New animals at the farm! Here are our two new piglets - Alice and her brother - her brother actually belongs to our friends Lynn and Betsy and they will need to name him :)


And here are the 'cow-boys' as we call them ... "Here cow-boys!, Here cow-boys!" and they come running for their pails of milk (most of which now seems to go on the ground or all over my pant legs in their haste to get it drunk down and FAST....) I was telling my son Seth that it used to annoy me when people would comment about how dumb sheep were - after all, sheep know what is important for sheep to know - but now if someone were to comment about how dumb calves are, well, I'd have a hard time making an argument.

Trouble's pups are doing well, growing and eating and sleeping a lot! She's taking excellent care of them although I think she pines for the day when she can come help work stock! They were a week old on Monday and it looks to me like they will be nice-sized pups.

The weather's been, well, dreadful - cold rain, snow flurries - clouds.... O New Mexico, how we miss you!

It was a busy weekend here on Rustic Road 4; my sister Suzanne came down from northern Minnesota for a visit which began with a trip to IKEA (new bathmat, some little glasses for dessert wine and new chairpads for Jim's cafe) and then the giant Mall of America for lunch at Nordstrom's with my niece Rachel. Rachel works at Nordstrom's in their handbag department where she has been a top seller of handbags that cost as much as my car. A very different life; when I showed up with a dozen of our gorgeous blue eggs she hardly knew what to think...it was one of those moments when I realized I am truly a hick!

At any rate, we put up the little greenhouse and I moved the lettuces out of the house and will transplant the head varieties out of the flats and into pots later this week; we fixed the fences that hang over the little Beaver Creek - this is a yearly chore that really only takes a little time but looms large as a project, I hauled one load of manure out of the barn and put it on the asparagus bed, Jim helped me castrate the calves (better now than later...) then we burned a pile of boxes and branches, and I began the process of cutting buckthorn. Indeed, I also found time to paint a "Open Saturday at 7:30" sign for Jim, did some maintenance cleaning on the kennel, took the dogs for a walk and swim and handled Trouble's pups - along with a little tiny video for their video diary. Last night I watched a great movie about an artist named Vik Muniz called "Wasteland" about a collaboration with Brazilian catadores.

This will be a busy week as spring starts to gear up - and we prepare for Birdie to join us on Sunday!

Deb Birnie's Aggie says "Happy Easter!"

We're waking to snow again this morning; it is coming down steadily although according to the news on MPR it should stop by noon. I've been outdoors already and it just doesn't seem all that cold...or maybe I'm acclimating.

The pups are doing well, even the little gals, and Trouble is being a great mom for a first-timer. She's a lovely Bouvier. For those of you who were waiting, yes BIRDIE is PREGNANT! She'll come here in a couple weeks to have and raise her pups. Seth (my son whose family companion Birdie claims) has conveniently planned a roadtrip to the east coast during that time. He tells me he had enough puppy raising chores as a kid!

I did move the chicks out of the house yesterday; it was all a bit much for even me ~ my friends know that our old farm kitchen has been home to orphan lambs, ducklings, chicks, piglets ~ as well as a place to make chevre and bottles of milk for calves ~ but even I needed to draw the line this time around!

Trouble's pups are born today! She flooded the kitchen floor around 1:30 a.m. and went into labor at around 4:45 with the first pup born at 5....I've set up a blog for her pups at www.troublepups.blogspot.com

An early morning here, up at 4 a.m. to do chores before heading out to a trial with Solo. He did well, getting a first place with a score of 197/200 and the best news is that we were back home by noon. We took the calves outdoors for some sunshine and introduced them to the bucket which will make feeding them easier (if messier for a while!) The little chicks are doing okay although the idea of having them, Trouble and her pups, plants, etc. all in the house is making me have second thoughts....looks like a cold wet week ahead!

I was busy in the kitchen yesterday when I realized that a peeping noise was coming from our family room...meaning, you guessed it! The chicks were beginning to hatch! We have 12 right now, all from brown eggs - none of the blue eggs have hatched, wierd!

The new calves are doing fine, glugging their gallon of milk replacer and cavorting about the barn during the day. At night they are put in pens so that the sheep can bring their lambs inside during this nasty weather.

