Here are some videos that I made this year. I like to hear the different sounds of the months. This first one is in February, when we played with the dogs in the ice.
This video is from the last day of April, which was the little lamb named April's first day outside.
Jamie catches a snake in this video from May.
The little chicks have feathers now, and are ready to go to their new homes. This video was from thier first days, in June.
Also from June, our flock of ewes with bird song. The deep rumble is the ram, calling to the girls from his adjacent pasture.
Here's a video of my flock as they emerge from the coop.
I baked a cake! A strawberry jam cake, with jam in the batter and between the layers. Three layers! We had more than one family birthday to celebrate, but we didn't have a big firefly party like memorial weekends of years past. It was too cold for the pool, but the fireflies showed up to entertain us, and the strawberry cake disapeared.
The farmer who sold us Pistol Pete, our ram, asked for some photos so he could see his progress. I thought this photo makes him look strong. He is strong. He head-butted me in the backside when I crossed his pasture, and nearly knocked me down!
I was very offended by this. It's one thing to accidently get knocked around by a skittish animal, but this was intentional and pre-meditated! Now I watch my back when I'm in his pasture.
Brandon bought two new ewes from the sheep farmer. One of them has pretty brown wool, and I named her Cookies. The other is a pale creamy color, so she was named Cream. Cookies and Cream call to Lambchop like she's their mother, but we're keeping them seperate until they settle in and we know they aren't sick. They seem very healthy and energetic. They are only four months old, and very skittish. I can sneak a scratch behind their ears while they are eating, but they run when they realize what I'm doing. I don't know how I'll ever catch them to trim their hooves.
Lambchop's little lambs are growing fast. She's a good mother too. I think her un-shed wool looks like a rump toupee! She doesn't like it when I try to pull it off. The ground all around her barn looked like snow, she shed so much wool. Just imagine what it will look like when there are five ewes shedding next year!
The donkeys haven't started their heavy shed yet. They still have the cute fuze around their faces.
A box of chicks came through the mail. Fifteen mixed breed layers, plus ten of the pearl white leghorns, which are small birds and make big white eggs. Most of these will go to my parents or my boss, but I get to enjoy raising them in my brooder box for their first weeks. I stored spare hoses in the box over the winter, and when I pulled the hoses out to get ready for the chicks, mice crawled up the hoses and gave me a scare! Brandon turned the box upside down and stapled wire screen over the bottom, so hopefully the mice will not get back in.
I really like raising chicks with the artificial hen/warming plate rather than the heat lamp. The chicks snuggle under it and sleep so quietly, and I don't worry that I'm going to burn the barn down.
We've been all the way to the big apple and back! Brandon tells me that arting isn't a word, but I think it's exactly what he's been up to in New York City. He spent nearly two weeks looking at art, talking about art, and traveling to and from art - he's been doing some serious arting!
I flew up on Thursday to meet him and we traveled home together on Sunday. We stayed in the same hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood as our last trip, and once again I was happy not to have a long train ride into the city each day. NYC in May is my official favorite! And, we discovered the High Line just around the block from the hotel. It's a raised park, on an old rail way.
It's so cool to be able to walk up a stairwell and have an elevated trail covered in wildflowers and shady trees.
The train tracks are visible in some places. Look, we're outside in public with no mask! The trees with the white bark and small leaves were labled gray birch.
The High Line passes between apartment buildings with cool architechture. You can see inside the apartments sometimes too, which is fun to get a peek at urban life.
When you look over the trail edge, you can see all the normal hustle and bustle, but on the high line everyone is strolling and stopping to admire the art and flowers.
Most of the plants were natives, although there were some I didn't recognize. I saw a bumble bee buzzing around the flowers. There really are polinators in the big city! The entire trail has benches.
There are overlooks, and sculptures.
The trial took us directly to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has some of the best art, plus the best views from the big windows and balconies. In this picture you can see the comfy couches that let you view the Julie Mehretu, but if you sit on the couch facing the the other way you get to see this...
