Dog magnets

Mealtime is a busy time of day

Are the words “dog” and “magnet” written over our front door or on our foreheads???  Maybe.  Or just:  2 big animal suckers live here?  We have had a chihuahua and a lab for many years, but then few years ago we inherited a Jack Russell from friends, and now it appears that our son’s dog is staying with us for awhile.  Daisy the Bluetick/Walker hound mix, 8 months old.  She is a sweetheart, big and gormless :*)   I guess our 20 acres is perfect for a dog like a hound.  She and Bear the Lab have a great time wandering and checking out the sights and smells. They look like two best friends going out the back door and heading into the woods in the snow.  And then two funny faces wait for us at the back door. But… it also makes for a pretty busy household!   Everyone has their place and a different relationship with their people:  Tesser the Chihuahua makes sure to sleep with us at night; Josie the Jack Russell sleeps in the dog bed in the bathroom; Daisy sleeps in her crate, and Bear spends her evenings outside the bathroom door, and daytimes she spends it on her blanket in front of the south-facing french doors.  I guess maybe everyone likes that location pretty well, come to think of it!

Naptime for the big 3!

Greenhouse revealed

Winter has hit us with a windy vengeance.  By the middle of last week we were having arctic wind gusts at approximately 30 mph, and it sounded as though a freight train was traveling through the neighborhood.  With the ice on the ground, it was a challenge to even reach the animal paddocks in one piece.  Last Thursday I was running up the driveway at dusk, head down to make sure I didn’t fall, threw open the gate to my work area that connects all three paddocks, and instead of a nicely covered temporary milking greenhouse, this is what I saw:

Greenhouse skeleton, laid bare :*(

Salsa and I were not pleased!  The lights were swinging in the wind and I couldn’t raise a soul in the house to come and help.  I guess in the end, it didn’t make any difference… I don’t think we could have hoisted that heavy covering over in the face of those winds, even if there were two of us.  We had to wait until the winds died down to get that lid back on.  The greenhouse needs a totally new covering, but they are not cheap, and I don’t want to replace it until we re-site the whole structure.  Before we really knew the lay of the land and how the winter winds travel across the front of the property, we put this and one other livestock greenhouse up, with the gable ends facing east/west.  Not the best planning on our parts!  The winds hoot down from the northwest and get into the gable ends and lift the whole heavy covering up and down, shifting it just ever so slightly, over and over again.  Eventually it just starts to come apart and lose its integrity.  We did finally get the cover back on and tied down again.  Not much more milking to be done this year, thank goodness.  Although I have to say, it was a beautiful, clear evening, and I got to snuggle up against a nice warm body and stargaze.

Happy Hanukkah! Merry Winter

It’s definitely feeling like winter out there today and we are feeling quite festive at our house.  John really did a nice job attaching some twinkle lights to the major beams in the living room.  I love having them up, we don’t end up turning the beam lights on as much.

All twinkled up

I hope that everyone who celebrates Hanukkah has had a peaceful holiday. We have enjoyed our latkes and the menorah with our son and grandson very much.  It’s certainly a nice way to bring some light into the darkest afternoons of the year!

John's copper tubing menorah

Snow day

Yesterday was our first snow day of the school year.  It was a great call as once the snow started it really came down.  And then of course it was followed by torrential, windswept rains.  Totally yucky by the end of the day.

I had finally picked up our smoked pork last Friday and we were forced to cook one of the hams over the weekend (held my feet to the fire and all… not!).

