Kamikaze Cardinal

TAP-Bump! TAP-Bump!

What the heck is that noise?

It's a cardinal who has been repeatedly bashing himself against my library window for the past three days. I only figured out what the sound was yesterday. Since then, I tried several times to chase him away, but he always comes back, even when my cats are eagerly sitting below, waiting for him to knock himself unconscious so they can eat him.

Maybe he sees his reflection in the window and thinks he's defending his territory. But if that's what he thinks, he's pretty dumb, since there are lots of other cardinals around, and he doesn't seem to be throwing himself at them.

Yesterday, he did have a girlfriend in the tree with him, watching his kamikaze act. Maybe he's just trying to impress her with his great feats of strength and courage (not to mention stupidity). He's definitely looking a little worse for wear, with his feathers all tousled and a kind of glazed, crazy look in his eye.

Perhaps it would be better for the gene pool if this one DIDN'T reproduce.

You can see a short video clip of his act here.

Lightning and Lightning Bugs

Back on June 16th, I took a video of a lightning storm playing over our big pasture. If you look closely, you can see lightning bugs rising up out of the grass at the same time. It was beautiful.

Here are a couple of still clips from the video:

How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 2)

As promised, it's the end of June, and here's Part 2 of my "How to Make Cherry Cordial" post.

As you may remember, the cherries and cinnamon sticks have been steeping in the brandy for about a month now. Yesterday, I opened the jars and strained the liquid. As you can see, the brandy leached not only most of the flavor, but also most of the color out of the cherries.


Next, I put a paper coffee filter (wetted with water, for ease of handling and to help speed the initial filtering) into a large funnel, and began filtering the cordials. This is the most tedious part of the cordial making process, because some cordials take a VERY long time to filter. But this one wasn't too bad.

While I was filtering, Ken made the sugar syrup. To do this, you heat 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan, stirring constantly until it just starts to boil and the liquid suddenly goes clear. Then remove the pan from the heat. This makes 2 cups of syrup.

When the cordial is done filtering and the sugar syrup is cool, you just add the syrup to the cordial, tasting frequently, until it is as sweet as you like it.

In this case, Ken and I felt that the cinnamon flavor was too strong and the cherry flavor was too weak, but we noticed that the cherry flavor became more prominent the more syrup we added. So we made a sweeter cordial than we normally do, by adding the entire 2 cups of sugar syrup.

The result was 2 mason jars almost full of cherry cordial, which will need to steep for about a week to reach full flavor.

Normally I bottle my cordials in pretty, tall, long-necked bottles, but this time around, I made this batch knowing that we're having a bunch of friends over for the July 4th weekend, and we'll probably drink most of the cordial then, so I didn't bother with the fancy bottles, I just put the cordial back into the mason jars to wait until our friends arrive:

I'm Still Here

I want to thank everybody who has been inquiring about where I've been and what's happened to all my blog posts. I'm still here, just very busy around the farm lately.

Besides the usual daily farm chores, I'm still trying to sell the last few sales horses before they eat us out of house and home. Many of the sheep on my sheep sales list are already spoken for, but I've been trying to get the others sold as well.

I've been trying to fit in a little spare time to put a little training on the two Art Deco fillies I'm keeping, and I gotta say, they are not easy! They are so hair-trigger, they take about 50 times as many repetitions of a lesson before they settle into it as my other horses have. For example, I was thrilled yesterday that when Grace managed to scrape her halter off in the paddock, she let me put it back on her without making very much of a fuss. This is only the second time I've been able to do that without investing a serious amount of time on the lesson. So at least she's making progress!

Glory is also making progress. I've been doing mostly desensitizing training on her, because she's so suspicious and spooky. The first time I waved a flapping raincoat (one of my usual desensitizing tools) in her paddock, it took more than 3 hours before she would settle down and reluctantly let me bring it near her. Now, she'll still spook at first, but then she remembers she's supposed to stand still, and she'll let me flop it against her (although her skin still flinches every time).

We had a professional shearer come and shear the sheep, which is a first for us. Usually we struggle along and try to do it ourselves, but it kills my back and takes a really long time. The professional shearer did an excellent job, and finished the whole flock in just a few hours.

