Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

Around 10am, I was working at the computer and heard a loud “POP!” out by our telephone pole, and all the electric went down. The electric co-op got a repairman here very quickly, and he extracted a fried squirrel from the transformer by our house. I’m afraid it’s the one we were getting friendly with, who would steal sunflower seeds from the shed when he thought we weren’t looking. I buried him in the yard, hope it’s not the one we were befriending.

Since our driveway is overgrown a bit, I had to trim a few small branches for the electric guy to get his truck in. The goats were VERY happy about this:

Zucchini starts sat around in their little pots till they started flowering, poor things, but now they’re in double-dug, well-manured soil:

Potatoes are growing like crazy…it’s very comforting to see, because this can be a staple item most of the year:

Kale is finally coming up (we had a strange, extended Winter and Spring):

Last year, our peas succumbed to a lawnmower accident…this year I marked them clearly, and they’re thriving, starting to flower now:

We started a whole bunch of tomatoes from seed in the early spring, and then the seedlings languished for months without really growing, and a few died. Finally, the plants are starting to take off:

This patch doesn’t look like much in the photo, but it holds red lettuce, onions, chives, broccoli, tomatoes, jalapeños, sweet peppers, and a whole bunch of sunflowers:

We have a lot of happy raspberry plants now. I bought 30 rhizomes from a neighbor (conventional red raspberries), and dug up a few of the luscious black raspberries from the woods, which are flowering now:

I know I posted the lingonberries before, but now they’ve got wood chip mulch, which makes them much more visible:

I prepared a little bed next to the house and planted dill, oregano, basil, and an especially nice catnip plant here:

The pear tree looks like it’s going to give us a huge crop this year:

There will be lots of apples too. These are about 1/2″ wide now:

Indian Plums grow wild here and there…edible, but not considered very tasty. We’ve yet to try them, but we will:

Unidentified pink one:

I don’t know what this is called either…I’ll call it a “Red Dangler”:

This, of course, is known as a “Red Puffy Thing”:

Yet another I can’t identify yet, but it looks like something from Star Trek:

Scotch Broom is an invasive that crowds out everything else on disturbed ground and leaves a thicket of ugly, dead stalks, but for a few weeks, it’s beautiful:

Feel like I should be able to identify this one:

Hey! I know what this is - it’s an Iris! I called them Sweet Tart plants for a while before learning that, because it smells like the candy of that name:

We have Foxglove everywhere…it’s beautiful, but highly toxic to pretty much any animal, so we’ll have to be careful about where we let the goats browse:

Swarm!
Yesterday, I was watering in a layer of mulch and soil around the potato plants when I heard a strange buzzing sound. I ignored it, and it got louder. Could the neighbor be home from work already, running some sort of machine? I turned off the water and the sound was much clearer. It was the sound of tens of thousands of bees bearing down on me, a huge black cloud the edge of which was only about 20 feet away.

I reminded myself that honeybees aren’t aggressive, particularly when they’re swarming (seeking a new hive), and stood my ground. For about five seconds. They were headed straight for me, and I ran like hell toward the house.

I dashed inside, got some local organic raw honey, and smeared a little bit into our recently purchased bee box. Ran back out the the garden with the box, but I could hear that the bees had already moved on, across the road. Oh well, that’s a project for next year anyway - we’ll probably buy a queen and workers from a local business called GloryBee. It would have been great if they’d decided to settle in with us, though.

Vacant:

Projects:
Bees can wait, but with organic eggs at $5/dozen, chickens can’t…so a new coop is rising from the rotted ruins of the one that was here when we arrived. It’s made of scrap lumber from a local sawmill and the better pieces of the old coop:

The most labor-intensive part of making your own beer is the bottling. Using bigger bottles helps, and replacing a rubber gasket now and then seems more sustainable than using new crimp-on caps every time, so we got a bunch of used Grolsch bottles…bottling is so much easier with pint bottles that don’t require use of the capper device.

Hillbillies from Brooklyn
Some might say we’re getting a little redneck-y out here in the mountains. I guess so, considering that a holiday decoration from last December is still hanging around:

I found a recipe online for making gjetost, a sweet, salty brown cheese I enjoyed in Sweden (and occasionally from a specialty shop here). It’s not a moldy type cheese, it’s boiled-down goat whey (the watery stuff left after you use goat milk to make a hard cheese).

Luckily, since our goats won’t be giving us milk until next Spring, I found a neighbor willing to part with a few gallons of whey, which would otherwise have been fed to her dogs. After boiling all day long, the two gallons of whey was a brown paste about 1″ deep in a 12″ pot. I whipped it smooth with a little hand blender and refrigerated. And it worked!

This is a love it or hate it cheese; carmelized lactose with lots of salt, about the consistency of peanut butter. My first batch turned out a little grainy, so I gave the second one more whipping with the blender, which seemed to help a bit. I was too busy to document the process, but here’s the recipe I followed, with some photos below.

How to Make Gjetost

Wrapped up for freezing:

Spread on a cracker*:

* The first batch was a little soft, so technically was mytost (same thing, but spreadable)

For the first few weeks, Koko would periodically let out the most heartbreaking-yet-hilarious screams when she wanted attention. She hardly ever does it any more, but here’s what it sounds like around here when we approach the goat pen with evening snacks:

Ummmm-ahhhhhh!

mmmmmm-EHHH!

UPDATE: Goat Ring Tones
…by request, here are links to plain MP3s of goatsongs - perfect for ringtones, error messages, etc:
Ummmm-ahhhhhh!
mmmmmm-EHHH!