Blog

We dropped yarn off at the weavers last week and I was fascinated by the loom that Karin's father brought over from Scotland. I was, in fact, immediately sucked down a rabbit hole of antiquity and folklore. With parts dating back to the 1700s, the loom is a functioning story board of the rich history of the textile industry. Perhaps it's just an oddity of mine, but I really wanted to touch the frames and move all the parts and pieces. I'm not a weaver and I resisted the urge as I wouldn't have

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Yesterday I found a woodcock roosting in the brushy edge of our sheep pasture. It's been years since I've seen one there. We used to hear them every spring as kids, but they lost their favorite field several years ago, and they've been slow to return. They are quite particular about where they choose to spend the summer, so I am very pleased we made the grade. They need brushy pastures for roosting, young forests for nesting, moist woodlands for feeding and fields for courtship.

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Even though cedar trees are considered invasive and have a tendancy to make a nuisance of themselves in pastures, I'm rather fond of the prickly things. Like a stonewall in the middle of a hardwood forest, cedar trees can help tell a story of how the land has been used over time.
Cedar saplings, which pop up constantly in fields, are one of the few plants that neither sheep, nor cows, will eat so if the pasture doesn't get mowed, the saplings soon become trees. A good stand of cedars in a field

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I've been arguing with a chicken for months. She has insisted on laying her eggs underneath our back porch and my days of happily crawling under the porch to retrieve those eggs are over, so we put an end to that. Anne and I blocked her access by covering the opening with poultry netting, and perhaps predictably she started laying eggs under the front porch. We covered up those openings as well, so she started laying eggs in an old kindling box on top of the porch - the dogs chased her out of

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We welcomed a much anticipated litter of seven piglets this week and one completely unexpected lamb. (The mom's got some explaining to do). The piglets all hit the ground running and if everything goes as planned, they should be about 280 pounds in as many days. The lamb, on the other hand, seems determined to not make it through the week. I had a vet once tell me that “Sheep are born looking for a way to die.” I haven't really found that to be true, but this little one is as unthrifty and

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We are still basking in the glow of having the sheep on pasture and not having to haul any more hay, but the lack of rain this past month was starting to feel eerily familiar. In a normal year (which is starting to feel less normal every year), we would be done with hay until winter. I really am very sorry about your Memorial Day plans but boy did we need the rain! If I were in charge (which clearly I am not), it would rain gently several nights a week from say 1 am to 5 am. Just enough to give

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We built a small chicken coop out of wood from my brother's sawmill - having loaned him my “feather plucker” in exchange. I like to think that the trade actually qualifies us as good 'ole yankee farmers, but I suspect the fact that I even own a feather plucker tips the scale decidedly towards just being a red neck.
The coop is near our house on Mountain Spring and is hopefully sufficiently fortified to keep the chickens safe from impending marauders. Most of our chickens will remain on

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Lambing season is always the height of chaos in our seasonal lifestyle and this year it was worse than ever as lambing overlapped with shearing and then rolled over into the start of grazing season. And in case life wasn't crazy enough, we had a house full of family and grandchildren staying with us. For certain, there is no task that isn't twice as hard with a two year old in tow, and exponentially harder still with 2 two year olds.
We actually did very well juggling everything that needed to g

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I should have known better! No sooner had I bragged about the serenity of our pasture, and waxed eloquent about it's calming influence, than pure unadulterated chaos descend upon us. The bottle-fed lambs we'd penned in broke out, the sheep we'd carefully fenced out broke in – and the pigs having discovered a weak link in our electric fence, decided to go on a walkabout, making a complete mockery of any and all attempts to corral them. After free ranging for 3 hours, they tired of their roaming a

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After a year of canceled Farmers Markets and Holiday Boutiques that never happened, we had our first sales event, at Hill-Stead's “May Market.” As we set up our table and put out our wares, it felt as if everyone was emerging from their respective storm shelters and rejoining old friends and neighbors. It was wonderful to see so many people we'd not seen in months. After a year of stockpiling our fiber products, it was gratifying to be selling again, but even better than the sales was the fairly

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