Looking forward to lambing

I've been preparing for the upcoming lambing season - including a wide-awake moment last night when I was fretting about assisting with the delivery of lambs with their heads turned back - a very random concern that shouldn't be bothering me yet! Anyway, since I hadn't started this blog last year at the time the lambs were born, and because lambs are extremely cute and cheerful, I decided to post a few of my best lamb pictures from 2010 in honor of the impending 2011 lambing season.

The ewes have come home

Saturday we hauled all of the ewes from New Hope back to our place. After three trips (small trailer, woolly sheep) Brian and I were peacefully watching the group in the pasture and thinking the same thing. We looked at each other and said in unison, "sure looks like a lot more sheep." Everything is relative. And let me tell you, 58 sheep appear to be a lot when they are in a half-acre paddock compared to a 20-acre field.

It is good to have all the sheep in one place again. We escaped without having a major snow event, so the ewes haven't been fed any hay yet this winter. And since they are just now coming home, we still have lots of fescue stockpiled for them to graze. If we can manage to squeeze two months out of our grass, we may not have to feed them hay until we start lambing in mid-March.

Brian's winter projects

The ham is still curing and is only a few days away from entering the aging process. In the meantime, Brian has made his first batch of summer sausage, another batch of home brew, and some delicious mozzarella cheese.

We've been making sausage from our venison for many years, fresh varieties for breakfast sausage, Italian links, or bratwurst. These are pretty straightforward and require little more than adding fat and seasoning to ground meat, then packaging the finished product. Lately, Brian has been getting more and more interested in cured and smoked meats. He made some delicious summer sausage over the weekend, and it really wasn't that difficult.

Summer sausage drying before being smoked.

Clever use of dowel rods to hang the sausages. We used the same technique after smoking to let them bloom, only that time the sausages hung from the laundry room shelf. No photo for that step because it happened at about 2 a.m., and the only time I get up at 2 a.m. is when there are ewes close to lambing.

The sausage maker and his loyal assistant. The stuffer in the foreground was worth buying! It was so much easier to get the casings filled to our satisfaction with this than with a stuffer attachment on the grinder.

Pictures of the cheese will have to wait until the next batch. All of the milk is pasteurized and ready to go, so hopefully there will be more mozzarella later this week. Yum!

Staying inside these days

This is a rather slow month around the farm. Sure we're feeding lambs every day, breaking ice most mornings, and starting to think about preparations for spring. But there is a lot less going on than most other times of the year and unless we get a big snow, there isn't much exciting news to blog about. Note, that does NOT mean I would like to see a big snow. I'm perfectly content to catch up on some of the other things I like to do during these slower weeks.

For instance, fulfilling year-old requests for craft projects like this wire wreath. I recently made two of these for a friend who asked me about them back in December of 2009.

Then there was a more recent request for a wire star tree-topper. I knocked that one out quickly before it too was pushed to the back burner in the constant march of "The Urgent" that rules most of the year.

I stained and painted a cabinet to help clear the counter in the kitchen, and we are really enjoying having more space to work. I couldn't believe how much stuff I cleaned off of the counter and the laundry closest. Hooray for the new year and new beginnings!

And I've been working on some beaded jewelery projects and catching up on Patricia Cornwell novels.

Ah, the luxury of cold winter days! Now, if I could just work up the energy to put away my Christmas decorations...and work on those free lance projects...and...well, maybe I should rethink that opening line about this not being a busy time of the year.

Christmas

Christmas came and went in a blur this year. We celebrated with both sides of our family and had a nice break from our normal routines. Here are some fun pictures of our niece and nephews.

Eliza with Char and Robin.

Noam, who will be crawling soon!

Eric pondering his gifts.

Eliza

Eric

It may be his first Christmas, but it didn't take Noam long to figure out what to do.