Goats and pickles and fireflies, oh my: working, working.

I've been acquiring new skills left and right:

- loading 58 bales of hay on a pickup truck and only having one fall off halfway home

- chainsawing (those things are no joke)

- disbudding baby goats

we can discuss that last one a bit. so the kids are between 1 and 3 weeks old now and their horns are starting to grow in. many farms are going the direction of disbudding nowadays, which means burning their horns off while they're still little. we use a cauterizing iron, which looks something like a curling iron. it gets extremely hot and the actual procedure is quick, just about a minute or so per horn altogether. aitan fashioned a kid-holder (it's a milk crate with a hole cut in it) and we put them in one at a time, sit on the top, and disbud them. I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't hurt them, because they certainly make some noise while it's happening, but right afterwards they bound away and start playing like nothing ever happened, which made me feel better about it. you can think of it like a circumcision, if that helps.

why do we do it? goats with horns ram or gore people, and more often and seriously, each other, which can result in injuries. they also can get their heads stuck in things like grain feeders or fences, sometimes with dire results. when it comes down to it, they don't really need their horns, and it's a much simpler and humane procedure to do when they're babies.

we're also having the back pasture logged, about 4 acres (our neighbor jay is doing it all by himself. he's a beast). with all the tree-felling and the baby-goat-screaming, it's probably better that there wasn't a retreat this week - not really great for the freedman PR.

on a goat-related note, stucco did not make it. it's sad, but perhaps better for her as she was a little damaged from birth and may not have lived a great life anyway.

onward! to other things I have learned.

- how to plant bare-root raspberries (18 inches apart with rock phosphate, kelp and green sand in the hole)

- wild foraging for food!

that one I'm the most excited about. it started yesterday (well, it really started the night before when I was sitting in meg and adam's living room saying, "I want to learn more about foraging") while emi and I were weeding the blueberries. we came upon some mushrooms which I was pretty sure were morels. we got a few independent confirmations and this morning we ate them for breakfast in some eggs. they were awesome.

in the interests of full disclosure, that is a picture of morels that I found on the internet, because I forgot to take a picture of ours before we ate them. but they looked pretty much just like that, except growing out of cardboard mulch and thistles.

then today we were talking about more foraging, which lead to an amazing dinner of pasta with nettle and garlic-mustard pesto and fried fiddleheads. stinging nettles are growing everywhere here out of control and while they sting you when they're fresh, if you steam them for awhile they taste nice and green and spinachy

garlic mustard is also growing everywhere out of control and we just took that off the stem and blended it into the pesto raw.

also an internet picture.

fiddleheads are the immature stalks of ostrich ferns, which happen to also be growing here, not as abundantly as our other dinner content, unfortunately, because they are totally delicious.

those we battered and fried. they came out looking like little fried shrimps and they tasted amazing, fresh and kinda asparagus-y.

then for dessert we made waffles. so unnecessary, and great.

in closing, here is a picture of aitan using the tractor, which I so dearly would like to drive and am so not allowed, to transport his bike.