May and June

A lot has happened in the last month - I already mentioned the twin goats and calf born in mid-May. The boy goat ended up dying (Tiffany the mama just didn't have enough milk for both of them, it seems), but Tascha (the girl) is doing great now. Then Dee, the other goat, had twin girls a few weeks later. Both of those babies are doing great - getting big and eating lots of brush along with getting milk from Dee. Gigi had her baby at the end of May, and Oliver named her Little Gigi. We call her Elgie for short. For some reason that we don't understand, Elgie is probably about double the size of the calf that Gigi had last year. We like to think it's because she's getting enough food here on our somewhat-pasture, but we don't really know.

We've been planting lots of seeds, and working on succession planting too. Our onions look better than they did last year, and one patch of shallots look good. Our garlic looks great, so that's an exciting improvement from last year, too. The first patch of carrots and beets didn't do much, but the second set is looking really good. We've been using compost to amend the soil as much as possible, and Orrin also bought some concentrated liquid kelp fertilizer, which seems to be helping as well.

On the down side, we have continued to find boulders in the greenhouse, through the process of prepping beds for summer vegetables. Some were a manageable size that Orrin was able to carry out. Others are big enough that we've had to use a come-a-long on the car to crank them out. We are currently wrestling with possibly the largest boulder of all that we've seen. Orrin has been attempting to break chunks off by drilling holes in a line in the rock, then hammering metal rods into the rock to try to  encourage it to crack. It worked on one part, but hasn't worked in several other lines that he's tried to do. We think the rock is so deep that the rods are just not going deep enough into it to cause a break. We are contemplating burying it again, because it's mostly below a path, and we need to plant out that section of bed that is affected. Maybe we'll just have to wait until another transition period to try to deal with it. It's been so frustrating to continue finding boulders! Enough already!

Our CSA starts this week, with one member for now. Two more start in September. It is very exciting, getting to this point, and we're so glad we're starting out small so we can figure it out as we go. This week we'll be providing kale, spinach, mixed lettuce, garlic scapes, rhubarb, a few different herbs (oregano, thyme and sage), new potatoes and eggs. Yay!

Skinny sheep - newly shorn at the end of May.

Gigi with her brand new baby, Elgie. Elgie was probably an hour old.

Elgie, two days old.

A pregnant Isabel at the end of May, starting to look a little bigger. She's due any day now.

Boulders that Orrin has recently pulled out of the greenhouse.

The biggest boulder yet, still in the unveiling stage at the time of this picture.

Cows in the "infield" (our name for the area between the other house, greenhouse and garden). Add a couple of babies to the mix, and suddenly it seems like we have a herd of cows. Six in total now.

Oliver and I finding time for some yoga.

A view of the garden from the upstairs of the house, taken in mid-June. Things are very lush right now.