The sheep have mostly been doing pretty well. The summer is always the most difficult time for them, because of the heat and the parasites. Once they were sheared, I could see that a lot of them were thinner than I would like them to be. Our pastures are not very good, so we've been supplementing the sheep's protein levels with protein blocks and hefty doses of pelleted sheep feed every day.

At this point, the bossier sheep (the rams and the larger, older ewes) are starting to get fat. I'm just waiting for my vaccine order to arrive so that I can do the annual shots for the flock, then after that, I'll be weaning the lambs.

I don't normally wean my lambs, I usually let them self wean. But this year, a lot of my buyers are ready to take their new sheep as early as July, so the babies will need to be weaned first. This will be good anyhow, since once I separate the lambs from the fat, bossy sheep, I'll be able to cut down on the feed for the adults, while still continuing to give the youngsters lots of nutrient-rich food to keep them growing well even through the hottest part of the summer, which will soon be upon us.

It's been helping a lot so far, I think. There are still a few lambs who are on the smallish side, comparatively---mostly the twins by the smaller, first-time moms---but the majority are much larger than usual. I've had occasion to pick a few of them up, and there are several that are well over 50 lbs. now, at only 2.5 months old. Compare this to a group of sheep I bought a few years ago, where the smallest was only 35 lbs. in September!

Since breeding season is still 4 months away, these lambs have tons of time left to keep growing before that. The larger and more mature the lambs are at the time, the more likely they are to have a good first breeding season. So, things are looking good so far.

I'm trying to sell off all the polled sheep and keep just the horned ones, which I happen to like better. I had two buyers who between them were planning to pretty much buy up all the adult polled sheep I have. But one sale fell through when the buyer had a financial crisis and the other buyer changed her mind and decided to buy horned sheep instead.

So, now I am almost completely sold out of all the horned sheep on my sales list, and still have the entire group of polled available. I was hoping that adding polled to the flock would expand my customer base, but apparently not. So, if I have to keep them through another breeding season and lambing, I will. They are very nice quality sheep, after all. But they'll stay on the sales list until someone decides to buy them.

The polled ewe lambs are all spoken for now, not because they've been sold, but because David, who is the person I traded my beloved mares Char and Scylla to in exchange for the group of polled sheep, has decided that he can't keep them after all. So I'm trading the ewe lambs back to him, plus Scylla's foal, to get Char and Scylla back.

If you remember how depressed I was about having to sell (trade) those mares in the first place, you would think that trading back would be great news. But we simply don't have the money to bring the mares back here. We can barely afford to feed the animals we have, that's why we got rid of the mares in the first place. So I'm trying to work out a way that the mares can go to my sister Donna's farm. Donna is also taking Char's foal, who will be her new stud to breed to her mares.

The difficulty is that David's farm and Donna's farm are very far apart, so shipping is going to be expensive. And I have to bring the ewe lambs to the Michigan Fiber Festival to meet David, so he can take them back to his farm, which will be another very long trip for me.

So, while I am committed to not losing Char (my favorite of all my horses) again, this turn of events is rather complicating my summer plans.

In other news... I've been trying to tackle a major cleanup and reorganization of our house. Because when we moved here, we knew that every room in the place was going to eventually need renovating, we didn't at first try to set them up the way we really wanted them. In time, several of the rooms ended up turning into big, messy storage areas for all the renovation supplies and all the belongings that we didn't have a final place for yet.

But since it seems that we are not going to have any money for continued renovation any time soon, we've been getting tired of having all those rooms be messy and unusable. So I've been struggling along doing a deep-level cleanup, pulling everything out of every closet and room, throwing away all the junk that is no longer relevant, and reorganizing how and where all the rest of the stuff is stored. It's a time-consuming job, and definitely makes the house look worse before it looks better, but when it's done, it will make the house a lot more livable until we can finally start renovating again.

Anyway, there's been more stuff going on in the past month when I haven't been writing blog posts, but that's the gist of it.

I appreciate all the people who contacted me to tell me they missed my posts and to ask if I was doing okay. I'll try to make time to post more frequently again. I appreciate all your comments and support!

It's the Pits

I picked more cherries yesterday---almost 7 quarts so far, and perhaps that many more on the parts of the tree that I can still reach (while standing on a small stepladder placed in the back of our pickup truck, that is!).

