Tag Archives: posted by Caroline

Yesterday Evening in Faces

Posted on August 2, 2012 by | Comments Off on Yesterday Evening in Faces

Sweet Sabine

Buster

Alabama

Cassiopeia

Happy Lucy

Callum, giving me the look.

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Special Projects Week

Posted on July 31, 2012 by | Comments Off on Special Projects Week

Where Zac and I went to high school, there was a special week-and-a-half-long period of time sandwiched between two regular terms that was especially set aside for students to pursue something outside their usual fields of study. Because it didn’t take place during a regular term, you could devote all your time to creating some magnum opus, or to the intense study of one particular subject, or to the exploration of some place or development of some skill you’d never thought about before. We called it Mini-term, but I think at other schools I’ve heard it called Special Projects Week.

That’s definitely what this past week has felt like to me. As soon as August starts, we’ll be back to our usual farm stays (and camps!), but, right now, we’ve all plunged headfirst in to our own particular projects.

For example, I’m getting a jump on the fall garden:

(In a cruel twist of fate, the seeds I’m starting right now are cool-season crops, and need temperatures below 70F to germinate, which means I can’t use the greenhouse for these guys. But soon I will!)

Zac and Susan are collaborating on a culinary project that I’m duty-bound to not reveal– but I can say that you all are going to love it. I love these pictures of Zac getting the perfect charred-and-still-smoking photo (to be fair, he uses the culinary blowtorch more than anybody I’ve ever heard of– this is pretty par for the course).

Of course, there’s also a bit of time for real, live relaxation: reading on the front porch with a cold drink and a good book.

Do you all try and designate a time to recharge your creative batteries? Do you ever break out of the routine by immersing yourselves in something completely new? What do you do? (and, practically speaking: How do you carve out the time?)

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Sheep of the Week: Draco

Posted on July 30, 2012 by | Comments Off on Sheep of the Week: Draco

In anticipation of the autumn, I’m going to introduce you all to our Border Leicester ram lamb, Draco. He was born this past spring at the same farm we’ve bought our other Border Leicesters from– but, importantly, he’s from a different bloodline.

Since he came to the farm not just as a lamb, but as a ram lamb, he was in for a particularly lonely adjustment period. The two new ewe lambs he came with, Sagitta and Boöetes, got to have one another for company in the girls’ pasture, while Draco had to fit in to the boy flock all by himself.

border leicester ram lamb

He’s done an admirable job finding his place, and he’s such a darling, self-assured little cutie (not a cutie for long, though, as we’ll see) that I always try and keep an eye out especially for him in the pasture.

Yesterday evening, though, I was doing some work in the garden when I noticed he was butting heads with some of the yearling wethers. He’d butt heads with Emu for a while, and then they’d both walk away. Then he’d butt heads a couple of times with Callum, and they’d both go about their grazing. He’s less than 7 months old, and yet he’s starting to feel his oats and pick some fights with sheep who’re more than twice his age!

border leicester ram lamb

Can it be? I wrote the other day about how quickly the lambs seemed to be growing up, but Draco’s already, somehow, feeling the autumn coming on.

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Summer Honey

Posted on July 29, 2012 by | Comments Off on Summer Honey

On Friday afternoon, our friend Erin came by help us harvest a bit of honey from our bees.

We’ll wait until later in the year for our full-on fall harvest– this is just a small summer sampling. It was wonderful to crack the hives open and see that all four of them are healthy and strong.

We’re planning on brewing up something special with it– I’m really excited to see how it turns out!

This early-season honey is light in color and delicately flavored. I keep thinking that it’s a perfect distillation of all the blooms we’ve had over the summer– the borage, the lavender, the sunflowers.

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My New Greenhouse!

Posted on July 28, 2012 by | Comments Off on My New Greenhouse!

Last Saturday, I celebrated my 24th birthday and got an inconceivably wonderful birthday surprise.

Let me first give you an important piece of information. Ever since a field trip in college to Dumbarton Oaks, I have wanted nothing more than an orangerie. This– Caroline and her longed-for orangerie– is something we joke about on the farm.

So, last Saturday, I’d woken up late and was having coffee on the front porch with Zac. I looked out at the yard.

“It looks so much nicer than last summer, but I keep thinking about how much better it could be next year. If we had a greenhouse, maybe.”

“Sure, maybe.”

