Blog
Hay and More Hay
November 17, 2023
Our pastures are done for the season, which is always a bit sad to see. We do, however, have a barn full of hay and a barnyard strewn with pumpkins so life is still pretty awesome. A full hayloft is truly a beautiful thing - it has the same zen-inducing-magic as a well stocked pantry. The intense self-satisfaction though, when the produce is of your own making, can start to slide into smugness – and I’m totally there!
Our inaugural haying season was epic, as we had to figure out everything
The Power of Pumpkins
November 9, 2023
Personally, I think the day after Halloween should be a national holiday. For years, we’ve spent it collecting leftover pumpkins from various churches and farm stands. We haul trailer load after trailer load to our pastures. The piles last for months as the animals happily work their way through them. Such an abundance of readily available food makes for a very content flock, be it chickens, pigs or sheep.
The pumpkins are a wonderful supplemental feed for all of them and have some therapeutic
Some Days
November 3, 2023
A couple lifetimes ago, Anne and I played on an indoor soccer team that was made up of mostly 40- something-year-old “soccer moms”. Very few of us had ever played in high school, much less at the college level. The teams we played against, though, were younger, more experienced, had fewer children, and took themselves way too seriously. Indoor soccer is an extremely fast-paced game and defeats can be demoralizing as the score can get racked up quickly. We were proof of that.
Golden Years
October 27, 2023
Anne and I aren’t the only ones preparing for the coming winter - our trees have been thinking about it for weeks. Sugar Maples use the final sunny days of fall to manufacture and store the carbohydrates they’ll need in early spring. Those carbs will also provide us with the sap we’ll boil to make maple syrup next year.
As trees sense the colder weather and shorter days of fall, they begin to cut off circulation to their leaves and the chlorophyl, which gives the leaf its green coloring, star
Out The Door
October 20, 2023
I put on warm socks and lace up a pair of work boots as she shifts her weight from one paw to another. I can feel her judging me as she watches me get dressed. The temperatures dropped this week, and it takes me that much longer to get out the door. I button up a long sleeve shirt and then pull on a sweatshirt - which of course needs zipping. Her ears go back as she shifts her weight again, her tail gently sweeping the floor. Her eyebrows rise when I reach for a jacket, and zip that up as well.
Late Again
October 13, 2023
Shortly before my mom passed away, she encountered a skunk with an empty dog food can stuck on its nose. She wanted to help but wasn’t sure how she could without getting sprayed. She was heading into the church for a meeting, and someone called out to her to leave it be and she did. She told me later that she felt like a hypocrite going into the church when she was too afraid to help what was surely the “least of these.” I told her, I for one, was very glad she didn’t try, as I would have had
Lion's Mane
October 6, 2023
Every spring we inoculate a couple hundred logs with various types of mushroom spawn. Shiitake, Maitake, Oyster, Lion’s Mane and Comb Tooth are a given but this year we branched out a bit and added a few new ones: Chestnut, Turkey Tail, Wine Caps and Almond Agaricus. We also made a fundamental change in how we handle the logs, and I’m extremely pleased with the results. In fact, Anne says I’m bordering on gloating.
Inoculating logs involves cutting them into 3-foot lengths, drilling several
When it Rains
September 29, 2023
During the last Ice Age, when glaciers scrubbed the surface of our landscape clean, any earthworms that had been living in New England were completely irradicated. Most of the worms living here now originated from either Europe or Asia and were likely brought here inadvertently in the dirt that was used as ballasts in the hull of ships exploring the “New World.” Some worms have also undoubtably arrived more recently in the root balls of imported plants. Whether intentionally imported,
Making a Life
September 22, 2023
As the days get noticeably shorter, the world around us starts to change. Inevitably, our chickens begin to lay less. A lot less. Even with a light on in the coop, they instinctively know we are heading towards winter, and that winter is a bad time to start raising chicks. Raising chicks is, after all, why chickens lay eggs. For them it’s not about providing us with sustenance – it’s about procreating.
Our sheep, on the other hand, respond to the change in daylight by coming into heat.
Thank You!
September 15, 2023
An anonymous private foundation (with exquisite funding tastes) bridged the gap between what we’d raised with our GoFundMe account and what we needed to cut hay for our sheep and to store it for the winter. GoFundMe raised enough money for us to cut the hay but we didn’t have what we needed to repair Hill-Stead’s Horse Barn so we could store the hay. In the meantime, we perfected the art of making haystacks for the Museum, which was fun but wasn’t going to provide the sheep with their winter hay
