Anything you can do....

Aimee is a much better photographer than I am. I tend to just snap away, hoping to get what I want to portray in the frame. Aimee waits for the moment she wants to capture.

These are her latest. Very cute shots of the young animals we have on the farm right now.

And I spoke too soon about getting no help with firewood! She must have been reading the blog, which she says she never reads. I got some very good help yesterday splitting a load of popple I got from a down tree at the Bale House.

Later that evening she stated that I kept trying to take the ax away from her, which was true -- I was worried she wasn't pacing herself, and wanted a turn, and that this meant I was afraid of being supplanted in my male role as provider of firewood.

Not true, I said, and to prove it I would get her another big load of logs to split all by herself. She could split as many as she wanted.

Less work for me!

Popple, to give it it's local name, has a nice clean odor to it once split, and I'm liking how our dooryard smells right now. This is a New England dialect name for the tree called poplar in Britain, but this particular species is actually the western or quaking aspen, not the tall Lombardy poplars we know in the yUKe. It gets precarious when it gets big, and tends to rot from the inside out and fall down, although once sawed into boards, the timber doesn't rot that quickly. It isn't great firewood for BTU content, but if properly dried burns easily enough. The Forest Trees of Maine, our bible in these respects, recommends leaving it for wildlife habitat since it provides nesting habitat for mammals in the rotted interiors, and this particular tree did indeed have a great nest inside, full of giant grubs, so huge they had to be luna moths.

But once they fall on your driveway, their nest-providing days are over.

Better smelling than the maggoty dead chicken Haggis got into the other night. That smell is now fully departed, thank you.

I'll know that the sex equality policy at the Womerlippi Farm Enterprise is complete and successful when all members of the employee pool are willing to handle the various dead maggoty items (and live maggoty sheep) that occur from time to time.

However, the one remaining luna moth grub that did survive the trip was picked up (using appropriate distancing tools) and fed to a chicken.

Happy chicken!