I take the frames in the house, scratch the combs to open them up and run them through the basket extractor.  The frames sit inside a spinning basket and centripetal forces work to sling the honey to the outside wall of the extractor where it runs to the bottom and flows into a filter bucket.  Once the honey settles through the filter, it can be bottled immediately.  From 5 frames (not quite full), we got a little more than 10 pounds of honey.  Enough for the year for us, so we’re happy.

Now we just have to figure out how to process the wax.  That will be our next project (added to the bottom of the queue).

I have been inspired by some amazing bloggers, many of them moms, like me, who have followed a similar path from university training to work/stay-at-home motherhood.  They take all of their intelligence and creativity and put it all where it matters most, into their homes.

Here are some of the sites, including some of the local places I shop/have fiber processed.  They are roughly classified, but some are hard to put in just one category.

Fiber processing and knitting:

Knttinghelp.com (This was how I learned how to knit, FYI)

Knitty (Free online user submitted knitting magazine)

Ravelry (Online fiber discussion group)

Mason Dixon Knitting (Hysterical knitting blog)

Schoolhouse Press (Knitting publishing house started by Elizabeth Zimmerman)

Still River Mill (Our local fiber mill, also sells eco-friendly dyes)

Fibers 4 Ewe (Another great local fiber mill)

General Homecrafts

Soule Mama (one of my daily must-read blogs)

angry chicken (another must-read blog, lots of sewing and craft ideas)

Sewing and Fabric:

Heather Ross (Amazing fiber artist and designer, plus very funny story teller)

Denyse Schmidt (Another great fabric designer)

Kaffe Fasset (Designer of fabrics, quilts, and knitting patterns)

Amy Butler (Fabric designer and maker of lovely patterns)

Anna Maria Horner (See above, plus a mom of six!!!)

Free Spirit Fabrics (Producer of most of the artists listed above)

Westminster Fabrics (Another fabric production house)

Sew Mama Sew (Great site for fabric and patterns, etc)

Fresh Squeezed Fabrics (Blog and great fabric store online)

Film in the Fridge (Beautiful quilting blog)

Crazy Mom Quilts (Another amazing quilting momma’s blog)

Colchester Mill Fabrics (My local fabric shop, love them!)

I also buy fabric and fiber related items online on sites like ebay and etsy.  I also like fatquartershop.com and quiltshops.com.

You can see some of my completed projects on flickr.  I hope to post more soon, lots of things are currently in process around here including a reversible flannel quilt, dress for my girl, naturally dyed wool and felt, and always dishrags and socks galore!!

We also had a ton of other squash and zucchini and green beans.  Jamie grilled a bunch of the veg and made several batches of zucchini bread and a green bean and purslane salad.  It was pointed out to us that we had purslane growing in our garden–we had considered it a weed.  It’s actually a very healthy, tasty and versatile green.  We absolutely love “wild” food like that.

As far as the bull goes, we coordinated with a local farmer who keeps a herd of herefords, dexters and galloways.  His galloway bull normally just stays with the herd.  We transported the bull here yesterday and he’ll stay through the end of August.  We had three options when it came to breeding our cows:

• Artificial insemination (AI)
• Buying a bull
• Leasing a bull

The main benefit of AI is not having to “manage” a bull, even short-term.  You also have a much larger range (essentially unlimited) of bulls to select from.  However, the downside of AI is that you have to have someone who is trainied in bovine AI do it and you really have to watch your cows to know when to “pull the tube” (literally, out of a cryogenic freezer).  Also, the success rate is generally much lower than using natural means.  Given that we are busy with other things at the moment, it seemed too involved a process, but it is something we’d reconsider in the future.

We also considered buying a bull.  In this case, we would have bought the bull, brought him over to breed the cows, and when he was done brought him to the butcher.  This would have simultaneously bred the cows as well as replenished our supply of hamburgers and hotdogs.  The downside is primarily cost, but also the unpredictability of a bull someone is willing to get rid of for a price we’re willing to pay.  Keeping a bull full time doesn’t make economic sense for us given the small size of our herd and the hay/feed/vet costs associated with his upkeep.

Our third option is the most traditional.  We would lease a bull, bring him to the farm, have him breed our cows and return him to his original herd when finished.  While the selection of breeding stock is more limited than AI (luckily our area of the state has a good number of cattle operations, so the selection really isn’t that bad).  It’s also a bit more “hands off”.  We bring the bull in for ideally 2 cycles (cows cycle every 28 days just like people) and have a good change of bred cows at the end.

