July Weekend Harvest

Summer is getting tasty!

Eleventeen gazillion garlic scapes

Dinosaur kale

Two and a half pounds of chanterelles from the woods behind our house

Very excited about this last one. New skills!

After a Rainstorm

I <3 Summer.

No Manure, No Magic

Life up here is often like this:

But sometimes, it's like this:

That is the end of the pile. It was as tall as I am when we started moving it!

On the bright side, our compost pile is finally hot enough to kill weed seeds, and the garden is going to love it next spring. So the dirty ol' cycle of life continues.

Sugar Honey Iced Tea

I can't believe we drove home from Herkimer County unaware that the top of the nuc was in no way fastened on! A box full of bees in the back of your hatchback is way better than a driver's ed teacher who flunked us for the day if his coffee spilled. All's well that ends well.

I love the honeybees, but the sound when I open the hive just scares the hell out of me. Maybe I was a bear in a past life. Deep breaths, slow and careful, and the girls are in the hive.

They are busy! Saw the queen, all golden and awesome. What a rush - my head is buzzing.

Kids al Fresco

The kids are five weeks old. Veronica and Vernon (yep, even baby boy has a name now - we think we are going to keep him as a wether and teach him to pull a cart, so we don't have to fire up the tractor every time we need to carry heavy stuff up the hill) are getting big now, at least twice their birth size. They have been confined in the shed, and I suspect they are beginning to drive their mother crazy.

Today, they hatched an escape plan.

They decided they were ready to get out and explore, so they crawled through an open space in the gate. Everyone seemed to be getting along nicely, so they have been out all day.

They seem delighted with their newfound freedom!

Everyone loves green leaves.

Yay May

Every year, when spring arrives, I am in disbelief, which is weird because I have lived in the Northeast my whole life, and spring has never failed to happen. It really is unbelievable great around here right now though.

Fourteen hours of sunlight, green grass, and bugs make for lots of tasty eggs.

My favorite tree, the deciduous conifer (is it a larch?) is leafing out. Actually, I guess it's needling out.

The flowers are just starting here. Quince and

daffodils, no lilacs yet.

And the baby goats are growing rapidly. They are super sweet.

Black Flies be Damned, We LOVE Spring!

Spring hit us hard this weekend. The grass and the baby goats are growing at an amazing rate, there are finally leaves on our trees, it was sunny and warm all weekend, and the garden dried out enough to plant some seeds and seedlings.

I'm telling you, these kids cannot be contained; we keep finding them all over the barn, not in the little section where we were trying to keep them. Fortunately, the barn is very small, so they are easy to find.

The grown-up goats are enjoying the sunshine and new green growth. Here is Juniper paying a visit to her niece and nephew.

And look - I was there too! Yep, that's me, Farmer Feather (right before I got my first sunburn of 2011). Apparently I have been a shadowy presence here on the Cotton Hill Farm Blog, so I wanted to set the record straight.

When I'm not taking pictures of pretty flowers and things that are cute, and writing about my life in third-person omniscient, I am busy snuggling - I mean socializing - baby goats, planting things in the ground, ignoring my houseplants, walking around, doing kitchen projects, and learning, learning, learning.

This weekend we learned that making mozzarella is actually fun if you use the microwave instead of a pot of hot water. Look at that stretch!

And that's what you need to know about me.