they came back!

Last June, I posted about a brief but fascinating visit by a pair of Black Bellied Whistling Ducks. They decided to stop at our place for just a short time one morning - a rest stop, I suppose, on their journey to...wherever they go. I thought it somewhat funny that they chose to fraternize with our domestic ducks that day. This year, on the morning of July 4th, they were here again! Again, it was a pair (the same ones?) and again, they hung out with our barnyard ducks in the yard for just a little while before moving on. I came inside for the camera, but by the time I made it back out to the yard, they had left. It was a year and one month since we had last seen them.

Are these two regular travelers through these parts, and have they decided that this is a nice place to stop? Is it even the same two? Or perhaps they live around here, and are simply making the rounds. I will be watching for them next summer.

past, present and future

Living on a farm has a profound effect on the way you experience time. Respecting its importance is critical. After awhile, you fall in sync with its rhythms - you wake up one day and find that you know just what's supposed to happen and when.

I must at once look to the past, act in the present and plan for the future. Case in point, I have already planned my fall garden - in May. I know just what will go in, and where, and roughly how much. I've ordered seeds where necessary. This is important here, because seeds for fall transplanting must be started as early as June in some cases (hello, peppers!). Put it off, or get caught off guard, and you've missed the boat. How do I know this? I've done it before. I determine what to plant and when to plant it by looking back - recalling what has worked well in the past, what was a bust, and what may have been a missed opportunity. Time moves quickly around here, and stands still.

There will be some additional expansion of the garden this fall, and that's probably where it will stay for awhile. We've finally gotten a grip on things around here, and aren't anxious to over-extend ourselves right away. There is a temporary moratorium on new projects. As we head rapidly into the dog days of summer, the spring garden is going strong, also marching through its time-honored phases. The onions are done and curing. The Greens Age has passed. We've bid farewell to the lettuce and radishes - we barely remember salad. The legions of squash and beans are upon us now, and tomatoes and peppers are visible on the horizon. I sincerely hope that just behind them, just beyond my sight, are eggplant and melons. They would be most welcome.

We're still contending with a pretty serious snake problem, which means no spring ducklings this year, but for the one - the lonely survivor from the last hatch. He's holding his own. We're fairly certain he's a he. This gives us mixed emotions - if the one surviving duckling were a girl, we'd be thrilled as it would give us another future mother, increasing our odds of boosting the duck population. If a boy, well, then we get to eat it, which was the whole point of the exercise. It's hard to say which option we prefer at this point. Not that it matters - we get what we're given.

Little Bridget is now weaned, and still with us. We're also transitioning the girls to a once-daily milking, so that we may have some semblance of a social life again. Two milkings a day was never part of the plan, but sometimes plans don't go along with you, do they? We frankly can't cope with the volume of milk that two milkings a day provides. A gallon a day for two people? Honestly, even WE can't eat that much cheese. Between the copious amounts of milk and all the overtime the hens are clocking these days, we have the world's luckiest dogs. They know better than to complain about much of anything - they know how good they have it.

I have a bit of garden maintenance to do over this long weekend, but the bulk of my plans involve planning. These are the days when we look back over our year, take lessons from it and decide how to move forward. Each year has its challenges, and yet we come through, always with something to show. The thermometer outside is telling me, "It's time to stop now. Sit down, pour a cold drink and take stock. The cycle will begin again sooner than you think, so make your plans."

That thermometer is wise.

down to one

Please forgive the silence around here - it's springtime, and that means our attention is needed more outside the house, and there's less time available to spend here at the blog. There is plenty going on, although it's been a week of mixed emotions.

Our second hatch of ducklings was small to start with - only six, which is a very small number for the prolific Muscovy ducks. We suspect that due to our unusually cold weather earlier in the season, some of the eggs may have frozen. We lost one of those six ducklings very early on - in the first couple of days. This is not unusual. The other five have been growing and thriving, and all was well until this week. Another one disappeared earlier in the week. I just found it this morning, inside the duck house, half-buried in the bedding. I don't have any idea what happened to the poor little guy. Betty has been sleeping outside with the babies at night, and we were worried that it had been taken by a predator - most likely a raccoon. Not wanting to risk any more of them, we closed them up inside the house last night for safety. Words cannot express the dismay I felt when I opened the door this morning and only one duckling came out. I searched inside the house, and all around the yard, and...nothing. Where did they go? What happened to them? I honestly don't know. My suspicion is that they wandered out through the wire enclosure during the night and were unable to get back in. Betty wouldn't have been able to go out after them, and they'd have been helpless in the grass. I feel beyond awful.

