2nd week of May 2009

Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea Blossoms The Dwarf Gray Sugar peas in the greenhouse are looking gorgeous with their purple blossoms. Both the flowers and the shoots have a distinct pea flavor and are great in salad. Our four year old thinks they are great for garden snacking too. The little planting of Sugar Ann snap peas in the greenhouse is producing a few handfuls of ripe peas also, just enough to whet our appetite for more. The first outdoor planting of peas was ready for fence to climb on so that task was accomplished. I'm always glad to get the fence in before the double row starts clinging to each other. I continue to thank my husband profusely for rigging up my trampoline cold frame. It helped produce three weeks worth of early salad bags plus currently has three inch beans growing under it. It's so wonderful to have abundant salad and my next challenge is to try to create a homemade ranch dressing that passes my family's taste test. My first batch was a good start. I put a mixture of soft homemade cheese, buttermilk, olive oil, garlic, a little raw sugar and several spices in the blender. They thought a little less sweet and a little more garlic might improve it. I'll need to make a small batch weekly since unlike the store bought variety, mine will have a very limited shelf life.

Oberhasli Goats This week started with Mother's Day and I requested as much homemade ice-cream as I could eat along with warm rhubarb crunch. Thanks to our Amish friend, we had plenty of rhubarb and the children pitched in to help me make the crunch and ice-cream mix. It was a little chilly for the first outdoor ice-cream cranking of the year but oh so delicious! I should have taken a picture of the yummy results but it disappeared before I thought to grab the camera. Good food is an appropriate way to celebrate simple events in life and is always a good reminder of what a blessing it is to have plenty to eat. We just finished reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and how they survived several weeks on coarse brown bread before the train could come through with supplies. Then they celebrated with a deluxe Christmas dinner in May.

Here are the new gals who joined our farm menagerie over the weekend. Our daughter used her Christmas/birthday $$ to buy two Oberhasli goats. Oberhaslis are a Swiss dairy breed who are know for being very docile and less "jumpy" (a plus for staying in fences). Here are Willow and Midnight enjoying an afternoon "salad bar" in the lawn. We try to stake them out for a while each day and they are marvelous for cleaning up brush and especially multiflora roses. The children have been observing which weeds that the goats will choose to eat first in a new area and noticed that dandelions are one of their favorites. Our daughter is tackling the morning and evening milkings and today made her first batch of soft goat cheese.

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