This weekend was a rare one.  Matt wasn’t milking and I wasn’t doing animal chores.  Neither of us had any obligations or plans, our weekly farm work didn’t flow into the weekend, and Matt’s ever-ringing cell phone was blissfully quiet.  It was a perfect weekend for fun with horses.

On Saturday morning, Matt hitched Pat and Pearl and hooked them up to the bobsled.  We loaded some wood scraps from our barn renovation project onto the sled for deposit on the burn pile—so maybe a little bit of weekly farm work did flow into the weekend, but when you’re gliding over snow through an open pasture and the horses are being just totally perfect, it’s really hard to feel like you’re working. 

I was surprised by the bobsled.  It’s a barebones thing and people mover—just runners and decking.  We sat on a well-placed hay bale and that was the fanciest thing about the operation.  But the motion was incredible.  We got the horses going at a trot through snow up to their knees, and I couldn’t stop smiling.  It was like a magic carpet, or riding a broomstick, but it was real, there was no trick, and it came along with the promise of a future of crisp weekend bobsled rides.

After we dumped the wood onto the burn pile, we turned around and headed to Beef Hill, the wide, north-facing slope where we grazed the beef herd this summer. When we got there, Tim, driving Bear and Duke, was pulling some friends up the hill on a toboggan.  A dozen friends and neighbors were there, toting sleds, snowshoes, skis, and tractor inner tubes, taking advantage of our very first horse drawn sledding adventure.

A few days before, someone had come up with the idea of having the horses run in a loop—they would pull people up the hill, the people would sled down, and the horses would meet them at the bottom to pull them back up for another run, eliminating the hardest part of sledding, the walk back up the hill.

It worked like a dream.  It was good, hard work for the horses, I got a face full of snow on a blockbuster toboggan ride, we drank hot chocolate and caught up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while.  It was some serious fun, and just like the bobsled ride, there was the feeling that this was just the first time.

Gillian

It’s a good day for a new blog.

If you’ve been following us for a little while, you might remember our old blog—neglected and rarely updated, the last post was from January 1st, 2012.

So on the one year anniversary of our old blog’s farewell, here we are, starting fresh.  We’re hoping to give this one a little more attention, hoping to keep in better touch with all of you reading out there by bringing you the latest farm news.  Call it a new year’s resolution.

The question I am most frequently asked this time of year is, “So what are you actually doing on the farm right now?”  The past weeks have brought us loads of snow, and if there is anything green growing in the world, I haven’t found it.  So what is there to be doing on a farm in the middle of winter?

The answer, of course, is lots.  Our dairy cows are still milked twice daily and are giving us very respectable amounts of milk.  Our beef cows and our pigs need to be fed every day, and with temperatures staying solidly below freezing, bringing them water can be a challenging task.  Our laying hens are still laying, so we have eggs to wash regularly.  Sam slaughtered a steer today, Brooke is rendering lard, and since our CSA distribution and Farmstand are open year round, setting out our storage vegetables and selling them is Rochelle’s weekly gig.

Beyond routine, winter is a time to tinker, mend, and refine.  I know that Tim has at least one cultivator to refurbish, and finding a fix for the two broken points on Matt’s plow would be nice.  During the growing season, you can always hear a farmer saying, “Well, that’s a winter project.”  In these snowy months, we start on those things that we were too busy to tackle in season.

My favorite part of this season is the dreaming.  We’re a young farm, still in the making, so possibilities are boundless—a reality that is exciting and overwhelming.  I’ve been spending time doing the seed order, which is just the concrete end of some wild hopes and decisions about what the farm will look like in the coming year and years.  I’ve been staring at maps of the farm and thinking about where our perennial plantings will set their roots and the best ways to irrigate our vegetable plantings.  It’s a heady feeling, spending time figuring out the intersection between my desires and the farm’s potential. 

Keep your eyes posted to the blog—more heady feelings, cute animal photos, and a whole lot of unknowns in the coming year.

Gillian