We've been expecting some bunnies as well. They were due to kindle around mid-week. I went out Wednesday afternoon to check on everyone and was excited to see that mama rabbit was inside the nest box! As I approached, however, something just didn't look right. The poor thing had died, presumably during labor. Two babies had been born, but were dead as well - the rest never made it out. I have no idea what happened here either, and between losing the rabbits and the ducklings, it has been a very dispiriting few days.

As usual, though, it hasn't been all bad. Our other duck is working on a new clutch of eggs, and we have another rabbit that's due to kindle in a couple of weeks. The garden is looking great - even the flagging beans are starting to rally - and the goats and chickens are producing in abundance. We processed the first half of the broiler chickens last weekend, and I could not be more pleased with the results. I'll write a full post on that soon. I know some of you have been awaiting a bee update, and I'll give that in a separate post as well. For now, I need to remind myself that weeks like this come along from time to time, but it's hard not to beat myself up. All I ever want is to do right by my animals - to give them a safe and happy life - and it crushes my spirit when I can't deliver even that.

**UPDATE** - I now know what happened to the ducklings. I just opened the duck house to find all the new eggs gone, and a snake (caught red-handed, I'll spare you the details). It has been dealt with, but I know there are more out there.

the first share

Friday morning was crazy. It started very early. Something like 2:30 am, in fact. I was awakened by the dogs, who apparently saw a super scary bunny outside and had to let me know that they had HANDLED THE THREAT. It was rough after that. No one got much sleep, and we all grudgingly rolled out of bed in the dark of the early morning to start our day bleary-eyed and cranky. It was stormy and wet that morning, and while I normally could have stayed in bed awhile longer, I had to be up and out extra early. I had an appointment to keep - a new adventure, in fact. I hurriedly milked the goats, saddled up and hit the road with a stop in town for more coffee and a bear claw (big mistake - too early for that much sugar). I was traveling two towns over to pick up our very first CSA share.

This was a very exciting moment. I have been trying to find a CSA near me to join for probably five years now, with no luck. There just haven't been that many in this area, and they were always either prohibitively far away or the pickup was at a time that I had no hope of ever making (like during my work hours). I've tried year after year, always in vain, until now. I got a half share, with the intention of using it as a supplement to what we're already growing for ourselves, and I think that's going to work out perfectly. Even for a half share, it wound up being more than I expected to receive, and it looked beautiful.



I had a lovely chat with the woman in charge, and the drive to her farm from mine was really beautiful - rolling green, curving farm roads, big shady trees. As I drove home, the skies cleared and the sun cut through the sodden morning like a song. The first thing I saw upon pulling up to the house was our anxiously-awaited new ducklings, just hatched that morning while I was away.



It was going to be a good day.

Basket contents for 4/23/10: mixed lettuce, swiss chard, mustard greens, collards, peas, broccoli, radishes, salad burnet, chives, onions, leeks, arugula, cilantro, parsley, thyme, dill

Home production as of 4/23/10: onions, mixed lettuce, spinach, cress, radishes, eggs, milk, cheese

how things are coming along

It has been a couple of years since I started this blog, and in that time we've gotten married, moved to the farm and taken on quite a few new projects and challenges. We've had some fairly lofty goals for ourselves all along and I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at our efforts and give an update on where we are now. If you're new to homesteading, or still just dreaming, understand that it isn't a race, and that it will take time. Don't beat yourself up if it's your third year of gardening and you're still not getting a bumper crop, or your bread didn't rise, or your hens have stopped laying and you haven't the faintest idea why. Some of the things we've set out to do have gone pretty much just as expected, while others brought big surprises. Some things we assumed would be no-brainers have proved to be surprisingly difficult, while things we were sure we'd screw up have been remarkably problem-free. Here is a brief synopsis of the things we've aced and the things we've buggered up over our first three years:

1. Vegetable Gardening: the obvious place to start for most homesteaders
The Goal: to grow (almost) all of our own vegetables
We've now planted three spring gardens and one fall garden (at two locations). While the results have been very mixed, our overall yields are gradually improving. I've learned a lot about growing veggies in general and about the nuances of gardening in Texas. We've had great success with greens regardless of season but still haven't managed to grow tomatoes or potatoes despite their reputation for being easy. They have become the holy grail of our gardening efforts - not because we even like them that much, but because we hate being denied. We also live on a long-neglected cattle pasture and have had to struggle quite a bit to build any sort of workable soil. As it stands now in our third year, we're probably growing about a quarter of our own produce, and expanding each season. We knew this would take time, and I'm not unhappy with our progress so far.
Biggest Success: homegrown greens on our table at Thanksgiving
Biggest Failure: those pesky potatoes
Biggest Surprise: digging under our HUGE potato plants at harvest time to find not. one. spud.

