Missing Willow Farm

We think we’re done with lambing and kidding for the year.  Shearing day is next weekend.  I’m sure Beatrice will maintain her reputation as the worse behaved sheep of all.

Our girls and grandson visited this weekend.  He had a blast herding the goats, who needs a border collie?  He remembered where the chickens hide their eggs and gathered every single one with no breakage.  Can’t wait until he visits us again!

I started milking Hermione this week and she’s giving me 1.5 quarts every morning.  I made my first batch of chevre but threw it away due to consistency issues which I am attributing to last year’s culture and rennet.  More have been ordered and will arrive soon.  That’s an AM haul of eggs, we get between 5 and 7 additional in the afternoon.  Just enough to keep our regular weekly customers happy.

The veggie seedlings we started a few months back have been potted up in peat pots and are becoming acclimated to the outdoors on our back deck.  I am itching to get them in the garden but am being cautious as we have a few weeks left until our possible last frost date for the season.  We have so much work to do on our raised beds.  We’ve got half of them weeded and replenished with compost from our barn.  We’ve purchased weed barrier for between the beds and have deer fence for the entire garden on order.

That tiny egg is one of our largest, the other one is a duck egg gifted to us by a friend.  It was delicious!  I start milking today.  Hermione’s last kid went to his new home where he’s going to live with lots of other well-loved goats and a few horses.  We need to get the remainder of our raised beds weeded and replenished with compost.  Our seedlings are raring to go and our last frost date is coming soon.  We purchased weed cloth for between the raised beds and that needs to be installed.  This is a busy time of year for us.

We keep a moon jar out by our Cowboy Cauldron as an outdoor night light.  It’s simply made from a frosted plastic container and the LED from a garden landscape light.  It collects sun rays all day then emits a soft glow all night.  I happened to look down when taking our dog Jack out right before bedtime last night and noticed something worshiping the moon in the jar.  Hello toad!

We picked up two packages of bees today about a 90 minute drive from here.  They rode home in the back seat of our car.  All 24,000 of them.  Packaged bees come with a can of sugar water with three little holes punched in the bottom for the bees to eat en route and a queen cage that has the queen plus a few worker bees who attend to her.  The queen cage has a plug of ‘candy’ at one end, contained by a cork plug.  We remove the cork plug and place the queen cage in the hive.  It takes the bees between 1 and 2 days to eat away the candy to release the queen into the hive.   Once the queen’s cage is hung in the hive, we dump in the packaged bees.  The feeder gets place on top with a pollen patty on one side and about a half gallon of homemade sugar syrup on the other before enclosing the entire thing.  Fingers crossed, we’ll get gallons and gallons of honey this summer!

A few of our 2015 lambs, waiting for their mamas to finish breakfast in the feeding pen.

We have our potato patch planted, and I expect to spend this afternoon in the greenhouse.  We have a nice long stretch of warm weather on the way here.  Gotta get busy!

We’ve had bees on order since December and need new hive frames on hand for when we pick them up next week.  I purchased these from a local guy who deals in bee supplies.  We really need to get busy with nails and wood glue!