Blog
Weaving a Community
June 15, 2023
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Last week we dropped off our rug yarn at Hartford Artisans Weaving Center so they can start weaving custom-made rugs for us. The Center teaches hand-weaving to Hartford area seniors and to people of all ages who are blind or visually impaired. Their goal is to create a welcoming and supportive place for the artisans to escape the isolation that plagues so many. They utilize a large group of volunteers to provide support, as needed, to the weavers.
Getting it Done
June 9, 2023
I’m always slightly envious of other people’s bucket lists. Things like bungee jumping or an African safari sound exhilarating. My bucket list is way more pragmatic, it’s a list of things I need to finish or fix before I go. I live in fear of leaving someone else stuck with my well-intended “to do” list – and all of those things that I never actually “got done”.
Last month we were contacted by someone in charge of finding a home for a flock of 6 sheep whose owner had died of Covid. We needed to
The Gift of Clover
June 2, 2023
When our sheep first started grazing at Hill-Stead, the pasture consisted of multiflora rose, a few saplings and poison ivy. The brambles were so dense the sheep’s wool would frequently get hopelessly tangled up in the thorns and they’d be completely unable to extricate themselves. I’d rescue them by cutting one thorny branch at a time until they were finally able to yank themselves free – inevitably trailing a branch of thorns which would shred my fingers as they bolted away.
Hope Springs Eternal
May 12, 2023
The poem begins “Hope springs eternal in the human breast”- but really, it’s springtime where hope truly dwells.
Making the Planet Great Again
May 5, 2023
All our sheep are back in the pasture eating grass again, which is truly a wonderful feeling. I imagine after a winter of eating nothing but hay, it’s a wonderful feeling for the sheep as well. On winter mornings when we showed up at the gate, they all bellowed impatiently, as if we’d been missing for days and they’d been left starving. Now that they are “on pasture” and can graze fresh grass to their heart’s content, when we show up in the morning, they lay complacently under the apple tree, ch
The Ever Elusive Morel
April 28, 2023
Some people say, “it’s when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear,” others say “it’s when the lilacs bloom”. Some suggest you “add the nighttime temperature to the daytime temperature and divide by 2 and once the average is above 50 you are good to go.” Personally, I wait 10 days after a good soaking rain, once the nighttime temperatures are reliably above 40 degrees. Whatever cue you choose – now is the time to start looking for morel mushrooms.
There is something special about the quest
The Chicken and the Egg
April 21, 2023
A hen lays roughly 275 eggs a year for the first few years of her life and then becomes more sporadic as time goes on. (Don’t we all?) Many farmers will retire the older hens to the stew pot, but we keep them around. It’s a fine line between free ranging and free loading, but we do our best to not keep track. We have plenty of room and I think chickens more than earn their keep even if they don’t lay as many eggs anymore. They spend their days scratching up leaves, aerating and fertilizing the
Teaching Deer to Jump
April 14, 2023
There is a section of electric fencing around our sheep pasture that keeps getting knocked offline by deer snapping the top wire. Just a few lazy inches of hoof drag breaks the wire and shorts out the entire fence, leaving our animals unprotected until morning. I could see the telltale hoof prints where the deer would land inside our pasture and where they would travel across to the other side. There, I could see where they jumped to get out - hitting the wire once again. Every night they would
Spring Migrations
April 7, 2023
Lambing season is definitely upon us. We welcomed 8 more lambs to our flock this week, bringing the total number of lambs, so far, to 18. We trailered some of the yearlings (last year’s lambs) to our Mountain Spring Road pasture for summer grazing. We’ll trailer them back to Hill-Stead in the fall.
We moved one of our sows to what will hopefully be her farrowing spot, and we’ll move the other sow to her own spot soon. We are 2 weeks away from finding out how our first venture into A.I. worked.
Shearing with Siri
March 31, 2023
Well, that was pretty amazing - we had 2,000 people come to our shearing event, including lots and lots of kids.
As I said to our shearer – “Thank you! That was a whole lot of people who got to see firsthand how completely unfazed the sheep were by being shorn.”
I heard comments from the crowd like;
“The one being shorn is falling asleep!”
“It’s like a day at the spa.”
“They are calmer than my dog is when it’s getting groomed.”
And so on.
As if trying to keep track of the 5 newborn lambs while