We chose belted galloway primarily because they are genetically polled (hornless, which is dominant so our horned cows’ offspring would be hornless), cross well with dexters, they are very hardy and the fact that they tend to throw smaller calves (a concern of ours given we have small dexter cows).

Hopefully this will be a success and we’ll have at least one if not two calves next spring.  Stay tuned!

Fast forward a bit…this weekend was the scheduled check of our honeybees.  The honey “supers” weren’t all full, but two frames were full enough to be pulled out.  Normally, we’d want to wait until all the frames were “capped” (where the honeycomb is drawn out all the way, the cells are full of honey and a cap of wax is closing the tops of the cells), but we were obviously very interested in tasting the first of our honey.  We processed the two frames very simply: I scraped the honey and wax out of the fames into a bowl and ran it through a sieve to separate the honey from the wax.  We got 1 quart and 1 half-pint, which we gave to our neighbor who has bad allergies (local honey is supposed to prime your defenses against local allergens).  All told, we netted about 3 pounds of honey.  Very tasty indeed.

Also, we’ve posted some updated pictures of our animals (pigs, goat, sheep, geese, etc) at our Flickr page.  Check it out.

The garden is amazing, all of the things that failed last year (beans, corn, squash) are thriving.  It looks like the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant will produce amazing amounts, and even our potatoes are doing well.  We began harvesting greens for salads the last week of May and yesterday Mike mowed down the greens section as it was just too weedy.  But, for a good solid month and a half, we had daily salads.  We will start some lettuce and other green seeds and transplant them for a fall crop later this month.

The fruit trees and bushes are looking a little sad, not enough rain, so we are having to water.  We got just enough raspberries and blueberries this year to eat as we pick, hopefully in years to come we will get enough to preserve as well.

The cows are great, we moved their pasture and they seem to like being closer.  We will be having a sweet Belted Galloway bull come and stay with us for a month or so to breed our girls.  The two CVM rams and our goat are in the paddock behind the barn.  In September they will all go to the butcher for meat and pelts.  Our four ewes are great and the little ram lamb is getting big.  The pigs are flourishing with all of the garden leftovers and the rabbits will be bred soon.  Our goose hatched two eggs (one gosling died, it’s stomach wall had not fully closed).  The surviving gosling is so cute and follows it parents everywhere.  We did have a duck sitting on eggs, but something must have disturbed her nest, as the eggs are all gone.  One chicken hatched a few rouge chicks, and we rehabed a rooster that was attacked by the fox.  Our turkey poults are getting big and next week we will move them to an outside run.  We will also be getting a shipment of broiler chicks and roosters to raise for meat.  We will be trying a new technique with the meat chicks, raising them on the grass, so hopefully they will be less gross.  If this doesn’t work, then no more broiler chicks for us.

We have been having lots of gatherings at the farm.  The food is amazing and it is so nice to be able to share in the bounties of our harvest with friends and family.

Enjoy your summer and remember to eat as much local food as you can with the people you love the most!

HOWEVER, had we given her mother a very inexpensive shot the month before the lamb was born, we could have prevented this from happening.  We feel horrific about the loss of this animal and hope that if you raise sheep, you never go through what we went through.  Now we know to give this shot during the spring shearing, right before lambing time and also two months after the lambs are born.  We learn hard lessons on this farm, and this will be a mistake that we hope to never repeat.

Good-bye sweet Leaf Dawn, we hope your body nourishes the grass and returns you to the circle of life on our farm.

We got our angora and deer pelts back from the tannery.  They are very lovely, the angora in particular.  In fact, it is so lovely, and the goat meat has been so surprisingly good that our male wether Clem will be joining the two rams this September in the freezer.  We also got all of our fiber from the mill, the roving from the ewes is lovely, and as nice as the mohair rug yarn is from the goat, it is nothing in comparison to the pelt.  So, we may even see if we can set up an arrangement with a local angora goat farmer to take two animals off of their farm each year to be raised for meat and pelts, more like we do with our meat sheep than our fiber sheep.

Hopefully now that life is settling back into a regular rhythm, we will be back to posting regularly.  But, seeing that it is summer, and we will be pretty busy with the garden and livestock, we will do our best.

Enjoy the season!

Our other ewe is due any day now.  Happy Mother’s Day everyone!