The best times of the year for blogging are also the ones when it’s hardest to find the time…but here’s a quick update on happenings around our homestead.

In the garden

Fairytale Eggplant – delicious, 3″ beauties: Blue Lake bush beans are starting to flower: The tobacco experiments are going better this year. The tallest of these is about 5′ now, because it’s in the raised hay-bale bed filled with pure composted goat bedding/poo: Watermelons are enjoying the poo-bed, too: Here it is from the end…zucchini closest to the camera, with 2′ long leaves: …but even in rather poor soil, zucchini plants just keep cranking the food out like nothing else we grow: Lemon cucumbers are struggling a bit, but producing well despite whatever I’m doing wrong: Our little fig tree is going strong: Delicata squash – one of my favorites. We saved seed from our Wintergreen Farm CSA boxes last year, I’m really glad they grew: The peas have been wonderful this year, making new pods as fast as we can pick them for months, and are just slowing down now: Summer is nothing without tomatoes…we have probably about 50 or 60 plants, mostly Brandywine red, seen here: Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes break our no-hybrids rule, but they’re 6′ tall and LOADED with fruit: Although 1 good zucchini plant is enough for a small family, we have the two giant ones int he pure poop, plus a few more seen here keeping the cantelope vines company: Beets are about ready to harvest, and we’re planting more. We both love beets, they store well, you can make dye from them, and if all else fails, they’re good goat food: Black oil sunflower seeds are great livestock feed…they’re scattered here and there, but next year we’ll probably plant a large field of them: Finally for this segment – apples! Many of the trees lost their buds in a late freeze, but for some reason this tree is as apple-y as ever:

Infrastructure report

The construction never, ever stops. The goats are now enjoying another 1/4 acre of pasture that I’ve fenced off, and we’ve enclosed about 1500 sq ft around the chicken house so they can still enjoy some freedom on days they don’t have the run of the whole property. They’re perfectly capable of flying over the fence, as one does every morning to lay her egg in our woodpile, but so far they haven’t figured out that the flying over the fence trick works in both directions. Chasing and flapping ensue. Since we started milking our goats this spring, we’ve been doing it under a rickety “just for today” tarp arrangement that’s not much fun when it rains: …but soon, we’ll have a nice, snug 8′x8′ milking shed: The big old red truck has some problems that I don’t have the time to deal with, and 8mpg isn’t very good even for something that only goes on the road a few times a month. A friend gave me a nice deal on his old truck, a much more reasonably sized Mazda b-2000. Only the perspective makes them look similar in size.

Cuteness

No blog post would be complete without a goat picture…here’s Drama about to eat my camera:

A recent pizza, with our own tomatoes, basil and oregano, plus mozzarella courtesy of our goats: Chesnok Red and Bavarian Purple garlic, harvested today. Kind of small, but pungent. Next year they’ll go into richer, looser ground, and today I’ll have garlic scapes and new potatoes (couldn’t resist digging just a few!) for every meal:

I recommend wearing gloves. The thick ones, like you would use for gardening or other outdoor work. Or developing a high pain threshold. ‘Cause when they’re broody, they really, really don’t want you taking their eggs away…

Ten dollars. At a yard sale even further up into the mountains than where we live. Where we also made some cool new friends. Not an electrical part on it anywhere. Completely human-powered. Seems to have all of the important (read: hard to replace) parts; what’s missing or loose can be replaced or adjusted. Don’t know when it was made, but it has a metal plate with a series of engraved patent dates, the most recent of which is 1886. Real wood. Real metal. No plastic in sight. In pretty good condition, considering its age. Beautiful. I’m looking forward to its company on cold winter nights, and am already imagining all of the things I can mend, make or re-make, with its help. But now, I’m off to harvest and hang to dry catnip, oregano and spearmint, check the chicken coop for eggs, and then help Peter put up fencing. My new treasure will wait. Out here, winter work is different than summer work.