I finally finished a skirt I’d cut out months ago.
Just in time for our first campfire of the season!
The fabric is a delectable avian print by Joel Dewberry.
And can I say how much I enjoy having a serger to make nice finished edges?
The pattern is one of my absolute favorites. It’s Amy Butler’s Barcelona Skirt pattern, and I’ve made many of them.
They’re comfortable, flattering and super easy to make. I don’t know why it took me so long to get this one sewn up.
This weekend I decided to try my hand at something I’d been thinking about for awhile. Soft tacos with brisket filling.
I didn’t really have a recipe as such so I just kind of winged it. This is what I came up with.
I threw a 2 lb beef brisket into the crockpot around 11 am and topped it with about 1/2 cup of catsup, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 3/4 cup of tequila, 1 cup of beef stock, 1 TBS red pepper flakes, 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper, and 2 tsp cumin. I cooked it on high heat for about 3 hours and then reduced it to low for about another 3 or 4 hours.
Once the brisket was done (super tender and falling apart!) I chopped up some tomatoes and onions and threw them together in a small bowl with a splash of lime juice. If I’d had any fresh cilantro on hand I’d have thrown that in as well.
Then I decided I may as well whip up some homemade tortillas.
Homemade tortillas are actually dead easy and quick, and if you’re going to go through the effort to make a fabulous brisket filling for your tacos, then you should have excellent tortillas, too. They’re so much more delicious than store – bought (unless you can buy freshly made ones!).
I use THIS RECIPE.
SO easy. Flour, salt, water and olive oil.
Break off a small ball at a time, roll it out with a rolling pin and throw it in a greased pan for about a minute.
It took me about 20 minutes to make 8.
Then I served them up. I filled each warm tortilla with brisket (plus a little brisket sauce from the crockpot) some monterey jack cheese, the tomato – onion mixture and some sour cream. If I had had any fresh guacamole I would have used that as well.
Et voila! A super delicious, super easy dinner that will wow your family.
This year has been my most ambitious garden undertaking to date. I have two raised beds in front full of radishes, chives, lavender, rosemary, yukon potatoes, and Adirondack blue potatoes.
I have the front garden full of garlic, arugula, two kinds of beets, two kinds of peas, pole beans, carrots, 4 different kinds of tomatoes, bell peppers, anaheim peppers, strawberries and raspberries.
The new, larger back garden has several kinds of pumpkins, butternut and acorn squash, zucchini and summer squash, two kinds of cucumbers, watermelon, two kinds of corn, blue potatoes, red potatoes, sweet potatoes, and basil.
Keeping up with the weeding has been the hardest part of it all (as is usually the case!).
The blueberry patio plant I bought last year (which was “guaranteed” to fruit the first year. Ha!) is finally in fruit.
The back garden.
Squash sprouts!
Sweet potato.
Red potato.
Pole beans.
One of the roses I planted to encourage visitation by pollinators.
It’s so hard to be patient when everything is just starting out, but soon enough if all goes well I’ll be overwhelmed with the bounty.
Fingers crossed!
Now that we’ve managed to carve this property more or less into what we need it to be we realized it’s time to make it look better.
We’re working on getting the pool open (a genius with pool chemicals I am not) and in anticipation of that Paul decided we needed stairs so we’re not walking down a veritable mud slide to it.
He spent the weekend bringing in dirt and setting the bricks in where they need to be.
I’m excited for the finished product – and I’m thinking some solar lights along the sides are called for.
I also bought more peony and dianthus plants to put in (haven’t gotten to them yet….ugh) and we’re working on smoothing out the back pasture and getting all the stumps removed (slowly but surely).
The good news is that I am starting to see this:
Grass! I can see grass starting to come in! It’s not growing in fast enough to suit me, but at least I can see that a day will come that it won’t look like a barren, post apocalyptic wasteland back there!
Life has given me a lot of really crappy days lately (and not just me – I know plenty of other people having tough times…..must be something in the air) but once in awhile it also hands me something really, really great.
Little Mr. Darby, our House Lamb, has turned a corner!
He’s been getting slowly perkier and perkier each day, and last evening started nibbling on a small amount of grain and drinking from a water bowl. It was great because I then didn’t need to get up in the middle of the night to give him a bottle. In the morning his ears perked up when I went to say “good morning” to him and he let out a tiny little “baa”. I put more grain in front of him and went for my own breakfast.
