Milking Lesson

First thing Sunday morning (before 7 a.m.!) Kristin and Lily arrived at the farm to learn to milk LaFonda. These two beauties are longtime friends of our daughter from high school rowing team days. Before they launched into chores and miking, they tied up their hair.

First we fed the chickens.  It’s part of the routine. When LaFonda sees me feeding the chickens she knows milking time is imminent and while I  take care of the poultry, she drinks water, lets Splotch drink his share of milk, and pees so she won’t have to do that in the milking parlor.

Everybody loves crazy Hobo.

I forgot to take photos during the actual milking session, but Kristin and Lily milked both by hand and using the bucket milker. LaFonda was totally calm and patient with them, and they were adept milkmaids.  After milking, they thanked LaFonda,  strained and chilled the milk, and cleaned and sanitized the equipment.

Afterward, we all relaxed on the patio, drinking cappuccino with fresh cream. Rog printed our instructions for making mozzarella and Kristin and Lily took home the morning’s milk for their next adventure, cheese-making. I can't wait to hear how it turned out!

Fish Gazebo at Night

We have been working on the fish gazebo the past week, making it more than just a fishery for the aquaponics system. First, we installed a UV filter to clear up the algae  in the water.  You can’t see the bottom, yet, but it has made a significant improvement and the water should get even clearer with time. Next, we added solar-powered rope lights around the top of the gazebo, underwater lights below the dock, and tucked a few solar path lights in the growing bed. It is not quite as bright at night as it appears in this  long-exposure photo, but it is pretty  magical and inviting.

It is the perfect place to watch the moon rise and the fireflies flickering across the pasture. And especially cool when a big catfish silhouette glides across the light in the water.

August Garden Adventures

Yesterday I was overjoyed to discover this monarch caterpillar in the Butterfly/Bee/Hummingbird garden! He was quite big and munching on the butterfly weed. Today he is gone, so I hope that means he is making his chrysalis somewhere.  There have been very few monarch butterflies this year, so I am delighted one chose to raise her offspring in my garden.

This garden is buzzing with  honeybees, bumbles and other native wild bees. The hummingbirds and hummingbird moths make regular visits, too.   It is so rewarding!

Obedient plants.

Phlox up close.

The hens keep pulling out the petunias from the  bottom pot of the tilted tower of flowers and settling in there. I give up.

The turkeys prefer patio furniture.

I had totally forgotten I planted a couple of high bush cranberries on the north side of the garage a few year ago.  This year they are loaded with brilliant berries.

Wild grapes along the driveway are starting to  ripen.

So many more to come.

A cuke growing in a flower bed by the barn, trying to fit in.

The alpin strawberries I started from seed last spring and transplanted into the aquaponics towers a few weeks ago have decided they like it there and are loading up with blossoms and berries! Alpine strawberries are tiny, but so tasty.

Tis weekend we finally hung gutters on the fish gazebo and filled with gravel for another aquaponic growing experiment. (Below the  gutters is a drain-and-fill gravel bed full of tomatoes basil, and other miscellaneous plants. They are thriving on the fish water.)

Last week I found four rather sad strawberry pots on end-of-the-season  clearance.  I pulled out the 28 everbearing strawberry plants, washed the dirt out of their roots, and  set them into the gravel in the gutters. I hope they like aquaponic life and begin producing bountiful berries  like the alpine strawberries.

Summer is winding down, but the show isn’t over yet!

Up and Down

What’s up:
Our first two wine cap mushrooms from our tiny mushroom bed by the garden shed!

What’s down:
Half of a 50-foot tall ash tree, one of a line of ash trees that were planted for each of the Braasch children, probably in the 1970s.  They were visiting this, their childhood home, last weekend for the barn's birthday and told me that. They were saddened when I told them the ash trees are probably all doomed to the emerald ash borer in the coming years.

You can’t see the crown of the fallen portion, which  fills the space between a large red maple and the granary. This is precisely where the cows spent the previous day relaxing in the shade, but we hadn’t yet moved them to the front yard for the day. Lynette was working a short distance away in the garden when she was startled by the sudden tremendous crash.  There wasn’t even any wind. It could sort of make you lose your trust of trees when one randomly crashes to the ground near you.

