When the Homily is about Immunology

Life on the Farm update

Yesterday I spent an unusual moment of alone time at our house just sitting on the front porch smoking my pipe, sipping an IPA, and reading VDH's book "Fields Without Dreams." I paused to look around and listen. It was noisy, but not with traffic or media. The birds were going on with their near constant (sun up to sun down) cacophony of songs, the neighbors' goats were bleating in the distance, and a gentle breeze was blowing through the tops of the trees. Killick raced past me barking at whatever critter it is he is frequently chasing off our land in the eastern woods. It was one of those otherwise quiet moments of self-satisfaction...looking around at the forest around me, and the little farm we were etching out of it and realizing that I was JUST where I wanted to be. Sue and the kids (adding their own cacophony) arrived and I got up to get the grill going as we waited for some good friends to arrive.

I continue to hammer away at the cabin. It's really taking shape now and some detail work is being done. I got all the windows in, the eves finished, and just a few more spots of sheathing to put up. More shingling remains and I am staring down the barrel of the technical aspects of hanging the doors. I need to have it functionally done before I leave for Uganda so I am going to be taking advantage of late sunsets and sunny weather.

Firefly has been giving us an abundance of milk and Sue has been fine-tuning her cheese making skills. I expect she'll provide some details, but I will say that her Mozzarella is delicious! Her first try at Feta is too salty, but quite edible in my opinion - I'm looking forward to putting it in my salad. I reckon we'll continue to experiment and learn...apparently I've been charged with constructing a press for making some of the hard cheeses. As it is, we've no need to look outside of our land for our dairy needs.

Still too much demand for eggs. We basically have enough "subscribers" that we hardly have any eggs left for individual sales. We've decided to build a second coop and run to add a second flock. This we plan to do ASAP (which merely means its higher up on the to-do list than other things).

We had our first encounter with bears Saturday night. Sue was the primary participant in seeing the fellow who never really came out of the woods into the open, but did end up near the neighbors goat pens before their dogs chased them off. We wouldn't let Killick outside because we're too fond of him. I was sorta hoping the bear would go after a chicken or our goats so I could shoot it and have a bearskin rug for the cabin. The girls were a bit overly scared of the situation and so some communicative balance was in order with regard to the extent of danger a bear posed.

Berries are abundant, even though the blackberries - by far the most abundant - have not yet come to be. Our little raspberry vineyard (I guess that's what I'd call it) has been producing massively and last night Sue harvested some to make a topping for our after dinner dessert. We also have wild salmon berries and huckleberries, the latter, I read recently were sometimes used by Native Americans as fishing bait because they look like large salmon eggs.

Well plenty to do and not much time to do it. As I sit here writing I recall that I still have a ton of wood to split, which I ought to do before long so that it will dry - need to take advantage of this beautiful dry weather we've been having. People complain about rain here, but I'll stand my ground on this: one bright sunny day in western Washington is worth 10 days anywhere else I've ever lived. One bright and sunny day on our farm? Even better.