Tag Archives: Farm

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Interruption By Puppy!

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And now, instead of the “In the Garden” post I was going to do, I had to share puppy pics instead.  I put them up on Facebook and realized I couldn’t not share them here as well.

For those of you who hadn’t heard, this past Saturday was Maryland Sheep & Wool.  Susan, Caroline and I drive all the way up there to meet some friends and partake in the wooliness.  Three hours in the car.  We no sooner got there than Zac called and announced that one of Susan’s Maremmas, Lucy, had just had a litter of 7 puppies.  Needless to say we did not stay in Maryland very long.  Which is why I have next to no pictures of the event to post here.

Instead I have adorable puppies to show you:

Maremmas are a livestock guard dog breed that hails from the Maremma region of Tuscany in Italy.  They are big, friendly working dogs that live their whole lives with the livestock they guard.

The best news?

We got to reserve one for us!!!!

I cannot tell you how absolutely thrilled I am and how excited we all are.

Especially the chickens.  They’ll have a full time guardian!

PS – for more puppy pics, click here for Susan’s blog.

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In the Garden: Kale

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While the tomatoes all languish in the house (outgrowing their pots by leaps and bounds) waiting for it to warm the heck up, the cold – weather crops are all coming in like crazy.

The beans and peas are starting to climb the wire trellis and I hope soon we’ll see some actual pods.

The lettuces (Black Seeded Simpson and Red Romaine) are all just about ready to be picked for salads, and the spinach is not far behind.

The broccoli is getting nice and leafy and I am waiting impatiently to see the flowery part!

Then there is the kale.  It is screaming for attention and picking right now – growing head and shoulders above everything else.  I wasn’t planning on making anything kale – related for dinner tonight, and it’s not very tall yet – but it is very crowded so I decided the time was about right to pick some of the tender leaves for making kale chips.

Kale is one of those greens that is very at home in a potato or ham – based soup – it is very sturdy and flavorful without being too overpowering (it is actually a part of the cabbage family).  It is also very good for you – being high in beta carotene, vitamin K, vitamin C and even calcium!

Kale chips can be made with large, fully – grown kale leaves, but I like to make them with the more tender, smaller leaves.  If you use big kale leaves, you’ll need to remove the stems and the ribs to make the chips.  With the small, baby leaves it’s not really necessary.

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees and wash your kale.  I just give mine a quick rinse if I’ve just pulled it from the garden – really all I am worried about is that we don’t end up eating too many hidden little bugs or spiders!

Lay your kale in a single layer on a cookie sheet either coated with cooking spray or with foil.

Drizzle some olive oil and salt and pepper to taste.  I also like to splash some vinegar on them – like salt & vinegar chips (malt vinegar is best, but just about any will work)!

Bake for about 20 to 25 minutes or until they are nice and dark and crispy.

They will come out like this – all nice and blurry!

Oona and I hogged all of these up before anyone else even got wind they were done.  They were yummy!

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Neve’s – Eye View

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We’ve been spending time on and off at Juniper Moon Farm all month to visit all the new babies, and last time we were there Neve took off with my camera.  She took almost 300 photos.

The following are the best ones (and for an 8 year old with no real camera knowledge they are pretty good!!!).

I think she’s ready for some formal lessons, don’t you???

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Chicken Prison

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The last couple of weeks have been rough for us, chicken – wise.  We lost 6 hens to either foxes and mysterious disappearances (also probably foxes).  We lost 3 rare breed hens which hurt the most, since, as you can imagine, they are tough to come by.

So I had a bit of a fit over it trying to figure out how to contain the free rangers who refuse to stay safely inside either chicken pen, because it’s the free rangers we keep losing.

That’s when Paul got brilliant.  And also I kind of wondered why the heck we haven’t done it this way before.

Voila.  Free ranger prison.  Maximum – security style.  (well, unless you’re a snake.  But they can get into anything, let me tell you).

