What Spring Entails!

Here is a quick look at the varied stages of development and issues that we have been addressing on the farm lately:

• We have very content puddle ducks who have discovered the singular, circular indentation of soil in their pasture, and these ducks just wait for spring showers to fill up their puddle! They play and splash and quack until the water has been flung far and wide, and then wait again for the rain to refill the puddle.
• The turkey poults continue hatching, and the Buff Orpington and Light Brahma Chicks are proving themselves easy-starters.
• The goslings (Pilgrim Geese) are learning how to control their gigantic “feet” and they tend to look more like a “Godzilla” remake than a cute baby bird, clomping around their pen. squawking.
• We have found a suitable mate for our Gloucestershire Old Spots gilts. For this first breeding, we will be using the services of a younger Red Duroc boar. He has a nice even temperament and is very healthy.
• Tending fences, moving animals to and from pastures, burning brush that fell during the winters’ huge ice storms, buying hay, performing general spring cleanup, starting seeds for the vegetable garden, constructing cold frames, bottle feeding the White Galloway Bull calf, tending goats, collecting about four dozen eggs daily, buying grain from the local coop, and mucking out winter accommodations have been on the itinerary lately.
• Raising my boys, ages 4 and 9 months, has also been on my plate — especially since the three of us are home, sick this week. 

We love spring!  Really, we do.

The Rain, The Park and Other Things

Sunday, March 29, 2009:  A gray, “rainy” New England day.  No “park” just substitute “Garden” for “park” — and as always, we have lots of “other things”!  (yes, it WAS the Cowsills)

The rhubarb is just beginning to emerge.

The newly constructed cold frame/hot frame.  If all goes as planned, it will get lots of use.  We have it placed in the turkey pasture at present.

It is just a perfect oatmeal walnut chocolate chunk & chip cookie day.  Three weeks ago, I whipped up a batch that was supposed to actually make a gross (144) of cookies — and I believe the recipe too — it was more than ten cups of ingredients before I added the chocolate!  We ate our way (painlessly! I might add) through half of the dough a few weeks ago. When I got sick of baking cookies that day, I rolled out the last of the dough, wrapped it in waxed paper, and double bagged it with the baking directions, and threw it into the freezer.   Voila!  Today, we have cookies.  Mmmm.

• A British rock group, Vanity Fare, poked fun at the Cowsills by naming their 1968 album The Sun, the Wind, and Other Things. (You can bet that I will use that as a blog title in a few weeks!)
• ‘”The Rain, The Park and Other Things” is known to many as “The Flower Girl”
• #1 in Canada in the week of November 13, 1967