Egg

I was so busy in the garden and canning and picking berries and getting things ready for Grace to start FOURTH GRADE (what!??) that I did not blog at all. Sorry about that. So here is the (disjointed) news:

You may have noticed that I love bullet points. I always have. It's just my style and you will have to get used to it.

• After all of the first egg excitement the second egg took five days to show up. At some point we may be tired of eggs, but for now we are just tired of feeding nearly 30 chickens and buying eggs at the store.
• I canned tomatoes from my garden. Twice.
• I vacuum sealed many fruits and veggies and cheeses and meats. Because I have a vacuum sealer now.
• I have 75 bazillion peas. Snow peas, sugar snaps, and shelling.
• I started seeds to overwinter. Fun!
• Chevre freezes nicely and I will be making a lot of it to see us though the holidays.
• I increased my 2011 berry-picking total to almost 80 pounds. (don't worry! the blackberries aren't ready yet).
• I have made 4 types of jam this summer and now I am done with jam for the year.
• Except maybe peach.
• I opened the last of the hard cheese for the year. They both taste like cheddar but I remain disappointed in myself. Hopefully next year will be better.
• My chest freezer has been decommissioned as a cheese aging box and reappointed as a chest freezer.
• Grace has many sassy new outfits for school.
• I also have some sassy new outfits and am ready for a date night. Mike.
• Mike fixed up our garden water situation in some terribly clever way and now it is considerably more efficient to water. Like magic!
• The goats also got a new water set up. They are very spoiled.
• Grace's room is all painted, and the carpet is on the premises. I hear it will be move in ready early in the week. I would not hire us as contractors unless literally the only thing you care about is coming in under budget. We are super good at that.
• Plus a bunch of dumb stuff like laundry and weeding and household drudgery.

I hear I am taking a day or two "off" this week, so maybe I will post some pictures or something with "sentences." But history would suggest otherwise so I better not make any bold statements.

YAY!!

Guess what we found in the coop yesterday?

AN EGG!!  (finally!)

It's very small, but it's perfectly formed and very lovely. And you have to start somewhere. I hope she (whoever she is) will tell the other ladies that it wasn't so scary or horrible and set a good example for the rest of them. Because one tiny egg is not going to be quite enough.

I have a picture of the egg but Grace is spending the night away and we promised we would not crack it open until she was here, so I will put up some pictures when I can include the inside and some shots of us enjoying it. Holy smokes do we love eggs. A lot.

Lazy and Grouchy

Sorry for the relatively long delay. My work schedule has been not exactly as I prefer it to be for the last month or so and this has resulted in extreme grouchiness on my part, which means no blogging. I usually work all my days in a row so I can have longer stretches off because I find it very hard to switch between days and nights (I work at night), so when I have only a few days off I do stuff like sleep until noon and then stumble around complaining about how the day is half gone for the next few hours and then I think 9:45 is an appropriate time to eat dinner. Also I try to cram a lot into my time off. And I get very grouchy about leaving. All of that make me feel like I don't have time to blog.

So for now you get some bullet-point style updates and that's it. But don't fret. I am back to my regular schedule and my glorious nine-day-off stretches starting Wednesday morning.

• We picked, canned, and froze almost 50 pounds of raspberries and Marion berries.
• In related news I had my first ever bee sting. It was dumb.
• I opened several aged cheeses. Some were good. One was quite good. Others not so much. I am frustrated and I am not sure exactly how to fix my mistakes.
• I made (and ate) pretty much butter from a friend's cow milk. I do love cream.
• I have tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers on a pretty regular basis now.
• We are wrapping up Grace's room construction.
• We ate another chicken.
• One of the baby goats had diarrhea, but I nursed him back to health and now he is perfect again.
• And those are the things. Pictures soon.

EXTREME EMERGENCY!!!

I mentioned in a previous post that I did not plant dill this year. I did go to some local nurseries but I could not locate any dill. There certainly is not enough time to grow some through seeds. So it appears that I am dill-less this year.

 This is sort of a big deal to me because I will soon be faced with about seven trillion pickling cucumbers. I must can pickles and if I have to buy dill at Safeway or something ridiculous like that I will, but I would like to save that for a worst case scenario. So this is a request for anyone who maybe planted too much dill or knows someone who did. Or maybe your neighbor did and you are comfortable with theft? Or maybe you know of someone in the area with dill for sale. Whatever works. If you can get me dill in any quantity I would appreciate it. I could trade you for pickles, cheese, milk, bread, eggs, money, praise.

Please help!