Here are some shots of our most recent activities. Click on any picture to enlarge.
We had some friends over for a lamb smoke. I also cooked some pork ribs with Dick Phillippi's pepper relish, and if I can figure out how to get those a little more tender, so they fall off the bone, perhaps with some tin foil, that recipe will become a favorite, I think. The flavor is great with the relish, so we just need to get the texture down.
Tomatoes are burgeoning. This is a Black Krim in perfect condition, ready for my dinner. The only tomato that tastes better than a Black Krim, IMHO, is an Aunt Ruby's German Green.
The garden is producing great guns and this looks to be our best year ever for tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, leeks, and onions. Corn was disappointing. Aimee's looking to buy some form another farm. Dry beans will be great if we can get them dry nicely. I may try to dry them in the barn to be sure of them.
The new hoophouse is adding to our tomato harvest and gave us earlier spring greens. I'll try to keep some greens going in there this fall and winter.
I've canned up about sixteen cans of tomatoes, so far. I need to do about twice as much again to last until next year's tomato harvest. The greenish-looking jars contain canned Black Krims. Usually they're just slicers and salad tomatoes, but we had so many, I canned some in quarters.
One of our Big Boy tomato plants, which will bear around 30 or 40 pounds before all is said and done. This variety is the bulk of what I'm canning. The fruits are so heavy they're very hard to keep off the ground, but they don't rot easily even when they do fall over. A very solid tomato that cans up nicely.
The weather has been dry and hot and the grass is not growing well, so the sheep are having hay some days. They're not enthusiastic about hay this time of year, especially when they can see green grass all around the place, but that grass is either ours and thus too short already and needs to rest some more, or the neighbors' and so not theirs to eat. Poor sheep. Still, there are worse things that can happen to a sheep than being fed oats and hay every day. Some of them will go to the butcher's shop soon, though.
Aimee got busy pretty quick with the last bit of wall she wants to shingle. It's an awkward wee corner and giving her some grief. There were some rather disgruntled and frustrated noises emanating from that corner today!
The switch to my table saw quit working, in a dangerous manner -- it was on all the time! I dismantled it and was able to repair it by sanding down the damaged contacts. Here they are pre-repair. I wish all such things could be fixed as successfully.
That's all we've been up to, or at least everything I have a picture for
School starts for real tomorrow, a serious change of pace.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.
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