llama Grove Groove

Our friend Heather introduced us to the way that gardens are done these days. Even large scale farmers are doing this. It’s actually easier, so we’ll go with it for this year, anyway. So we won’t till next year, we’ll just put our compost on the rows we already established. We’ll put the shavings from the apple tree trimmings between our rows (either that or that’s where we’ll till to keep the weeds down). This way we’ll have walking paths and not be giving too many weeds our hard-earned manure.

It’s that time of year again. Now we have raspberries that need made to jam. Lots of stuff in the freezer that will be great later.

This is the first time we’ve tried freezer jam. It feels almost like cheating. There is so little mess to clean up, so few dishes, no stove top heat. Hope it turns out!

These little guys came back from the brink after being stepped on and having a small drought. Thank goodness for tastely little troopers.

The biggest challenge to living out here and keeping a real life with everything a real life has to offer is getting things done in a timely manner. Mother nature has her schedule, the boss at the paying job has a schedule, friends have schedules, and we all have a laundry list of items to get done each week, season, year. Some things start to slip. They might not be done right when they should. Like thinning the apple trees or putting down a new layer of gravel on the driveway. So we only weeded half the garden. *shrug* Things being the way they are, we chose the half that had veggies. It seemed a reasonable solution. We also haven’t been putting the big animals into stalls at night; this way we don’t have to clean any stalls but the chicken stalls. Besides, the big animals have a llama to protect them. Why won’t horses just run off coyotes already?

The biggest outside put-off item on the agenda this week was trimming the horses hooves. He’s got really good hooves. They grow strong and slowly. He only needs them rasped every few weeks to keep them down. But when other things take priority, the rasping might be skipped or forgotten. So today he needed the clippers as well as the rasp. Ray did a great job his first time trimming hooves. He’s always taken care of alpaca, llama, goat, and now cow feet, so really it expands his repertoire.

Ray also cleaned the barn, took the neighbor’s tractor into town and had beet juice put into the tires for stability and to top it all off, he made breakfast. A true Renaissance man.