The ducks’ wings are getting stronger and stronger, but they aren’t strong enough yet to let the ducks really fly. Everytime the girls flap their wings, little puffy feathers jump off the ducks and make me think of cottonwood trees.

Tomorrow the poor ducks have to stay in their house/run because their pen needs to be rebuilt. The current pen isn’t able to stand up to the stress of being moved so often. Andy and I both dread moving day, which seems to be occuring more frequently lately. The ducks are making mudholes around the waterer much, much quicker than they had been. Once the girls have a good mudhole going, the pen goes to pot pretty quickly. I shoulda taken a shot of the most recent mess, but I didn’t so here’s the last one. It’s not as impressive as the current one.

When Andy heads down the hill each night to put the sheep in the barn, I’ve been letting the ducks out to play and hunt down moths. They (the ducks) make cute little whirring, swirly, chirpy noises while they dig around in the grass. I’ve also been giving them lots of yummy treats like blackberry guts leftover from the wine juicing process and bits of tomato core. In this next photo, the girls are looking at me as if to ask, “More?”

I have transferred the small batch of wine I made into its secondary fermenter to sit for a few months. It’s only about a gallon and a half, but what I tasted after the main fermentation tasted like a yeasty red wine. Which is to be expected since the yeast is still in suspension, but at least it didn’t taste sour or anything like that. It has a nice red color to it, but I’ve read that it will fade over time.

The blackberries, however, do not stop coming. I took the 12 pounds of berries I collected and made a larger batch of (according to the recipe, anyways) what will be a sweeter wine. After mashing and letting them soak overnight, I strained them and added the sugar and yeast, and have ended up with about 4 1/2 gallons this time. Hopefully it will not foam so much that the top blows off the fermenter!

This is what 12 pounds of berries looks like:

Blackberries

Today I picked approximately six quarts of blackberries, mostly off the patch along the road. That many berries would probably cost us $45-50 at the market.

My arms look like I was in a fight with Buddy. It’s a little freaky when you hit a vine and a blob of a dozen or more Japanese Beetles falls on you, buzzing angrily. Or you discover a berry covered with tiny ants. I don’t like ants.

I’d estimate there is still at least another six quarts waiting to ripen on the vines, although I’m not sure if the hot dry weather will cause them to turn black slower or quicker than if it is raining. I hope it’s quicker, because I’d like to make another batch of wine, and I think Cabol wants to make jam…

Cabol told me this morning one of the ducks got three inches (that’s a thousand or so decalitres for you metric folk) off the ground. Is that considered flying?

Feeding grain to the sheep in the morning is even more fun than watching bunnies eat. They both shove their little faces into the bucket and make happy snuffling sounds while scarfing it all down. Then they make sad sounds in the evening when I go in the barn and they realize they won’t be getting more until the next day.

The sheep are here.

The ducks are here, too.

“Touch it!”

“No.”

“Come on! I really want you to touch it.”

“No. I’m not gonna touch it.”

“You’re gonna touch it eventually. You should touch it now so it doesn’t scare you when it happens later.”

“I don’t care! I won’t touch it!”

“Please touch it? I want to know if you think it’s strong enough.”

“I’m not a sheep.”

We put up the fence today. It got tangled. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a knife handy. I don’t think electric fences work too well when they are cut to shreds. We finally got the tangles out and got the pieces all set up and got the charger plugged in. Then we had to drive back to Cburg for more poles. We were there this morning already. Blerg. But hey, the fence is up!

We also got some hay and cracked cornn for the sheep today. The folks at GFF said the sheep’ve been eating cracked corn, so we figured we should have some for them when they get here. Speaking of feeding critters, I picked Japanese beetles for the ducks. The last few days there have been hordes of them on the blackberry plants down by the road. Today I only found about a dozen. I never thought I’d be sad to not be able to find Japanese beetles on my plants.

Yesterday Andy called me at work and told me the blackberries are starting to be ripe. He said he’d picked one or two when he was down checking the mail and planned to go back later in the day to pick some more. When I got home, I parked the truck at the craft shack and walked back to the blackberry brambles that are growing along the fence on the front of the property. Low and behold, Andy was there already picking!

There’s a sort of ongoing thing with me and Andy. When I hit the driveway at the end of the day, I’m focused on a couple things: whatever story happens to be on NPR, avoiding bunnies, the current state of the driveway and the weeds/wild flowers leaning over the driveway that I get to hit when I pass, the level of the pond, the ducks waiting for me, dinner, bills, knitting… Lots of stuff. So, when I get to the house, and Andy’s not there and then trundles up later asking, “Did you not see me jumping up and down waving by the pond/at the craft shack door/by the mailbox/near the barn???” …Well, is it surprising the answer is “No?”

