We’ve stayed toasty this Winter by the wood stove in our little house, newly insulated and sided with tulip poplar boards. We’ve entertained ourselves by breaking ice in water troughs, shoveling snow, homeschooling, preparing food, Primal Planitz™ planning, research, and coaching, doing bodywork, dining by candle light, making art, sewing, playing music, snuggling up and reading Little House on the Prairie.
Our farm animals are strong and healthy and hopefully bred after staying outside most of the time except the few coldest days where they had the luxury of chewing their curd happily hunkered down out of the wind in the barn. The cows and sheep and Rosa, our mare, have been filling their bellies with hay from Burke’s Garden. Our laying hens and livestock guardian dogs have been feasting on lamb and pork. We’ve deep bedded the garden with lots of cow and chicken poop, humanure, ashes, and wood shaving.
We’ve dined each day, ourselves, on grass fed beef and chicken raised on Burke’s Garden Farm or Miller’s Organic Farm stored in our freezer and fresh milk and cream straight out of our A2 Jerseys. Avyanna makes our raw unsalted butter, sour cream, and yogurt. Our never-heated, never fed sugar, never medicated honey comes from Tatara Ridge.
We augment our mostly local raw meat and dairy diet with bites of hydroponic tomatoes, lemons from Florida, celery and cilantro juice and dates California, avocados from Central America. We have fish and oysters every Sunday shipped in from the coast. And, when we get stir crazy at home, which happens about once a month, we dine out on sashimi or rare “still mooing” steak with guacamole, tomatoes, and pico de gallo.
As the ice begins to tease us with the first pre-Spring melt, we sit in the hammock eating wineberry ice cream watching the creek waters fill their banks. The geese are returning. The daffodils are beginning to sprout. The crocuses are blooming. The ants are coming out of hibernation (which tastes like lemon by the way).
Our meat-fed laying hens with the extra hour of sunshine have began foraging out and doubled their egg production. It’s time to dig out the seeds. We’ll try tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, parsley, cilantro, snap peas, cabbage, and sunflowers this year. We’ve started saving the root balls of the celery to sprout for the garden.
We have been truly blessed with this abundant life so connected to nature. We hope all the snow melt will make for a year of lush, green pastures, healthy and happy animals, healthy meats and dairy, and healthy happy people.