2. Rabbits: our first foray into livestock
The Goal: meat for ourselves and the dogs (with extra to sell), fertilizer
What a ride this has been. Rabbits were the first animals we ever bred and butchered. They were billed as easy keepers, which they mostly are - quiet, low space requirements, low feed requirements, low upfront investment. They do make copious amounts of wonderful fertilizer as promised. What they do not reliably make are babies. After three years, six breeding animals and countless litters, we have successfully raised only four baby rabbits, and have only eaten one animal in all that time - an adult that we had to cull early (the four babies were passed on to other people in barter arrangements). We also learned that they do very poorly in our extreme summer heat. They are, however, easy to keep around and easy to process. We really want to make rabbits work for us, so with some tweaking, we continue to persevere. This year they will be moved outdoors and we're transitioning them to a mostly foraged diet with supplemental hay and very little pellet feed. If things don't improve this year, we may be scrapping rabbits.
Biggest Success: loads of fertilizer
Biggest Failure: loads of babies that haven't survived
Biggest Surprise: rabbits just don't breed like, well...rabbits...in captivity, apparently

3. Laying Hens: the golden egg
The Goal: all the eggs we can eat, plus extra to sell and the occasional chicken dinner
This project has gone extremely well. Chickens are very hardy, unfussy and generally dependable. They are also wonderfully scalable, in that it's no more work to take care of thirty chickens than three, so if you have the space you really might as well go bigger. The return on the extra eggs is more than enough to pay for the cost of keeping them, so we actually do make a little bit of a profit here, which is nice. We get all the eggs we want, plus lots of extras for the dogs. A retired laying hen or extra rooster makes the best chicken soup we've ever eaten, and the dogs win here too - they get necks, organs and other throwaway bits. The fact that we can generate our own replacement stock makes this an all-around win. This project hasn't been without its setbacks, but they've been comparatively few.
Biggest Success: turning a (tiny) profit
Biggest Failure: unknowingly sending a batch of new chicks to bed (and to their demise) with a rat snake - boy, do we feel bad about that one, still
Biggest Surprise: the books don't tell you all the things that will cause them to STOP laying

4. Other Poultry: ducks and broilers
The Goal: meat supply for ourselves and the dogs, with extras to sell
(You may have begun to notice a theme here - our goals tend to center around food production. Our over-arching aim, the one that all other goals tie into, is to be totally or nearly self sufficient in as many areas as possible. That means fulfilling most of our needs ourselves with as few external inputs as possible, and in a way that still allows us to live fairly well. We've started with our food, since that seems to be the easiest place to start and the area where we can make the biggest impact right away.)
We acquired our ducks as a breeding pair, free of charge, from a friend. They were reported to be quite prolific and it seemed like a good way to add extra meat to our freezer. Much like the rabbits, we have yet to eat a single duck, but that's not got much to do with their performance. They do perform as advertised, and are extremely low maintenance. They lay and set large clutches of eggs, eat very little feed and prefer to sleep out in the open. In short, they require virtually no care. We've had some failed hatches due to things such as cold weather and egg-thieving predators, and the ducklings that have hatched have so far all been sold or traded away before they met the chopping block. They're unexpectedly charming, and as easy as they are to keep around, we'll keep them whether they ever do anything productive or not. Raising chickens strictly for meat is a project that's still in its infancy here, so it's a bit too soon for a progress report. Our first batch was a group of heritage breed roosters, which turned out bland, small and a bit tough, without much to recommend them. We're almost to harvest time with a batch of proper broiler-type birds, but as they're still on the wing, the jury is still out on them.
Biggest Success: too soon to declare
Biggest Failure: losing over half of a batch of about sixty-five broiler chicks (although this wasn't technically our fault)
Biggest Surprise: duck eggs make world class egg salad

