The good thing about drier weather is that the late blight seems to have missed us, and the tomatoes are doing very well. I had enough space for six Early Girl and two cherry tomato plants, one Sweet Million, and one called a "raisin tomato" because it's supposed to be good for drying. It is a very sweet small cherry tomato. All the tomatoes are doing tremendously, especially the cherries. I think I'll be overrun with them, but I'm not complaining.

I also put in 6 cabbage plants and have already harvested them and made 15 lbs of sauerkraut (still in progress in a crock in the cellar). That's not a lot of sauerkraut but I'm the only one who eats it around here, so it's enough. I left the cabbage plants in the ground and just removed the heads, and the cabbages are now producing lots of small cabbages around where the main head used to be. I'll harvest those and use them fresh. They should make good single serving portions (I'm also the only one who eats cabbage).

The basil has flowered and the bees are loving it. You walk out to the garden and all you hear is "bzzzzzzzz... bzzz.... bzzzzzzzzzzzzz". I've already made some pesto and will make some more.

We had two "volunteer" sunflowers come up amongst the aforementioned cabbages. Actually a whole bunch came up in a small area no bigger than 2 inches in diameter, planted there by some critter. I pulled out all but two. They have flowered and have big happy sunny yellow faces. I've always wanted to grow sunflowers but never made space for them, so this was a nice surprise.

The garlic was harvested in July and has been hanging in the woodshed drying since then. It's probably about time to cut them down and store them until planting time in October. The chickens got into the garden this spring and were digging around in the nice soft fluffy raised beds looking for bugs and worms, and managed to decimate some of the garlic crop, so hopefully I'll have enough large cloves to plant the same amount again this year.

The only thing that hasn't done well are the peppers. They were supposed to be Early Bell, but although they are big and green and healthy, there is a serious lack of fruit on the plants. This morning I saw one small green pepper and a few more very tiny ones starting, but nothing else. Not sure what the problem was there.

In non-garden news, Ken has been doing a phenomenal job of clearing the slash from the logging last summer/fall. He couldn't start on it until mid-summer really because of a spring back injury, but he's made a huge amount of progress. I admit to looking at the mess and feeling pretty hopeless, but he picked a spot and waded in and started pulling out all the good firewood and piling the rest into piles for burning later. He said he felt sort of hopeless too, but his motivation came from knowing there was good firewood in there. As a result we have a woodshed more than half full. It would hold about 8 cords if it was completely full, and we only use about 2 cords per winter.

The other way to clear it would be to hire someone with a dozer to come in and push it all up into a long pile, but that would mean losing the firewood, having a big ugly pile, and probably losing a good amount of topsoil. This way, we save the soil, and have smaller piles that we can burn easily. It's much slower this way, but sometimes doing things faster isn't always the best.

I just realized that I haven't given a lamb report for this spring! We had 6 ewes bred, but only 4 caught. One that didn't was a ewe that rejected one of her lambs last year, and then spent the winter bullying the other ewes, so she is being culled this fall. The other ewe that didn't lamb I think was just in too poor a condition last fall, and there was something else going on with her as well. I wormed her and gave her a tonic drench and extra Selenium-Vitamin E and she came through the winter OK. She was never really "sick", but I think her poor condition after lactation last year, probably combined with worms contributed to her lack of lambing this year. She looks great now of course and I expect will have no trouble getting pregnant this fall!

She spent half the summer stealing supplement rations from the lactating ewes and was then moved over to pasture where she has continued to thrive. I think that last year when I had all the lactating ewes and their lambs on pasture (thinking that would be the best thing for them) that they all got too thin due to the quality of the pasture available and for some reason it affected her the most. It's not the best pasture but is fine for maintaining non-lactating animals, and last year's too much rain/too little warmth didn't help the pasture grow well either. So this year I kept all the ewes with lambs here and they have been on hay and a ration of mixed soybean meal/alfalfa pellets/beet pulp pellets/Shepherd 16 and what little grass we have available, and they've all done much better.