Around noon, Susan was going to take us all out for a birthday lunch. On the way to town, though, we needed to swing by Virginia Custom Buildings (the place we bought our chicken coop) to check up on something– it would only take a few minutes. Maybe we wanted to look at all the different sheds while Susan ran in to the office?

I spied a greenhouse off to the right and made a beeline for it (not knowing that Susan was beelining across the lot to the other greenhouse, birthday ribbon in hand!). I walked in and turned around.

“Wouldn’t it be so nice to have one of these one day, Zac?”

“Well, yeah, sure it would. Let’s– um, hey, we really need to go look at the Adirondack chairs across the way.”

And that’s how I got talked out of one greenhouse and into another one. I was absolutely floored when I saw the bow!

You guys. She got me my orangerie!

When they delivered it yesterday, I still kind of couldn’t believe that it was for me. Susan and Zac worked like crazy to find a way to get me a greenhouse (I think they were the ones who convinced Virginia Custom Buildings to offer them in the first place!), and I just hope that I can live up to all the newly-opened potential it offers. It was the perfect present, and I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten anything nicer as a gift.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this is going to change our lives. Next year, we can start even more seeds even earlier. We can have flowers in the winter! We have anything in the winter!

Now, just one thing: I have a feeling that greenhouse gardening is a whole different animal than outdoor gardening. Do you all have tips, suggestions, favorite books, crazy ideas, or general advice for a newly minted greenhouse gardener?

The first step, though, I know. It’s orange trees.

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Melons of All Sizes

Posted on July 24, 2012 by | Comments Off on Melons of All Sizes

Whenever I get too down about summer in the South, and long for a perfectly cool New England summer garden, with nothing crisped up or frizzled or killed and brown, I remember melons– those awful, sticky summer nights are what allow us to grow piles and piles of delicious subtropical wonders with complete ease.

With fruit like these, it might all be worth it (and with central A/C, it definitely is).

Those Petit Gris de Rennes melons I was so excited about have finally came to fruit around the beginning of the month, and our CSA members have gotten them in their baskets for the past three weeks (yesterday, they each got two!).

This might be analogous to hearing your children complimented, but it was the most gratifying thing in the world to hear that these melons were the best they’d ever had.

And, honestly, I agree.

They’re perfectly sweet, delightfully perfumed, and, on the whole, small enough to make a meal for a single person (for all their good qualities– or, in fact, because of them– these melons are not for sharing).

There is really nothing more decadent than bringing a whole, warm, luscious melon straight in from the field, and enjoying it as a slow breakfast.

However, all the rain we’ve had– right on the heels of a considerable hot and dry spell– has caused a few of them to split and crack wide open. Once the yellow jackets have found a melon, it’s a little too risky to try and pick it up and compost it, so I’ve just been leaving them to compost in place.

 Over on the other side of the garden, we’re growing Mexican Sour Gherkins.

 They’ve apparently been on the hip vegetable radar (?) since 2007, when New York Magazine ran a story about them, although I learned about them in last summer’s Bon Appetit (at which point, of course, I had to wait until the next summer to grow them).

They’re literally the size of a jelly bean. They look like watermelons and taste like a sour cucumber. We haven’t been able to keep them around! Despite the fact that the vines are prodigiously prolific, and seem to thrive in the heat, I snack on a handful nearly every trip out to the garden.

Which is why we don’t have so many left.

 Luckily, though, the vines are putting out more. See how absolutely tiny they are when they start out?

The most adorable thing about these adorable little guys, though, might be that their name in Spanish– sandia de raton– translates to Mouse Melon.

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Sheep of the Week: Finch

Posted on July 23, 2012 by | Comments Off on Sheep of the Week: Finch

Finch, eartag number 0110, is one of my favorite wethers from last year’s class of lambs.

When he was quite young– maybe only 3 or 4 weeks old– he wandered away from his mama, Catalina, and tripped into a serious quantity of red clay mud (this would have been in April, the tail end of our mud season). He soon became the lamb I could identify the most quickly, because he was the bright-red dirty-lamb.

But he washed up pretty nicely, didn’t he?

I love the look he has on his face as Emily shears him: (Welp, looks like there’s nothin’ I can do ’bout this.)

He still looks pretty lamb-like in this photo from early this past spring.

But, how quickly they grow up!

His nose is longer, his deep Cormo neck-wrinkle is larger, and the perspective is, I admit, a little forced.

