Chores and Joys

Today we are supposed to go plant sorghum with our neighbors, which I’ve been looking forward to since last fall. However, I am so exhausted this morning that I’m just a tiny little bit hoping to get rained out!

Still needing to castrate and dock lambs, but I haven’t been able to find the dosage of tetanus toxoid to give a lamb. (Anybody?) The helpful folks at Jeffers should get back with me today, after talking to the manufacturer of the vaccine.

I attended a blessingway last night for my friend MH. She’s due in June, and I’m her doula (or “froula”, as her husband R* put it—their “friend who will be at the birth”). This will be my first birth in a couple of years (well, human, that is), and I’m very excited. The blessingway last night was lovely and intimate and in a gorgeous setting (our friend S*’s house). Yet another reminder of how lucky we all are to be here.

Paper Pots

This may turn out to be the most boring post ever, but I really want to show a cheap and easy way to make pots for seed starting and potting up. I can’t bring myself to actually pay money for pots for in the greenhouse, and while I enthusiastically reuse all the plastic pots that end up coming my way, there are only so many of them, and they disintegrate all too rapidly.

 

Years ago, a friend loaned me a paper pot maker—one of those nifty little wooden gadgets that you can pay biggish bucks for in the “green” catalogs, and I liked it pretty well, but it had its limitations. Such as the one size of pot you could make with it, which was too small for a lot of what I needed, and also the fact that somewhere along the line I lost it. So I started making newspaper pots using different size tin cans for the form. It works great! A little labor intensive, but very, very cheap. Newspapers work, and so do old phone books. And just like a peat pot, you plant the whole thing, pot and all. Not that there’s usually all that much pot left by the time you put it out—it’s mostly a soil ball held together by roots and a thin veneer of paper.

Fast Update


I love this time of year, even though I feel so busy I don’t know if I’m coming or going!

Lambing is all done for the year—now just have to finish up with the castrating and tail-docking chores.

Two more does are due to kid this month. We’ve culled a big chunk of our herd—none of us are loving the offspring of our last buck. (We are, however, nuts about the offspring of our current buck!) So we are down to three does milking, with these two more due to kid soon, both of whom are looking like keepers.

Maude is as sweet and mischievous as ever, and giving us two and a half to three gallons of very rich and very yellow milk a day. She’s due (I hope) to calve on 22 August. I’d like to get a vet out to check her—I don’t want to start drying her up if we’re not sure she’s bred!

The pigs are growing well. They’re staying pretty lean without the high grain input, but are healthy and growing. Soon I’m going to start letting them go out in the pasture—right after they’re finished with some garden tilling duties.

We have a coop full of chicks in the front yard, along with the goat kids. It feels like a day care, and when you open the front door, everybody starts yelling for something!

Liath, the dog, is due to have puppies around the first of June. She has turned out to be a marvelous dog—hard-working, sweet natured, eager to please. She gets along amazingly well with all the other animals. That was one of the problems we’ve always had with Fionn, our male: he loved the goats, but hated all the other animals—particularly the cows and sheep. Liath and Maude are buddies—I watched them stroll around the pasture together this morning. And she has a strong desire to dismember strange dogs—just another little something I love about her.

The garden is looking beautiful. We’re eating a lot of salads and onions. The greenhouse is a lot of fun, and is full of tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and basil, and a whole lot more!

And last, but certainly not least, we had a delightful and exhausting visit from DH’s three grandsons early this week. They spent a couple of nights—one with their parents, one without!—and DH camped out in a tent in the yard with them. It was really a blast, and I’m almost recovered.