Picturesque skylines and boats on the water.
This sculptural island park was having it's grand opening while we were there. People were swarming all over it!
We hopped from one gallery to the next, and spent some time at The Met. There's so much art in the city, it's impossible to see it all. When our feet and legs were tired, we took breaks for tasty beverages, and enjoyed Indian or Puruvian take-out dinners in our room in front of the TV, and went to bed early. The morning we left for home, we watched the city from our room as it revealed itslef in the early light.
Some of the tallest and shiniest buildings glowed with the sun rise. It's strange to me to go from way high in the air, to deep underground to catch the train to the airport. We were home before dark and so glad to get there!
I was at the office on Friday when Brandon called with the surprizing news - we have lambs! Our ewe, Lambchop, delivered two baby girls with no problems and no assistance from us. Which is a good thing, since I had given up and assumed she wasn't pregnant, just fluffy.
Brandon named the one with the brown face Derby...
and the one with the white face and black spot on her back April. He thinks these names will help him remember how old they are.
One their first day Lambchop let us hold and examine them, but she was nervous and made little grunting noises when the lambs cried. They mind her well, and stay close to her side. Now that they are bouncy I doubt I'll easily catch them again. By their second day they were already playing and curious.
Pistol Pete is in the little pasture near Lambchop and the lambs. The night before they were born, he was acting strange. Grunting and runnining up and down the fence. I thought he was excited for his grains, but he didn't calm down after eating. He acted eratic the whole day after the lambs were born too. Phermones I guess. He's rubbed most of his loose wool off by scraping his body on the fence.
When he rubs on the fence, his wool forms strands of yarn that wrap the wire.
I think the wool wrapped fence wire looks kinda cool, like a stripe of fabric down the fence. Brandon does not agree with me!
Wendigo has been extra playful now that she's an only dog again. All the attention that was focused on the puppy is now hers to enjoy, and she's loving it.
Sienna started helping herself to our good nieghbor's chicken eggs, straight from his coop, and I was worried she would help herself to a few of his chickens too. When she went to visit our far nieghbor during their daughters senior photos, we got some cute pictures and a chance to catch up, but we also got worried that she was so far from home. Our neighbor warned us that the highway was very close. We decided to implement plans for a perimeter fence, ASAP. On the back side of our little farm, the fence is wire on mostly metal posts that connect all the pasture fences together, but in the front of the house, we used wood posts, and painted them black.
Brandon has been building all our pasture fences by digging post holes with a gas powered auger, or with old fasioned post hole diggers, and then tamping the dirt around the base of the post with a heavy metal bar. It's slow, and exhausting.
To speed things up, we borrowed a fence pounding machine, and Jamie came over on a rainy weekend to help install the posts. Despite the rain, and more than two tractor malfunctions, we managed to get all the wood posts in place and return the machine on time.
Here's a little clip of the machine in action. It was amazing, and once they figured out how to get the posts in straight, it made quick work of a big job. Not quick enough.
I took lots of pictures the day we used the fence machine. It wasn't very cold, so working in the rain was kind of nice and the drizzle made the tree flowers even prettier.
Little redbud trees planted years ago are finally big enough to be a presence, and pair well with the apple tree near the hammock.
While the fence was in the works, we tried putting Sienna in the pasture fences near the sheep. It worked okay, but she didn't like being kept away from us and Wendigo, and we didn't like it either, so we would let her out.
On Sunday we were working on the fence with both dogs, when Sienna took off after a smell. She would do that - just take off after something, like a deer or a rabbit, and she could run so fast there was no stopping her. Like when she would go shark eyed and chase a chicken. Her instinct to chase would kick in and she had no self control.
We worried all day, but then someone called our number from her collar and kindly told us where to find her body by the guard rail. It was late by the time she was retrieved and burried under the apple tree.