But I’m mainly so glad of the fact that he’s kept his bottle-baby sweetness and lack of fear, but somehow never acquired that famous bottle-baby brattiness. He’s a perfectly gentle, absolutely lovely sheep.

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Stitching Sundays

Posted on July 22, 2012 by | Comments Off on Stitching Sundays

There’s a certain tradition here at Juniper Moon Farm that we do our very best to uphold.

Every Sunday, we sit down at the long craft table to sew, knit, and work together while watching movies and chatting. It’s rare that we’re able to carve out the entire day for ourselves, but, every week, we do our best to take some time to make.

I’ve been working on an Aran sweater, and am almost finished.

Charlotte’s been learning to sew, and has been making a few things for her new apartment. Today, she made potholders.

I’ve been teaching her to use my machine, and, let me tell you– I would give anything to be as patient, encouraging, knowledgeable, and infectiously joyful a teacher as the women who taught me to sew back in March, or to have been such a bold and undaunted a student and stitcher as Charlotte is now.

Somehow, the potholders turned out all right: corners clipped, raw edges all on the inside, pockets fully functional.

Zac kept us going with a platter of cucumber, tomato, and lox sandwiches– all in all, it’s been a really stellar Stitching Sunday.

What do you all do to recharge your creative batteries?

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Pastures New

Posted on July 18, 2012 by | Comments Off on Pastures New

Remember how, about three days ago, all the sheep turned up with an orange stripe down their noses? Three days after worming, we rotate the sheep to a new pasture. Not only is the grass greener and lusher in the new pasture, but it’s also been cleaned of sheep parasites by our three cows and two donkeys.

The flock lost no time at all, and went straight to grazing. I know I say this frequently, but turning sheep out onto fresh pasture is such a wonderful feeling.

cormo sheep and border leicester

Lindbergh and Ara

cormo lamb

Lewis

ewe

Willoughby

cormo ewe lambs

Diane and Cordelia

maremma

Happy Cini

maremma

and Happy Lucy.

llama

Jerry was happy to stick his head over the fence and eat everything that the other animals couldn’t reach. He cleans up our fencelines better than any string trimmer, though, so we don’t mind a bit.

border leicester lamb queen anne's lace

Canis, on the other hand, jumped through the fence in a weak spot, but still wanted to eat pasture grass (don’t worry: after taking this, Zac and I caught him and put him back on the right side of the fence).

geese

The only ones less than happy about having the flock in a new pasture?

Lucky for the sheep, though, the geese don’t get to vote.

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Garden Concerns in High Summer: Fall Planting

Posted on July 17, 2012 by | Comments Off on Garden Concerns in High Summer: Fall Planting

Holy cow! I have a feeling I might be super-late to the party on this one– and we’re not even going to talk about favorite gardening apps, because, hello, flip phone held together by duct tape– but have you all seen the neato planting calculators available (for free!) at Johnny’s? I nearly died of happiness when Susan forwarded them to me!

You can plant your fall garden by backtracking from your fall frost date, plan out succession plantings, and even figure out how to have [x] amount of [y] crop by [z] important date. The one I’m especially in love with is the Fall Planting Calculator. You enter your fall frost date, and it tells you the date by which you need to have your plants in the ground, either as 4-week-old transplants or directly-sown.

We’ve been doing the usual round of high summer garden maintenance– tearing out the peas and transplanting in young tomatoes; harvesting the last of the beets and carrots and putting peppers in their places; digging up the last of the potatoes and throwing down squash seeds– but, at the same time, we need to start thinking about which plants will succeed the ones that are currently producing at full tilt.

A few beds have already been planted with cover crops that will protect and nourish the soil all through the fall and winter. But the rest of the beds– the corn, beans, tomatoes, and cucurbits,  which are currently producing heavily– will need to find new tenants in the fall. In fact, they’re giving us so much, they might wear themselves out over the course of the next few weeks.

Having played around with the calculator, I’ve learned that we need to get a move on our brussels sprouts, peas, broccoli, and cabbage. Since these crops need cooler temperatures to germinate, we’ll be setting up the greenhouse indoors, in the air conditioning (or, at the very least, in the garage). Unfortunately, these crops need lots of extra attention (and water) to keep from frizzling when they’re transplanted in early August– exactly when one doesn’t want to spend any more time outdoors than strictly necessary.

I still have to work out a full rotation plan, but the past few hours of paging through the catalog and dreaming of Fall have been a wonderful respite– a close analog, I guess, to sitting by the fire in January and dreaming of July.

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