Miscellaneous Tidbits Interspersed With Chickens

It's not often I go an entire week without a blog post, but it is even more unusual for me not to shoot a bunch of photos every day.  That just goes to show how busy life has been lately. Here is a brief rundown on recent farm happenings, some illustrated with random chicken photos, since my camera seems to have taken a few days off.

Notice the bare ground and sunshine. It feels like spring, which makes me  feel kind of panicked and  behind schedule - I don't have my seeds planted yet!  We are  forecast for a huge snowstorm with freezing rain tomorrow, so it's not quite spring yet, but  the last three predicted storms missed us entirely so I'm not holding my breath.

That doesn't mean I am not prepared, however.  I picked up chicken feed and grain for the cows today so I don't have to drive the slip-slidey truck if we do get freezing rain.

The seed orders have arrived!  These came from Seedsavers a few days  ago and a few more packets of tomato seeds from Tomatofest arrived today --they sell 600 varieties of heirloom tomatoes! I intend to start planting tomorrow.

Thanks to Facebook, we reconnected with a high school friend, Kat, who came for a visit  with her husband Spike.  Spike is an author working on a book featuring farm building projects, so he was curious about our farm enterprises. (I am now immersed in his recent book, A Splintered History of Wood,  a great read!)   We fired up the  clay oven and made wood-fired pizza with them. We also had an embarrassing mozzarella-making fail - it turned out more like ricotta than mozzarella but still tasted good.

Even though my own sofa reupholstery project is not yet totally done (that's why you haven't seen the finished photos yet) I am undertaking another upholstery project - the sofa of my friend Gael.  She and our friend Robin came over to help me with the hardest part: unupholstering. Gael and  Orange relaxed in the sofa  one last time before we tore into it...

and here it is two hours later, totally naked.  I am eager to  get this sofa covered and then finish my own darn sofa before the crazy busyness of spring hits.

That friendly, stray black cat in the barn that might be a pregnant female?   I named her/him Poet and no kittens have arrived yet, although Poet is very rotund.  A second stray cat, a gray tiger, seems to have taken up residence in the hayloft, but it is totally wild and unapproachable.

Lastly, I am working part time again for the Clean Energy Resource Teams this spring in the far SE Minnesota counties.  It is great to be back working with such wonderful people on renewable energy! (It may mean less frequent blog posts, however.  I'll try to keep up.)