Sienna was the best bad dog I've ever had. She chased and killed, and barked all night. She jumped and scratched with muddy paws and head butted those she loved. She stank like the skunk she harrassed and the dead things she loved to bring home to chew, and had ticks and burrs, and sticks tangled in her tail. We thought she was great and wanted more than five months of life together. We will finish her fence before we get another dog.
I mailed the mandatory veternary inspection form today, along with this photo of Ernest. These were the last two items I owed the equine adoption agency, and now Ernest should be offically ours!
I'm not sure Rufus is as excited by this as I am. You mean we have to keep him? Ernest passed the vet inspection, getting good ratings for his coat and foot condition. He did have to get his teeth "floated," which meant he was sedated, rigged up with a wicked looking metal halter that pried his mouth open, and his teeth were filed with an electric grinder. The vet said older equines sometimes have the outside of the teeth grow too long, and that's probably why Ernest was packing his cheek with chewed food, which isn't good for his teeth. Ernest balked when he saw the needle, but once that part was over he handled having his teach filed pretty well. He wobbled and sneezed from the sedative for the rest of the evening.
Our ewe, Lambchop, never had a baby. Brandon is nearly finished with the fencing on another small pasture, so we can rotate our grazing, and we have two more ewes on order for May. We're not counting lambs before they hatch, of course, but we're hoping that next spring will find us with lambs for the freezer.
Sienna, our newest livestock gardian (ha!) dog, killed and ate one of my chickens yesterday. Sigh.
I ordered chicks, which should come in the mail at the end of May. I'll raise them in my brooder until the have feathers, and then they are for my parents or my friend. It will be fun to have little chicks again!
We might have flurries tomorrow, and a few nights of below freezing temperatures, but I think winter is behind us. The frogs are calling furiously from the neighbors pond, the birds are in a twittering frenzy, insects swarm my headlamp during my nightly rounds, and the plum tree has so many blooms that the air smells like candy!
The world really is round! These photos are a from the end of November, when my brother and sister-in-law and nephew came for a pie and coffee Thanksgiving campfire, and brought their drone. Shane let me watch the screen on his phone so I could see what the drone sees, and make screen shots. Can you believe Brandon cut all that grass! Not just our fields, but our good neighbors field, and even his neighbor, so everything green you can see in the photo.
That bright red tree in the front yard is the small volunteer Brandford pear, and that pile of wood is the cut up trunk of our old shade tree. Those small brown circles in the front lawn are little soil hummocks made by the mole, who is Brandon's nemisis. Brandon recently said the best thing about Sienna, our new dog, is that she loves to kill moles. I think she makes a bigger mess than the mole during her excavations, but Brandon thinks it's worth it to reduce the mole population. She doesn't eat them, so we find frozen mole-sicles by the front door regularly. They do not have eyes, I checked.
The pool is covered for the winter, and the garden looks just as messy from above as it does from the ground. Last summer four helicopters flew low over us while we were skinny dipping in the pool. I tried to shield myself with the wall of the pool and told myself they couldn't really see much. Ha! You can see everything from up there!
The donkeys have turned their little paddock into dirt. They enjoying rolling in the dust, and the light tan spots in the field are places they roll and kick up clouds of dirt. Now that's it winter, it's mud. We're discussing pouring a concrete pad so they have a place to stand at the food trough with their feet out of the mud. The farrier trimmed their hooves last week and didn't report any foot problems, but I would hate to stand in the mud for meals, and everytime I move the trough they trample the surrounding area into mud. I don't have to worry about Ernest overeating grass. I wonder...if all the green things in world were edible to you, and you had a big appetite, would it be terrible to look out over the fence at all that green while you chewed your hay? Like eating a dry salad in land made of hamburgers?
In the south facing view you can see the little forest I'm encouraging on the east side of the house. That bright green shrub in the forground is bush honeysuckle. I can't wait to cut that down and feed it to the goats!
A journal of creating a home in an old blue school bus, as well as a do-it-yourself farm house renovation, living with backyard chickens, learning to farm, gardening, preserving food, and other projects.
