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:

Worming Day Rocketsheep!

Yesterday, Ken and I rounded up all the sheep to give them their Bo-Se shots and to check which ones needed worming. I also mixed up a batch of my own personal vitamin/mineral drench to give them all, to get them off to a good start for the summer.

We knew this task would be something of an ordeal. That's the trouble with raising an unusually intelligent breed of sheep. They can tell the difference between when you're just calling them in from pasture to feed them and when you're trying to lure them into a catch pen to do something unpleasant to them.

We managed to lure most of the sheep into a moderate-sized catch pen by pouring dishes of grain in there and then shutting the gate after them once they were inside. That left about half the lambs outside. We made a little catch pen next to where all the adult sheep were caught, and gradually herded the lambs into there, where I caught them one by one and handed them over the fence to Ken.

When all the sheep were in the one catch pen, we got ready for the main part of the task. One by one, we caught each sheep, and one of us held it while the other gave it the Bo-Se shot, the vitamin drench, and checked to see if it needed worming.

You do this by using your thumb to press the sheep's lower eyelid down and open, and checking the color of the inside tissues. If they are red or dark pink, the sheep is healthy. If they are pale, the sheep is getting anemic, most likely from an infestation of barberpole worm (Haemonchus contortus), which is the most troublesome and deadly sheep parasite in this area.

Because parasites eventually build up immunities to chemical wormers, I am trying to breed my sheep to improve their natural resistance to parasites. I have a few sheep that are very parasite resistant, and others that are not. With careful selective breeding, I hope to have my whole flock showing good resistance within a few generations.

While checking the lambs yesterday, I was pleased to see that the lambs whose parents were both resistant seem to have inherited that resistance. The rest of the flock had varying degrees of light-to-moderate infestation, and only one sheep had a severe infestation. After yesterday's treatment, they should all be feeling better in the next few days.

Last summer, I developed my own vitamin/mineral drench recipe for my sheep. Several other breeders of Icelandics tried it and reported excellent results---almost immediate improvements in sheep suffering from heat/parasite related stress and bottlejaw. So I'm posting the recipe here in case it might help some other shepherd.

Ingleside Farm Sheep Vitamin & Mineral Drench Recipe

1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup blackstrap molasses
1 cup Red Cell
1/4 cup Vitamin E Liquid
1/4 cup concentrated liquid garlic

Stir thoroughly.

I dose at the rate of 30-60 ml per adult sheep and 10-30 ml per lamb, depending on size and condition.

Vinegar aids the sheep's overall health and improves wool quality. It contains small amounts of potassium, magnesium, calcium, and phosphorous. Molasses improves taste and is a good source of iron, calcium, manganese, potassium, and magnesium. Red Cell is mainly an iron supplement that includes a wide range of other minerals and vitamins as well. Vitamin E helps the sheep absorb selenium, which is crucial to withstanding summer stress. And the concentrated liquid garlic is a natural wormer.

NOTE: Red Cell contains copper. While Icelandic sheep have proved to need a small amount of copper in their diets, other breeds of sheep are usually much more copper-sensitive. Do your research and choose your copper dosages wisely to make sure you don't poison your sheep!

Anyway, things were going along pretty well for the first part of the task. When the catch pen is full, it's easy to catch the sheep because they are too crowded to run around. But as we dosed each sheep, we let her out the gate into the yard, so we wouldn't accidentally dose anyone twice. Even though I keep records of each sheep's dosage and condition on my clipboard, mistakes could happen. And besides, it's easier to catch the sheep you haven't dosed yet when they're not all mingled in with the ones you have.

As the crowed in catch pen gradually thinned, the sheep had more room to try to avoid being caught. And of course, the ones that remained were all the ones who were more skilled at avoiding being caught in the first place, since we obviously caught all the easy ones first!

So, we were about halfway through and were trying to catch the next sheep. Ken was bending over trying to grab Mona as she swerved past him, when all of a sudden she rocketed straight up in the air---and straight into Ken's face! I heard the CRACK when her hard skull crashed into Ken's face at full speed. Thank goodness Mona is one of the polled sheep (although Ken pointed out that if she'd had horns, we would have been able to catch her more easily).

Poor Ken staggered out of the catch pen, and we rushed him up to the house to put ice on his face. I had my nose broken by a horse running into me when I was a teenager, so I knew just how he was feeling. His nose wasn't bleeding, and it wasn't crooked, so I knew it wasn't broken. But his cheekbone was swelling, his teeth were numb, and by nightfall, he'd developed a black eye.

He rested with an ice bag on his face for a few hours, but the rest of the sheep needed to be done, so before nightfall, he bravely came back out and we finished catching and dosing the rest of the flock.

Now it's time to start thinking about ways to improve our catch pen system to be more effective. Less stress on the sheep means less stress on the humans as well!

