Farming in the shade

Another crop of small grains came off the field this week (remember to enter my giveaway here before Friday--currently Carol is the ONLY grain guesser!). We baled up a bunch of straw. We cut a couple more fields of hay. Straw vs. Hay 101: When grain is harvested the stem of the plant is left behind. This is called straw and has very little nutritional value. It is usually used for bedding. Hay, on the other hand, is grasses and other plants harvested whole for feed. Straw is generally golden colored. Hay is generally green colored. Hay bales are HEAVIER. We dewormed our sheep.  We demonstrated weaving, spinning, rug braiding, and sock knitting at our church's annual picnic. Very fun--many of our long-time friends had no idea we were so weird. And we've had relatives visiting. No time for blogging this week.  I feel a little like a line worker in a factory who cannot quite keep up with the conveyor and things are spilling off the end faster than I can catch them. 

Last week (during the craziness of fair week) we hosted a yarn dyeing workshop at the farm. The local knitting guild's members drove out for an evening of fun. Worsted or sportweight?  We presoaked their yarn in white vinegar and water. Then we guessed how much of each color dye would be needed. We guessed wrong, of course. We needed  more of every color, but the hot colors of the evening were purple and green.  We placed the presoaked yarn on plastic-covered tables and handed out the rubber gloves. And then the fun began! After they left, we steamed each skein for half an hour, and hung them out to dry. Here's a peek at what the end results were after reskeining...

This past week we harvested one of our small grain fields. The grain will be used for seed for various "green manure" projects. Occasionally, we'll plant a field to small grains, let it grow a while, and then plow it down. The greenery adds nutrients to the soil, allowing us to bypass commercial, synthetic fertilizers.  Anyone want to guess what the name of the small grain is, based on the photos?  I have a hard time telling the small grains apart, so don't feel badly if you guess wrong. Hey, I know! Those who guess will have their name entered in a drawing for a set of sheep greeting cards (my choice) from Shady Side Farm. Those who guess correctly will have their name added in the drawing twice. Ready, set, guess! Drawing ends at 10:00 PM EST this Friday, August 1.

If you are interested in practical instruction in the home arts, please visit Granny Miller's blog . Her posts on canning and freezing (including video she's made herself) are great starting points for those who are new to these almost-lost arts.

The recent  salmonella  outbreak has had people calling for more oversight in food production. Here's an editorial on why that might not be the best idea from one of my favorite websites, Local Harvest . By the way, if you're interested in buying food directly from the producer, Local Harvest can help with that. Enjoy!

Today was the biggest day of the fair for our family. We picked veggies and grains to enter in the veggie show (an almost extinct part of our county fair, which is in itself an endangered species). We packed along the show clothes and some lunch and headed out mid-morning. The kids had enough time before the show to weigh their lambs and wash them. We ate a quick lunch, and they changed into their show clothes. The first judging was on showmanship. Showmanship is really about how the kids handle themselves. They need to make eye contact with the judge, smile pleasantly, and answer questions intelligently, all while leading and setting up their lamb. Setting up refers to positioning the legs and body of the lamb so that it looks nice. It doesn't sound hard, but lambs often have other ideas! Both our kids did very well, but our daughter took first place in her showmanship class. Woot! After showmanship, the lambs are separated into four classes by gender and weight--light wether (cas...

Yesterday we brought all our fine art, home ec, and photography entries to the fairgrounds for the open class judging. Entries included: framed photos (some of which were first seen on this blog), braided and rag rugs, knitted socks, handspun and hand-dyed yarns, drawings and paintings. It's our family goal to keep our little county fair from passing away by reason of neglect. Today we brought the 4-H entries in. More photos, a notebook containing a marketing plan, a decorated cake, more handiwork and four lambs. Yesterday and today most of the 4-H and open class entries were judged. Tomorrow is the 4-H lamb show.  For those of you not familiar with 4-H, here's the wikipedia info.  I'll try to keep up with photos and text this week, but...

Three long, hot, humid days. Four men, one boy, and a bunch of power tools. 

At Shady Side Farm, we are trying to build soil health and not use synthetic chemicals on our land. I saw a poster in a doctors' office once that said "Healthy Soil, Healthy Plants, Healthy People", which I thought was very surprising. We've been learning about this as we switch over to organic, and I didn't know that any doctors had made the connection between soil health and people health yet. Good sign. (In fact, does anyone else wonder if the amazing amount of sickness and obesity is related to what we eat? And I'm not talking about eating whole milk cheese instead of 2% milk cheese, here. I'm not a fan of "lowfat" foods that have to make up for the lost taste with high fructose corn syrup. I'm talking more about food that has been bred to "keep" well, ship far, and taste like sawdust. I'll bet the "keeping" and the "nutrition" are inversely proportional. Take the strawberries from California or Florida t...

