A Thursday Night in Fall




Things are *just* starting to wind down, and it's nice to see the slower pace ahead, even if it will be a few weeks. Tomorrow is our last farmer's market, and come next week we'll start selling our eggs to a local ice cream shop and selling off the oldest hens. E will need my help to get a head count - our goal is to keep this year's pullets, the old Americaunas (all the green eggs we can get!), and any others that seem to still be laying well. He'll have to clean up the barn real well first though, as my preggo self can't deal with too much eau de chicken. In the spring, once we get a good idea of demand, we'll bring our flock numbers back up with some point of lay pullets, probably a mix of brown and white layers. I've also got big plans for adding enough Khaki Campbells to sell a few dozen eggs each week, as well as some turkeys in late-summer to raise for friends and family for the holidays, but we'll see what happens to those plans once farmhand #2 arrives.

I've been drying and packing up tomatoes and herbs, and canned up another few quarts of tomato sauce. Some of our winter squash weren't situated well, and showed a poor, poor yield, but we've been eating up those butternuts since they aren't in good enough shape to keep all winter, and once the vines die we'll bring in our very nice acorn squash crop. We'll definitely grow those again, they did wonderfully. We're still harvesting string beans, a handful of late tomatoes, waiting on the beet greens to re-grow before we harvest them, and only a few days ago from the radishes all being ready. We'll pick kale all through the fall and into winter. I'm sure we'd do well if we stayed at the market through October, but with gestation and two full time jobs already in this family, we need a break.

I tend to get better at time management once I'm back at school, so I've had time to get back to sewing - all patterns from "Bend the rules sewing" and so far so good -even better now that a local sewing shop opened right in our little tiny downtown - all one block of it. Just in time too, since the local chain fabric store (the only one anywhere near here) shut down all its locations. Hopefully I can get by with this new shop and occasional trips to the Jo-Anne's in Princeton. Off to quilt...

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Posted: Thu - September 27, 2007 at 10:32 PM        

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