At one time, we counted the lavender plants here on the farm. I have lost track of the number.
We have a lot of lavender.
I’m trying to decide how much to harvest, when to harvest, and what to do with it after we get it cut.
We have two or three varieties.
Any ideas?
All the pics of lavender were taken by my photobug daughter, Isabella.
I have been looking for something else to do with the abundance of Swiss chard that we have in our garden. I make some several times a week, sauteed in olive oil with garlic, but I have been ready for a change for a while. Fortunately, Salim Ben Mami has come to my rescue again.
This recipe looks absolutely incredible. We have the chard, the eggs (oh, my, do we have eggs!), and we have a lot of fresh onions in the garden. I suppose this means I need to take some time and make some cheese to go with. It says goat cheese, I’m guessing he means chevre. I’m not a fan of goat cheese (true story), so maybe I’ll play around and see what other cheeses I can make that would work here.
For those who don’t want to take the trouble, I strongly recommend Cafe Collage in Oregon House (open for dinner, Thurs-Sun). Amazing food, super fresh and expertly prepared.
When I’m not farming or chasing kids I…..write about farming and chasing kids. And a few other things.
Giveaway ends June 15, 2012.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
I think the first time I heard the term “bucket list” was when a movie came out with that name. I don’t know if the writers of that movie came out with the term to connote a list of things a person wants to do before dying (kicking the bucket). Maybe it was an old phrase I’d just missed until then. I’ve heard the phrase a lot since then. It is now a part of our collective lexicon.
On the farm, we have a bucket list, too. That is, we have a list of things we do with buckets, and a list of buckets we like, and we even have a list of ways to get along without a bucket if we can’t seem to find one.
When we first started the farm, we were amazed at the cost of chicken feeders. We rustled up a bunch of buckets we had lying around, and Brian drilled some holes and fastened on the bottom of a planter. For about 1/10 of the price, we had feeders for our chickens. Almost four years later, we still have most of them in use.
Ok, so technically, this was a 55-gallon drum, not a bucket, but it made a great turkey feeder. We could put in 100 lbs of feed at a time…..then refill it the next day. Lesson? Don’t have so many turkeys!
These are the small buckets we use to collect scraps for the compost and worm piles. We have to rely on the kindness of strangers to get these–they are the containers for cheap “ice cream,” and I would rather have small amounts of REAL ice cream than mass quantities of…..what is it anyway?
This one is kind of a no-brainer. We use buckets to move stuff around. In this case, we have a bucket full of organic crackers (leftovers, funny shaped, etc) that we get from a local factory. We use this as a small part of our feed for the pigs, and occasionally the other animals have some as a treat as well.
Bella’s daily chore–mixing pig buckets. Organic crackers, sprouted grains, soaked corn, milk, and yogurt. Yum.
When Bella sprouts the grains for the animals, it looks kinda like this too. She sets up several buckets, soaks overnight, then drains the next day. Rinse and drain, rinse and drain, wait a day or two and….sprouts!
This little bucket used to be a planter. We turned it into a feed scoop!
And finally, my favorite use for a bucket:
My milking stool. The kids sometimes join me (and sit wherever–looks like a camp chair in this pic). A friend gave me a fancy milking stool when I got my first cow, but a bucket just always seemed to suit me. I’m a pretty simple girl at heart.
It is 11:25 p.m.
The “wow there is something I need to do” function in my brain just connected.
Goslings arrive tomorrow. Early.
People who have goslings to pick up at the post office should go to bed early so they have time to get ready for the goslings.
OR, they need a lot of coffee. I’m going with what’s behind idea #2.
Looks like we have a clutch of baby ducks! The kids came in all excited about them hatching. Our Muscovy ducks are great mothers, but we’ve found that the predator pressure here is pretty intense, so we will be isolating the mom and babies as soon as we can catch them.
I got a message today on our facebook page asking about how to care for baby ducks. It seems that someone found some ducklings that had no mother around. In our experience, ducks don’t just walk off and leave their ducklings. It may happen, it just hasn’t happened here. The person writing wanted some basic info on keeping those little cuties alive, so here it is.
Ducklings need warmth and protection. We usually have a small brooder box with a heat light. They need water to drink, but not to swim in. Because their feathers aren’t in yet (with protective oil to keep them dry) they should not have access to water they can get into–they will drown. Most feed stores carry waterers for baby chicks, those will work fine, but ducks are super messy and they will drink more than you thought possible (and spill the rest), so we check ours and refill waterers several times a day.
For our Muscovy ducks that just hatched, we will keep them with their mamas, but today we will catch them all and put them into a large hoop house so they can have some extra protection. We have a couple other ducks on nests, so I am hopeful we will have a nice big lot of ducklings this year.
Isabella has been trying out her photography skills lately. She took these pictures of the river. This is across the road from the farm.
Astute readers of this blog will recall last fall when I had a bag-ordering mishap and my bag order got lost. I did actually order the bags, but at the last minute. Fortunately, the great folks at Christiansen’s Family Farm inUtah saw my post and bailed me out by sending me some extra bags. How great is that? And if that doesn’t make you love them already, I should tell you that they sell lard through the mail. If I didn’t already make some, I would totally order it.
So, with that memory of how I learned my lesson about ordering bags early still fresh in your mind, now we get to play a fun game called Be the Farmer’s Wife. This is an exciting game in which you put yourself in the place of your favorite farmer’s wife and try and coordinate such exciting things as ordering geese for Christmas when it is only May and trying to calculate the reproductive cycle of a dairy cow.
When this game catches on –and I’m sure there is some Hollywood producer just waiting to hear about it—you can tell all your friends you played it here first, and you can let me know that someone ripped off my idea and maybe I can sue them for copyright infringement. Or something.
Be the Farmer’s Wife is a multiple choice format game. The question for this round is:
When should you order freezer bags for chickens:
1. order for the whole season in January, just to be safe
2. order every month at the beginning of the month when you have a firm count on chickens in order to have a steady supply and not over stock
3. order after you already sent the chickens to butcher then go to Cash N Carry for backup bags
If you answered 1 or 2, then you would make a great farm wife. If you answered 3, well, you would be me.
Fortunately for me, our customers are super great and amazing and wonderful and they were all really sweet about the whole thing. And I’m off to order bags.
Want to read more Godfrey adventures? Follow along on Facebook, or check out The Pig in the Pantry.
We were expecting a small farm tour today, but they didn’t show. I wonder if it was this couple.