Anyway, of the four ewes that did lamb, three had singles, and one had twins for a total of 5 lambs. Two are white, one is black, and we have one black mouflon and one black grey for a nice variety of color. All are horned. No moorit though, which is my favorite. I think we may be keeping the black ram lamb as a replacement ram, and the rest of the lambs are ewes and will probably all end up as freezer lambs if they aren't sold for breeding stock.

We are trying to cut our ewe flock back a bit so I have put some up for sale. We "should" have our newly cleared area fenced by next spring and we've been working hard to get grass growing in the new field. We even spread manure by hand, scooping it into the tractor's loader, driving it up to the field, and forking it out of the loader bucket and spreading it around. The soil isn't bad for NH, but every little bit of extra organic matter helps. We would like to be able to keep all of our sheep here, instead of having to put some of them on the borrowed pasture a few miles away, so having a slightly smaller ewe flock will help with being able to do that.

So I tottered downstairs, to be met by Jake who quickly ran back towards the door. I opened the door a crack, and listened and heard "something" very odd. I then let Jake out and he roared out the door giving his "I'm 150lbs of badness and you don't want to mess with me" bark. In actuality he only weighs about 50lbs, but he barks bigger, and don't tell the critters out there, but he's really quite a softie, although he's given our rams what-for a couple times and they respect him.

Anyway, I stepped out behind him with my trusty LED flashlight, and from somewhere down the slope behind our house I heard:

ARGHSNARFSCHNARGLEBLORG

Now, that gave me pause. I normally don't fear things in the woods, even at night, but my brain simply could not come up with any realistic possibilities for THAT sound. A rabid pig? The Tazmanian Devil? At about that time Jake went blasting down the slope barking and I followed him to the edge and aimed the flashlight down the hill. Nothing. The noise had stopped, and Jake was casting back and forth for scent. I started sweeping the light back and forth and then tried up and down. AHA! About 30ft up a tree at the bottom of the slope I caught a couple pairs of eyeballs staring back. It was too far away to see what owned the eyeballs, but they were definitely there and were moving about. They kept turning away and then back towards my light.

After a few minutes I called Jake back and we went back into the house.

The consensus seems to be raccoons, most likely, fighting over some morsel, or perhaps territory. Or perhaps raccoons normally go about their business sounding like that?

Whatever it was, they got the message and did not come back for the remainder of the night. Or maybe they did but kept their vocalizations to whispers.

"BAA-A-A-A-A-AAAA" (rinse, repeat)

I look over past the sheep paddock and there is one of my neighbor's visitors, a guy in shorts and no shirt, up on the stone wall baa-ing at the sheep, who were eating and not terribly interested in the strange human making noises at them.

I don't think the man noticed me where I was standing in the chicken pen, but then I went into the duck pen with the hose to refill their water tub. By then the man had been joined by his wife or girlfriend and a toddler-aged child on the stone wall. He was continuing his serenade of the sheep who continued to ignore him.

When I moved into the duck pen and began filling the water tub and staring at these people, I think they saw me because they quickly climbed down off the wall and told the little girl to "say bye-bye!", presumably to the sheep (who still didn't care).

Now, who hasn't driven past a field with cows and said "Moo" out the window? But, I have yet to walk up to some farmer's field or barn yard and stand there mooing at his cows. And I have to wonder if I appeared in this person's yard and started barking at his dog or talking baby-talk to his toddler, exactly what he would think of it? I doubt he would appreciate it. He'd probably call the cops and have me arrested. However, for some reason, he thought it was OK to stand on my stone wall and "BAA" at my sheep. Not that it caused any harm... but... WHY?

I do not understand some people.

It's not that we had a bad winter. We had lower than normal snowfall amounts, and it didn't get particularly cold. I think it might have gotten as low as -13F on a few nights. We did get a January thaw and then no precipitation for most of February until the very end where we got almost 3 inches of rain in one storm. After getting a taste of warmer weather recently, with Spring-like days reaching to 50F (even if the nights drop back below freezing) you start to want more and more of that, and less of the cold.

We are also getting closer to lambing time. Based on when I put the breeding groups together, we should start getting lambs in mid-April. Last year we started on April 23rd and finished by May 1st. I'm thinking this year that the lambs are going to be coming over a longer timeframe though. We should start around April 15th, and could end up with lambs still coming in mid-May. I was trying to avoid that by having the breeding groups set up a little earlier than last season, but the sheep had their own ideas I guess.

