General update

Between urgent events we have been working away at the usual farm stuff. We picked up 4 pigs July 2. They are nice looking barrows bred by a friend of a friend in Stuarts Draft. The boar they are out of is a beautiful Berkshire. I can't remember what the sows were. It was neat to see this operation set up in an old hog facility. The boars and feeder pigs are in a slotted-floor barn with self feeders and nipple drinkers. The sows farrow in huts on pasture and there was one giving birth while we were there. I had never seen baby, baby piglets. These were just a few minutes old and so very adorable.

It was great to find pigs close to home and even better to learn they had already been trained to self feeders and nipple drinkers. They settled right into their new home but are pretty skittish. We're working to get them calmed down a bit so they don't bolt every time we come within 100 feet of their pen.

Two words: Zoom. Lens.

We cleaned out the barn last week to make room for the lambs we weaned on July 7. We got all the sheep to the barn, separated ewes from lambs, wormed everyone as needed, and gave booster shots to a few lambs in record time. We love the new handling system and the barn!! We didn't weigh the lambs because we wanted to get all the working done as early in the day as possible to avoid the heat. Hopefully we will have a chance to run them across the scales this week and set up pens so we can feed them in groups by weight.

Cleaning the barn with the landscape rake - piece of cake!

Random pics of other recent events:

A beautiful sunset. Do you see the face in the clouds?

Full moon.

Laying plastic mulch in the garden on May 13. The mulch layer is pretty impressive; it buries drip tape under the plastic, flattens and firms the planting bed, stretches the plastic over the bed, and seals the edge with dirt.

We planted most of the garden in May, but didn't get the peppers out until June 16. This is a water-wheel transplanter we rented to help set the peppers. It punches a hole in the plastic and fills the hole with water containing starter fertilizer. Then the people who are sitting in the seats drop a plant in each hole. It is not easy because you are moving very fast (even at the slowest speed the tractor can go), but it is easier than doing this by hand. So far the peppers have had a rough go with a late start, pressure from a hungry groundhog, and then the derecho. We'll be lucky to get a handful of peppers at this rate. We're just hoping for a late frost...

The main garden on June 20. Mulched and ready to grow.

So far this year we've only seen one hen turkey with her brood and we've only seen them a couple of times. It seems like this is earlier than usual, I'm pretty sure last year we saw them in August. This picture was taken June 27, and I had seen them a few days before that on the side of the driveway.

Bird on a wire.

Bird nest on the front porch, complete with wool. This reminds me, I never have seen any baby birds in this nest. I'll have to crawl up there and see if the eggs are gone.

Another bird nest that used wool; this one is in the big lilac bush in the back yard.

We harvested garlic the last week of June. The softneck was maybe a little past when it should have been pulled, but the hardneck seems to have been just right. I didn't get a picture yet, but it is beautiful. I am a garlic lover, but I have discovered a new favorite way to prepare it - roasting, and I don't know why we eat it any other way! If you haven't tried roasted garlic, you really should. I put a little olive oil, salt, and basil or rosemary on some foil, wrap the garlic in it and bake for 45 minutes to an hour at 400 degrees. Roasted garlic tastes nothing like raw garlic. It is buttery, nutty, utterly amazing! Perfect squeezed on a cracker or bit of toast.

In other culinary pursuits, I canned 19 quarts of concentrated chicken stock last week. This little project removed approximately 30 pounds of assorted chicken parts from my freezer and took care of the 2011 chicken. I still have probably 12 to 15 pounds from this year to cook down, plus whatever we get from this current batch of chicks.

We harvested the wheat and are working our way through second cutting hay, with one really nice field worth of alfalfa and one rather mature field already in the barn as square bales. I forget the exact count, somewhere around 220, and there is still 20 acres to mow. We have had just enough rain here to keep everything green, although we are well behind normal. Last week's stretch of days in the high 90's did dry us out, but we got a half inch of rain over the weekend. Over in New Hope everything is shriveled up, dusty and crusty. The grass crunches when you walk on it and the corn has rolled up so tightly that it looks like broomsticks. At home we are closer to the mountains, on the very western edge of the valley and often catch more rain as it blows in from the west. But New Hope is much closer to the eastern side of the valley, and it is dry, dry, dry this summer. I haven't been over there since Sunday, but it looked like they should have gotten some rain in the last couple of days. Sure hope so, or our corn crop is going to be ugly.

That pretty much catches you up to what's been going on here. Still to come, pictures from our Pioneer trip to San Francisco and the much anticipated story of chicken coop 6.0.