5. Goats: the sweetest milk trucks on earth
The Goal: keep dairy goats for milk, cheese and soap, for our own use and to sell
Keeping goats was probably the undertaking we most feared - it involved LARGE LIVESTOCK, a considerable upfront investment, a significant learning curve, and holy crap we'll have to birth babies! We've only had goats for one year, which is really a short time in the scheme of things, but honestly this one has been far easier than we imagined. Books, websites and other goat raisers filled our heads with all sorts of fears and conflicting advice, and in the end we just had to get zen about it and go with our gut. We've adapted our methods to suit our individual circumstances, and keep our goats in good flesh largely through attentiveness and good management. We've brought forth three babies to two first-time fresheners, learned to disbud and give shots and are milking about a gallon a day. I'm making good chevre, feta and ricotta, with other cheeses and dairy products in development. Other goat milk products such as soap and cajeta are in development right now as well. They also provide us with good fertilizer, good company and loads of entertainment.
Biggest Success: killer feta whenever we want it!
Biggest Failure: umm, none really
Biggest Surprise: how much we adore them

6. Bees: the littlest army
The Goal: honey, beeswax and related products (with extra to sell), plant pollination
Even though we've been trying to establish some honeybees for a couple of years, this one still feels too early to call. Our first attempt was a swarm that just never would play ball, and the following year we ordered some package bees that arrived dead. Not to be deterred, I ordered and received another package this year, only to have them FLY OFF just three days after moving them in. I've finally got two colonies going that are looking good, but since they've only been around for a few days, it's just impossible to rate this one yet. I will say that I find them intensely fascinating, and apparently enjoy them enough to keep throwing money at this hobby even though it has so far yielded nada.
Biggest Success: finally getting some colonies established (so far, fingers crossed)
Biggest Failure: watching our third attempt at bees fly away right before my eyes
Biggest Surprise: how much I'm willing to invest in this before giving up

7. DIY: not buying it
The Goal: to supply many of our own needs, such as pet and animal feed, household products, repairs and maintenance, construction, etc.
We're doing rather well here so far, although it's a long road. We're making compost, we've built a combined chicken coop and shed and I've begun making our soap. we're supplying more and more of our animals' diet from on-property - between wild edibles, kitchen scraps, butchering waste and excess eggs, milk and whey from cheesemaking, our overall feed bill continues to decline and almost nothing goes to waste. With the exception of onion skins and orange rinds, pretty much everything gets eaten by someone, and if not, it goes to the compost. We do still have a long way to go in this area, though, and we realize we will always have certain needs we can't fulfill on our own. It's a process.

8. Financial Independence: freedom, in a nutshell
The Goal: to need as little actual cash as possible, so we can work as little as possible
This ties in closely with DIY, and again, is a lengthy process. We've made some significant steps forward - paying off the car, paying off the mortgage, dramatically reducing our debt and finding some non-conventional income streams. The downside here is that we still have some debt to whittle away at, a brand new mortgage, and we still need hard cash for quite a lot of things, although we're closing the gap more and more all the time. Each new endeavor requires an upfront cash investment, but eventually translates to one less thing we have to buy on a continuing basis. We'd like to reduce our needs to the point where we can comfortably live on roughly half of what we earn today (or even less) and take back a large chunk of our time.

Well, there you have it - the biggies. There have been other small victories and disappointments, too numerous to mention, but these are the things that have made us elated, made us cry, kept us up nights, brought us peace and made our bones ache. For all the times you haven't seen us, or we haven't called, or we just couldn't make it...this is what we have to show for it. We've come an awfully long way in two years and yet have so much more ahead of us.

ducklings for easter

losing faith

When you sign up for this kind of life, you know it's going to be hard. There are huge rewards, to be sure, but they are always balanced by difficulty, tragedy. It's been an especially rough week here. We've lost about twenty-five animals in the past seven days. I wish I was kidding. Due to a postal service screw-up, we lost well over half of the broiler chicks we ordered last week. The replacements that the hatchery was kind enough to send me are now at large too. They've been in transit since Wednesday and no sign of them so far. I fear the worst. We also discovered a hen dead in the nest earlier in the week - a fairly young one at that. My guess is that the poor thing must have been egg-bound. Our broody hen keeps moving around to different egg piles, so I'm pretty sure the eggs I gave her are no longer viable. One of our new rabbits kindled yesterday but failed to make a nest, so all eight of the babies were completely exposed and died in the cold.*

It's times like these that really make me feel discouraged. I know this is part and parcel of the life I've chosen, and I know it won't always be this bad, but right now we really, desperately need for something to go right around here. (Mama duck - I'm looking at YOU. Fix this! Give me babies!) These kinds of weeks weigh heavily on my heart.