Other things coming up this year - more fencing! We haven't done serious fencing work since we left NY. Ken built the paddock we have, with help from his Dad and aunt, soon after he moved up here, but since then our only fencing has been putting up and expanding the poultry yards. The reason was that we had more trees than open space. Since the logging was done, now we have open pasture space, but also a boatload of slash cleanup to do, and clearing of fencelines so we can run the fence. That will have to wait for the rest of the snow to disappear though, so we've been working on other projects.

One thing I finally did yesterday was to clean up the kitchenette area in the apartment so I could properly store and find sheep supplies, not to mention having some room to work. I had some things in our kitchen, some things in storage totes, and some things in the kitchenette. That area had become a catch-all for various stuff, as it's right inside the door from the shed/workshop. For instance, one side of the counter was full of Things That Should Not Be Frozen such as paint and spackle and caulking. They came inside from the unheated shed last Fall and made it as far as the counter, where they've been sitting all winter, collecting dust. On the other side of the sink area I had my tote I use for carrying sheep stuff out when I need to work with the sheep, worming, or trimming hooves, or giving vaccinations, etc. It needed to be cleaned out and restocked for lambing season. There are built-in shelves to the right of the countertop that had also collected various things that could be put elsewhere. I also organized my notebooks and paperwork and threw out a lot of old stuff that wasn't needed anymore, and put the notebooks on those shelves, reorganized the cupboards, and cleaned everything with soap and water. Ta-da! No, you don't get to see a "before" photo - use your imagination!

There's also wood to be cut and split for next winter, and the garden to plan and expand, and the house needs the siding re-stained, and, and, and..... but we have to try to take things one (or maybe two) at a time and try not to get feeling too overwhelmed.

As someone once said, "Do one thing at a time, and use both hands."

Just before it arrived, we finally got the roof part of the solar hot water system done. During Thanksgiving week, when my parents were visiting, my dad and Ken got the collector rack mounted on the porch roof. That left the plumbing part to finish. This was what we completed just before the snow came, and then Ken had to finish the plumbing in the basement. The system is an Apricus-30 which uses vaccuum tubes mounted on the above-mentioned rack to heat glycol which flows down into the basement and through a heat exchanger where it preheats the domestic hot water. Pretty nifty.

Earlier in November we bought two yearling ewes from Dancing Lamb Farm in NY, bringing our adult ewe count up to 6. We made two breeding groups with them and our two rams, each ram having 3 ewes. This year we constructed our breeding pens with a 6-8 foot no sheep zone in between to avoid the kind of problems we had a year ago (see "Merry Christmas, we broke the fence!" from December 2008). So far it is working well. The breeding groups were put together on November 22nd. Lambing should happen starting mid-April and continue through mid-May. I was actually hoping to have most of the lambs come earlier in the year than they did last year, and put the breeding groups together earlier. But I think at least one ewe will be lambing mid-May-ish, where last year we were all done by May 1st. Oh well!

We also have two ewe lambs that I didn't want to breed. They are spending the winter with our wether, Oliver, in a separate pen up behind the house. They are cute, but demanding, and it doesn't help that they can see us through the windows of the house. "Bring us hay now, hay wench!"

Also in mid-November we sent 3 lambs and a 2 year old ewe to the butcher. Two of the lambs were breeding quality, but not many people were in the market for breeding stock this year, so we sold them for meat. We didn't have the space or hay to keep them over the winter. The other lamb and the ewe were necessary culls to keep the quality of our flock up.

So now it's just the usual mid-winter chore routine, pretty much. Fortunately we have not had the amount of snow that fell in the last two winters. Here are a couple of winter scenes.

Well, Ken's been working under the house, in the crawl space, to get floors insulated, wires rerouted, and ultimately, to get the drains fixed. The problem was that there was apparently very little slope, and, "creative" joins where all the various drains came together into one, including a Fernco coupling which was never meant to be used in such a fashion. Do you know what happens when water freezes inside an improperly fitted Fernco? It expands, and leaks, and forms "icicles" from the coupling down to the ground, under the house. We know because we stuck our heads under there last year and saw the spectacle.

