Friday, January 9, 2015

Heavenly Eggs

Adena excels at presentation. Since we added the dark brown eggs from the Marans, she's come up with a new pattern.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Cold!

Water droplets freezing on my gloves and boots this morning! Putting a heat tape on the outdoor hydrant this winter has prevented many bucket trips from the bathtub!

Monday, January 5, 2015

De-scurring the shaggy goat

We read Daniel 8 this morning -- Coincidentally (Providentially?) poignant because the chore of the day was to cut back the scurs on Liaison, our Lamancha buck.

Verse 8 reads:

"Therefore the goat waxed exceeding great, and when he was at the strongest, his great horn was broken: and for it came up four that appeared toward the four winds of the heaven."

Liaison broke one scur off a few weeks back, but his other one (the "great horn") needed trimmed as it was curling back against his head.  With some wrestling on the milk stand and a hacksaw, we were able to cut off about an inch.  I'll let it heal up and trim it back some more.

Hopefully four new horns don't appear in its place as Daniel prophesied concerning the Greek empire. 

The joys of livestock!  Here's a before pic... I'll spare the after. 


You can see Liaison's Great Horn above his left eye

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Hugelkultur!

After a pretty good garden last last year, I'm more than doubling it this year.  Eventually I want to put in a semi-sunken earthbag greenhouse.  If that's not eco-hippie enough for you, I'm starting a hugelkulture bed (ultimately for wild blackberry canes, but we'll see).  Read more about hugelkultur (or permaculture) here.

I'm starting with the oversized and rotten logs from the wood pile and have been adding leaves, dead cowpen daisies, the last of the old wood chip pile and manure.  The idea is to replicate the deep bed of the forest floor where the fungi and insects found in the rotting wood break it down to useable nutrients for the plants. Anyway, it gives me something to do with the chunks of firewood that are too rotten for use!

The initial pics are below -- I'll add more as I go.