Big Pink Farm

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.