We are on the steep, downhill side of summer now, which makes me feel wistful when I think about it.  But I try not to think about it and just savor the days, which have been so lovely.  Our lives are a colorful, crazy jumble, sort of like this  chaos in the bee/butterfly/hummingbird garden.

The garden is now providing beans galore, cucumbers, summer squash, greens of every ilk, garlic and the first tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers. This was yesterday’s pretty CSA box.

LaFonda’s  sweet little calf, Splotch, has grown so much and is beginning to look like a little steer. The past week he has been having occasional scours (diarrhea) of a type which I believe is caused by gluttony, drinking too much rich, creamy milk.

So, I got these giant pills, called boluses, for simple scours

and I am getting pretty good at making him swallow them.

The boluses must have suppressed his appetite for a couple of days. LaFonda gave me a whopping 6 gallons of milk for those days, twice as much as usual. Her udder was so huge! But everyone is back to normal now, thank goodness.

Our wonderful WWOOFers, Lynette and Jessica, have gotten the garden into great shape, and so with the abundance of milk have been experimenting with making skyr (an Icelandic yogurt made with rennet) and hard cheeses.

Today we tasted Lynette’s first wheel of  manchego ( a cheese which can be eaten fresh or aged.)  Absolutely delicious!

Jessica relaxes for  moment with Orange.

The meat chickens are approaching harvest weight.  Today we nabbed a a big one and weighed him - he was 7 pounds, which will be about 5.5  processed. I made a processing appointment for two weeks from now. These are f really  sweet birds, and I love how they are at the stage when they make kazoo sounds. It will be sad to harvest them.

According to our  cupola which has the year 1914 embossed into it, this is the 100th birthday of our barn.

We think the barn is actually considerably older than that, but we took advantage of the opportunity to  celebrate a centennial birthday and invited neighbors and previous farm owners.

Bg barn birtday cake - red velvet. I am a bit embarrassed it wasn’t homemade, but it was tasty.

It is tomaoto tart season!!

And if that is not enough to make your mouth water, here is the delectable supper Lynette made for us tonight:

Garlic fried eggs, fresh manchego cheese on sourdough rye toasts with gooseberry jam, roasted pepper-olive-walnut tapenade, sliced cucumbers, roasted eggplant. All the ingredients except  the walnuts and kalamata olives came from the farm!

Life is pretty darn good at Squash Blossom Farm.

Soggy, Foggy Morning

It has been a glorious summer for people, but the past week or so the garden has been wishing for some rain, and we finally got it, an earth-quenching downpour, yesterday. This morning dawned foggy, warm and dripping wet.

Raindrops on the asparagus.

Gourdita grinning beneath her hat.

My favorite flower, the squash blossom.

Lush garden and  granary.

Rudbeckia.

Birdhouse gourd blossom.

Faux chicken (a gift from  Rhonda and Doug) on a fence post. With spiderweb.

Baby watermelon.

Fallen garden angel.

Unbearably cute garden shed in a fog.

End of an Era

My Grandma Waughtal’s bread mixing bowl met its demise today in the line of duty while baking for market.

I have been  using this bowl for almost 35 years, since around 1980, when my grandma moved to live with with my aunt and uncle in Oregon and my sister Rita moved into Grandma’s house for a year. She said I should have it because I was the one in the family who baked bread. I always thought it was one of Grandma’s wedding presents, but I don’t know if it was quite that old.

This was the bowl that Grandma always made her famous cinnamon roll dough in. We kids spent many an afternoon spent drinking milky tea and devouring hot cinnamon rolls while playing Scrabble with Grandma. She mixed her chocolate chip cookie dough in it (the last pan of cookies ALWAYS  burned on the bottom, but we assured her we liked them that way). This bowl has memories of  Dilly Bread, baked in coffee cans, associated with it, too. Both of my daughters requested to inherit the bowl.  I found the same bowl only in better shape on EBay and told them one would get the original and one would get another, more perfect, version. Now they will both get lovely copies.

Never fear, this noble bowl will continue in my life--it will go on to becoming art, in some as-yet-to-be-determined mosaic project.