What I didn't realize was how long it would take to pit all those cherries! They are small, about the size of cranberries, so there are a lot of cherries---and a lot of pits---in 7 quarts. Lucky for me, Ken pitched in and helped. We spent several hours pitting cherries and watching tv last night. The results all went into the freezer.

I plan to pick the rest of the cherries that are in reach this afternoon, so I guess we'll have another evening of pitting tonight.

But for cherries that taste this good, it's worth it to preserve as many of them as possible.

How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 1)

The bird netting we put up on our cherry tree last week really shouldn't have done much good, because when we hung it, we could only reach the very lowest branches, leaving the majority of the tree exposed. But apparently the very presence of bird netting so offended the local crows and cardinals, that they promptly abandoned our tree and have left it untouched, despite the thousands of ripe cherries it now boasts.

There is something about a loaded fruit tree---especially if it's one that you didn't have to plant, prune, water, or spray with pesticide---that makes you feel rich, gifted with the treasure of free food in abundance, there for the taking. There's something profoundly joyful about accepting Nature's bounty, as if the earth herself has chosen that moment to try to make you feel welcome on the planet.

With such an abundance of cherries this year, it took me almost no time at all to pick enough to make a couple of jars of cordial. I don't know what variety these cherries are, but they are clearly the smaller, tarter pie cherries, not the big sweet eating cherries.

I've only made cherry cordial twice before. Once with sweet cherries, which turned out thin and insipid, and once with tiny wild black cherries, which had so much pectin in them that the cordial turned into a sort of alcoholic jelly in the bottles!

Let's hope this time we find a happy medium!

After I picked a big bowlful of cherries, I pitted them all by poking them with a kitchen skewer. Then I filled two clean mason jars about 1/2 full (approximately 2 cups of cherries in each one), and mashed the cherries thoroughly to release as much of the juice and flavor as possible. Then I dropped a 3" piece of stick cinnamon into each jar (breaking each one into several pieces for better flavor distribution), and filled the jars to the brim with brandy.

For cordial making, we use Christian Brothers Frost White Brandy, because it is colorless. For best presentation, we like our cordials to get all of their color from the natural ingredients inside, not from the alcohol base.

Once the jars were filled and sealed, I shook each one briefly to disperse the brandy all through the fruit. The brandy is what preserves the fruit from spoiling as it steeps, so you want to make sure it's well mixed.

Now I just put the jars away for a few weeks in a cool, dark place. I'll shake them once a day for a few days to keep the brandy well-dispersed.

Then, near the end of June, I'll do the next step. So stay tuned for Part 2!

Thirteen Years and Counting

Happy anniversary to us! Thirteen years ago today, Ken and I got married. It was on the 1-year anniversary of our first date, so we've been together for 14 years now.

We're living proof of how important it is to choose your partner based on COMPATIBILITY above all other things. Life is hard, and relationships can be too, sometimes. But being with someone truly compatible makes everything just a little bit easier and a little bit more fun.

Like any couple, we've had our ups and downs, but through it all, there's no one else I'd rather spend my life with.

Callista Loses Her Long Locks

Taking advantage of another hot, sunny day, I gave Callista a bath today so I could take some new sales photos of her.

She had the most beautiful, long mane that came down a good 6 inches past the bottom of her neck (as you can see in some of her previous photos), but living here on our windy hilltop, it was always horribly knotted and tangled. And Callista hates standing still to have her mane combed. For some reason, it really upsets her.

So, reluctantly, I decided to cut it all off in a short hunter horse style. (I know, technically, you're supposed to shorten a horse's mane by pulling it, but if Callista can't stand her mane being combed, I wasn't about to try pulling).

After her makeover, I took her to the round pen for the photo shoot. The lighting was a little too harsh, and the heat made Callista a little sluggish, so I didn't get the best selection of pictures. Still, at least she's clean!

But You Should See the Other Guy

Ken's black eye is developing nicely after his run-in with Mona on Saturday. He wanted me to commemorate it by taking a photo.

Good thing purple is his favorite color!

New Photos of Penny

My yearling filly Penny is for sale, but none of the photos I had for advertising her were very good. So today I gave her a bath and did a photo shoot to try to get some photos that do her justice.

Now that she has shed her winter coat and started her yearling growth spurt, she looks quite nice. Here she is: