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Tag Archives: Seasons
I Love Autumn …
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Tagged autumn, farms, fences, flowers, fruit, Martha's Vineyard, New England, New Jersey, pumpkins, Seasons
Scenes From An Early Spring
One of the chickens has taken to laying eggs inside the haybale, where the sheep have made indentations from snacking. When done with her daily task, she’s been known to pause for a nap on Darby’s back for a bit.
I’ve always seen sweet pictures on the internet of sheep with other little animals on their backs; usually cats. I’ve never had it happen here before, and I seriously doubt Samson cat will ever get up the nerve to nap on a woolly back. It’s a happy circumstance for me, then, to catch this hen hanging out with her ovine companions.
Most of our hens now are laying darker brown eggs; a fact I realized today when getting ready to boil eggs to dye with the kids. Nothing worse than having four dozen eggs in your fridge and having to buy more so your kids can play with pastel colors.
My Shepherd Sweater is flying off my needles with much more speed than any of my previous projects. I’m guessing this is due to the huge amount of time I’ve spent this year waiting. Waiting for Neve to get out of school. Waiting for doctor’s appointments. Waiting for the garden to wake up. I’ve got the main portion of the body done, and am about to finish the second sleeve.
I still have to do the pockets as well. They are done as steeks, and I haven’t ever worked one before, so I’m a bit nervous.
Handsome Granola. I hope he’s done his job!
The Bradford Pears and Forsythia are finally blooming, and the Cherry Blossoms are on the verge.
The peonies have only just started poking up, and I’m seeing the very beginnings of the radishes I planted starting up, as well as one lone asparagus that has broken up through the earth. I’m really hoping the rest will show themselves soon!
Welcome Spring 2018!
It almost looked like spring out there, with all of the buds about to open on the trees, and all of the daffodils blooming. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I love a good snow, and a good day off! Besides, here in Central Virginia in March, this will be gone tomorrow, and we’ll be back to business as usual. In the meantime, we are enjoying a day of relaxing and knitting inside.
I tried getting some good pictures of the flock, but they were convinced I must have cookies in my pockets for them, and wouldn’t let me step back far enough.
Darby unbelievably turned 5 a few days ago. 5!
Scout has taken her usual spot for the day……
…..and so have the cats. What’s funny about this situation on the cat tree is not that it is unusual – they do this every day. What’s funny is these two hate each other, and only on the tree do they reach any semblance of coexistence.
Of course, a snow day would be incomplete without a baked good of some sort. This is our current favorite – the Whole Orange Bundt Cake from Joy the Baker. The recipe can be found HERE, and I highly, highly recommend it.
I’ll be rounding out the day by knitting and listening to podcasts ( current favorite is My Favorite Murder ) in front of the fireplace. Maybe a nice wee dram of scotch later – current favorite for that is Ardbeg.
How are you spending this spring day?
In The Bleak Midwinter
This seems appropriate for today’s grey, overcast stillness. It’s, as John Mayer once put it, “the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon”, where the sky remains the same dreary hue from dawn to dusk.
It is, however, above freezing today. The polar temps we’ve been experiencing have relented and given way to some balmy 40 degree days. Honestly, I’d rather keep the polar cold. It’s helpful in killing off harmful parasites and bugs that plague us all through the warmer months. On the plus side, it’s nicer when the water troughs and bottles don’t freeze immediately after they’ve been filled. The sheep have a heated bucket that keeps water liquid, but it’s rather small and requires me hauling buckets of water out rather frequently. The rabbits, unfortunately, do not have heated water bottles, and we’ve spent a great deal of time thawing them out so they always have something to drink. They are otherwise doing very well and producing an impressive amount of compost for the gardens.
The ducks and chickens are hard-up for water, too. Mostly they drink from the stream, but as it is solid right now, they too are depending on us putting out water.
Despite the relative quiet and lack of activity here right now, there are a couple of new faces.
This is Scout. She is a Great Pyrenees who belongs to friends of ours who are transitioning from one home to another, and she is lodging with us while they find their new place and get settled. Though she’s used to guarding livestock and being outside, she followed me in one day and claimed the couch as her own. Most days that’s where you’ll find her.
She does get overheated fairly easily in the house, though, and will tap on the back door in order to go lay out in the cold for awhile.
The second new face around here is a permanent one. Meet our new farm cat, Samson.
