Rain rain and more . . . rain. I'm having some deja vu of last summer, but this summer at least, we're better prepared to bring in the grain, no matter what the weather. Ben is hard at work preparing a summer newsletter, with lots more on this, so I won't steal his thunder. But I will tell you that Ben, farmer Adam, Seth Seeger, a metalworker, and a volunteer engineer have been very busy building a grain dryer from scratch. Yay!
Despite the rain, and the unnervingly cool weather, the garden is moving right along.
We've been out in the drizzle, harvesting strawberries before they dissolve, getting ready for jam-making this weekend. I'm determined to kick serious preserving butt this year. I'm so ready to never see the inside of a grocery store again.
We planted corn in our field at home again, since the crows ate all the little shoots last time. A few hours later, we heard the raucous sound of . . . a pack of crows, in the corn field. We've put out piles for them to eat, hoping that Eliot Coleman is right and crows with full bellies won't go to the trouble of digging up our corn. Arrggg.
It seems that nearly every week Ella still has a new first, but this is a big one, I swear. First haircut! I especially like how in this photo she seems to have done the haircut herself.
Our draft horse search continues. We were very lucky this week to meet a local teamster, Roy Nilson. He's a super sweetie and knows a lot about the horses in the area, so we're hoping this means we're closing in on ours! After meeting Roy and two possible horses (huge Belgians), Ben was so pumped that the next day he, Seth, Cristie, and Jeanine put up fencing for the horse paddock. One step closer.
The crows have been eating your corn, and something has been eating the leaves off of some of our bean plants! Darned those animals.
But let's remember the ending of a very good song... "a few bales of hay might keep you [the mice] alive, but he'll [the farmer] pay more to kill you than to let you survive!"
http://www.peteseeger.net/peoplescratching.htm
I love the idea of putting out extra corn. What a good way to deal with the problem.
Posted by: Seth | 06/25/2009 at 05:59 PM