It's Friday afternoon, do you know where your kitchen table is?

I can rarely find my kitchen table on Fridays. I know where it is, really, I do. This table-clutter problem arises every Friday as it is my main "prep" day for Saturday's market, causing my kitchen to become enveloped in all things of a markety nature.

Some of the things that are obstructing the view to my table are the many jams and jellies that I make all year long. The jam usually lives in my pantry but being that I don't always remember things unless they are in plain sight the jam makes it's migration to the table on Friday so that I won't forget to load it...still not a guarantee. Much of the produce to make the jams is harvested from the trees and gardens on our property and then frozen or canned while it is in season. Our Rhubarb is growing fast and furious right now, so Wednesday I made a batch of fresh Strawberry Rhubarb Jam-one of my favorites. I was searching for other ways to use up some of my tart little rhubarb friends and came across a recipe for Blueberry Rhubarb jam...hmmm....interesting. When I mentioned to my dear husband that I thought I would try making the blueberry/rhubarb concoction for next weekend's market, he wrinkled his nose and with a look of great pain on his face said, "Ewww, you can't do that, blueberries and rhubarb don't belong together!" Well, he has been married to me long enough to know better-if you tell me it can't/shouldn't be done-it's getting done. Now he has sealed his fate, he will be eating blueberry rhubarb jam on his toast next week....I will let you know how that all turns out. In the mean time, I have a large collection of other flavors headed for market: Blueberry, pear butter, caramel apple, peach, pear, strawberry, apple pie, strawberry rhubarb...why is that any different than blueberry rhubarb?
Salted Nut Rolls also adorn my table, for the time being.

For the first few markets I only bake about 5 different varieties of cookies. Once the season gets fully underway I will have about 8 varieties plus "Puppy Chow" and some other snacks. I do all of my baking on Fridays because I am kind of a freshness nut...among other types of nuts that I have been called. Interestingly many of my neighbors 'happen' to stop by on Fridays...coincidence?
Fridays are impossibly busy and always fly by so quickly. Once the baking is done everything has to be labeled, the truck has to be loaded, any produce that I am taking needs to be harvested and cleaned, hand spun yarn gets boxed, clay figurines need to be packed and loaded and lastly, eggs are sorted and ready to put into the cooler in the morning. You may be wondering- if I am so busy why am I writing on my blog? Well...I have to do something while I am waiting for the oven timer to go off every ten minutes or so!

Incidentally, I am not very excited about the weather forecast for tomorrow morning-

Cloudy and 39 degrees by morning with winds at 15-25 miles per hour......I may be eating a lot of baked goods myself.

Chicken math

This morning I was trying to get some photos of the lambs because my intended blog post was going to be an update on the littlest of sheepies......that was my intention....until I got a call from Sand Hill Preservation. It was Linda calling, "Corinne, we have your order of 5 Blue Orpington chicks ready...and Glen threw in an extra." Those of you that have been following my blog can guess the rest of the conversation. "He didn't want to leave just 6 chicks in the box, so there are a few filler chicks." I hesitantly ask, "How many filler chicks, Linda?" Wait for it, wait for it. Her response was, "Just 12." Aaaaand there it is.
I love these people. They are the best chicken enablers EVER!
So, in addition to the five...(or six) Blue Orpingtons that I ordered, I ended up with a few more friends than I had anticipated. I am bad at math, I think we all know that by now, but even I know that 6+12=18, right? So why did I end up with 20 chicks?

I love that the extra chicks are always an interesting breed. This time, other than a couple of unidentified chickies, there is a Red Dorking, 5 Barred Hollands, and a few Red Pyle Cubalayas.
Here's the problem...once again this was only part of my original order. So, let's review. I ordered 20 chicks all together last winter. I received the first group of 10 a couple of months ago, which ended up being 24, this group of "5" turned out to be 20, I still have 5 Welsummer chicks coming at some point.....5 more.....5. Just 5.

To market to market.......

Today was the opening day for the outdoor Freight House Farmers' Market. I sometimes do not relish getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays-even before my roosters have awakened, to load the truck, drive all the way downtown and get my booth set up before the sun comes up, but I must admit I was very excited this morning at the prospect of seeing my fellow vendors and my favorite customers again. There is always somewhat of a party atmosphere at market, especially so on opening day.

