May 2021
The $5 Haircut
From overgrown woolly bears to naked-looking sheep, the transformation on shearing day is woolly amazing! Best of all, our shearer only charges $5 a sheep. I asked if she could cut my hair too but she didn't think the sheared style would look good on me. Too bad.
This year, we shipped all our raw wool to Fredericton, New Brunswick where a young fine artist and a local nature school will be using the materials to not only handcraft their own projects but teach kids weaving on a peg loom. What we definitely aren't going to do this year is make dryer balls out of our wool after last year's 200 wool dryer ball $600 fiasco. I still have 10 sets left. Dryer balls anyone?
Do my sheep only give birth to boys?
Denver and Buddy (as named by their new owners) have left the farm and are now happily grazing in their new paddocks. I miss their woolly cuteness and bouncing energy but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that next year my ewes will finally give birth to at least one girl. To date, my 2 ewes have given birth to 6 boys. What's up with that? Next spring, I'm taking matters into my own hands and purchasing 2 additional ewe lambs in the hopes that I have more birthing luck in larger numbers.
My accidental naked bum
Our family recently spent the weekend at a hotel and I unwisely decided to go to the pool with the kids. I had my bathing suit on underneath my clothes so that when I got to the pool all I had to do was undress. As I started to walk towards the edge of the water, I felt air flowing around my bum. I put my hands on my bottom and there was nothing covering it. I looked down at my stomach and there was extra material around my waist. I had my bathing suit on backward. Who does that? Me. Just me.
If that wasn't embarrassing enough, I went to the doctor's this month and when I came home, I realized I had a gaping hole in the bum of my NEW jeans. I can only imagine what the nurse must have been thinking as she stood behind me and politely asked me to step onto the scale to be weighed. Groan.
PS. Did you realize that at a certain age they start measuring your height again? I told her I was pretty sure I had not grown and she replied with a smile, "No, dear. We're seeing if you've shrunk." I'm happy to report that I'm not any shorter…yet.
The bees are alive!
What does a beekeeper do all winter long? They worry and fret about their bees so much that by the time spring comes around they have no fingernails left and they are certain their bees are all dead. Or maybe that's only me? I definitely breathed a huge sigh of relief to discover my bees were still alive. Today, we picked up our new Queens so we can split our hives to create even more.
Too many eggs
We are literally drowning in eggs over here. We had eggs in buckets, on the counter, in the fridge, on the ground…I couldn't keep up. I've been water glassing all the clean eggs, dating and refrigerating the dirty ones and still, we have too many. I spent all of last weekend baking my most egg-heavy recipes such as coconut flour cake, cookies, and bread. I'm now looking into pickling eggs and I may even try fermenting a few.
Indoor salad garden and productivity
Anyone who read the post about my New Year's resolutions is probably wondering what the heck happened to my indoor salad garden and all this talk of meaningful productivity around the homestead. Well, I'm excited to say we finished the indoor salad garden and it has been producing greens but when I sat down to write about it, I realized it was the wrong time of year. Everyone is now growing outdoors. Doh! So, I've archived the post for the fall.
As for meaningful productivity, I'm trying different things to see what actually works for me and this is taking longer than I anticipated. Although some ideas sounded great in theory, when I put them into practice in real life, they fell flat or I lost interest. Fortunately, a few things have worked and I am eager to share them with you very soon.