Ugh.

So, Ken finally got to the point where he could work on the drainpipes, which entailed digging out quite a bit of soil so he'd have room to maneuver under there. The original plan was to push the pipes up, as they'd obviously been hung up before (but the plastic hangers broke) and re-hang them. Last night that was what we tried to do, with Ken under the house, and me inside. Except, there wasn't enough space to push the pipe up enough to get the slope. It would just run into the floor joists between the first and second floor and couldn't go any farther. I should mention that the apartment has an upstairs half-bath and a downstairs full bath. The drainpipes for the upstairs bath run through the ceiling and then down next to the end of the staircase where the PVC pipe is visible for all to see and then down through the floor and underneath the house. The ceiling fortunately is made of rough barn boards so they can be taken down fairly easily to expose all the lovely plumbing.

After examining all this it became apparent that the vertical length of pipe running from the second floor down to the first was too long. And since the other bits and pieces up there in the ceiling had been leaking in various spots, it was decided to just take it all apart, and start over. Today therefore we made a trip to Home Depot and picked up all the necessary parts and got home and Ken started sawing through pipe and removing it bit by bit.

Then things got really interesting. He was upstairs in the half-bath where he'd had to cut a hole in the wall behind the toilet (after removing said toilet) to get to the vent pipe which goes up through the eave space and through the roof. He suspected that the coupling used to to join the vent wasn't glued, and indeed, it was just jammed on tight and not glued, which explained why we had periodic leaks. So he was up there examining that and I was downstairs, on the computer, writing a blog entry in fact, when the lights simply went out. No flickering, no warning, just out. Well, it was pretty windy and apparently a power line was taken out somewhere. So, now we have a dismantled drain system, and Ken's all dirty from crawling around under the house, and there's stuff all over, and we have no power. Oh, and did I mention it was raining?

What to do but press on! We got the generator out, plugged in some worklights (and our freezer), and kept going.

To make this long story slightly shorter, once Ken was able to get all the old parts out from under the house, he started to hang tees and wyes under there so he could measure to cut pipe to make the joins, and also so he could get the right slope..... except.... as currently configured, there is no slope to be had. See, where all of this rigamarole enters the basement of the main house, the pipe is up too high (it goes through an old window which is boarded up). From where the pipe enters through the old window, back to where the pipe comes down through the floor in the apartment, there is virtually no slope at all, and no way to get any slope because the pipe has to run across the floor joists, and it bumps up against them. The only way to get the required slope is going to be to lower the drain pipe where it enters through the window and runs into the basement of the main house. Fortunately, once it goes through the window it drops straight down for a distance before heading along the wall to the other end where it goes out to the septic. So, there is room to lower it, without messing up the drainage on the inside of the house.

About the time that Ken finished getting the old bits out from under the apartment, the power did come back on, so that was one bright spot (no pun intended) in this whole mess. But you can see why this Halloween turned into such a horror!

Seems I have a bit of catching up to do blog-wise, but I did want to share that we now have some beautiful Icelandic sheepskin pelts for sale on our farm website, here.

These were professionally tanned using a method that produces a pelt that does not require dry-cleaning. They can simply be washed in water with mild soap, or even shampoo, and washing instructions will be included. These pelts are very soft and supple, due to the lower number of wool follicles per square inch in this breed as compared with some other breeds. They can be used in many ways, including for rugs, chair or sofa throws, cushions, wall hangings, crafts, to keep your car seat warmer in the winter and many other uses.

Here is one example, just to tempt you to take a look at the full listing. :-) A 12-inch ruler was laid on the pelt for scale.

We also built a new coop this summer. It's been done and has been inhabited for several weeks by our new batch of laying pullets, but I hadn't taken any photos of it after getting it painted. Here are a couple.

And this was the other project we started today after finishing with the woodpile. This is the roof frame of what will be our new hay shelter. We bought the kit from ShelterLogic. It's 12W x 24L x 11H at the peak. This is as far as we got this afternoon. Tomorrow we put the legs on it, anchor it, and get the cover on.... I hope!