a whole stinkin' month!!

Can you believe we've lived in PA that long now?  We're staying really busy and it is so hard to believe it's been an entire month already. Time is just FLYING! 

We're workin hard on the farm. We've had just a few short bursts of sunshine this week and so we're bustin' it to get some outdoor work done around here. This update is mostly pictures, feel free to comment on any of them to get more info on what the heck is going on.

First we walked our future garden space. We used an A-frame level to lay out our contour lines as the garden is going to be on a hillside.  We'll run our garden beds along the length of the contour to minimize erosion and soil loss through the 44 inches of rain we get here.

We also (Justin specifically) are pruning the beautiful ancient apple trees.  For now we're cutting off all the dead wood and Roger The Apple Tree Guy will be coming up here this weekend to take a look with us to see what can be done to restore them somewhat. They haven't been pruned at all in 20 years. Many of them are already hollowed out in the trunk so they don't have a lot of life left, but we can make them productive for whatever years are left.

 These are the cool door handles Justin made for the greenhouse.  When it's vertical you can open the door, when you turn it horizontally it clasps the door closed. 

My herbs

Onions and lettuce

 Ooooh. Here's the good stuff. I know it doesn't look appetizing but if you were a canine, you couldn't STAND how good this stuff smells.

 I made 2 big pans of food today. It took from 9 till about 1 when I got it all in the oven. This should hopefully last about 3 weeks, but she's growing all the time. It looks like it costs about $30 a month for her food with the sources we currently have for animal organs. That's our main expense for the dog food.   If we find a local producer who needs to get rid of that stuff for next to free, then our cost will drop significantly.  The vegetables are mostly scraps from when we make our own meals. Apple cores banana and carrot peels, getting-close-to-yucky veggies in the fridge that we can't eat fast enough, and a couple whole sweet potatoes etc. Soon we'll have our own of those things as well!  So it's pricey now but it could be as little as $10-15/month to feed her this summer. We shall see!

Here's my first batch of soap. Something actually went awry and so I have melted it down TWICE now, adding a little more water and letting it "rebatch" to see if it turns out a sellable product. It's milk honey and oat soap and it smells divine, but we'll see if it's worth anything.  If it doesn't turn out like I want, give me your mailing address and I'll send you some really great soap that isn't very pretty. 

The silly chicken coop!  we just moved the girls into it. It's too muddy to move it out of the pasture right now, but soon, hopefully, we can put the girls out in the yard or over the garden

 

 Here's a few of our pretty horses, Jazzy and Arion.  Apparently Jazzy is a champion! You may have seen all those ribbons I was wearing in a post about 3 weeks ago.  Those ribbons were all won riding Jazzy. She's bossy and kind of a B, but I think it's just cause she knows she's hot stuff!

Jazzy and our neighbor's farm in the background

Arion is such a handsome horse. He's a pony, so he's a little bit shorter than Jazzy, but he's super stocky, and we've heard that he's a breed that can really work! If we're here long enough and get the guts to try our hand at training a horse, we'd love to teach him to pull a cart!

he IS a pretty boy!

Isn't he?

K guys, I had a couple requests for the chicken pot pie recipe I used in a previous post. maybe tomorrow I'll get that up here for those of you who would like to try it! It was SO good.

Miss you all!