A few moments later I heard his little “baa” again. When I went back, he was looking at me expectantly. He had eaten all of his grain so I gave him some more. Just tiny amounts so he wouldn’t overdo it.
We repeated this process all morning until I took him out to enjoy the sun and lay in the grass.
Except he didn’t want to lay in the grass. He wanted to walk!
He is still fairly weak and can’t walk around a whole lot on his own, but the fact that he has started to do it gives me great hope. It will be wonderful to see him back out with his fellow lambs instead of hanging out in the craft room impersonating a spoiled invalid.
This:
Is the sum total of my knitting for the month.
Two measly rows.
To be fair, it’s been an insanely busy month. I am starting to realize that April seems to be THE busiest month of the farm year. Between babies being born, shearing being done and garden work going on, it’s exhausting.
Plus, Susan is moving, and we’ve been helping her take things to the landfill and storage as needed. It’s been a fun and hectic month, but it leaves little down time. In the evenings, when I would normally be knitting, Oona has decided that snuggles on my lap are essential.
I can hardly complain about that.
The good news is that by next week the majority of the garden prep and planting will be done, everyone will be settled, and things will calm down a bit. Then that yarn and I are going to spend some quality time together.
Some week, huh?
Luckily I’ve had plenty to distract me and keep me busy so I wouldn’t sit around and worry about friends and relatives in Boston.
Paul did some tractoring in the area out back where the squash garden will be put in.
It will more or less double the garden space we already have, and this way the squash can spread all it likes and it won’t overtake the tomatoes and peppers like last year.
We also did tails, tags and testes this week.
We dock our lambs’ tails to avoid the potential for fly strike. Although we can do it ourselves, we prefer to let the vet take care of it. It’s done with the use of a very tight rubber band that disrupts blood flow to the tail. It’s uncomfortable for them, but not super painful. After a while the tail simply “dries up” and falls off. We do the testicles of our boy lambs and goats the same way. The vet gives them some pain killer at the time the banding is done, and after an hour or so they don’t seem to remember that the bands are there at all, and they are back to playing and eating normally.
Ear tags were done this week at the same time.
Darby. Lord I love that little lamb.
Doesn’t he look spiffy with his new tag?
We also had a lovely visit from my friend Theresa who came down from New Jersey with her little ones.
We played with lambs and the kids had a blast.
We are so fortunate to have wonderful friends and beautiful weather and adorable babies!
Susan came over on April 1st bearing a box – and not just any box.
I think in fact her words were “Happy April Fools! I brought you ducks!”
Six of these little cuties are residing in a makeshift brooder in one of our chicken coops. We don’t know the breed(s) or gender(s), but they’re ducks, so does it really matter?
They have a nice heat lamp to keep them warm since it hasn’t exactly warmed up yet the way it did last year at this point. We’re excited for them to feather out so we can let them swim!
Meanwhile the chickens are giving us sure signs of spring: they’re laying eggs again. Lots of eggs. I am about to be overloaded again. I am not complaining about that, though. I’d rather be overloaded than otherwise; I actually had to buy eggs this winter. Free – range organic eggs are not cheap, let me tell you, and I won’t have extra money to buy expensive eggs for awhile because of this:
We got a tractor.
There was just no getting around it anymore – we need a tractor. Our road out to the pasture is usually too muddy for hay delivery, and there’s no way to move an 800 pound bale of hay without a good sized tractor.
Not to mention that we need to FINISH the pasture.
This weekend we are going to focus on penning in a portion for the animals to stay in while we remove the rest of the tree stumps from the field (again, tractor required) and get some grass growing.
I also need to focus on getting the new squash bed tilled and ready for planting in a few weeks. I’m actually thinking I may borrow Susan’s pigs for a few weeks to dig it up and fertilize it for me.
Things are getting exciting around here!
I think Susan and I could easily engage in a “cute-off”. She’d win, only because she has a lot more lambs than I. I am sadly thinking that Wren and Fairfax are not bred after all, which means I will only have two lambs this year.
But such cute lambs they are!
Beatrix.
Darby.
Darby and Amelia.
We are so completely in love with these little darlings. I wish we could have lambs around ALL the time!
Merry Magpie Farm 