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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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Out Like a Lamb

March 24, 2023

Our first lambs of the season arrived this week. The twins were born early Saturday morning and were already standing and happily nursing by the time we got to the barn. All our lambs this year will have names that start with the letter “W” (it’s 2023 and “w” is the 23rd letter of the alphabet). We named these two Willow and Wilma.
The ram, for whatever reason, was being completely obnoxious. More obnoxious than his usual obnoxious self. I don’t know if it was enthusiasm for the chilly spring-

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Pulling the Taps

March 17, 2023

We pulled the taps on our sugar maples this week, bringing to an end the shortest, least productive, maple sugaring season we’ve ever had. We only had a couple good runs and the rest of the season it was either too cold, or too warm, for days on end. The temperature needs to fluctuate between freezing and thawing, but it never really did. The nights that froze, the temperatures barely warmed up during the day, and the days that did warm, it didn’t freeze at night. It’s the freeze thaw differenti

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In Search of a Queen

March 10, 2023

I miss our bees! Our ransacked hive should be waking up just about now. It’s not though. It stands completely empty and silent - devoid of everything but our very best intentions. We cleaned up the mess the bear left behind, put all the pieces back together and are in the process of building a bear proof electric fence.
We could purchase “replacement bees,” and have them shipped from some faraway place – but what’s the fun in that? Somewhere nearby, there’s another honeybee colony that’s just w

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In Defense of Wool

March 3, 2023

Last week we received an email from a woman who was thoroughly distraught that we were making a celebration of our sheep shearing. The atrocities that she attributed to the wool industry in general were absolutely horrific, and to my knowledge completely unfounded. I can’t imagine how painful it must be to be her and believe there is so much evil all around. I know it exists, but I also know for certain that it is not the norm, and that alone is reason enough to celebrate.

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A Little Too Long and a Little Too Short

February 24, 2023

After a yearlong hiatus, we finally had the wool collection day for the CT Blanket Project. The mill in Rhode Island that had been making our blankets for years closed, and it’s taken this long to find a replacement. Saturday, though, we collected 1,800 pounds of wool, all of it grown on CT sheep farms. Yay!
Each participating farm brings their wool to be inspected - and each farmer spends time inspecting another’s. One by one every fleece is laid out on the “skirting table” and everyone around

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