Samson is what you’d call “aggressively friendly”. He’s the friendliest rodent control you’ll ever meet.
He’s an outdoor cat, but he has a bed in the garage, as well as a sun room on the back deck ( basically, a big box with a cat door with a glass panel that faces out and gets a ton of sun. He loves it). He is a much better solution to keeping rats away from the livestock feed than any kind of poison or trap!
Samson accompanies me on my walks around the farm to check on things and enjoy the sites. I love the bare shapes of nature in the winter.
Even the little waterfall in the stream is frozen solid. There were little birds skittering over the surface, but on my approach with the cat, they flew off.
It’s an interesting state everything is in; not quite asleep (there are buds on some of my fruit trees!), but not quite ready for spring, either. We haven’t had any real snow yet, though I am still hoping for at least one good storm. Maybe we are all holding our breath a bit, waiting to see how much winter is left.
Tagged: Farm, Pets, Seasons
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Tagged Farm, Pets, Seasons, Uncategorized
Happy Summer!
I can’t believe how long I’ve been going between posts. I have no real excuse, other than my life seems to be an endless stream of appointments for the kids coupled with hours of weeding the gardens (followed by removing dozens of ticks every night).
Thankfully, there’s something else that’s been endless recently: wild blackberries. Every year I’m astonished at how much more there are than the previous year. It’s also a time game, though. You have to pick them just at ripeness or risk losing them all to japanese beetles and birds. Since I don’t always have time to do anything with the bucketloads I’ve been picking, I’ve been letting the kids eat them all in one go. With the solstice, though, I decided something special needed to be done with them. So I made ice cream.
I started by heating up the berries with some sugar and cinnamon on the stove and lightly mashing them to release some of the juice.
While that was cooling, I used a Ben & Jerry’s recipe for the base. It basically entails whipping eggs with cream and sugar until fluffy. Super easy and quick.
Then the berries were added, and I poured as much as I could fit into the trusty Cuisinart ice cream maker.
There was just enough left over to make popsicles.
When the machine had finished churning, I froze the ice cream an additional few hours before serving.
Success!
Tagged: food, Garden, Seasons
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Tagged food, garden, Seasons, Uncategorized
Still Waiting
Waiting for winter, waiting for spring, waiting to see if my ewes are bred. If they are, they’re not telling. If they aren’t, they are getting pretty fat anyway.
I’ve been organizing my lambing supplies and ordering what I need, just in case. I’ve also been trying not to bother them too much, though that isn’t as easy. I want to keep my hands on them to make sure they’re gaining enough weight, and checking their mucous membranes for signs of anemia. So far, everything seems okay, but one thing I’ve learned is to never count on it staying that way!
Last year’s baby chicks are finally starting to lay and/or crow, and I’m dreaming of ducklings now. I won’t order any chicks, but if one of our hens decides to go broody, I’ll put together a little maternity ward and hatch some eggs that way.
Signs of spring are definitely everywhere. The buds are really popping on the trees, and daffodils and forsythia are blooming everywhere. Mine are a little bit behind, owing to our little micro-climate in our hollow. It’s tough not to be out every day prepping the garden beds and getting the seeds started, but it’s only February. Winter has been known to come back and smack us hard in March, so I’m not counting on this warmer weather to last reliably. I have been out covering over troublesome weed areas with cardboard and feed bags, though. The war against weeds knows no winter!
I’ve also been cleaning up my beehive components and getting them ready for new occupants. For Valentine’s Day Paul ordered me a new colony set to arrive in April from a local source. It’ll be so good to have bees again! I’m debating moving them a bit closer to the house and away from the neighbor who sprayed bifenthrin all over their property the summer before my previous colony failed. They haven’t done so since, and I’m hoping they won’t again.
On cooler days I’ve been trying to catch up on making stock from the leftover chicken carcasses from dinners. I’ve been keeping them frozen until I had a chance to let them slow cook, and whenever I can, I put them on the stove in my giant pot and make up gallons of stock. It’s one of the most satisfying things to make in your kitchen!
Despite the warmer temperatures, Pussy Hats have been flying off my needles. I’m on my fourth at the moment, and keep getting requests for more. I’m more than happy to oblige, though I realize I could have finished my Chimney Fire sweater a few times over by now! It is gratifying though to have smaller projects that work up quickly and are portable enough to bring to appointments during the week.