Leftover ham

It was fantastic, some of the best pork we have raised yet.  The breed cross is my personal favorite (Tamworth boar on Large Black Sows) and then they had all of that goat milk and whey, they couldn’t not be wonderful!  Even though we have our hams cut in half, they are still pretty impressive hunks of meat and we ate from it all weekend and into the early part of this week.  So yesterday my husband looked at me and begged for lima bean and ham soup.  One of my all-time favorites as well.   Trouble was, only a few dried limas were hiding in the pantry.  So I dug through the containers and unearthed two different kinds of beans

Locally grown beans

that were grown locally in Jefferson, Maine, at Bluebird Hill Farm.  Wild Goose beans and cannellini beans.  The wild goose beans are small and multicolored, with little swirly markings on them.  Then I found a handful of black beans, not locally grown, and decided to throw those in as well.  It cuts down on the ‘locavore’ listing of this meal, but that’s o.k., it was awesome, and we have a huge pot of leftovers that will be welcome again tonight. To make it even better, a neighbor invited us over to share supper with them so we ended up having a small feast.  Can’t beat that on a stormy night!

Ham and bean soup

Seasonal updates

It’s been awhile since I last posted and I feel like a slacker.  Starting the week before Thanksgiving we have had a crazy schedule which is partly to blame, and holidays always kind of knock me out of sync with my usual daily patterns.  I dried off our doe Elf, as she was having some shyness about being milked during the whole breeding craziness, and I just didn’t want to fight her!  Salsa and SnowPea’s milk amounts dropped, and

Salsa on the milkstand

Salsa’s appetite wasn’t what it usually is, but that has changed drastically in the last week.  So I am down to two goaties on the milk stand and am probably going to start the drying-off process toward the end of the month.  I like having some milk coming in so I can make mad batches of chevre and throw them into the freezer for our winter and spring dining pleasure!  Choretime isn’t the same without the milking routines, and I miss that closeness with the does, but on the other hand, below 20F temps and howling wind make the whole milking experience less than fun.  It’s all part of the flow of the seasons and the year.  It’s also been a relief to note that Elvis the stink-o has returned more to his normal self and is not constantly trying to impress the girls.  I actually got into the pen with him the other day and he didn’t act as though I needed to be inspected and snurlfed like crazy.  Hopefully that means that everyone is bred and all’s right with the herd!

As for the sheep, we disbanded the breeding group that was up at the house with Mr. Big

Mr. Big with his girls

the week before Thanksgiving.  He hadn’t been showing any interest in the ewes he was hanging out with (and hadn’t marked any either), so he went back to the boys’ pen and the girls went up the hill into the group with Zorro the llama.  That left our breeding group down in the pasture to handle.  Everything appeared to be fine with the breeding:  our little Hamish the ram lamb took care of business promptly and they have had what is left of the grass in the pasture in a huge area.  I had been getting a little nervous about them being in the field as there have been a very vocal group of coyotes in the area.  Around dusk I have been hearing them yapping and calling, and then very clearly, an answering bray from Jingle the donkey, who was down there with those 6 sheep.  She had also been doing her perimeter run about the same time of day, so I guess she let them know who is the boss! (That. Or a combination of that and the electric fence).  The weather has been so balmy that I haven’t felt the usual frantic need to get them home and into the winter paddock, but the threat of this snowstorm got my attention at last.  So with Chloe and our son’s help on Saturday, we made 3 trips down to the pasture and loaded them two-by-two into the Subaru and brought them home.  Then Jingle walked with Chloe and I up the street and home at last.  Another chapter closed as the year ends and our minds turn to lambing!

In-betweens

We have had a lot of unnaturally warm weather this November and I have to say that I have been enjoying it.  It’s not winter yet, but the brilliance of October has definitely gone past.  I always feel as if I want to hold onto those brightly colored leaves on the skyline, but when the leaves are down and it’s not really winter yet, there is a certain feeling of expectancy, first of the Thanksgiving holiday to come, and then of the winter.  I have been thinking about that as I do chores and am enjoying even these gray Northeast skies, the clouds and the birds.  It didn’t seem like something I would bother to blog about, but I happened to visit the blog of one of my favorite children’s authors, Cynthia Lord of Brunswick, Maine, and I just had to put a link to her beautiful and simply written thought about November, as well as the other in-between months that come to us in northern climates between the drama of the 4 seasons.  Here it is:  The Concept of November.  Thank you Cynthia!

