Hurricane Farm

Here are some of the much anticipated photos of our baby farm animals.  We've been quite busy getting things prepared for their births and arrivals, as well as with sugaring, but here are some shots of the recent additions to our farm.

Moments after birth--and still wet--the baby lambs hang with their mom.

Later in the day, all nestled into their own private stall.  They are twins, though it does not look like it!

Here are the hogs, still quite young, but not looking like babies any longer!  Looks quite comfortable.  Perhaps I'll join them for an afternoon snooze...

We also acquired a new calf this past week.  He is a week and half old and already he towers above our kids.  His name is Aloysius (but our son calls him "Monster Truck") and he is an Ayershire bull calf.  This breed is larger than the Jerseys and is sort of neat for us to have as they originated in southern Scotland. 

He has two bottles a day, and is already starting to eat some hay and a little grain.

We've spent most of this rainy day rebuilding, cleaning, and repainting the bee hives that I had picked up last summer.  We ordered a 3 lb. package of bees and will be getting them into their hive in about three weeks or so.  There will be several updates on that project, I'm sure.

A task up ahead is to section the pasture off into at least two, maybe three areas for grazing.  That way, we can rotate the animals from one area to another and keep the grass from getting too low.

With that in mind, I responded to an online advertisement for "Fresh Cut Cedar Posts."  There were 30 of them and I was told that I might need a LARGE truck to carry them all.  No problem, I thought, I have had 60 fence posts in there before, I can easily fit 30 cedar posts in...

How wrong I was!  These things are gargantuan!  Two trips in the truck and some heavy lifting left us with this nice pile of fresh cut logs:

Fence posts!?  I think not.  These are way too nice (and huge) to use for posts.  I will use some of the smaller ones for end and corner posts, but I have some other plans for the large ones.  My sugar shack design has now changed from "traditional" shack to a post and beam pavillion-type deal using these cedar poles!  I think that it will be unique and also let us still enjoy the "outdoors" aspect of sugarin' that we love so much.

The sugarin' season is just about up, but here are some photos of last week's late night boil.

The whole family was out there working on making the sweet stuff, and we managed to even rig up some lights so we could see what we were doing.

We had a "warming" fire going as it was starting to get pretty cold again that night.  It hit about 20 degrees, but the sugaring season is so short that one must take advantage of every possible moment!

We had a pretty yummy dinner out there!

We even set up a little serving table!  We're so lucky that the kids enjoy this sort of thing...

In the past, I mentioned that we have the fire so hot in the evaporator that you can sometimes see flames licking out of the smokestack...In the next picture you can sort of see them shooting out a little bit.  Watch out!  Hot fire!

We still have a few more gallons left to boil, but it looks like we'll be topping 11 gallons of pure maple syrup this year!  Quite an improvement from our make-shift efforts with Hotel pans over an open fire...

Gallons of our finished syrup ready to be bottled into glass jars...Yummy!