Missing Willow Farm

Mallards enjoying a respite on our pond.  Since it’s a male/female pair, I’d love them to stick around and raise ducklings!  The frogs have awoken and started singing constantly down by the pond.  It won’t belong before our entire property is covered in teeny tiny frogs.

Our pink-eared lamb getting to know a pasture-mate.  He’s got wool and will need to be shorn one day, the other one doesn’t and won’t.  The lambs hang together in a feisty little gang all day long.  I imagine they sleep with their mamas but am not entirely sure.  I hope they sneak off together and play practical jokes on the goats at night.  🙂

I made bourbon vanilla bean marshmallows and chocolate chip cookies for a s’mores dessert last weekend.  It won’t be the last time, I assure you!  They were toasted over our cauldron and assembled in the back yard.  Yum!

Sheep’s eye view of Beatrice noshing on hay (our sheep and goats also get a daily ration of grain).  Our pastures are just starting to green up so they won’t be eating hay for much longer.

We made our third trip to the Charleston Wine and Food Festival this weekend to support our friend Craig at his events.  So much good food and wine!  Here are a few photos of the excitement.  A lamb on  the spit, biscuits and chicken fried lamb with gravy on a biscuit accompanied by rose champagne for breakfast, a cauldron full of posole and a make your own s’mores station at night.  Can’t wait until next year!

A visible barrier is all it takes to keep sheep from running amok when we move them from the small pasture across our driveway to the big one.  That, and a border collie on their tails.  These bits of fence are literally being held up by leaning against a wheelbarrow and our Mule.   A fence illusion.

Neither one seems bothered by our recent weather.  One is much easier to spot in the snow.  🙂

We’ve finally been caught up in the big East Coast weather situation.  Everything is frozen.  The pond is solid, our Mule hasn’t started all week, our house water is a trickle, and all four yard hydrants are frozen solid out in our pastures.  This means schlepping water from the house trickle to the pastures in buckets.  Oh joy.  Thankfully, the goats, sheep and chickens all have heated waterers so it’s just a matter of topping their water off.  Lizzie needs fresh every day.  On the plus side, the snow is lovely and we haven’t missed one evening out in our hot tub despite the wind chill and record lows.  Cause that’s how we roll.

Drag out a small feeder and a square bale of hay and it’s like a piranha feeding frenzy.  Despite the fact that there’s a giant large found bale in the stock feeder right next to it…

This little guy is a week old now and hasn’t lost his little pink ears.  I think they might be here to stay.  He’s got a texel’s wooly coat, unlike most of our other lambs who are mostly kathadin, so are are soft as puppies.