Thankful
I walked around the farm today with my daughters Alisa, Olivia, and Susanna . What a sunny, crisp November day! It is hard to believe December 1st is in a few days. Alisa wanted to see how everything was going since she has been in Australia travelling with her brothers. Our son Timothy has been shearing over there for the past 3 months, so Nathan (our oldest) and Alisa went "down under," to travel the country with Tim. They had a marvelous time and covered a lot of ground. They traveled around Sydney and the beautiful beaches there, flew up to Cairns and explored the Tablelands, and the Great Barrier Reef, flew down to the Blue Mountains and spent days hiking, and then drove to Mudgee. Mudgee is Australia's beautiful wine country. Alisa enjoyed the rural, slower pace of this area, and they enjoyed the wine tasting as well. She is very happy to be back home! We are thrilled to have her back as well. We can't wait to see all the pictures!
The sheep have been out on pasture all spring, summer, and fall. Its is almost time to bring them closer to the barn. I love coming out to see them! Their fleeces are full, clean, and ready to keep them warm all winter. The winter time allows us to slow down a little and pull out our knitting needles and start using up the wool from last year. We usually process our fleeces into yarn and then use it for weaving or knitting. Olivia has been busy weaving baby and lap blankets for our Christmas Market. Olivia also has an Etsy store online,where you can purchase handwoven items. Theodora has been very busy needle felting Christmas ornaments and cute little penguins, lambs, fawns, gnomes, and more....
As winter is fast approaching we are finishing up with projects outside. One hoop house has ranuculus, anenomes, and tulips planted for the spring. This is new for us this year. Our cut flower venture is a work in progress. We also planted 55 white peonies outside in a new area. These will take about 3 years to establish. We are really looking forward to them! One hoop house has winter greens and then the other hoop houses our laying flock for the winter. We need to finish up our cut flower seed order soon. We learned so much this past summer about cut flowers! I especially enjoy planning out the gardens around the farm. Our favorites were snapdragons, zinnias, dahlias, bells of Ireland, stock, and sunflowers.
Andy has been busy on the weekends working on the pole barn with William. They put on a new roof, windows, new steel, and are in the process of insulating the room inside. Everything seems to take longer than you think! They are doing an awesome job! We hope to have our a Farm store open this coming summer. We were so blessed to have over 500 guests out to the farm this year! We had many return customers and met several new friends. Our customer support allows our hard work to continue. This makes our job of providing local, healthy, safe, and chemical free food a joy. We are thankful indeed!