Another blogger has featured one of Shady Side Farm's rugs on her blog . If you happen to read this sometime after July 14, you may have to scroll down a ways on her blog to find today's entry. For some reason, I can't just link directly to that one post.  Since we listed the rug on April 21, 606 people have looked at that rug on etsy. We'll see what the number is after today. And perhaps we'll even sell it!

Whew! That's over... The morning started out with steady rain. The Farmer and one daughter went ahead with the large tent and set it up. They called home and asked us to bring towels. Not a good sign. We set up in the rain, and were the only ones to do so. Eventually (about an hour after the show started), the rain quit and things started to dry out. Vendors set up and we started to get traffic.  It was a fun day, and it's always good to go to these events even if it's just for the exposure. We sold some things, met some great people, and let a few try out the spinning wheel.  I talked with one fiber-loving couple who recently retired. The women told me that she was planning to do all kinds of fun stuff in retirement--spin, weave, etc. But now that she's retired, her hands fall asleep, and she's not able to do the things she planned. I saw in her face regret, and I realized again that every day is precious and life is short.  Carpe diem...

I think we're ready. We have TWO vehicles packed to the gills with goodies for tomorrow's Arts & Antiques Show .  It's been a long, frustrating, satisfying week. Here are five of the nine rugs I removed from the looms and finished off today. I cut them apart and sew the ends on my trusty Necchi in the basement. The weather forecast for tomorrow is iffy. Chance of thunderstorms. That would be especially not fun, as everything we are selling absorbs water.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Sometimes I realize that all this computer time takes away from face-to-fact contact. Like with my family. And the weeds in my garden. (By the way, thanks, Mom, for beginning the weeding process in the perennial bed.)  So I've declared Saturday, July 12, to be IRL Day! IRL stands for In Real Life (as opposed to TACM, which is Through A Computer Monitor). If you are up for a road trip (beware, gas in our area is $4.15/gallon today), we are making an IRL appearance at an art and antique show in Holland Michigan.  The Farmer is the Art and I am the Antique. If you want to plug an actual address into a GPS, here's one:  442 Washington Ave. Holland, Michigan 49423. That should get you very close. We'll be set up at the Art & Antique Show from 9 a.m. - 2 p.m.  The Farmer will be knitting socks on his circular sock knitting machine. I would love to haul a loom along and demonstrate the art of rug weaving. I don't think it's going to happen.  If you are in need of yarn...

I am the keeper of a often-neglected perennial bed. If you came to visit right now, you would be interested to see how tall the lambsquarter and other weeds are. I do know better than to let the weeds get away from me, but once again I am behind. Probably too much blogging, not enough weeding. However, perennials are absolutely stunning even when slightly neglected. Case in point--my lavender.   See if you can find the bees. They love my lavender, too.  Bees are very necessary to the life-cycle of plants. Right now we are hosting several hives of honeybees east of one of our pastures. They are between gigs--they're done pollinating the blueberries, and the squash is not quite ready for them yet. We are happy to allow the beekeeper to park his trailer of bees here. I am a bee-lover, but only from a distance. I once suited up and got an up close and personal guided tour. I was glad to see the insides of the hives. I was even more glad to be away from the hives when it was all over. ...

The Mission-minded Peace-loving Farmer's Prayer May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth. May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. Then the land will yield its harvest, and God, our God, will bless us. God will bless us, and all the ends of the earth will fear him. --Psalm 67

Major rain events here again today. We needed the rain (finally dried out after the great flood of June ), but not quite so much, quite so fast. And we could've done without the wind, easily. The medium sized poplar tree right by the house will have to come out--the whole top is cracked off and hanging, waiting to bean some unsuspecting passerby. Before the rain hit, The Farmer was working like crazy to get the big round bales in from the field. He got most of them, and the rest will have to sit at the edge of the field waiting for a buyer. The sheep barn is full. We'd still like to stack some more small square bales in the old barn's hayloft, but that'll have to wait for second cutting. First cutting is all finished, finally, thank the Lord. I've been weaving rag rugs every spare moment in preparation for an art show next weekend. The kids busied themselves yesterday with some roving and made cat toys. We listed this one in our etsy shop . They've sold pretty ...

The first couple of days right after vacation are usually busy for everyone. It's the same with farm families. The Farmer is cultivating or harrowing almost daily right now, to keep ahead of the weeds. Once the weeds get an upper hand, it's all over. This is our second year of cultivating instead of spraying the weeds. It's definitely a science and an art. Especially as half the field drowned out and needed replanting. You cultivate baby plants differently than you do larger plants. The Farmer ended up cultivating only the older corn and beans. So he rode down half the row with the cultivator down, and then lifted it up when he got to the new plantings and rode to the end of the rows. Turned around and reversed the sequence. Our good friend Joe didn't mention these sorts of situations when he told us how to make the switch from spraying to mechanical weed control... While we were on vacation having fun, the bills continued to come in. So yesterday I spent a couple of ho...