*This is actually fairly common for first-time rabbit mothers, and we sort of expected it, but it's heart-wrenching just the same.

guess who's feeling motherly?

That's right, everyone's favorite broody is back. Only this time, she's not sitting on a phony. Nope, this time it's the real deal. She's got five full-sized eggs under there. (Interestingly, she can cover five eggs, but five eggs plus a golf ball is just that much too much. The "decoy" had to be removed!) Just look at the spread of those wings. You'd never guess to look at her here, but she's really quite a tiny thing. Now that we have ample nest space and nice secure housing, we've decided that she can raise as many babies as she likes, whenever she likes. No more wooden eggs and golf balls for this girl. Besides, with all the variety we have in the poultry yard, it will be fun to see what sort of mixed breeds we end up with! Given our luck, though, they will ALL be Barred Rocks, and they will ALL be roosters, since that seems to be how we roll around here.

This time of year is a time for babies on the farm. We'll soon be awash in them. The first goat kid was only the beginning of a long spell of new life emerging. Between now and May, it will be an almost constant influx of offspring - a hostile takeover by the next generation. There are twenty-five chicks coming tomorrow, in addition to these five eggs being incubated in-house. Mother duck is building a clutch as we speak - it grows larger by the day and more deeply feathered. We're still awaiting the rest of the kids to make their appearance, and we know we have some buns in the oven, thanks to our new Californian does. Another crate of honeybees will join us in early April, and the gardens, trees and pasture will be offering up new leaves and shoots before we can say boo. The old will stand down. Youth will reign supreme. They are coming.

While I generally don't get emotionally attached to my livestock, I must admit to a certain fondness for the mothers around here. They're so earnest and work so hard. Their whole being is distilled and dedicated to a singular purpose. They really put heart, soul and unwavering determination into their efforts, and for that I adore (and applaud) them.

a girl's got to freshen up

Ronnie has finished her molt (finally). Isn't she lovely?



Apparently it was time for a new look. The all-black head was SO last season. That's her with the black head in the blog header photo - quite the metamorphosis, no?

reincarnation

See, we have this...structure...that we built. Or rather, that my husband built. It's been around for a couple of years now. It's nothing fancy, and in fact you might say it's rather crude, but it is a chameleon of a thing. It seems to have an uncanny knack for serving whatever purpose we need it to serve in the moment. Here it is at its birth, when it was a rabbit hutch:



After awhile, we moved the rabbit cages into the barn, and when the ducks arrived, we converted this into a house for them. We cut the legs off, knocked out the solid sides, extended the front by several feet, hung a door and enclosed the whole thing with welded wire. Here they are, not enjoying it:



Shortly thereafter, the ducks turned up their bills at the accommodations and moved out. Conveniently, we had new tenants waiting to take up residence:



All it took was the addition of some roosts and some smaller-weave poultry netting to transform it from DuxHostel to Casa de Pollo. The chickens like it just fine, thank you very much.

Ah, but they'll be moving out soon too. Pretty soon their dee-luxe accommodations will be complete, and they will all be moving into the poultry penthouse, leaving the structure empty once more. Around that time, the goat barn will no longer be co-ed. The boys will be needing their own dorm. As we sat on the porch over the weekend, planning their shelter, we looked over at the rabbit-duck-chicken-hutch-coop...


"I think the goats' shelter could be about that size. The height is fine. It's plenty deep and wide enough too."'

"Okay, then. I'll use that as a guide and build their shelter more or less to those dimensions."

"Wait...why don't we just use that?"

"Hmmm...yeah...the chickens will be moved out. I'll need to fortify it a bit."

"...and put a roof over the whole thing, and pull off the wire and add on some solid walls."

"Done."


Ouila! Maison de Chevres! I can't wait to see what it turns into next.

good morning

Ducklings, Round Two!

