Missing Willow Farm

Dinner on Saturday night was fried home grown chicken, roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes, bacon cheddar biscuits and this fantastic chocolate cake.  My friend and farmer’s market partner Lora brought it, she used to own a bakery and won a Food Network cake decorating challenge (for real).  Everyone has a good friend like that, right?  It’s chocolate inside, too, and is sooo delicious.  She also brought the mashed potatoes.  Her savory is as good as her sweet!

Spinach, lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, peas and rutabaga.  That’s what we’ve got growing in our new greenhouse beds.  We started with one bed last year and ate our own cool season produce through the winter.  We’ve got four now, and they are packed with veggies.  A baby spinach salad with hard cooked farm fresh eggs, a sprinkle of blue cheese, crumbled bacon and a dijon vinegarette.  What’s not to love about that?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Raising chicks in the late Fall evidently isn’t a terrible idea, these Buckeye chicks are thriving, despite nights below freezing.  We’ve got them in a brooder box in a room inside the barn under a grow light.  They’re getting in some beautiful feathers.  Look closely, that’s Jenna in the background of one of the photos eating poop off of the barn floor.  😛  Brian took these photos, I’m still gimpy.  Luckily I’m off of the walker for short distances, this is my 2nd day.  I’ve started physical therapy, which is torture in case you were curious.

  Beauty berry is in bloom again.  I love it!  It’s taller than I am now.  We purchase it in 2009 in the dead of winter.  We bought basically a stick in a pot that they assured us would bloom in the Spring and it did.  The leaves will fall with the freeze, the berries will stay and the birds will ignore the berries.  Same as it ever was.

October’s quilt square is a lovely purple and green combination.  Just two more to go for the year.  Then comes the hard part, putting it all together.  I took a class in something called Quilt As You Go over the summer.  Each square gets sandwiched with batting and backing, quilted, then you sew the squares together.  I already did January and February, guess I’m committed to finishing it with this method.

Halloween is tomorrow but my newest quilt won’t be done by then.  I’ve finished piecing the top, though, and learned a lot of new techniques doing it.  I still need to back it, bat it, quilt it and bind it.  Maybe by next year.

October is garlic planting month around here.  We purchased some red chesnok (paper bag) and music (red container) seed garlic from a local farm that produces acres of the stuff every year.  They specialize in garlic and raspberries, an odd combination.  The giant cloves in the glass bowl were saved from our garden, and include our blue ribbon winning garlic heads from the fair last month.  I don’t recall what kind it is, we save our own every year and only propagate the best.  I got the easy job, which was breaking the heads into cloves.  Brian did the planting.  We’ve got three raised beds dedicated to this stuff, 100 plants per bed.  You plant a clove of garlic then next  June you harvest a head of garlic.   If you’re in gardening zone 7, grab some garlic from your kitchen and stick a clove or two in the ground.  Next Summer, you’ll be happy you did!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Finally made it out to the pasture to see our new chicks.  I didn’t go past the pasture gate because I’m still using a walker since my fall and didn’t want to get poop on it.  😛  My husband brought a few of them out in a bucket for me to see.  They’re already getting their big girl feathers which is good because it’s starting to get cold here, particularly at night.  These are a critically endangered heritage breed of chicken called buckeyes.  We don’t usually start chicks this time of year because of the impending weather but they were free so we’re going to give it a try.  We’ve already discussed moving them into a chicken tractor inside the big barn until they’re old enough to join our other layers in the little barn.

 

Haven’t yet made it out to the barn to see our new baby chicks, maybe this afternoon when my Aunt Carol and Uncle Lynn stop by for a visit on their big East Coast road trip.  I did, however, find this photo from a week ago in my camera.  Our beltie cow Jessica follows Jenna along the fence line whenever she sees her.  It doesn’t matter which direction Jenna is going, Jessica lopes along until she catches up.  She ignores the other dogs, it’s just Jenna she finds fascinating.  They have the same coloring, maybe she thinks Jenna is a tiny calf who runs really fast?

Horseback riding is something I haven’t done in 35 years.  I had a chance to go last Monday on a beautiful trail in the company of friends and a beagle.  Unfortunately, soon after I got this shot the horse took off and I came off.  An emergency room visit confirmed I have no broken bones, thankfully, but still couldn’t lift my left leg.  It’s been five days and I’m getting around OK with a walker.  The hospital gave me an NSAID pain reliever prescription (dude… seriously?)  Luckily we’ve got a stash of the good stuff from a 1999 surgery that’s still potent.  Since my fall, we’ve added 11 baby chicks to the farm that I haven’t seen yet.  As soon as I’m feeling up to a trip to the barn, I’ll post a photo.  Can’t wait to see them myself!