"Love Coming Home To This Sweet Face"

A friend of mine sent this picture of her favorite goat from her farm.   She included the above quote with her picture.

This is Mr. McHowl.  Even though he won't let me come close to him,  he waits for me in the morning by my door.  I do have to bring the other dogs inside before I drop a bowl of food right out my door.  He is very skittish and he waits until I go back inside before he gets close to the bowl.  He makes me happy when I see him.

You have seen this picture before.  This is what happens when the hogs see you coming - they run to greet you.  And look how we love our dogs!  OK...so it all revolves around food - but who cares what the motivation is.

Animals engage our attention.  They greet us with a snort, a bark, a jump or a meow; and they make us feel welcomed into their world.   And for a moment in time - we forget what worries us.





And now all the baby animals have arrived.  And they all engage our attention and make us happy.

200 Baby Chicks

3 litters of baby rabbitts

7 baby hogletts that are the new hooligans

175 baby ducklings

The garden is booming because it is too cold for the bugs.

Brussel sprouts, lettuce, radish, potatoes, pees, carrots, artichoke, kale.  I learned you just cut the tops off the lettuce and it grows back!  So you don't need a lot of lettuce plants.  You can't see the small tomato and pepper plants in the dirt.



I almost forgot about the bees.   I received them last weekend and they are catching the flow of nectar.   I moved them into the garden that we have fenced off from predators - like those hooligan hoglets which keep trying to get into the garden beds.

Beehive 1

Beehive 2

And speaking of predators... when you live on a farm, you begin to understand life as a food chain.  Even the dirt is a living organism.  If you kill one tiny microbe with pesticide you are using to kill something else; you also kill the things that lives off that microbe.  And maybe the thing that lives off that microbe is important to a small creature that is critical to a plant.  And maybe that plant is critical to making the air that we breath and the food that we eat!  You really begin to see and understand how everything is involved in a web of connectivity.  Even the smallest microbe is as important as a human in the web of life.

The word 'sustainability' is used in a lot of different situations - from the corporate world to organic farming.  But I am beginning to understand this word as - DO NO HARM.  Do no harm to your soil, do no harm to your animals, do no harm to the people around you - everything is connected and needed.   It is a word easily thrown around, but very difficult to live when you have been brought up to just buy whatever you need, kill what you don't want in your yard, and close you door when you don't want people to be involved in your life.

And so, we have had 20 straight days of rain, one day of sun and now it is dark and raining again. But what the heck, the animals are always happy to see us and doesn't that make anyones day!!