Tuesday Dose of Cute: Lunch on the Go

Because we live so far from everything (10 miles to the post office to get our mail, 17 miles to an itty bitty library, 40 miles to a big supermarket, 90 miles to Lowe's), unless it's an emergency, we never leave the farm for just one thing.

During today's seven hour outing we made 11 stops, which was actually on the low side (and we only forgot three four things!). We never travel without snacks, sandwiches, jugs of water, and emergency miniature candy bars.

The chickens, on the other hand (foot?), just have to look down and peck for their lunch—though of course they also never have to leave the farm. Lucky clucks.

More chick pics? Here.
More farm life tidbits? Here.

© FarmgirlFare.com, always glad to be back home sweet home.

Sunday Dose of Cute: This Morning (and Fencing)

More below. . .

Friday Farm Photo: Through the Kitchen Window

Twenty-two degrees and a graceful morning view.

Firearm deer season opens tomorrow. All around the area, hearty community breakfasts will start being served at 3:30 am. Businesses will be closed or short-staffed all week, and the kids are off from school. Vacation days from work were scheduled months ago, and campers and RVs have been parked in favorite hunting spots for days.

The small local meat processor, located five miles outside a town of 325, will take in something like 600 deer over the next week and a half—and those are just the ones hunters don't process themselves.

Deer season is a really big deal around here.

More below. . .

Wednesday Dose of Cute: Donkey Admiration Society

Also known as Dan's fans

It's the end of an era! The vet will be here soon to 'de-jack' our beloved Donkey Doodle Dandy, as well as young Gus and Gnat. It seems that somebody around here thinks a herd of seven longears is plenty, and that this whole baby donkey business needs to stop.

I'll certainly miss having adorable baby donkeys around each year (although there's a slight chance, ahem, Evie might be pregnant), but it'll be great to be able to let Dan go back to running with his people rather than with the sheep.

The farrier is coming this afternoon, too. He'll help hold Dan completely still while the vet puts the shot of sedative in his neck, and he'll also give Dan a much needed pedicure—probably while he's still sedated.

I'm a little worried (okay, a lot worried) about all this, especially since dear Dan is 10 years old (you can read about how Dan joined the farm family in The Tail of A Donkey and His Ratty Blue Halter). Cross your hooves that all goes well.

In the meantime, I can't believe I blew it. I should have saved this photo for today's announcement!

© FarmgirlFare.com, where I've found that it's always a good idea to hand out bribes treats to the hired help, so I have two bags of giant oatmeal raisin cookies and a couple of big hunks of old-fashioned banana cake with cream cheese frosting ready to go.

An Easy Recipe for Old-Fashioned Blackberry Crisp (and Life in a Very Small Town)

This simple crisp is a sweet comfort treat for breakfast, snack time, or dessert.

Because our farm is located several miles past the last mailbox on the local delivery route, the U.S. postal service won't come out this far. Instead, they provide us with a post office box in town at no charge.

'Town' is ten miles away and consists of a church, a tiny post office—where you can only collect the mail in your box when the office is actually open for business—and a general store where the gas is full serve and you pay with cash or put it on a tab.

The small, dark store, which is freezing in winter and a stuffy furnace in summer, has three chairs lined up just inside the heavy white front door (that jingles each time it opens), allowing whoever is sitting around shooting the bull an excellent view of everyone coming and going.

If the owner is in the back slicing up deli meat or making a sandwich or out front pumping gas, the area next to the cash register quickly fills with patiently waiting customers.

More below. . .

Saturday Farm Photo: Done!

At least for now.

Three weeks, five cuttings, several gallons of ice water, 695 bales of hay neatly stacked in the pole barn. It's definitely a record.

The entire hayfield has been cut, except for the sloped section you can see above where the grass was too thin to bother. During several of the past years we weren't, for various reasons, even able to get the whole hayfield cut. In better years we would have ended up with a lot more than 695 bales, but at least these all look pretty good.

We're still 205 bales shy of our 900 bale goal, so the plan—weather and everything else permitting—is to re-cut some of the hayfield in three or four weeks, once the summer grass is taller but before it starts to go to seed and/or burn up. We don't usually do this, but we're hopeful it'll work out.

More about haying below. . .

Monday Farm Photos: Back in the Hay - for a Whole Lot of Days

More photos and the story below. . .

Friday Dose of Cute: Sheep Freedom Day!

The sheep are always excited. . .

More photos and a much longer than planned story below. . .

Sunday Dose of Cute and Farm Life: It Was Sheep Working Weekend!

One sneaky little lamb tried to escape, but my hunky farmguy hopped the fence and saved the day.

Now that lambing season—which lasted less than a month!—seems to be over (it doesn't look like that last ewe is pregnant), it's time to focus on other things, like keeping the sheep in tiptop condition. This means working them, which is always so much fun! Not.

More below. . .

Monday Farm Photos: Creek's Up. Way Up.

For at least 11 months out of most years, our wet weather creek bed, which meanders for about a mile through the farm, is filled with nothing more than ten million rocks and my wishes that our peaceful and useful (no hauling water for the sheep!) little babbling brook would run all the time—especially during the heat of summer.

After we've had a lot of rain or snow, the creek will start to run, first upstream next to Donkeyland, then down past The Shack, and finally alongside the entire length of the hayfield before it leaves the property. The water comes off the hillsides and from underground wet weather seep springs. Sometimes it takes several days for the creek to make it down to The Shack, and sometimes it dries back up before it reaches us.

More photos and story below. . .

Saturday Farm Photos: Geese! And a Maine Farm

Back in 1991, when I was an early 20's California girl dreaming and scheming about moving to rural New England (which was the plan before life intervened and I ended up adventuring sight unseen to Missouri instead), I asked a friend who was working at a bookstore to order me a copy of a book called Maine Farm: A Year of Country Life by Stanley Joseph and his photographer wife, Lynn Karlin. I knew nothing about it except that it had a nice title.

The book, which is available from amazon.com for under $5, turned out to be a large square hardcover that is part farm journal, part how-to manual, and part beautiful coffee table book. It covers a year on Stanley and Lynn's 22-acre Penobscot Bay farm, which was previously owned by back-to-the-land icons and authors Scott and Helen Nearing and is located down the road from Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch's Four Season Farm.

Wednesday Dose of Cute: Watching It Get Whiter

Nothing stays the same on a farm, and yet there are some things that never change. From year to year, we find a comforting rhythm: little lambs in early spring, juicy heirloom tomatoes in summer, beautiful color in fall, feeding hay in winter, and most of our snow in February.

The storms just keep coming. At least today's three inches of snow covered up all the treacherous ice.

Don't get me wrong; I really do love winter.

This photo is from one year ago today (when our beloved wet weather creek was running), but it could have easily been taken this afternoon—except for the lack of blood.