The Flock/Herd

It took me a long time to decide on a name for our cria but I've finally decided on Nina. A good Spanish name that I think suits her. Here she is with her mom Ivy. 

This is how Nina spends most of her time each day. Ivy is a great mom and stands for long periods of time to let her baby nurse. We're not used to this as the lambs are so aggressive when nursing. They kneel down and slam their mouths onto their moms udders, sometimes lifting moms back end off the ground slightly, suckle for a few seconds and it's over. The alpacas nursing sessions are so relaxed and nurturing by comparison. Nina will spend up to 5 minutes under there sometimes!

Here's Esther. A lot has been written about her here already but to summarize Esther, she's a: carrot and apple loving, affectionate yet temperamental, brave but timid guard llama. She's great at her job, despite some new competition from Domini.

Here's a few of the girls all in a row. I tried to take individual pictures of everyone today but it's in their nature to stick close together when feeling threatened, even by me. From the left there's Mirabelle, Hazel or Henny (I STILL can't tell them apart), Izzy, Freckles and Ippi. Mirabelle is the ovine matriarch around here. She's mom to Freckles, Hazel and Henny. We're quite happy with our little flock now and it's fun to have all the ewes very closely related. We'll bring in an unrelated Ram each year to service the ewes and with only four of them the genetics are quite easy to work out.
Ippi and Izzy are great lambs. It's hardly fair to write too affectionately about animals that will go to slaughter in a few short months, but it's our philosophy that in order to really live a good life here a name and a relationship with the animal helps. Ippi is a lot of fun and he's developing a common tendency of rams that is to be very friendly with humans. When we book an appointment for him at the local abattoir I'll be sure to get his fleece back as the black and white will make a nice sheepskin. Ippi's sister, Izzy, is a lovely little sheep. She's still very timid but cute as anything. I took her to the vet a couple months ago as she had a lame foot. Turned out to be just a sprained ankle (or equivalent thereof) and after some pain medication she stopped limping. Though costly to visit the vet it's worth it as Izzy runs around now as if nothing ever happened.

 Hazel and Henny, seen below, are never far from each other. In fact, I'd bet they've not been more than 50 feet from one another since birth. They look nearly identical, except that Hazel has a patch of black fleece on the right side of her neck. You can't see it unless you move the fleece around and find it so telling these two apart is very difficult. They're still quite young and neither had a successful birth this Spring. They've grown up a lot this summer though and have matured a bit as they're not as skittish as they used to be. I'm hoping they produce some nice lambs next Spring and I think they'll be much more ready to do so then.

Mirabelle, the matriarch and leader of the flock. She does whatever she wants whenever and those who want to follow can...and usually do. A couple weeks ago she reasserted her role as leader by bringing Freckles down a few notches. I don't know how it came about but these two butted heads with one another for hours one day and eventually it was obvious that Freckles had lost.
Mirabelle has the loudest Bah of the lot and when I feed the chickens each morning before work I try to do so without being seen by her. If she knows I'm around she bah's to "ask" for grain and I fear that all the neighbours will be awoken.

Domini is an interesting girl. She's nice enough but has an edge to her and we've not yet established a good relationship. Interestingly she seems to be fixing to take over as guardian, or at least as an early warning system. She's got a keen, though often misguided, eye/ear and alerts us all to things lurking along the tree line with her high pitched impression of a cartoon squeaky wheel. Always on the lookout, I fear that Dom will greatly reduce my chances of filling my deer tags right off the farm this season.

Carrots, Kale and Tomato Ketchup

After a couple couple good frosts the carrots were ready to harvest. With Ella's help we pulled them all a couple days ago and now we'll store them in a plastic barrel with about an inch of water in the bottom. The carrots sit on a slate tile which is elevated from the bottom of the barrel on bricks. The micro-climate in the barrel maintains good humidity level which keeps the carrots crisp all winter long.  

 Here's Beth showing off some of the larger carrots, under the watchful eye of Esther, the carrot-loving llama.

We grew a lot of different tomatoes this summer, some of which were heirloom varieties, thanks to our friend Will. When he was laid up after a knee surgery Will started a whole bunch of tomato plants and gave some to us. We lost track of which were which but they're all delicious. Now that they're finally ripening, after sitting in the sun in our spare room, we have to deal with them. We've got a batch of pasta sauce on the stove right now and yesterday I made ketchup - for the first time ever. I found a recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage fame and it called for 6kg of tomatoes - perfect.

One of the heirloom plants yielded about 30 of these guys!

The toms were all sorts of colours from pink to deep red and yellow. 

 I used the apple sieve to separate the seeds and skins. 

The recipe said it would take about an hour to cook the sauce, but it took way longer. A few glitches along the way and I got 12 bottles in the end. The spices that went in the ketchup included cinnamon, mace, celery seed, all spice, cloves, mustard, pepper, bay leaves, garlic and paprika. It's pretty good but if I were to do it again I'd lay off the celery seed as it's a bit strong. I think that because the ketchup took so long to reduce down to a thicker consistency it would have been best to remove the spice bag earlier. 

We pulled the kale plants yesterday and today I blanched it and froze it. 

We're nearly done processing all the food now. Just a few more spices to dry, more pasta sauce to freeze and these three squirrels will be ready for winter.