I really try to look out for him, I do. The problem is, he keeps moving. At first he would hang out by the pond. So, I started slowing down a bit as I passed the pond to look for him. Then, though, he decided to hang out at the craft shack. So, I had to start to pay attention to the craft shack AND the pond. Luckily, when he was hanging out in the middle of the driveway down by the mailbox…that time I did see him. Because, well, he was in the middle of the driveway. (If he had been standing slightly to the side of the driveway? That’s a different story.)

Back to the story. I walked up to the blackberry patch, and there Andy was. He seemed excited!

“Yay! You heard me yelling!”

“Umm…..ermmm….”

“You remembered I said I’d be here and you heard me yell as you went by and you stopped. Awww!”

“Ummm…well…No. I just decided to stop. *cough*”

He then seemed a bit sad and yet again confused at how I could have missed him yet again. But, he recovered quickly when I began to help him pick the berries. Blackberry picking is painful. The thorns on the plants are bigger and meaner than on raspberry plants, and, according to Andy, the sting lingers. In addition to the patch on the front fence, we also found a smaller patch near the apple tree and another on the steep slope at the curve in the driveway by the pond. We also found a lot of poison ivy. I did not pick the berries sitting on the poison ivy. (I hope.)

Here’s the day’s bounty (berries plus the three tomatoes we’ve picked so far this year). It’s about a quart or so and weighs 2lbs.

Blackberries look a lot like bunny cecotrope-y poo, which is the poo that the bunnies eat back up because it still has lots of good stuff in it. If you have bunnies you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t have bunnies, you are probably gagging right now. In bunny reference material, they often say these bunny poo candies look like clusters of grapes. In truth, the bunny poo candies look like blackberries.

This bunny poo, however, is the normal poo poo type. It looks like cocoa puffs. In this case, the bunny poo looks like a smiley of cocoa puffs.

Sheep fence arrives today. Sheep on Sunday!

We got an email from Kate at Green Fence Farm. Our sheeps are ready to come home! The plan right now is to pick them up this coming weekend. We weren’t expecting to bring them home quite this soon, so we’ve been hustling to get things ready.

Yesterday we went to tractor supply (we had to go anyhow to get bunny litter) and picked up a bag of sheep minerals and a water bowl/bucket thingy. That was the easy part. Today, Andy started working on getting the barn ready. He had to clean a ton of junk out and pull up some plastic that the previous owners had put down. The previous owners really really liked to put down plastic. Finally, we built a wall to make a smaller, cozier area for the sheep and put down a bunch of lawn hay. Whaddya think? Would you sleep there?

It was sort of difficult to put a wall up in the middle of an open spot. Good thing there were lots of bits and pieces of wood in the barn. This next photo is shot from the backside of the wall (where the sheep will not go). It may look funny, but it seems pretty stable. (And it was all free!!!) The tires are there to add a bit of resistance to sheep pushing.

We still have to get the fencing up. Not looking forward to that task at all.

The raspberries are pretty much gone. There were lots of dried up lil berries…but not lots of yummy ready ones. While we were picking along the fence on T. and S.’s side, T. came over and said hello. We talked berries, and he mentioned there were tons of raspberry bushes on the other side of his property in his other neighbor’s land. He offered to and did call the other neighbor to see if we could go over there and pick berries, and then he led us through the grass and weeds and poision ivy to where the patch was. Alas, there weren’t many berries left there, either. Perhaps next year when ours ripen, we’ll talk to those folks again and see if we can pick there. We’ll also need a machete. We got about a pint or two of berries from all the plants. Maybe tomorrow I can make a cobbler or somethin’?

One of our slithering friends is growing. We found this skin floating along the edge of the pond. While it was in the water, the skin still looked sort of snake shaped…especially the head part. When Andy took the skin out of the water, the tail was full like a balloon and was leaky. It was neato.

Today the ducks started eating Big Girl food. *sniffle* They grow up so fast! They still have baby fluff but are mostly feathers. They are working on growing wings now, too. At the tips of their wings are growing what looks like white plastic pins…I guess the foundation for their big wing feathers. And they follow Andy so well!

The blackberries should be ripe in a week or two. At least that’s what T. thought, and he should know better than us. Blackberries. Ooodles and oodles of blackberries. Dang, we really need a big freezer! Ya know how lots of people set up wish lists of Amazon or Toys R Us or Bob’s House of Llamas? Do you know any online stores where we can build this wish list:

– large chest freezer
– hand sheep shears
– machete
– spinning wheel
– electric fencing

“Look, Ma! I can fly!!!”

The ducklings are getting their big girl feathers, and before we know it, they’ll be trying to fly. Their grown-up feathers are all sorts of shades of brown. I never thought boring old brown could be so pretty. Really, they shouldn’t be called Khaki Campbells. They should be Cocoa Campbells. Yumm. Chocolate ducks. You can sort of see their new feathers in this picture. Check out their tummies, tails, and wings.

Their house is done now, and Andy has a good start on the attached run. The girls don’t quite seem to know what to think of it yet, but there have been no more escape attempts.