We already found mushrooms...lobster last week and an absolute bounty of puffballs yesterday. Puffballs are edible when their interiors are still white. The boys hatched a plan to make a vegetable soup. I sat by with a sandwich, lobbing advice here and there, though none of it was needed. The boys have plenty of ability in the kitchen, which I admire.
Tomorrow we are having 10 lambs slaughtered. They have been good lambs and well-behaved, with the exception of Whitey Ford who I would have named Houdini had I known what an escape artist he was destined to become. Heidi has never developed an affinity for baseball history and thus never latched on to calling him by his duly given name but rather and spontaneously redubbing him Frankie White.
Most lambs, when they want out of a paddock, will get tangled in the fence, or knock it down. Not Frankie. He holds the 'most escapes' record by a country mile, with at least 9. Typically one is the most a given lamb can manage. But even more impressive to me is that I have never been able to discover where along the fence he made his break. He is either a world-class jumper, or a shapeshifter, taking snake form and slithering under the fence.
People always say you can't name your animals that are destined for the freezer. But being a natural contrarian and an avid namer of things, I could hardly help myself. Which is why tomorrow we will say goodbye, not to lambs #0-9, but instead to:
- Rorschach
- Cleopatra
- James Pinto
- Dottie
- Butterball
- B-Rabbit
- and the aforementioned Frankie White
The other three failed to distinguish themselves and will thus remain nameless.
Remaining for another two months will be Charlotte's ramling B-Rabbit and Pepper the European import.
Ewes remaining will be
- Evelyn
- Lucy Honeychurch
- Charlotte Bartlett
- Elizabeth Doolittle
- Clarabelle
- Cicily Tyson
- Betty White
Last but not least we have our first East Friesian ewe lamb that was born on-site: Babette Bartlett, daughter of Charlotte and Tuck the mighty.
In related news we discovered that planting in last winters sheep bedding is far and away the easiest way we have yet found to produce a low effort, high yield squash patch.
Likewise, my green dent corn grew fantastically in the chicken garden. Ears were commonly 2x the size of last year's typical. After planting I topdressed the soil with what I could scrape up from below the chicken's roost.
Yield was reduced significantly by some voracious varmint that was able to climb the corn stalks, chew through the husks and devour 7/8ths of an ear. We lost more than 10 ears in this manner, which was another first after growing this type of corn for 5 years.
Nevertheless, it's progress.
