Big Pink Farm

Late, late, late!  I feel like Piglet.  We must keep to the schedule!  We're behind schedule!

The fairs are over.  First up was the county fair, and this past weekend saw us at the Ohio State Fair where Max, Ben, and Sadie Ann all got to compete in their respective non-livestock 4-H projects.  Natalie didn't qualify for the state fair in her project, but she did get an Outstanding of the Day ribbon.  There's always next year!

 

Sadie Ann took this goat to the county fair.  This was her first year in 4-H and she did great!  I did take a photograph of her showing her goat, but it turned out too blurry to share.  Bummer.  But trust me, she was a quick learner in the show ring.

 

Here are my poultry boys.  Max showed meat chickens and Ben showed a really wonderful turkey.  They raised those birds with minimal help from me.  I'm very proud of them.

 

At the end of the week, they all participated in the Small Animal Dress Up Contest.  Maxwell made his chicken the Tooth Fairy, Natalie turned her goat into a Radio Controlled Airplane, Benjamin imagined his turkey was a Snowman, and Sadie Ann was a cowgirl to her goat, which was really a Horse. 

Natalie got Best of Show for her efforts.  She was pleased.  And a photograph of Ben with his turkey even made the New Philadelphia paper.

Next up, photos from the Football Hall of Fame Parade and then the Ohio State Fair.  Before the end of the month, even.  I think.  But don't quote me on that.

What did you do to celebrate the 4th of July?

Despite weather that looked like it didn't want to cooperate with our plans, we spent the afternoon and evening at our friends' house.  They throw a big party every year, and this year there were lots of kids.  We played (or watched everyone else play): volleyball, baseball, water balloon fights, and various board and card games. 

Somehow the water balloon fights degenerated into squirting each other with the hose.  You skip the middle man that way.  Funny thing is, only my kids ended up being soaked from head to toe.  Why is that?  I thought I was raising kids with more sense.  But no, I guess not.  So they shivered their way through the rest of the evening because I neglected to bring dry clothes for them.  Actually, other mothers stepped in and offered towels and clothing for the wet kids, so they didn't suffer all night.  (Note to self: bring dry clothes next year.) 

At dusk we did the requisite sparkler and smoke bomb igniting.  Honestly, I hate that part.  To this  mom it's an accident waiting to happen.  But the kids love it, so I tried to be calm and rational, taking deep breaths the whole time and not shrieking, "STAND BACK!  BE CAREFUL!  ONE AT A TIME!"  Okay, maybe I shrieked once, but I think it was more like a holler which is not as hysterical.

Here's my patriotic baby.  Awww.

In farm news, the kids are gearing up for the county fair which is next week.  I'm not ready.  I know from prior experience that I will not get much sleep that week and it will be too hot to breathe.  But the kids are really excited about the fair, so I am, too.  Ben's turkeys are enormous.  All he has left to do is figure out which one he wants to bring to the fair and then give it a bath. 

Have you ever bathed a turkey?  You should.  It's hilarious.  You will get very wet.

We also picked some surprise blackberries last week and should be able to pick more this week.  They were a surprise to me because I thought all the blackberry bushes had been devoured by the goats last year.  But no!  We have a few surviving bushes!  Hooray! 

The kids are pretty good berry pickers.  The don't eat as much as they put in the buckets, so that's good.  The do complain about the thorns and they do throw the rotten berries at each other and they do paint their faces with the rotten ones and pretend they're warriors, but for the most part they get the job done without too much hassle.

Do you know how long it takes for berry juice to wear off your skin if you take too long before you wash it off?  At least four days.  File that useful tidbit away for future reference.

You want to know what makes me really irritable?  No?  Oh.  Well I'll tell you anyway. 

I just spent time carefully composing a new post, trying to give you dear readers a glimpse into the activities of the last few weeks.  It's been too long since I last posted and I wanted to do a good job.  I included photos and what I thought was an insightful look into life at Big Pink Farm.

Then Internet Explorer crashed and I lost it all.  I'm sure there's a lesson in there, or perhaps a metaphor about the fleeting and sometimes futile plans that we make.  But right now I'm too frustrated to see it.

In brief:

Ben's turkeys are huge, over two feet tall.  They follow us everywhere like dogs.  It's pretty entertaining, especially early in the morning when I'm easily amused. 

The meat birds have outgrown the brooder and are also getting huge.  That's good eating right there.

The guinea fowl decimated one garden plot, leaving us with just three pepper plants and a great number of bird-sized depressions in the dirt.  We had to cut the size of that plot by two-thirds and start over.  The good news is that the tomatoes, potatoes, onions, lettuce, and spinach were not affected.  The bad news is that everything else was and that this year's garden will not be big enough to supply a market as we had hoped.

Speaking of the farmer's market, soon we will be spending Saturday mornings at the Carrollton Farmer's Market (in the parking lot of the Ponderosa Restaurant on OH-43) selling goat milk soap, goat milk fudge, and whole grain breads.  The timetable is pretty fluid right now because I'm juggling my kids' various 4-H commitments and county fair preparations.  But soon!

Now on to the photos.  Here's a cute kid photo.

 

Oh you thought I meant "kid" of the two-legged variety, didn't you?   Okay, I have pics of those, too.

 

Here's Roger guinea-proofing one of the now much smaller than we originally intended garden plots.  Live and learn.

And just in case you ever wondered, we live on the most beautiful mountain in the entire world.  Here's proof.

Memorial Day and the unofficial start to the American Summer is almost over, but it feels weird this year. 

I hope you were able to thank a veteran today.  We went to the local parade this morning and honored the many vets there and I know that it means a lot to the kids.  But the one soldier that I wish we could have thanked today left this earth a short while ago.  We miss him deeply.

Thank you, Dad.   

The weather as I type this is far too lovely for me to be squandering time in front of the computer, so this will be brief.  But since I am still sitting here with a child on my lap, I might as well show you the turkeys.  They have been here for two weeks already - my how time flies!

That's what a turkey looks like when it's one day old.  Ben is raising them for one of his 4-H projects this year, just like he did last year.  He does a very good job of taking care of them; I only have to look in the brooder once a day to see that he is keeping them in food and water.  In a couple of weeks, they'll be ready to move out of the brooder and onto pasture.  Then, when they're ready for market, they will be almost as big as Ben.

Here he is in the show ring with the turkey he selected to take to the county fair for judging.  He won the trophy for Novice Showmanship.  I'm very proud of him!

Today was the kind of day you daydream about in the middle of January.  The sun was warm, the winds were mostly calm, the mud was drying up, and the pastures were green.  Green is very good.

 

We got a lot of spring cleaning done this afternoon.  Max tended the fire.

Olivia helped clear debris out of the garden.  Note her stylish attire.  She's a very classy little girl.

The duck harrassed Frodo, which was, I suspect, the highlight of his day.  Poor Frodo endured the humiliation with great patience. 

Here's the very next photo in the series, in which Frodo gets his revenge.  Best Friends Forever!

There's no such thing as perfection here on earth,  but today was a really good day.  Roger and I and all the children will go to sleep tonight with pleasantly worn-out muscles and sun-reddened faces and the faint fragrance of pollen and moist dirt...Spring's lullaby for us.

I keep thinking spring will arrive for good.  It will, it just has to!  This morning during chores I convinced myself that the pastures are greening up a little.  They are, I swear!

Yesterday was rainy and dreary, so I stayed inside for most of it and played Queen of the Kitchen.  (Except for the hour or so spent outside chasing baby goats with Max.  Most of them don't like to be caught, and half of them are more agile and wily than football players.  More agile than gazelles, even.)

Last year's garden produced 8 tons of cayenne and habanero peppers, and I'm only slightly exaggerating.  I dutifully dried them out for long-term storage in my handy-dandy food dehydrator, and now I have a lifetime supply of really hot peppers.  What didn't get dehydrated got turned into relish, hot sauces, and even jam.  Good thing Roger and Max both crave really hot condiments.

Yesterday, as Queen of the Kitchen, I made more hot sauce with some of the dried cayennes and a couple of the habaneros.  I was curious if the process would differ any from using fresh peppers.  The good news is that the results taste the same, but because the peppers were dried this time, I didn't have to get all freaked out about the hot oils getting on my skin and wear gloves up to my elbows and try really hard not to rub my eyes absent-mindedly.

I took pictures.  I'm kind of a dork.

 
But wait!  There's more!  Milk production is really starting to take off now that all the dairy does have kidded, so yesterday I made cheese.  Here's the curd just after it has been cut.

Here's Calvin, my little helper, next to my makeshift cheese press after the cooked and drained curds have been loaded into it for the first light pressing.  Before it was done, the cheese got flipped and pressed two more times with increasing weight.  And behold, this is what we have this morning, a little more than 2 pounds of fresh cheese.  I'll let it age for a few weeks before we dig in.  So yummy!

I have other photos of mundane happenings around the farm (like the baby turkeys that arrived two days ago!), but I'll save those for another post on another day.

I'm hoping to distract you, dear reader, from noticing that I have not posted anything new, despite my promise.  So here's some photos!  The weather here has alternated between spring-like (which means lots of mud!) to arctic-like (which means single-digit temps!).  The weird weather fluctuations have been rough on the kids.  The people haven't liked it much, either.

 

This little one is very friendly.  Natalie usually is, too.

 Sunbathing kids.  If you look carefully, you will see a children's playhouse in the background that we were forced to put into active duty in the goat shed when the temperatures dipped into the single digits with winds over 30 mph.

 

See the little red tongue?  I love that.

 

Quick!  Find the duck in the snow!

So did it work?  Have you forgotten all about my empty promises?  Stay tuned for further updates, but let's just say the timetable is fairly fluid.

What a difference a day makes!  As of this writing, 25 kids have been born here at Big Pink.  Sleep?  What's that, and why do I miss it so?

We have one little doeling who lives in the house for now.  She was weak this morning, so we scooped her up and now she's our bottle baby.  We will transition her to the great outdoors, of course, but for now she's here.  And she's really cute.  Frodo the Dog really likes her, too.  Too bad he can't be the one in charge of giving her the bottle.

So this is my birthday week, as I mentioned earlier.  With all the goats being born, I haven't had a lot of sleep.  So please keep that in mind when you look at this photo of my leftover cake.  I'm sleep-deprived, and I'm pretty sure that qualifies as a mental handicap.  Right?

I can't promise I'll have something to add every day, but I would like to post here regularly as a way to keep you, dear reader, up-to-date on what's happening here at the farm.  They'll be some family stuff, as well.  For instance, some of you have asked for a family photograph.  We don't have one per se, but we do have one of the kids taken last month.  We do it every year.  Happy New Year from Big Pink Farm!

Roger says one day we'll have a family band.  Perhaps we'll call ourselves "Goat Hot Dogs."