Deviant Dispatches

Our CSA through Circle M Farm has started up again, and it's been amazing. Every other Thursday when we pick up our box is like a delicious, strange Christmas - after three years, Spousal Unit and I are still surprised at some of the stuff that graces our kitchen. This year, we finally have a fridge big enough to house the fresh greens and produce. In past years, our tiny apartment fridges barely fit everything, and the tails of greenery would spill out of the sensitive crisper drawer and even hang out of the fridge door. Cramming everything in like that sometimes meant things went bad more quickly - there was no room to set a glassful of fresh herbs.  The benefits of our house keep surprising me. I've never needed more than a stove and a sink and a handful of fresh ingredients to cook great food and enjoy doing it. But it's a little more fun when you can move the teapot to a different counter instead of a different room to avoid oil splatters. I have more room to ...

Happy Monday! Are you the big goat or the little goat? This morning, my head felt like the little one. I'd love another day off, but that would be greedy of me. I had a great weekend, with lots of reading, knitting, time with Spousal Unit, and a few hours of wool carding at the farm. "You're not allowed to have better facial hair than me. C'mere, let me nibble it." This is one of the sheep I helped shear in the spring... ...and this is the resulting wool, cleaned, dyed, and ready for carding. I made seven rovings, which can now be turned into yarn! I really like the cotton candy one. And the blue, purple, and green one. Arranging the flower box cornucopia, just like my mama taught me.

Last weekend, we visited Eplegaarden , "da apple orchard vit da Norvegian experience." They have pretty much everything you could want in an orchard/pumpkin patch experience. Awesome animals were among them. Here, Spousal Unit and his goat friend model their fabulous hiar. We picked a small bag of ginormous apples - honeycrisp! Sandy picked her first pumpkin - ever! A great bluegrass group serenaded us as we paid for the produce. Even the shop in the big red barn was charming. This clock ran backwards! Ole &Lena's Time: Going back to the Good Old Days

I love salads. For those of you who may not know, this is a new development. Last year - our first CSA - I was over  the leafy greens by box number 3. Salads were boring and obnoxious to assemble for so little reward - healthy, but not worth it. I'd rather have had a bowl full of lima beans. (That's totally an exaggeration. I will never want a bowl full of lima beans.) I think the reason I disliked salads so much last year was the cleaning process. The great thing about fresh veggies all summer long is that they're picked in the field mere hours before arriving at your door, chosen lovingly by a farmer who is battling things like flash flooding and windstorms - and therefore, dirt and sand. But I wasn't used to using more than a dash of water to clean leaves, and I didn't really have the means to do it well. Don't get me wrong. I love that my food comes to me with a little dirt on it. It speaks to the freshness, to the recent close contact with the earth...

One day, you are all going to be so sick of farm pictures. But that day is not today, because I have lamb pictures. For some reason, lambs like containers, so these little spotted guys are hanging out near (and in) one. My main purpose in going to the farm was to work with wool, but new lambs are a bit time-consuming (and adorable) so I didn't do all that much with fluff. But I did make the blue and brown ball of roving, which is ready to be spun into yarn or used for needle felting. Turned out decent for my first one! These two were only a few hours old when I met them! Their names are Simon and Sigfried. (I went *squee* in my heart so many times while I was there.) A few of the lambs have to be bottle-fed. Some lost their mother during birth, and some are just so cold in this awful spring that they have to be reminded that food is awesome. This tiny fuzzball is one of the oldest this season at two weeks. But she's the runt of the litter, and while oth...