The two weakest spots were at the top (Tevye flew right out before we were done) and along the bottom, where they kept trying to tunnel out.  So, the top has plastic mesh all around so there are no gaps to fly through, and the bottom has extra welded wire all around to prevent tunneling out.

Those chickens are not too pleased.

BUT. They are safe, and that is priority number one when you own animals.  Their safety.  I don’t care that they are happier free ranging, because clearly they are also tastier to foxes that way.

Believe it or not, this is still being looked at as a temporary solution.  We still have landscapers coming (any day now………seriously……any day) to clear the property and then we will see how things lay in terms of fencing and chicken territory.  It may be we end up putting a coop in this prison and let that be that, but we’ll see.  For now they are clucking around during the day, and sleeping either in the dog shed we put in there or roosting on the sticks I put in the corner.

As Paul said, if they break out of there, they deserve to get eaten.

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Jerry Gets A Haircut

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Well, it’s been nearly two years since Jerry got the hackjob of a shearing I did that first summer I owned him.  Since then his fleece hasn’t really grown out the way a fiber llama’s would.  Those llamas you see at ag fairs and fiber festivals have fleece that falls to their knees.  Jerry’s headed just south of his belly and then started to look more rasta than long and luxurious.  It looked like it was beginning to felt right on his back.

With summer coming (and I am predicting a hot and awful one) it was time to lose those matted locks.  So when the awesome Emily the Shearer came to Juniper Moon Farm to do a mini shearing this week, I took the chance to have Jerry done.

Emily’s not crazy about shearing llamas.  And to be honest, I don’t blame her.  As fiber animals go, they’re bratty and they don’t like to be touched  – AND they’re rather too large to be easily controlled without a restraining “chute”, which I don’t have.

Zac did wonderfully well keeping Jerry “calm”, but despite his best efforts, Emily, Caroline and I all got spit upon.  Now that’s saying something, because as llamas go, Jerry isn’t a spitter.

Thankfully Emily really knows her stuff, and she’s fast.  As well she should be, freshly back from her time in New Zealand at The Golden Shears.

She can knock out a sheep in no time flat – but that’s what comes of spending six weeks shearing 200 sheep a day!

Jerry was preeeetty pissed.

For as bad mannered and upset as he was, though, he did pretty well – though I think a lot of that come down to Zac and Emily being so good at handling him.

He looks like a hobby horse on a stick, no?

Although he looks rather sad and undignified without his fleece it will make a huge difference in his comfort level this summer – llamas are better suited to colder climates – they come from the Andes, after all!

For the finishing touch?  A much – needed pedicure.

I totally owe Emily big on this one.  Especially since in two years I’ll need to ask her to do it again.

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March Catch – Up

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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.

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The Beginnings of Something Wonderful

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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!

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Weekend In Pictures

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Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

As you may or may not know, St. Patrick’s Day is our wedding anniversary.  This year was number 16 – and we celebrated the way we always do: with good food, cold Guinness, and watching Darby O’Gill and the Little People together.  Maddie made a lovely Chocolate Stout Cake with Bailey’s Cream Cheese frosting, and I made Jamie Oliver’s Steak, Guinness & Cheese Pie (from Jamie At Home).  I made fresh granola and played with my new Janome sewing machine,  and Paul brought home his new toy: a giant trailer.

There’s no real recipe at play here: I just toss some oats, sesame seeds, coconut & sliced almonds with some dried blueberries, some honey, some maple syrup and canola oil and bake it lightly.

Truffles and Speckles fighting over a nesting box.  Neither one would cede to the other, and they ended up both laying their eggs at the same time.

No, I don’t particularly like “Hello Kitty”.  The machine just happened to be  branded that way and it was a steal.

Paul’s new toy.

What do you mean I can’t have this marshmallow Oona dropped that’s bigger than my head??!!

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The Nanny Goat Waiting Game

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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.

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Lizzy House Quilting Weekend! (extra-long post)

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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!!!