All Quiet on the Farm Front

It is the dark days. The quiet time, the resting time. The goats are pregnant - most but hopefully not all of them - and lie around munching their cud and avoiding the rain and the mud. The pigs spend their time rooting around in the mud, looking for a bit of beet or a squash or something they might have missed from breakfast. They are just growing, growing bigger and ever closer to their date with the butcher sometime in February. The chickens huddle up in the hayloft, laying their few winter eggs inaccessibly between the bales.

And we, the people, spend as little time out in the barnyard as possible, to tell the truth. It hasn't been awful, the weather, but it hasn't been nice, either. It's par for the course Pacific Northwest January weather - wet, windy, and grey. Nice weather for watching movies and reading books, not nice weather for trimming goat hooves or fixing fences. Not that those tasks can be put off forever, of course. Just until... just until... well, maybe next week.

Because of the gleaner's pantry, it is always preserving season around here. Lately we have been getting a ton of apples. Last week I brought home a dozen bags of assorted varieties of organic apples. First I made four quarts of applesauce, then I noticed that we already have an awful lot of applesauce that we aren't eating in the cupboard. So I broke out the dehydrator. It has five trays, and can hold about a dozen thinly sliced apples. Then it tales about six or eight hours to dry them the way I like them, so dry they are crispy. The dehydrator has been going for three days straight, and we have three gallon-sized ziplocks full of apple rings in the snack drawer. The kitchen smells great.

There's nothing much on the immediate horizon. The goats aren't due to give birth until late March. Holidays are over, no big celebrations coming up until Easter. My birthday is next week, but it isn't a landmark birthday (46) and I don't expect much of a to-do. Times like this I think I should take up knitting, or set up my studio again and try to get back into painting. Or maybe try again to journal every day. Or at the very least, do some ambitious cooking and baking.

We do have to eat some of the meat from the freezer to make room for the pork that will be coming in soon. Maybe it's time to have a party, and make a big old feast.