The Umbrella Game

Training is progressing for my two Art Deco fillies, Grace and Glory.

First, I need to reacquaint them with the idea of getting their halters put on and taken off frequently without jerking away and making a fuss. Grace has reason to need work in this area, because she has had a couple of minor injuries and one fairly serious scare, but Glory is difficult about it for no other reason than that she's difficult about everything.

Because both fillies are so extremely jumpy, I'm using my no-pressure technique for haltering. I put their ration of grain in a bucket and hold the open halter just above it, so that if the filly wants her grain, she has to choose to shove her nose into the halter. At that point, I wrap the strap around the back of her head. If she jumps away, that's fine, she can go, I let her pull free and don't try to hold her.

Each time she comes back, I put the strap across. Eventually, she gets tired of jumping and I buckle the halter. Then she can eat her grain while I wiggle the halter all around, tap on the buckle, stroke her ears, etc. Everything to get her used to being calm about the situation. If she doesn't fuss, then I stop and let her eat her grain in peace. When she's done eating, I come back and take the halter off.

My goal is to ingrain in her mind that the halter is the required uniform for eating her grain. When it gets to be no big deal to put the halter on with the grain bucket there, then I'll progress to putting it on BEFORE I get the grain bucket. Then I'll progress to putting it on and then leading her someplace nice to graze on fresh grass. Over and over, I'll make the halter be the prelude to something pleasant, until she forgets that she was ever upset about it.

Today was the third day of this training for both fillies. They are still so jumpy---none of my other youngsters were like this, but I've been told that the Art Deco bloodline is very hot and unpredictable---but they're making progress, so after the halter lesson was over, I decided to add another lesson: The Umbrella Game.

Here's how it goes: I bring an umbrella into the paddock and open it up. The horse reacts (in this case, by bugging out her eyes and careening around the paddock as if I had just released a herd of wild tigers). I stand still, quietly holding the umbrella until the horse stops and looks at me. Then the game begins.

If the horse stands still, looking at me, I stand still and keep the umbrella motionless. If she looks away or gets distracted, I wiggle the umbrella until she looks at me again. If the horse moves away, I move closer, bringing the umbrella with me. If the horse comes closer to me, I yield and take a step backwards.

The idea is to encourage the horse to react calmly to scary objects by making the correct responses have less stressful consequences than the wrong responses.

Grace snorted and flew around the paddock when she first saw the umbrella, but once the game began, she picked it up very quickly. After seeing my positive response to her stepping forward a couple of times, she gathered up her nerve and walked straight over and started nibbling on the edge of the umbrella. What a good girl! She is SO much easier to work with now that I've separated her from the unruly influence of her sister.

Then it was Glory's turn. I stood in the center of her large paddock (far away from her) and opened the umbrella. She shied so hard she crashed into the fence, bolted around me in a circle and crashed into the fence a couple more times before regaining control enough to simply race around without crashing. She may be a total flake, but WOW does she have nice gaits. The suspension on that extended trot is breathtaking!

As expected, she took much longer to stop running. Even with me standing perfectly still, she was hair-trigger, ready to fly right out of there at the slightest twitch. I let her stand and bug her eyes out at me for a long time, and then I started gently twisting the umbrella and swaying it back and forth. Another explosion!

Each time she ran, I'd just ignore her and keep doing what I was doing. Each time she stopped, I'd stop. After a while, I could see that she was no longer genuinely terrified, she was just reactionary because it was habit. But at least her attention was fully, 110% engaged with the lesson for the first time. She's typically so evasive about not wanting to focus on anything you ask her to do, but this time she was fully present.

This went on for at least an hour before she took her first step towards me, that allowed me to give her the "right answer" reward of backing up. She's extremely smart, and I could see her watching me and testing me dozens of times to check my responses. She'd step one foot forward, then move it back. She's stomp it in place. She'd shuffle it back and forth. She'd try moving a back foot instead.

After examining every possible scenario, she finally figured out what the rules were and realized that we were playing a game where it was actually possible for her to have some power over what happened. That gave her a little more confidence, but she still had no desire to actually approach the umbrella.

So then I closed the umbrella to make it small, and gradually approached her with it. Eventually, after many tries and some more nervous galloping, she stretched her nose out and touched it. I immediately praised her and backed way off, turning my back on her to release all pressure.

She's smart. She got it. After a few more tries, she was willing to take a step towards me and touch the closed umbrella each time.

Then we had to start all over with the open umbrella. She's not a horse who will take for granted that just because the closed umbrella is safe, the open one must be as well. So we went through the whole thing again. At last, she was okay about touching the open umbrella too.

There was just one last step to go. I backed way up far away from her, made sure she was looking directly at me so she would have a chance to brace herself, and then I held the umbrella up over my head... and OPENED it.

