Missing Willow Farm

Jessica’s getting more comfortable with being at our place.  She always waits for us in the morning for her bucket of sweet feed and then hangs out most of the day with the herd.  That’s her ‘where’s my bucket?’ face.

Helen’s got her head between the top of our goat fencing and our electric fence wire.  Good thing it’s not energized!  We’ve got a solar energizer that we’ve never found a reason to install.  Deer can jump our fence and do sometimes.  We’ll find Fifi and Milos watching over them as they sleep with our goats, which is weird.  Otherwise, nothing’s ever gotten in or out.

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Yesterday was pick up day at our county fair, which gave us our first opportunity to figure out our results.  Once again, we took home the largest check of the fair.  Our blue ribbon percentage is almost 50% of everything we enter.  Not bad!  I included a photo of the back of some of our blue ribbon entries so you can see the care I put into each and every jar.  Oh, and I was told that if I had done more quilting on my candy jar quilt I would have done even better.  Which is a moot point because it got exactly the amount of quilting that I could tolerate.

Yesterday we finished processing our turkeys.  All ten are in the freezer.  One of them managed to sink a poop covered talon into the fleshy part of my hand on his way out of the poultry tractor.  If my doctor’s office was open on the weekend, I would have gone.  Instead, I’m toughing it out and keeping an eye on it vs. driving an hour to an urgent care facility.  He got me good but we got him back.  😉

P.S. You never have to worry about me posting disturbing images of our farm chores on here.  Unless it’s something like shoveling the barn out.  But then who wants to see that?!

Applique third place ribbon at the county fair!   Kind of amazing since while we are an hour from a Home Depot and there’s no McDonalds in the entire county, we’re in the heart of awesome quilter country.  And there are some really strict judging rules and I’m so very not a fussy person (I’m sure there were lots of imperfections).  Any way.. pretty happy with my results.  🙂  I’ll post a photo of the finished quilt and anything else that got a ribbon after we pick stuff up at the end of the fair.

Yesterday was county fair turn in day.  Here are a few of the things we entered.  With our greenhouse, we start gardening so early in the year that a lot of what we planted was harvested long ago.  We also entered lots of  canned goods and my candy jar quilt which is finally finished.  Since it’s my first quilt I have zero expectations, especially after hearing from my quilting teacher all of the fussy reasons that points are taken away during  judging.  It will be nice to see it hanging at the fair with all of the others!

Halloween will be without a jack o’lantern again this year.  Our lone pumpkin is harvested, sitting on the porch… and rotting.   Oh well, there’s always next year.  That’s my annual pumpkin mantra!

Turkeys have been hanging out in our yard for the past few weeks, quite a large bunch of them.   Maybe they’re impressed by our giant pumpkin?  They are hardly bothered when we’re around.  I’ve tried fussing at them to see what they do and it’s mostly stare at us.  Like the deer who sleep in our front yard do.  We get no respect from our local wildlife!

Roosters got kicked out of our barn for injuring the hens and had been running amok for the past few months.  We saw them hanging with a group of wild turkeys last week and they were heading down the driveway towards the house on Monday (a quarter mile from the barn).  They had also started following me into the big pasture and that was a big mistake.  We found them there this morning, our livestock guardian dogs had gotten them.  Yes, chickens can fly.  Maybe they didn’t see the dogs coming?  Did the dogs do something bad?  No, believe it or not large predatory birds can kill young livestock.  Our neighbors lost a few baby goats this Spring to predatory birds.  I guess Milos and FiFi don’t know the difference between chickens and chicken hawks.  On the upside, my husband doesn’t have to build them their own shelter for the winter.  On the downside, they made me laugh every day.  And Jenna loved bringing them to me.  Maybe we’ll get a few more next Spring.

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Our mushroom logs surprised us this week with a fresh crop, they’re popping out everywhere.  These are shiitakes.  We’ve got oyster mushroom logs, too, but they haven’t yet produced for us.  I’m going to make mushroom risotto and lamb shanks for dinner tonight!