Can't Wait

I'M SEEING MY CATS TODAY! And Rebecca and Anthony and we're going to have a fabulous weekend. Can't wait!

Also also...

We pressed cider today! And I forgot my camera!

Cider pressing is incredibly easy (with the right tools) and really fun. We made 9 gallons in an afternoon and had loads of fun climbing the apple trees to shake down the fruit.

Also...

Also, this happened. I'm refering to the part about spraying molasses all over the grass. Lee, my fellow farmer friend, is blogging as well. She, however, can add captions and borders to her pictures, making them look much cooler. I'm very jealous.

Chores part 2

The other side of daily chores is the weekend chores. We have a rotation where we each do it every six weeks and I just had my first weekend. Emma and I did all the animal chores two days in a row which was pretty intense. That said, if this was my own farm, I'd do that every day. Of the year. Always.

Weekend chores are supposed to be low stress but the animals decided to play jail break on Saturday. The day began with moving the sheep. We have this electrified net that is set up in a pasture and a second one that's set up for them to move into in the morning. We normally lift up the panels that are close to each other and they scoot through to the fresh grass. We don't really know what went wrong, but a number started getting tangled in it that morning. It ended up, after much sheep herding with the ram and a lamb on the outside of the fence.

Sheep when separated from their flock go a bit crazy and try to get back with them. Not so easy for us, since they were only a few feet away eating yummy grass and didn't realize they weren't with the rest of the sheep. As I wrote a few days ago, there are a few friendly sheep like number 60. Then there are sheep that want nothing to do with up. Emma and I spent 10 minutes walking after the ram and lamb as they walked away from us. Very frustrating.

It ended up with Emma running back to the house to get grain and some reinforcements. While lured towards the grain, Emma and Sophia tackled the lamb and wrestled him to the ground. We dragged him, one each on his front legs, towards the fence and shooed him in.

The ram was much tougher since we didn't feel comfortable tackling him and not getting hurt. He also has one thing on his mind and it's not food so he was not all that interested in our grain bucket. Needless to say, after much stress, coersion and herding, we got him back with his ladies.

The rest of the weekend was better. The cows had escaped a number of times the past week and we convinced them to stay in their pasture with much extra hay. Luckily I have a few weeks until my next weekend responsibilities!

Nightlife

Besides attending local football games, there's not a whole lot to do out here. Luckily, we make our own fun. We: do laundry, make dinner, knit, play music, draw, read, make yogurt, make cheese, make cookies, clean up the dead mice the cats leave us, have campfires, have craft nights, having singing nights, dehydrate various foods in our dehydrator to see what they come out like and go to bed around 9 pm. It's all very wholesome.

If all else fails, there's a night club in Orange. Hopefully it never comes to that.

Rabbit the Ram

We had some excitement the other day when our ram showed up. His name is Rabbit and we found out that it's probably because he doesn't walk: he hops. Actually, getting him to hop is an improvement over dragging him by his halter a quarter mile to the ewes. We realized that that just wasn't happening and got a great lesson from Josh, the bearer of the ram, in how to flip a sheep over. Sheep become very docile when on their back, a fact that came in handy this weekend when two sheep escaped and we had to tackle them under the guise of giving them grain.

Post ram flip:

Dragging Rabbit:

Giving up on dragging Rabbit and loading him into the truck:

Rabbit securely in the truck, ready for his trip to the ewes:

Harvest Celebration

On Saturday we celebrated the end of the harvest season. We invited everyone who works on the ridge top with us as well as some friends and family. Most everything was cooked in our wood fired bread oven. We also ate some delicious road kill. A few weeks ago, a deer was hit by a car and lay dying in our swiss chard patch. One of our neighbors came out to dispatch it, rather than let it linger in it's state. We had it butchered and served the back strap, or tenderloin with dinner. So. Delicious. We don't eat much meat here so a piece of juicy deer like that hit the spot (this came after the discussion Emily, Justin and I had if it was ethically right to eat animals).

Andrew supplied a wild turkey that had also been hit by a car and he killed and brought back to the farm. He brined and roasted it. Better than any turkey I've had to date, so I'll have to see how Thanksgiving matches up.

Theo made mozzarella, Sophia made feta, Justin made pizza dough, Emily made brownies, Emma made scalloped potatoes and Bradley brought hard cider (I did chores and lots of dishes).

It was so nice to have everyone sitting together down to dinner, plus children running around the house and delicious food from the farm.