Back from the Lake, Part II




The girls and I have been busy these past few days, catching up from our vacation in Cape Cod. WIth enormous thanks to Sarah and Ryan, everyone on the farm was 100% happy and healthy when we came home, which was a relief after a few rocky years of farm-sitters. Saturday was a slow day at market, but we still sold over 40 dozen eggs, which emptied out the fridges from the week we were away. Some tomatoes split on the vine, but the pigs and chickens were more then happy to take care of them for me. The winter squash and second plantings of beans, broccoli rabe, and kale are coming along pretty well too. I'm not sure if I'll have any prepped room for radishes or lettuce but we'll see.

I go back to work in less then two weeks, so I try to cut us plenty of slack as far as fall planting and fall farmer's markets goes - we'll go to market until we sell most of our hens off, probably the end of September. We are still planting on raising our own replacemtns, using the barn as a big brooder, so I need to see what company can ship us a October order. I gave in to a few broody hens too and we'll see what they hatch out as well. Should be in a week or so.



Since my quilts have been selling well, I'm hoping to pick up some extra sales from the returning university students, and I've signed up for one craft fair so far, and will hopefully will get into a few more. One advantage of Etsy is that I already have nice photos of all my work for when I need to submit an application to a juried show. The alchemy orders are picking up, so much that I barely have time to work on my other planned projects, but that's a great problem to have! I'm still under-charging, as E keeps reminding me, but I'm getting better at pricing my work more competitively.

After a couple of failed attempts by different companies to find and pump our septic since the electric company has shredded a few years worth of wood chips over the likely location, we're calling in the big guns today. An inspection company is going to "flush" a sensor down into the tank and pick it up with a radio transmitter, and then the pump truck will come a few hours later. One more item checked off my summer to-do list hopefully. Update: So then inspection guy found the tank but the cover is busted up and he doesn't want to try removing it until he replaces it. Yet another bill, but he re-scheduled the pump truck and it looks like all this poop drama will finally! be wrapped up tomorrow. I'm sure glad we didn't wait till we were having plumbing problems!

We're also working on Georgia's thank you notes - I wanted her to be involved somehow, so I ended up having her color all over some big pieces of paper and stamp them with a "thank-you" stamp. I'll cut them into squares and write her thank-you's on the back. Once she takes a nap I'm painting a "goats for sale" sign to put up outside tonight and hopefully we can sell our little doeling ASAP. I'll probably have E put up our laying hens sign as well - with an extra week of eggs, we can afford to start sales a bit earlier then last year. The less birds we have to bring to the livestock dealer the better!

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Posted: Mon - August 18, 2008 at 10:42 AM        

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