Maybe my sweater will be done before winter is, but it’s not looking like it. Secretly (or not…), I AM still hoping for one good wallop of snow before spring.
Fingers crossed.
Tagged: Farm, Garden, Knitting, Pets, Seasons
Happy Holidays!
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Tagged Farm, Seasons, Uncategorized
Solstice
“And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now.
This year and every year.”
–Susan Cooper
It’s the Winter Solstice, once again. Slowly but surely the light will come back now, as we round the year and tilt toward summer again. But first, winter is upon us (though it remains relatively warm here, and aggravatingly snow-free). It felt fitting to spend the day baking cookies and enjoying each other’s company. In the late afternoon I took my usual walk around the pastures and found my center among the natural world. This is my favorite time of year for walking in the woods and bringing treats to the sheep. Though low, the stream is full of tiny minnows. The dried-up weeds and vines and fallen trees become like hedgerows, teeming with birds. You’d be forgiven for thinking there was a huge animal crashing about out there, the birds are so plentiful and noisy. It’s hard to get pictures of them; I haven’t got a zoom lens and they fly off in huge clouds of winds and chirping if I get too close.
I can see now that the small, wild holly trees are thriving, and I’m hoping I can transplant them at some point to a better location. I also found the remains of a skunk in the back pasture, who I assume was killed by one of the many hawks we see out there every day. We’d been smelling the pervasive scent rather strongly back in October, but never found the source.
After dinner the girls and I bundled into the car and we set off for our yearly viewing of Christmas lights. It seemed fitting on the night of the Solstice to celebrate the colorful lights people have on their homes.
Happy Solstice, all. May your days be long and bright, and your nights warm and cheerful.
Tagged: Farm, food, Pets, Seasons
Gearing Up For Christmas
We are finally starting to really feel some of the holiday spirit we’ve been needing. I won’t give all the credit to gluhwein and egg nog, but it certainly hasn’t hurt!
Everyone loves the tree! It feels magical at night with the tree lights and the heady scent of fresh pine. If only we’d get some snow, to complete the effect.
We’ve only just begun our cookie baking in earnest, and I’m definitely feeling the crunch. We’ve managed to get some pfeffernusse done today and I’m working on linzer cookies next. Tomorrow I’ll put the kids to work making the iced cookies.
Oona’s been working on her Christmas gift knitting in between devouring chapters of Harry Potter. She’s completely obsessed right now, and I couldn’t be happier. I told Paul that since she was too young to really appreciate Harry Potter World when we went to Universal Studios that we’ll have to taker her again!
Tonight we are watching It’s A Wonderful Life while I frantically work on more cookies, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tagged: kids, Pets, Seasons
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Tagged Kids, Pets, Seasons, Uncategorized
Not Feeling Forty
It happened. I turned 40. I don’t know how; I certainly don’t feel 40! There are many days still when I wonder how it is that I’m the adult around here. Now, if you must turn 40, it’s best to do it in the company of some of the best people you know. Which is, luckily, and 100% thanks to my best friend Jessie, what I did.
Though there are a couple of people missing, I was surprised by all the people I love most. I don’t know how I got so lucky.
Now that my birthday has come and gone, we are well and truly on our way to fall. Hooray!!! The light quality has already changed quite a bit – though the temperature is still disappointingly hot – and the fall flowers and colors are starting to show.
These flowers started popping up in late August and are now exploding everywhere, especially along the stream.
There are persimmons on the tree again. It would be nice if we could harvest them before the squirrels eat them all. Not that I am super crazy about persimmons…..but still!
While I was out and about looking at the persimmons and admiring the flowers, I decided to check closer to the stream, and ran into this guy:
I noticed him and froze. He noticed me and froze. I remained perfectly still, and he continued on rooting around in the grass for whatever it was he was on the lookout for. After a few moments he began waddling off on his merry way, and I was happy to watch him disappear off into the distance. I wasn’t out to get skunked, for sure! I’ve warned the kids to be more aware outside now; this happened right in the middle of the day!
He WAS pretty cute, I have to admit. And, as long as he steers clear of the chickens, he’s welcome to hang out on the periphery of the farm. Any closer and the dogs would be happy to make his acquaintance.
Tagged: Farm, Pets, Seasons
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Tagged Farm, Kids, Pets, Seasons, Uncategorized