I did it again...

I did it again....waited WAY too long between posts.  But I have been busy, I promise...

Planted Something: I'm forcing tulip bulbs, but they're to tiny to bother with a photo right now...just imagine four sprouting bulbs in a purple pot.

Harvested Something:  It continues to be eggs, but every day the girls surprise me...someone "new" is laying, can you see?  I suspect it is our white Silkie, Sapphire.

Preserved something: In the manner that this refers to storing away food...I baked 7+ loaves of bread.  (See the entry under "Local Food")  Thank God I was able to control my hunger around the fresh baked bread and most of them got into the freezer...

Prepped something:  Right now, the only thing that comes to mind is all the dyeing we are doing to build up inventory, as we are applying to vend at the Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Fair.

Cooked something: Nothing too exciting here; can we just acknowledge that I cook every day, and change this category to Knitted something?  (at least that comes with a picture...)  I was inspired by my friend Susan's ear warmer, and pulled together one of my own design with mittens, using some local wool that I dyed last year.  Funny how last year I didn't like the color or dye job, and this year...go figure.

Managed reserves:  This time of year, that means hay.  I am still searching for those final 3 dozen bales to get us through Spring.  I am reluctant to pay for hay, when my previous employer still owes me money (for which I was planning on getting hay...) but soon I will have to break down and fork over (eek!)  $5 a bale....sigh

And my friend Susan is also a farmer who preserves our reserves of endangered and heirloom populations.  We visited her about a week ago to see her American Buff geese:

and her Icelandic sheep.  Don't they look just like the Shetlands?  You have to get close enough  to check out the fleece structure to tell the difference.

Worked on local food systems:  I've met a Mennonite woman through our local knitting group that makes all her own bread, and WOW! is it good.  I had to beg only a little to ask her to  teach me, (since baking decent bread has so far in my life been a skill I cannot master) and besides her patient teaching, apparently the secret is using the right flour.  She uses Occident flour (which can only be had by waiting till the next trip to Pennsylvania and buying a 50# bag for our house) and Red Star yeast.  I was so happy when my stuff rose the first time, you'd think I won the lottery!

It was the start of a wonderful system - we are bartering for even more skills lessons in the future - pickling for dyeing yarn and so on...

Reduced waste/Recycled:  Well this category was also satisfied by knitting - I used stash yarn to knit up helmet liners for military personnel.  It was a satisfying  project, and I encourage anyone with needles and some wool yarn to think about it...

Learned something: No matter how ridiculous it may seem...the cat knows better.  I thought she was nuts spending 6 hours a day parked in front of the stove like this:

Until I turned on the self-cleaning feature (which heats up the oven quite hot) and out scurried a mouse.  Which she grabbed in her mouth and wouldn't give up until I  put a can of fresh cat food down on the floor nearby.  And so I was left to capture the mangled, yet still perky, mouse.  Which my husband helpfully suggested I could put out in the back hall until he got home to dispose of it.   Yeah....well, not actually.  The mouse had other ideas and left before DH got home by leaping tall garbage cans with a single bound and scurrying for freedom.  Which may  have simply meant back where he came from...because guess where Lucky is spending her days????  Hmm....

The misadventures of Kitty (or why I can't get a DAMN thing done around here)

For the umpteenth time, a service person has made an appointment to come to our house, but is unable to narrow their arrival down to less than a 5 hour window.  The service industry apparently has NO understanding of farming or any other stay-at-home enterprise, because they are convinced all you have to do is sit around in the house and wait for their arrival.  Around here, they have taken to calling you before they arrive, and GOD FORBID you not answer the phone, because that's all the excuse they need not to come...

Being the good-natured person I am (cough, cough) I decide to make the best of my time indoors and do something constructive and hopefully profitable like making jam/jelly for the final market on Saturday.

I make several lightening fast trips outdoors to collect apples and quince, running like a frantic rabbit between trees (my neighbors must think I am completely soft-headed) and settle in to prepare fruit.  I notice (slowly) that the indoor cat has been absent for the last 15 minutes or so, and then I notice that there is a cat outside the bay window in the kitchen that looks remarkably like our indoor cat.  Hmmm....

S--t!  I throw on my house slippers and fly out the door (again) to try and retrieve the cat.  She runs away from everything, so I approach slowly and she moves onto the front porch.  Not wanting to scare her further away, I run back inside the house to open the front door and coax her in.  Thankfully, she comes in, but as she passes by me, I notice she has something in her mouth.  Ick!  a mouse...