See, there was even a marching band performing!

Even some of the dogs got in on the celebration.....I am not sure what a dog has to do to get this number of Mardi Gras beads.....

One of the things that draws many people to the market is the endless array of goodies. Unfortunately, I am drawn to the goodies as well and I am forced to be in close proximity to them for a good portion of every Saturday. Most people gain extra weight in the winter, but I place the blame for my summer 'Farmer's Market 5' squarely on the shoulders (or pastries) of my market buddies....or ARE they my buddies???

Market generally turns into a 5 hour long brunch.
I guess you could eat healthy...if you wanted to.....but I don't eat meat so I clearly had no choice but the goodies.
My other downfall is the selection of beautiful plants that are available. I am probably safe for the short term since most of the bedding plants are not quite ready for sale..yet. I will be in HUGE trouble when my next door vendor returns with his Hostas. I am addicted to hostas and unfortunately there are thousands of varieties and even a few that I don't have..yet. Maybe...a few. There were lots of nice hanging baskets this week though.


It was also fun to see all of my canine friends again. There are three booths that sell gourmet doggie treats so there are a large number of dogs in attendance at the market. Like these three cuties.
Oops, four.
There are also ample opportunities for 'people watching'. It is one of the few places where you can see manly-men doing what they probably consider to be kind of unmanly-man stuff. Like carrying around baskets of pretty flowers for their wives....and looking SO excited about it.
Or walking his wife's cute little dog that happens to be sporting a John Deere tee-shirt and bandanna....maybe the John Deere tee-shirt was an attempt to 'man up' the little dog.

Or carrying a hot dog shaped balloon.........
Yep, I needed to see that again too....
I am really hoping that this guy is a hot dog vendor.

Thanks to all of my regular customers for making it a great day today and for finding me after the market shuffle.

The wild bunch

" That was exhausting!"

Lambing is done!

Lambing season has officially ended at Crosswinds Farm. With only two ewes left to go on Tuesday, first-time mom, Cassie, had a gorgeous ewe lamb with the softest, crimpy, single-coated fleece. This ewe lamb is either fawn or mioget-leaning more towards fawn. These pictures make it look like there is a yellowish cast to the fleece indicating mioget but in reality I am not seeing that...I will give it some time. Her sire is mioget and her dam is modified as well.

By Wednesday night my final holdout, Lovey, started labor....of course she made this momentous decision just as I was getting ready to head for bed....my sheep have the BEST timing!

Lovey always has twins, so I was anticipating one last lovely set of twins to end the season-SOMEBODY needed to pick up the slack-most of the ewes had single births this year which was quite unusual for my group.

Since Lovey is an old pro at this there was nothing remarkable about her labor, everything was progressing quite normally. The water bag was presented and soon afterwards the first lamb was delivered. It was a nice ewe lamb. Immediately after birth the lamb was having trouble. She was very still and was not attempting to breathe so I quickly cleared her airway and gave her some brisk rubs with the towel and after a few tense minutes she was up and looking for lunch. Lovey began to push again and soon the feet and head of a ram lamb were visible, with a final push he was delivered. Instantly I knew something was terribly wrong, there was only a feeble attempt to breathe and almost no movement. I tried everything in my bag of tricks to save him, but I wasn't able to. I was heartsick. This happens sometimes, and I know that there was nothing else that could have been done, but that doesn't make it any easier. This is the most difficult part of shepherding. I am thankful that at least one of the twins survived.

This is the lucky little ewe lamb..............I guess now that all of the lambs are on the ground I should start assigning some names.
I am keeping a close eye on her as she seems a bit less vigorous than most lambs. She is nursing well, in fact, Lovey always has a huge udder and is producing enough milk for the twins that she was expecting so I know that the lamb is getting more than her fair share of milk-no problem with that. All of her vital signs are good-she just seems pretty quiet and subdued. I am not sure what happened with this pregnancy-just one of those things, I suppose. I still have them in the lambing jug and have cut out Lovey's grain ration completely to slow her milk production a bit. They won't be going out with the rowdy group for another couple of days until I am certain that everything is OK.

The rest of the group is doing great and growing by leaps and bounds...literally. What a nice crop of lambs this year.

It has been raining here for the past couple of days, so I am hoping to get individual pictures for a blog post of each lamb once the weather clears........maybe they will even have names by then!