Rock & Roll Farm |
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Friday! Dec 17 2004 // 7:10 pm // permalink cow day! We got a cow and her calf today! Cows rock! I’ll post lots of pictures tomorrow. For now I need to take a shower because I smell like cow. *shower, shower, shower* Today we drove a few counties over to Hudson, MI to pick up a beautiful Guernsey cow and her three-week old calf. The cow came with a name, Fawn. We think we’re going to keep that name. There’s still the issue of a name for the calf. I put up some sheets of paper in the kitchen for people to write ideas. As soon as the votes are in I’ll let you know. Here are some of the choices: Jezebel, Pumpkin, Petunia, Kwansayum, Florida, Bonnie, Adelheid, Smartypants, Junior, TRON, Crumpet, Milky II, Aran, Pulsa, Sorrell, Butter, Pansy, Violet, Harriet, Peanut, Poopers, Dweezil, Clementine, Ace… Last week we cleaned out the basement of our new (to us) barn (across the street on our newly acquired land) in preparation. The stalls hadn’t been mucked in ten years. We made a lot of jokes about the manure being pure gold after ten years to sit and cure. We already have several round bales of straw for bedding, but yesterday we picked up a load of square bale hay for feed. We’re looking for a round bale feeder (a huge metal frame that holds the round bales during feeding) but haven’t found one yet. In other news: the timber frame project was put on hold on account of the cow. Richard and I may do a little work on it next week but we’ll be the only ones here so I’m not sure how far we’ll get. We harvested a few bins of carrots and parsnips yesterday morning. I hope that was the last harvest till spring - it was the kind of windy cold morning that makes you want to sit in front of the fire and drink cocoa.
Sunday! Dec 12 2004 // 1:45 pm // permalink Archival updatesI was surprised to find that my archives are in a little bit of a demand. More like three people asked in passing when I’m putting them back up. But still…that’s enough positive reenforcement for me to get motivated. So in response I’m slowly making the archives accessible. With limitations, of course. Thursday! Dec 09 2004 // 8:43 pm // permalink Today’s sky There are also new photos of the timber frame project on the farm_photos page. Wednesday! Dec 08 2004 // 9:03 pm // permalink Starting the timber frame.I may have failed High School Geometry, but I can now add timber framing to my resume. The wood came in last week, and of course we dropped the longest, heaviest, most green timber we could find right on Reid’s leg. He’s okay, but it was scary for a minute there. And then funny. And now legendary. Monday and Tuesday we worked on the layout of the timbers. Each piece of the frame is designated well in advance, and all cuts are drawn directly on the wood. I learned to lay out mortises, tenons, dovetails, braces, and floor joists. Accuracy and precision has never been a strong point of mine so this was a challenging task for me. Spending time quietly measuring and marking was a nice contrast to the sometimes-violent work of the farm this time of year. Tomorrow we will begin cutting, chiseling and drilling. The thought of power tools makes me more excited than I probably should be. The thought of chisels makes me even more excited. The structure will be a distribution shed for the CSA. One of the challenges has been what to do with the produce that doesn’t fit in the share boxes. Simply trying to keep it in the shade didn’t work. Now we can have everything in the shed, out of the elements. This will also provide some continuity to the distribution process, and lots of storage space. Thursday! Dec 02 2004 // 10:11 pm // permalink new photoscheck out the link over on the right there, under the heading navigation, called farm_photos. |
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R&R Farm sans sheriff archive |