Before she can get the chance to drop the disgusting thing and chase it all over the house, I scoop her up and head for the bathroom, where I dangle her over the tub and shake her to loose the varmint from her jaws.  (The thinking on this, in case you are wondering, was that if she does drop it, the mouse will fall into the tub and be unable to scale the slippery sides, giving me time to do....something...)

Finally...

It's clearly dead.  Only now I have to wad up enough paper towels to protect me from actually feeling the mouse as I clean it up, dash the whole mess in the garbage can, put all of that outside the back door (no time to run to the burn pile lest I miss the furnace man!) and go back inside to scrub down the tub followed with a bleach rinse for good measure.

Finally back to the fruit, I resume peeling when I hear a strange scrabbling noise coming from the living room.  The cat is up on the PC.

No, she is not adjusting the connections.  Nor is she chasing dust balls, like I had hoped.  She is stuck.  Yep, stuck.  As in her claw has hooked itself into one of the teeny holes in the metal cover plate on the back of the computer and she can't get loose.

Believe me, she tried.  And I tried.  And there were six or seven really good tries where I grabbed a hold of her leg and maneuvered it forward to try and wrangle the curve of her claw out of the teeny hole.  (Kind of like trying to crochet with a fish hook...)  She hissed.  I hissed back. She growled.  I growled back.  Finally, I had to clean off the entire table top, pull the PC tower around so we could pull at a better angle, and worked her loose.

Forget putting all the stuff on the table and the PC back, my jam is boiling over.

THAT'S what I get for being lazy...

It's Sunday, and I am desperately trying to cling to a few minutes of blissful inactivity early in the morning...which includes not feeding the cat the very INSTANT my feet hit the kitchen floor...and this is what I get.

The kitty decides to go get breakfast on her own.  She got it in the cellar (God, I hope that's where it came from!)  And she brings it upstairs to show it to me.  Kind of a feline "So, there!"

My usual rodent-catching hero is upstairs, asleep.

I get the bathroom garbage can.   I catch "breakfast" and quickly cover it up with the closest thing on hand.  Any chance of that blissful, lazy moment is gone, because now both kitty and the "breakfast" are sitting there, mocking me.  I can't take "it" outside, because when I remove the cover, I am afraid it will jump up and eat my eyebrows off my face, or run up my leg, or be in reality, a rat.  

I am going upstairs to join my hero, and see if I can subtly entice him into waking up.  For me.  'Cause who wouldn't want to deal with rodents the very first INSTANT their feet hit the floor... (for the one they love?) 
 

Escapades, escapes, and scapes

Life on any farm has its ups and downs, and those of us that pursue this lifestyle know that sometimes the ups and downs come with laughs, sometimes you come close to committing a crime, and sometimes the lifestyle amazes you. Whichever it is, it's definitely harder than most people realize. (Hence, the blog...)

This week it has been all of the above.

Cats on the farm can be quite utilitarian, but we seem to have passed right by that function and moved on to "soft lumps of purring companionship". But even there, I beg to draw The Line. We have a house cat (so deemed because life on the outside is just too risky for my daughter's emotional stability) who wakes me up practically every morning by purring in my ear. Loudly. But she has pushed this companionship thing a little too far. She has taken over my bath.

And this morning, she just wasn't giving it up. For anything. Even when I started up the water. So I figured I could start by washing my hair (under the faucet and with the pseudo-shower attachment thingy - we have no shower, don't ask.) and she would get the hint. Apparently not. She stayed right there for the rinse, too. And when I shifted positions to continue, still no movement. (Now this is where it gets ridiculous, but it was before 6, and any caffeine.) I actually finished the whole thing, remaining in pseudo-shower mode, so as not to push the envelope, and she responded by simply beginning to wash her nether parts, remaining defiantly in the dry end of the tub. I could have had this photographically documented, but the blog is PG, so forget that.

Now, being that we are a farm, people think they can drop off unwanted pets, and somehow they will discover some idyllic life on the farm, and we farmers will magically have loads of extra pet food just lying about. So, there are a sizeable herd of feral cats in all stages of wildness wandering about. We worked hard to tame one, dubbed Max, and have taken her into our hearts. Once we had done all the hard work, de-ticking, cleaning, feeding, and getting the flea collar, our neighbors decided they needed another trailer cat, and promptly snatched Max up. For days, I worried some evil had befallen her, until the fateful day we drove by and saw Max plastered up against the bathroom window, mewing. Wheh! Not dead, just kidnapped. But I couldn't imagine how I was going to have THAT conversation with the less-than-friendly neighbors...

Knock, knock. "Do you have my stray?"

