Monday, August 27, 2012

August's Closing Shop

Time flies when you're working hard...sometimes you forget to eat lunch, or pee, or even (astonishingly) write a blog entry.  But the farm is still here, and thriving on the whole.  We are deeply grateful to Kerstin and Katya, our apprentices this season, for the many hours of hard labor they have put in on the farm.

Before I go farther, I want to formally invite all blog readers to our annual pig roast, co-hosted at our place by North Branch, Artisan Builders, and First Light Community Midwives.  It is on Saturday, September 8th at 3 pm and it is a potluck (don't bring pork) family-friendly event, with hay rides, music, and fun.  We hope many of you can make it, and feel free to contact us here or on our facebook page if you need more details.

We are actually coming to the end of an interesting time in the vegetables and fruits right now, when we mainly watch, wait, weed, and water.  This slight grace period in the cultivated crops coincides beautifully with hay-making, and when that’s not going on we have endless lists to fill the time between morning and evening milkings.  We’ve moved firewood, worked on building a small cabin, frozen green beans, made sauerkraut, canned salsa, bud-grafted 4000 fruit trees, fenced in tens of acres of new pasture, treated mastitis infections, hosted an ultimate frisbee game and cook-out, planned a field trip to the Blue Hill peninsula, broken and repaired my camera (one excuse for the dearth of activity here), had our weekly meetings, and even gotten the veggies and fruits certified organic by MOFGA!

Now for the photos:
 
A view of our farm, looking south from the new cabin.

The milking parlor

Tyler, a blissful milker

Our new Massey 80 hp tractor

Frida the Brown Swiss, on loan to us for three months.

Elsie filtering milk.
Additional feline news:

We are the new adopted family of a burly gray cat named Scottie who has come to help us with our rodent problems.  Mere days after Scottie came to live at the farm, we found a scrawny, loud little kitten scrunched under the edge of our outhouse.  What shall we do with the little lass?  She's crawling with fleas, and seems to need a home!  We're feeding and housing her for now, and waiting to see how she and Scottie get on.

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