Winter is Coming

This past week has been Winter is Coming week. Bill took a few days off and we've been stockpiling important things for the coming cold.

Hey! It's hay! We have a pile of hay that we (mostly Bill) scythed this year, but it's not enough for the entire winter, so we purchased some bales as well.

We've been stacking wood too. Last year we got a small electric splitter which is tied with our chicken plucker as one of my favorite purchases.

This is about an hour of splitting. Not nearly enough yet! Some of that wood is cherry, which means our shed smells amazing. 

Lastly, I've been doing a little quilting. Having my own craft room and working on project bags for my little Etsy shop has reacquainted me with my sewing machine (and fabric shops), so I'm hoping my quilting bug returns. I'm machine quilting a pepper quilt I started when we first moved to Indiana.

The archived process of making this quilt is on my very first (I think), rather old blog. Here's the best photo from the series:

We have lots more work to do before the snow (I hope!) flies, but we've gotten a good start.

Red, Yellow, Green

We've been eating lots of red and yellow meals lately. Wanna see?

Delicata squash soup and tomatoes on garlic bread with NY wine.

Two pots of tomato sauce for canning. Bill was pretty insistent that the yellow pot stay purely yellow. There were two separate spoons for stirring, and the immersion blender had to go into the yellow sauce first, lest some red bits contaminate it.

Not being eaten are these yellow pickling cucumbers. Bill has trepidation about them, and I rightfully know that all cucumbers are vile. So, I've been picking them and they sit on our counter...destined to become chicken food.

Finally, here's what the goats and sheep have been eating. That "grass is greener" thing is apparently not to be taken lightly, as I noticed when we moved some fences around this weekend. The old paddock where the ruminants had been confined is on the left. There is a clear line where the fence was with the "other side" of the fence on the right. Makes you think that maybe we've been using that saying incorrectly for all these years.

Frosty!

The 90% first frost date in our area is early October. But, of course, this is an exceptional year and our first frost was on September 22.

We have gobs of green tomatoes and lots of Thai hot peppers that aren't ripe yet, so we covered most of important stuff in plastic.

Bill also built me a cold frame for the top of a couple of raised beds. I started broccoli and beets in here a few weeks ago and recently added some lettuce and radishes. We'll see how it works! Hopefully we'll have some homegrown lettuce for tacos throughout the winter.

Spring means baby mammals....

It's been a mammal-rific weekend around these parts. Wild fuzzy animals are everywhere. It started with an odd stray dog/hyena thing in our driveway. Later, a raccoon (a big, fat, ugly one) was caught in the act of trying to eat our baby turkeys. We were out for evening poultry chores and, when we went into the garage to check on the turks, we saw a striped fuzzy tail slink away from the brooding box and into a corner.

Boo.

The chicks are all ok. The raccoon is not. Predator defense is not fun.

But look! A baby bunny!

Later that same evening...Bill (at the insistent urging of Sugar Pie) discovered a momma opossum and her SEVEN babies in our garage. We've had opossums around for a while without any harm to the birds, but they are known to eat baby birds, steal eggs and sometimes attack mature hens. To the momma opossum's great benefit, her babies were adorable and Bill is a softy. We spent nearly an hour gathering them all up in a garbage can and then transported them back to our woods. They were given a stern talking-to and told that there would be some serious trouble if they messed with our birds.

As the momma opossum headed off into the woods with 7 babies clinging to her back, Bill swears she turned back toward him - tear in her eye - to ask why she was being thrown out on the streets, a single mom with 7 mouths to feed.

But look! A baby bunny!

This little bundle was spared a dramatic end in the chicken pen. Bill was out scything the tall grass in the pen (rather than using a weedwacker or lawn mower) when he found the baby bunny. We made him pose for some photos, contemplated keeping him, but eventually let him go.

Adorable.

But he's been warned. Before we let him go, he was given a demonstration of what might happen if we caught him snooping around our garden:

Nature abhors a vacuum...

...and I abhor a monoculture lawn.

We have a small front lawn. It is worthless, we do not use it. It is heavily shaded, bordered on the South by jack pines, the West by black locusts, the East by quaking aspen, and the North by the house. It is approximately square, about 2000 sq ft. We want to put garden in there, or perhaps something else. Whatever it is needs to be shade tolerant.

One option is to kill the grass and re-seed it with a shade tolerant prairie mix (we are planning to put prairie out into the field as well...)

Or, we can design some sort of ordered garden. What say you, readers? Good suggestions for plants/gardens for the front yard? See the pic of the house in the sidebar of the blog to see what the yard looks like...