Well, apparently the first weekend the grand-brats were over, one of them left the door open, and Max escaped. Yay, we have our stray back.

Now it appears the word is out in the feline press. Our porch is the new place to be and be seen. This greeted me this morning.

This kitty yoga practitioner is another stray. Now named Henry, for the time being.

Two nights ago, as I sat picking away at the computer, I heard a familiar "bleh". But it took only a second to register - this "bleh" was WAY too close. I looked outside into the pitch blackness beyond the front porch, and all six sheep ran by. All there was to do at 11:00 p.m. was pack them in the upper barn, and wait for the morning.

They had broken out of their pasture, broken into the garden, and broke out the onion dip, baby. They didn't leave until they had eaten every brocolli, brussel sprout, cauliflower and onion top. I seriously considered a mutton barbeque. And I'm vegetarian.

For me, the worst damage was the wheat. Almost 2/3 the plot. (Sigh.)

Why couldn't they have taken the garlic scapes? We planted garlic for the first time this year, and almost 100 plants came up. So that's 100 scapes. (Garlic "flowers"/"buds") That's a lot of scapes for folks who don't have a clue what to do with them. But we're learning!

Has it been that long?

Shame on me! I get so wrapped up in jobs around the farm, and I forget to keep my blog family up to date...

Well, Madison has made real gains with Max, the abandoned kitty. As you can see, he trusts us enough now to eat from a bowl, and he has earned a bed on the front porch, toy included...

We've started with a flea/tick collar, to get him used to that, and to help him with the bugs. I've pulled four ticks off him already, but none since the collar. We can make it a "real" collar if he stays through the summer...

The sheep are on pasture full time. Here they are down by the pond, Hattie (center) and her first twins, Jack and Victoria. All camera hams.

The electronet gets moved several times a day to keep the sheep mowing, and tummies full. And Hattie has dandelion duty - she cruises the lawn and nibbles the yellow flowers off in each new section.

(Wonder what they taste like? Lemon? )

And, we are lighter on the rooster load by one. Ewok, the Ameracuana with attitude, found a new owner at the Fairgrounds Tailgate Poultry sale.

But we are up on the fence count...this one is totally decorative.

Flowers to come...

Sunny Saturday

A sunny weekend day usually means chores, but we promised ourselves a trip to Hancock Shaker Village, a historic farm/museum/preservation site only 30 minutes drive from our place. It was the last weekend of Baby Animals, and there was sheep shearing...so we couldn't resist!

This round barn is the centerpiece of the farm - it's construction is magnificent! The whole place is awe-inspiring...what beauty there is in the peaceful and thoughtful pursuit of a way of life.

Inside were the baby animals - sheep, pigs, cows, and all sorts. Madison got to help bottle feed a lamb...

There were furniture and woodworking barns...

And we left feeling very satisfied and justified in the lifestyle choices we are making. Everywhere around us were families of all makes and ages, and the one thing that most had in common was their absolute amazement at farm life, and an unsettling ignorance of what the farm is/was all about.

A woman who had no idea what the shearer was doing to the poor ewe, and who was even more clueless as to how that stuff got to be yarn (You only have to do that once for each sheep, right? What?!? Every year? Doesn't that hurt the sheep?) A man who explained to his grandson that the 3-week-old chick, half-feathered and as large as pidgeon, was just hatched. Today. (And as soon as it gets all it's feathers, it will begin to lay an egg every day until it dies.) Another woman who thought maple syrup came right out of the trees, ready to go. (These recipes sound delicious, but who'd want to go to all the effort to cut their trees and get out the syrup? You cook it to get it that way? But, why?) And a man who couldn't tell the difference between a goat and a sheep, despite the big yellow signs that identified all the animals. (You have to look at the back, dear. Those ones with the big bags back there are goats, because that is where goat's milk comes from. And the ones with horns are all sheep. Curly horns are males, straight horns are females.)

We couldn't leave without perusing the gift shop, where DH found edibles, and the midget and I found books, books, and more books. (Gotta haves.)

Back at the ranch by 3:00, and the chores began. Rototilling, mailbox installation, feeding, and moving roosters, and more (pictures tomorrow!)

And we made a new friend.

Or, I should say, Madison made a new friend. This is a feral? cat that has been hanging around since last summer. She/he is sooooo timid, and has a very damaged right ear, and if my eyes don't deceive me, a funny gait with that back left leg. Perhaps abuse? What ever the circumstances, my patient and kind little midget spent all afternoon coaxing it out from under the porch with milk and cat food. She has dubbed "it" Max.