WHOA!!!! That set her off galloping again, but just for a second. She stopped, and I let her touch the open umbrella with her nose. Then I backed up away from her, closed the umbrella, waited for her to look at me, then held it over my head and opened it. Off she went again!

I repeated this dozens of times. Each time, she clearly knew what was going to happen, but couldn't help herself from flinching and running. But each time she stopped and asked to come touch the umbrella again to reassure herself.

After many, many, MANY more times, I could see her finally decide that her fear reaction was pointless. I opened the umbrella a couple more times, with her just standing there looking at me cheerfully with her ears up. Then I let her touch the umbrella one more time, closed it, and left her paddock.

As she watched me walk away, I opened the umbrella one last time, and she didn't even flinch.

That's the nice thing about natural-horsemanship-style games. If you do them right, you BOTH can win.

Defending Our Cherries

One of the nice surprises we discovered after we bought this farm is the cherry tree in the back yard. I'd never seen a cherry tree before, so I didn't identify it for the longest time. It's clumped in amongst the lilac bushes, so at first I just assumed it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Even after it formed fruit the first year, I ignored it, thinking it was some kind of crabapple, and not worth harvesting.

The following year, on a whim, I tasted one of the "crabapples" and figured out what we had. Yummy delicious cherries, free in our back yard! But things were busy and I was going out of town, so I didn't harvest any.

Last year, I had good intentions to harvest some. I checked the tree regularly, waiting for the day when they would be ripe. The day I thought they would be just about perfect, our neighborhood crows got up several hours earlier than I did, and stripped the tree bare before I could get a single one!

This year, we have a bumper crop, just starting to turn red. The crows and other birds have already been checking them, but they're not quite ripe yet. We don't have much time left to stake our claim to our share of the treasure.

So Ken went to the local farm store and got some bird netting. The tree is large and the majority of the cherries will be well out of our reach, so the birds are welcome to them. But we draped the netting all around on the part of the tree that we can reach, hoping that will protect at least a little of the crop for us.

I tasted one of the not-quite-ripe fruits today. It's still very tart, but wow, what a flavor. I'll have to decide what to do with the cherries I pick. Eat them fresh? Make a pie? Freeze them? Dry them? Make a cherry cordial? I'm a whiz at making home-made cordials---I've taught workshops on it, and have developed dozens of recipes.

I guess what I do with them will depend on how many we get. I'm just looking forward to getting SOME, for a change.

Heavenly Honeysuckle

Is there anything so wonderful as the smell of honeysuckle? With its heady scent hinting of coconut and gardenia, it makes every spring breeze a luscious, sensual delight.

Our farm used to be overrun with honeysuckle vines (everywhere, that is, that wasn't already overrun with poison ivy vines!), but the sheep find it so tasty that it is now all gone except for several healthy vines that tangled themselves in our enormous boxwoods, out of the reach of sheep.

Even the few plants that are left are making our whole yard smell delicious right now. The flowers make a wonderful herbal tea, very healthy, and it makes you feel good just because it tastes as wonderful as it smells.

Honeysuckle doesn't dry well for use as tea. Even after a VERY long time in a high-quality food dehydrator, I've found that the flowers have a tendency to mold if stored over the winter. So this year I collected a ziplock bag of flowers, which I'm going to try freezing, to see if that preserves them better.

Since I'm prone to long bouts of bronchitis every time I get the smallest cold or flu, I've done a lot of research on herbs and natural remedies that can help. Honeysuckle-Hyssop tea, sweetened with honey is one of my favorites. It tastes SO good!

Here's part of what the Peterson Guide to Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants and Herbs, by Steven Foster and James A. Duke, has to say about honeysuckle:

Leaves and flowers a beverage tea (Japan). Flowers traditionally used (in e. Asia) in tea for bacterial dysentery, enteritis, laryngitis, colds, fevers, flu; externally as a wash for rheumatism, sores, tumors (especially breast cancer), infected boils, scabies, swelling. Stem tea is weaker. Experimentally, flower extracts lower cholesterol; also antiviral, antibacterial, tuberculostatic. Widely used in prescriptions and patent medicines in Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat colds and flu. Pills are made from floral concentrates. Both authors have used such preparations for bronchitis, colds, and flu. When Echinacea or Garlic have failed against flu, Jim Duke has used the plant as a last resort. Flowers contain at least a dozen antiviral compounds. With the rapid evolution of viruses, synergistic combinations of phytochemicals, such as those found in Japanese Honeysuckle, are less liable to lead to resistant strains than solitary chemical compounds. This serious weed might be managed by using it for proven medicinal purposes.

Such a wonderful gift from the land: something so beautiful to see and smell that makes good sheep feed and helps cure you when you're sick!