First Birthday Friday!

It's hard to believe, but our Farmer Sam turned one year old today! He had a great day (the rest of us enjoyed it too) full of fun, popcorn, cake, and ice cream. I'll explain the popcorn in a minute ;0).

Smokestack and I saw an ad for a popcorn machine in the shopper's guide this week. We went to look at it and got an incredible deal on a nearly-new popper. We're going to try growing old-fashioned colored popcorn and selling it at the Farmer's Market, as well as selling regular popcorn at any event we can get into. We tried the popper out today and it worked like a charm.

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock

Expressions From A Year Of Life

Fair Friday

We have a few things going on here at the farm, but no pictures. Therefore, today is Fair Friday, as our county fair was this week.

Smokestack entered some of his honey and won third place in the "Amber" category. That category totaled eight entries, which was a fairly large amount of competition compared to most agriculture categories (such as persimmons and fingershape eggplant:).

The winning giant pumpkin weighed 140 pounds.

Farmer Sam enjoyed his first ride on a merry-go-round. He had a little trouble staying astride his mount.

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock

Lemon

Farm Saturday

I apologize for the lack of Farm Friday posts lately. I'll get back on track now.

We've planted carrots, radishes, beets, kale, lettuce, leeks, rutabagas, spinach, cabbage and mixed greens (turnip, mustard,spinach, kale, and collards) in our fall/winter garden. We're also planning to plant peas, broccoli, more varieties of lettuce, raddichio, arugula, claytonia, minutina, endive, and cornsalad. That sounds like a lot, but it's all planted so close that it doesn't really take up very much space.

I'm building a peaked roof on my first (Salatin-style) chicken pen, so it looks like a little house now. I'm not finished yet, but when I do I'll take pictures.

Last week we bush-hogged the pasture to beat the brush down. It looks pretty good now, but again, we don't have any pictures yet.

The Cullman County Fair is this week. Smokestack is going to enter some of his honey. If he wins, we might add "Award Winning" to the label. :)

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock

Green Beans Anyone?

This morning (before it got hot) we picked a LOT of green beans at our Grandparents' garden.

We'll be snapping green beans for a while! I've got to go snap beans now or we'll be up until midnight.

~Smokestack

Introducing Cocoa

Yesterday we added a mascot to our farm, meet Cocoa.

She is a six week old Australian shepherd puppy. Our Aunt and Uncle had unexpected puppys and they gave one of them to us. As you can see she has pretty bright blue eyes, which are fairly rare in most dogs, but evidently are common in Australian shepherds. The mother (Patches) has one blue eye and one brown eye.

~Smokestack