Yesterday I snuck away to the big city to the American Crafts Council show - wonderful things, most too nice or too expensive for our life - but I was certainly appreciating the gifts and talents of the artists who have stuck with it. Today we went BACK to the city for some car-shopping since my van is now almost a luxury item....we looked mostly at volkswagon jetta sportwagons...they seem great with the exception of the unfortunately uncomfortable seats. We're going to keep looking however.

Mr. Beautiful is still very young so his tail will get thicker and more colorful as he matures ~ having said that, here he is, displaying. He will raise his tail and make it shimmy as he walks sideways - it's sort of funny when I think about it - but I suppose it's part of his display behavior as he courts the peahens or the ancient goose or the birdbath...whatever...he's not particularly choosy!

It was a busy weekend; we got the sheep sheared and were amazed that the price of our clip went up to a whopping 54 cents per pound, almost paying for the shearer this year who charges a trip charge of $30, a $2.50 fee per sheep to shear plus $1.00 to trim their hooves. They came through the winter in better shape than I'd feared what with the extreme cold.

I see that the bees actually did make it through the winter as well - and have ordered some bee cake (pollen, sugar, vitamins, medication) from B and B Honeyfarm which should come this week and give them a boost.

I moved the chicks out of the kennel into the henhouse in their own section along with feeders, waters and a heatlamp. They adjusted well and I'm sure the dogs are glad to have them gone! Then I transplanted tomato seedlings into peatpots and planted head lettuces into flats; all of which are still in the family room. This weekend we will put the cover on the greenhouse and get that set up for lettuce. I see that the raspberries had a really tough time over the winter; either mice or some other rodent seems to have stripped most if not all the canes. I know they will recover for next year but wonder if we'll get any crop at all this year. Time will tell - the rabbits stripped the dwarf apples I'd planted near the kennel and I highly doubt they'll recover. They didn't get the bottom so much as up the trunk; Jim thinks that the snowpack was so high that they just ate higher up as the snow piled up.

Most of the snow is now gone; there's still some in the ditches and in the woods but the pastures are mostly clear and we have not had the flooding that was predicted which means they should dry out and kick in to growth fairly soon. We still are feeding hay of course.

The little calves should be coming this afternoon; I'll post when they actually get here. Trouble is heavy with pups now so I don't know that she'll be much help with any of the stock for a few weeks. She's due on the 19th. Her sister Sam had a great weekend at an AKC herding trial, coming in with a 93/100 on Saturday for a Reserve High in Trial! Sunday she didn't do quite as well but still qualified...one more qualifying run and she'll have her title. The fellow who has her has done a wonderful job training and trialing and I really appreciate the effort he'd made so that we can see what our dogs are made of.

Here are a few pictures of lambs from the new Dorper ram. All these 'circus lambs' are ewe lambs! Jim wants to keep them all.

Gail was a beauty as a youngster - she's now 12 years old and still a wonderful girl.

Ch. Briarlea Blackstone Cadette

The chicks arrived on Thursday, 51 of them, all lively and chirping away at the post office when I picked them up at 7:30 a.m. They are in the kennel building with a heat lamp, feeders and water and I honestly believe they have grown since then! I'll be surprised if they still fit in the little kiddie pool by this time next weekend.

Also on Thursday, I drove over to Phyllis' house to visit with Susan and Noche' and to let Trouble work sheep a little bit. One of the old ewes at Phyllis' house had milk fever and was doing poorly - I brought her two lambs home with me yesterday and they're on milk replacer and creep feed now. I rounded out the day by taking Solo to Warren's for training (french ringsport) - it was his first session since last December and he was hot to go! It was great! Then yesterday we went to Eau Claire where we trained obedience at a new site ~ we're entered in trials this month and he needs de-sensitizing to all the commotion that comes with indoor spaces and lots of dogs and kids.

Today we worked around the place, Jim hauled hay out to the pasture where there are some dry-er spots for the ewes and lambs. The barnyard is a mess of course between all the melt-off and rain and the less time they need to spend there, the better. We are up to 28 lambs now; it has been a relatively uneventful lambing season (thank goodness!)

We sat down with pad and paper this morning to figure out our costs for the chickens - it used to be that they were cheap, cheap, cheap...but last year between buying the chicks, buying feed and paying for processing they cost us about $12 each. That's expensive. On the flip side, a chicken will last the two of us almost a week since they tend to be BIG and, of course, tasty.