Butchers and a Local Thanksgiving harvest

Wow, it’s Sunday and it’s still sunny and warm. I am reveling in being at home for the day and  am recuperating from the back to back trips to butchers:  Friday night a trip to the butcher in Albion to pick up the fresh pork cuts from our pigs, and a 200+ mile round-trip yesterday to Dover-Foxcroft to pick up our lamb and goat meat from that butcher.  It feels wonderful to have gotten that taken care of before Thanksgiving, but I am bone-tired.  I wish I had taken a photo of the back of my Subaru crammed with boxes covered with blankets, towels and those heavy moving blankety things.  I rode with most of the windows open as it was a really warm day yesterday and was afraid of the 2.5 hour ride.  But between the cardboard and all the coverings, the meat was fine and still frozen solid.  It was great to get this taken care of.  Now all we wait for is the smoked pork cuts like the bacon and the hams.  Yum!  Can’t wait :*)

Gotta love a freezer full of home-grown meat!

I am not so very ready for Thanksgiving however, except that I did order a turkey and while cleaning out one of the freezers, I came across my back-up supply of locally grown cranberries.  Well, grown in Maine cranberries!  That’s two items taken care of.  I want to make Thanksgiving as close to a locavore meal as I can this year.  Coffee, olive oil, sugar and flour can’t count, I guess, as I don’t think I can get that here in Maine yet, although the flour is going to be possible in the near future.  We have our own potatoes, onions, milk, goat cheese, italian sausage for the stuffing, turkey from nearby, cranberries from Maine, eggs from friends (? Hatchtown???), and maybe instead of a pumpkin pie I need to make one with our butternut squashes.  It might work.  Hmmm. I am going to give it a try.

Weather. And Meteors

As everyone else has pointed out this week, the weather couldn’t be nicer.  Decidedly unusual for this time in November, the week before Thanksgiving.  I am still trying to get over the sinus infection and feeling a little draggy, but the worst of it is being at work and looking out that window and imagining all the wonderful things I could be doing at home on the farm!  Scooping poop, moving the sheep one last time out in the pasture, dyeing skeins, planting the garlic, you know :*)

But the highlight of my week was on Monday night and early Tuesday morning:  the Leonid meteor showers.  I didn’t have the energy to do what our neighbors did (get up in the middle of the night), but between 6:30 and 7:30 on Monday night during chores, and then again on Tuesday morning during the 5 a.m. chore hour, I saw plenty.  I always look forward to the Perseids in August, but this past summer it was too cloudy that week.  So we have to be content with this show.  What a hardship to live in such a beautiful place with such a great expanse of sky!

Garden remainders

A truly gorgeous day out today.  It was 40 F when I got up this morning, and although it’s breezy, it’s beautiful.  I wish we didn’t have erranding to do, I would much rather be working outdoors!

As I was walking in from chores, my eye was caught by this lovely volunteer that is thriving near the parsley and the dried up cucumber vines in the vegetable garden, and I just had to take a picture.

Volunteer pansies in the vegetable garden

Since I stopped to admire the pansies, my eye was caught by the other garden denizen that is looking kind of exotic and special.  John had tied one or two of these plants up as they were sprawling all over.  One of my most favorite vegetables!  (Sorry the picture isn’t a little more distinct, the little berries (?) on the plant are so eye-catching!)

Autumn view of one of the the asparagus plants

Snow and pork

Bear and Josie footprints on the back steps yesterday morning

Snowy morning yesterday.  Day for loading up the piggles.  Usually we have them getting acquainted with the trailer for two or three days before the big day, but John was having some trouble with the wiring… so it was dark before the trailer gate was closed, but we could hear them happily sucking up the last of the evening’s milk and burrowing in the straw.  One more yearly task can be checked off of our list and, as the winter approaches, at least the chore load is diminishing!  And think of all that lovely pork in the freezer :*)