Our plan is to bring our little goats home in one week. We hope to have them here the Saturday before Easter. We have cleared the fence line, put up most of the fencing, and bought a metal shed. The shed needs to be put together, and that is our goal on this frosty April morning.
Yesterday we chose two baby goats and put a deposit down on them. In a month they will come live with us. It’s time for us to get busy preparing.
They look very similar, but the top one is a girl and the bottom one is a boy. They’re not brother and sister, but they are likely cousins as many goats in their herd are related.
Goat shed planning is in the works.
Time for me to go prepare the pasture fence line.
The little tomato starts are getting big!
When my house is base layer clean, that is, basically organized underneath the mess; it cleans up so quickly.
Hello. Sorry to be away for so long.
Now it is February and the end of winter here in Northern Michigan. I am starting seeds indoors and cozily cooking hearty food and baking muffins and apple cakes.
Outside springy winds are blowing. Followed in turn by ice storms. The process of spring has started. I can feel it in the air and the light tells the story of spring.
I’ve been sorting my seeds and taking stock. I’ve also been making a list for my second order from Baker Creek Seeds this year.
I started all of my nightshades and onion family seeds s as well as some flowers that take a long time to mature.
We’ve been playing with root cellaring this year. Here are four onions I harvested this Autumn that are still looking fantastic in February.
I’ll be back again soon with more news from our little homestead.
Teaching River to do laundry. She likes it, so washing towels is going tp be one of her chores. She’s trying out mopping in the kitchen right now and doing a great job. She DID just climb on the island to get out of corner she mopped herself into, but whatever.
I refuse to ever submit to the idea that just because I earn no money for the work I do at home that it is any less valuable or that it is not a job. I do my job out of love and a desire to care for my home, family and land. And it is valuable work.
Third graders in The United States of America are supposed to learn how to write letters properly. River has been resistant to this. She wrote lots of letters last spring and this autumn. She just refused to follow the proper format insisting that it was ‘dumb’ and that ‘no one talks like that.’ I told her that it wasn’t talking, it was writing, but she still rebelled against the letter writing format.
Today we tried again. She asked if we could play a game set in old fashioned times and pretend we were writing a letter to someone important. So we pretended that we were sisters who ran a restaurant. River said that in the game our restaurant had a rat infestation and it was effecting our business. She wrote to the mayor asking him to call animal control to help (in real life we do our best to do catch and release of any critters we don’t want in our house).
The end result was that River ended up writing two letters. One from the waitress to the mayor, and another from the female president back to the waitress. She also read the majority of a letter written in cursive (another 3rd grade skill we’re working on), written by me, posing as the mayor, in response to the waitress.
Today play helped us navigate our way through a hard lesson. Being old fashioned made River feel like this formal type of letter writing could find its proper place in her mind. She learned the format, did the work, and had fun. And now all is well because my waitress assured me that there were no rats in the radish stew.
First harvest in the new homestead garden today! Three Cherry Belle Radishes. Also brought in a few pots of live Buttercrunch Lettuce for feasting upon.
These seeds were started back in April. Today is the 31st of May, Labor day Weekend, and our harvest is beginning. Soon to follow are collard greens and baby kale, followed by endive and a second round of Buttercrunch Lettuce. Finally peas, and then strawberries will round out the early spring garden. I’m expecting harvests during June for all the plants mentioned.
Staggering garden planting has so many advantages. I can’t sing it’s praise enough. I believe that continual plantings and harvestings are key to a garden’s health and success.
erinsbackyardfarm 