sophie and Adelaide’s baby-daddy, Jack – who may or may not be the future baby - daddy of kids that Milkshakes may or may not be already carrying. She’s been sneaking into his pasture to spend some “quality time” with him.
I got to see Coconut, who is 18 kinds of adorable, and I just want to rub those ears! But, aside from nibbling at Susan’s fingers, he’s a bit skittish still.
Mr. Jefferson here gave me lots of nice, wet cow kisses.
Sophie and Adelaide are almost as big as Milkshakes, and they won’t let me near them. On the plus side, unlike Frodo and Finnegan who thought they were lapdogs, these little ladies know they are goats.
Wren! She’s gotten just about too big for me to be picking her up and snorgling her now.
As for Jerry, he likes to make it difficult to get a decent picture. Once he knows your game he’s either INYOURFACE or lurking just behind you.
This way you either get NO pictures, or ones like these:
I miss that crazy llama!