My mama duck is laying eggs again! She has decided that a large dog kennel is more to her liking this time and is making her nest in there. I'm excited - this means that we should have a new bevy of fuzzy ducklings just in time for my birthday. :-D

Which will also mean roast duck just in time for Christmas... *ahem*

We do have a pretty serious gender imbalance right now, and we're hoping another hatch will get us to a more comfortable ratio. Right now we have two females and four males - not good! Those girls are getting the runaround, and the boys are starting to fight amongst themselves. We hope to end up with four to six females and two males as our foundation stock, so any females from this new hatch will be kept, and all but about two males will be sold, or will be, uh, dinner. All unpleasantness aside, though, ducklings are ADORABLE!

signs of improvement

Well, things in the poultry yard seem to be looking up. It seems that enough pullets from the first batch have survived the predators to replace most of the adults I've lost. I have quite a few boys that are already at fryer weight, plus a whole new batch of pullets arriving in about a week and a half (those girls will be enjoying maximum security accommodations). Add to that the two dozen or so little cockerels we're raising for meat (six weeks old now) and we'll be awash in fryers and eggs before we know it!

One of our male Muscovy ducks, at the tender age of three months has just taken the reigns as pater familias, and has started to...errr...prove his virility. Which means that we should soon be back in the duck business as well.

The next step for me is to turn my little enterprise into something cohesive, rather than a haphazard mess of birds running around the property like so much buckshot. Which is what we have now.

garden update and how to use duck eggs

Well, we turned over the rest of our potatoes and the results were about the same. Just a handful, all small. We had a long period of heavy rain this spring, followed immediately by a long period of very high temperatures. So the pill bugs came, then as soon as they left the fire ants came. Ehhh...maybe next year will be our year for potatoes.

Our beans have mostly tanked in the heat, although we are getting a small quantity of cow peas and limas. The greens are really holding their own, though. The swiss chard is hanging in there and the New Zealand spinach (a heat tolerant variety) is really taking off. We had our first salad of that stuff a couple of nights ago and it was lovely to have salad from the garden again...or anything, for that matter!

In the poultry yard, it turns out that our one adult muscovy duck is our most reliable layer. Normally we'd let her set them, but with no mature male at the moment, we've not much choice but to pick them up. Besides, they're divine! We especially like them boiled, as they have a very smooth, creamy texture. Having grown tired of egg salad (!), I found a new and really wonderful use for them. I urge you to try this at home - even if you don't have access to duck eggs, it would still be good with boiled chicken eggs. Also, feel free to substitute vegetables as they are available. I can imagine this also being delicious with garlic and greens, or onions and zucchini.

SPAGHETTI WITH PEAS AND HARD COOKED EGGS

1 lb spaghetti (or linguini or angel hair)
6 T. butter
1 shallot, minced
1 cup green peas (fresh or frozen)
1 cup freshly grated parmesan
salt and cracked pepper to taste*
2 hard cooked duck eggs (or 3 chicken eggs), peeled and finely minced

Cook pasta as directed and drain, reserving about two cups of the cooking water. Melt butter in the pasta pot over medium heat and saute shallot until just tender. Add pasta and peas back to the pot and toss. Add reserved cooking water in increments until you have a "sauce" consistency you are happy with. Add parmesan, salt and pepper and toss to combine. Serve in deep bowls topped with a generous helping of minced egg. If you have crusty bread and fresh summer tomatoes to serve with this, do so!

*Note: I actually used ZERO salt in this and it tasted great, and I'm not a "no salt" type.

Ducks Like The Pool

Shame On Me.

We caught this guy last night, dining at the Baby Chick Buffet. Seems he'd already been through the line quite a few times.



For days now I've been wondering how the chicks have been disappearing, and why they look so...bad. Not only have their numbers dwindled, but they've been really high strung and scrappy looking, and I just couldn't figure out what the problem was. Turns out the "problem" was a 6-foot rat snake living under the pine shavings in their house. Poor babies. Who knew I was putting them to bed with a monster every night?

Now, before you rake me over the coals, I understand that snakes such as this one are generally a boon. We owe them a debt of gratitude for keeping the rodents in check. I'm afraid, though, that even the most well-meaning critters sometimes overstep boundaries, and eating our livestock is one such circumstance. Since a snake can't very well be reasoned with and asked politely not to dine at our establishment any more, he (she?) had to be dispatched. All the same, there's just nothing like finding something like this at 11:00 pm in boots and a nightgown.

Shame on me also for something else. I realized lately that I've begun to only share our troubles on this blog, and neglect to give our triumphs equal time. Good stuff DOES happen here, and it makes us happy. The goats are thriving, Caspian the Bumble has settled into his role as Protector of the Caprines, the ducks are downright adorable, we have beautiful lettuce in the garden:



We ate some of these homegrown baby greens for dinner, topped with homemade, marinated feta cheese. THAT was quite a triumph, and so satisfying.