With all four baby boy goats now in the freezer and lots of eggplant, cucumber and pumpkin from the garden, my mom hosted a Persian feast with a bunch of friends from Iran.  This was the Mokhalafat – the accompaniments to the main dishes with fresh chopped vegetables from the garden, lacto-fermented pickles, homemade goat…

We got ONE casaba melon – just one, but oh my goodness, it is huge!  It’s a cantaloupe-type melon, but the size of a watermelon.  The plants set so many fruits and they were all tragically destroyed by the awful melon borer moths.  I hate those things!  They migrate through and can be avoided, but…

Ethan’s grandmother recently had a bad fall and broke both her ankle and leg – one on each side.  She was not doing very well, but is better now that she is out of the hospital and at home.  We managed to finally go down for a short visit.  We were all happy to see…

  There are about a dozen blooming sow thistles right near the milking shed, and every day I have seen so much life on and around them.  There are at least twenty of these little butterflies at any given time.  For some reason the name Horace’s Dusky Wing comes to mind, but that could be…

When I was a kid my mom would get out a hot plate and let us put pieces of paper on it to draw with crayons.  The heat melted the crayons as you drew, so it was almost like painting with wax.  I remember really enjoying drawing this way, almost like wet-on-wet watercolor in which…

The corn is not only tasseling, but little ear tufts are out, too!  These seem to have appeared overnight.  I was even watching for them carefully this year. (you can get a little glimpse of the incredible jungle of squash vines in the background there).   We got the first watermelon, too!  I grew the…

 The piglets are weaned!  Star is so happy.  They were getting so big and annoying to her.  I remember that moment, when Rose was two and a half and was flipping herself all over my body while I was nursing her, and kneed me in the face. They aren’t super happy about it, of course,…

For years now I had thought that all the little holes we saw every where were from mice, but we recently discovered that they are actually toad holes.  That must be how they stay cool and hydrated during the hot day. One evening when we were out finishing the chores around dusk, one little toad…

 There’s been so much rain lately, the pig’s wallow is twice the usual size.  You can see the high-water mark on Bee.  The wallow is pretty deep.  The pastures are growing back so well right now with all the rain, but it makes it hard to get the chores done and not be sopping wet…

Having older kids and then a new baby, it was hard to remember what it was like with child-proofing.  I don’t know that I even did any childproofing.  I didn’t need to.  All the fragile knick-knacks were put away, but that was it. So childproofing was far from my mind when I moved my herb…

This is our cat Teasel, and she loves to sleep on the speed hump on hot days.  We call this her “Roadkill Impression.”  Ethan always jokes that we should put up a sign saying, “Dear Earthskillers, please do not take our cat.  She is not dead yet.”  The rumor was that they were going to…