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This past Friday Jesse and Alice went to a "back to farm auction" in hopes of picking up some new sheep. Jesse was brave taking a two year old to a livestock auction, but it was a successful night. The next morning we were ready to welcome the sheep to the barn.  Alice wore an appropriate barn outfit....... don't argue with a toddler when they pick out their clothes. (If you look close, you can see her shoes are on the wrong feet!)  I peered into the trailer to find these three cuties looking back at me. These are Suffolk ewes, they were all born in January 2015, and have been with a buck for the past few months. They are potentially bred with an unknown lambing date..... Have I even mentioned how much I LOVE surprises?  Suffolk sheep have an all black "smooth" face. Our last buck was a Hampshire, and his offspring have a bit more wool on their face, we refer to them as The Fuzzies. Below is 22, a 2014 Fuzzy. 
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For me, country living is having fresh cut flowers from the garden in the house, all summer long.  This weekend is the symbolic end of summer, when the days slowly start melting into fall. The sunflowers in our pumpkin patch just bloomed, and I will be using them to hold onto summer as long as possible.
The weather has finally cleared up and allowed us to get hay made. Everybody at the farm likes to watch hay being made. Friends, their children, and our daughter....  But mostly the dog.  In our garden we grow two types of green beans. The green kind and the purple kind. I enjoy the purple beans for their interesting appearance and their delicate flavor. These are my favorite beans to eat raw or slightly cooked. This year we had a few more than we could eat before they went bad, so I had to can some of the crop. The thing about purple beans is they are a little bit magic. Not magic like grow a stalk up to the land of the giants, but magic as in their own right.  I started with a big basket of purple beans and snapped them like normal. Look how beautiful these beans are snapped! I love the contrast of the green and purple.  But when I pull them out of the canner 30 minutes later, they looked just like regular old green beans.  It's actually a kind of disappointing magic trick.
It's been a rainy summer. This is an understatement. We've have 14 inches of rain at our farm in 25 days. The sun came out the other day, and I took the opportunity to harvest the bumper crop of parsley that has been growing. One of my favorite ways to store herbs is to freeze them. Freezing herbs retains their fresh flavor, and there is nothing like the flavor of fresh parsley in winter soups and stews. I picked a huge bunch of parsley, cleaned it, and picked the leaves off the stems.  |
The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of Archives
January 2018
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