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Hi Everyone,
We are not counting sheep lately, but we sure are moving them a lot. Monday we wrapped the garden in three sets of hotwire netting, and then we let the sheep out of the barn field and called them down to the garden. Our first attempts were not successful for there was a green field before you got to the garden so of course they decided to barge through the hotwire and head out to greener pastures. We are so thankful for our “Leader of the Pack”, an old bottle lamb named Smokey (because we found her on a smoky day). Once Smokey knows that we are calling the sheep she comes a running to us—and when the others see her running, they are very sure to follow just in case Smokey gets something good. After a few tries we finally got all the sheep into the garden and they were most delighted to find betony, Carolina geranium, clover, wild lettuce, goldenrod and other green delicacies. We only left them there a few hours—because it was going to be rainy and cold that night and they needed to go back to the barn field so that they could have shelter. To our great delight when we went back out later they were ready to go back to the barn and eat hay—so they followed us with no problem. For the next few days every morning Papa would lead the sheep to the garden, and every afternoon Mom and Steve or Papa would lead the sheep back to the barn. It took them about three days to devour all the weeds in the garden, and then we began letting them graze on the winter grass fields—though there really isn’t enough of it, but there is enough to satisfy them.
My sister Samantha came over to spend the day with us on Tuesday, and we had a nice visit. It is always enjoyable to have someone to talk to while we milk. Mabel is getting better at being milked, and with two freshened cows we are getting a lot more milk. We usually separate the calves at night in order to get some extra milk in the morning. Last week we had too much milk for a few days—so we really didn’t have to separate the calves at night but since it was cold and rainy some nights we realized that it would be better for the calves to be separated so that they could get extra hay and alfalfa and be able to stay warm and dry in the barn. If we left them with their mama’s then they wouldn’t get much hay because of all the big cows. So in order to take special care of the calves, we continued to separate them at night and then when we brought the cows in to be milked in the morning we would let the calves out so that they could drink their mama’s dry—and we wouldn’t have to milk them. That allowed me to get a few things done in the greenhouse.
Thursday Steve, Mom and I all worked in the garden. I weeded a bed in the morning, and then after lunch Steve filled it with compost and then I planted the bed with close to 50 mullein plants. The last few years I have sprinkled mullein seeds in the garden on a weed free bed—and little mullein plants sprouted up everywhere. The problem was that the weed seeds also sprouted and the weeds grew faster than the mullein plants. Therefore, this year I decided to start the seeds in the greenhouse. They sprouted and have been able to grow without any competition. They finally got big enough to plant in the garden and have a good head start against any weeds—just in case I cannot get around to weeding the bed if weeds appear. Mom worked in the West tunnel weeding betony out of the walkway that was creeping into the Swiss chard bed. Steve worked on the other side of the tunnel weeding one of the rows so that in a few weeks I can plant a crop of red potatoes. The other day I gathered around 40 little potatoes out of our fall crop and have set them out to chit (grow eyes-sprouts). I am a little late at getting around to it, for they say that it takes about 4 to 6 weeks to chit a potato—but I only have three weeks. We shall see how they are progressing in a few weeks.
Friday was a BIG day as two families showed up to help us juice all 15 buckets of lemons. The mothers told us that the children were so excited about coming over to help. We had a nice assembly line set up. Two people (the children took turns doing this job) were washing the lemons under water with a scrubber, and then two people (the mom’s) peeled the lemons so that we could dehydrate the peels and make powdered lemon zest. I was in charge of cutting the lemons in half, and then we had five electric juicers going. Mom was the one in charge of filling the containers with the juice and she could hardly keep up with five juicers. Once all the lemons were juiced and the containers rinsed off then sheets of labels were passed around and the children had a blast putting stickers on the quart jugs. The whole process took us two hours.
Mom and I are still recovering from Covid. Thankfully Papa recovered very quickly. Exhaustion is definitely high on our list. We are thankful that the Lord has always given us the strength to milk the cows and cook our meals. Some days we have extra strength to do a little more, and other days we spend our days resting. We look forward to feeling strong again.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare