TexasMadness
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Fall on the farm
Wow, fall has truly set in at Sand Holler. I'm finally back into the swing of things at the farm and I've been getting a lot done!
This weekend we finally finished preserving the last big batches of fall vegetables. I dehydrated a bunch (almost 10 pounds!) of poblanos and fish peppers. I also froze another couple pounds of poblanos. I made a HUGE batch of eggplant soup but none of that got put up - we just distributed it to friends! We also made some marinated eggplant and mixed it with some farm feta. It's really good!
I made 10 pounds of mozzarella this weekend. I didn't get quite enough salt in it but I think I can soak it longer and it will be good.
Trimmed the goats' hooves. They haven't been done properly in a long time and they are looking pretty bad. The farm caretakers just clipped the excess but never shaped the hoof. It's going to be a few weeks of reshaping, but nothing permanently damaged!
Unfortunately I didn't get much else done outside. It rained and rained and rained! The garden flooded (again...) so I couldn't do anything in there. I got some foliar feed for the orchard but don't want to apply it when there's constant rain the forecast. Oh, but during a windy part of the day, I heard a tree cracking (just happened to be outside. It was way away but a few months ago the neighbor's horse got out when a tree fell on his fence line so I figured I should go investigate. Sure enough, we had a dead tree (about 10% of the trees in our area died this summer from the drought) blew over onto our fence and crushed it pretty good. So my mom and I had to trudge out there with the chainsaw (too big to move by hand) and take care of that and mend the fence. It was actually kind of fun! She never does the "handy work" (that's my dad's job) so she really enjoyed the opportunity!
And more work this weekend! Hopefully we can get some gardening done!
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10/28/2009, 3:50 pm
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Firlefanz
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Re: Fall on the farm
My goodness, that farm is also an adventure ground!
Glad you got the goats' hooves trimmed. I'd think that is fairly important, especially if they live on soft ground most of the time. I remember Ranting Hobbit, who made his sheep walk over some concrete every day, so their hooves shape themselves.
Now I wonder where he is and how he's doing. Hmmm. *calling Ranting Hobbit*
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10/28/2009, 5:24 pm
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TexasMadness
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Re: Fall on the farm
I've been wondering about ranting too! Since we've gotten some sheep I always wonder how much he would laugh at how we care for them. Ours are so ridiculously babied and I know he was more of a "let nature take it's course" guy.
We just started putting concrete near the water troughs so that the goats would have to stand on it. Silly goats now crane their necks super far into the trough so that they don't have to get on the rough surface! It's even harder with the sheep since we move their enclosure every week (electric fence) and lugging concrete all over the place is a pain! But their hooves don't seem to grow as fast - but I guess they are still young so it might be more of an issue in the future!
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10/28/2009, 5:51 pm
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