Emmanuel Farm Blog

Wow! This has been a busy week and I am feeling it. But it’s a good feeling to be tired from work accomplished outside. It has been rainy and cold for so long that we felt like spring was never really going to happen and we have fallen weeks behind on several outdoor projects. This week we had three sunny, perfect days in a row and we took advantage of them.

Monday a friend came down to help me get my seed starts into the ground. Yes, most of them have worked this year to my great pleasure. We got all the corn planted, the sunflowers and the peas. Jonathan and I were also able to plot out the new area that the guys tilled last week. The guys moved the cows in to new pasture.

Tuesday we processed several roosters that we discovered we had this spring. Late last summer we ordered several breeds as straight run, meaning we get some male and some female, so that we could experiment with brooding our own chicks. We didn’t realize we ended up with so many roosters and it was creating some territorial issues. We have been waiting for a warm, sunny day to do it and this week it arrived. A family that we have recently enjoyed getting to know, came out to help us and especially enjoyed helping the boys shoot the ducks that also needed processing. The ducks are too hard to catch so we decided to shoot them in the head with Andrew’s 22. It worked better than we thought it would and we were able to get all 13. We left a mallard pair and a muskovy pair. It was a long day but much more enjoyable to share it with friends. We even enjoyed a nice break eating lunch in the shade. And we are looking forward to sharing a duck dinner tomorrow afternoon.

The other exciting thing about Tuesday is that our fourth calf was born early this morning. Sadly, it was another bull but he is a beauty, reddish brown with lots of white spots. He is also the biggest calf of all of them and came from the smallest cow. He is the size of our Guernsey calves. We decided that God must be moving us into beef sooner than we planned.

Wednesday is my busy day of bread baking. This week I ended up baking bread Tuesday morning and Wed morning because I had so many orders. My new sourdough loaf has become quite popular. I have searched for years for a good wholegrain sourdough recipe and I finally find it. I am so excited about how well it turns out every time, without any white flour or added yeast. Baking it in my makeshift stoneware oven is the key to a golden, crusty exterior. We also had record sales this week at 26 gallons of milk and 21 dozen eggs.

After picking up the boys from their youth event and picking up our laundry from a friend’s house, we had to pick up a dog that Erik is petsitting this weekend and squeeze him into the car along with our basket of laundry, four coolers, bread crate and 5 gal water jug. We were packed to the gills! It is a very long day for us but this week in particular since we didn’t get home until almost midnight.

Thursday Andrew flew out to VA to spend the weekend with my Dad, brother and his son. He had to leave home at 5:00 am to make his 7:00 flight so it was a short night. I also agreed to donate a baby shower cake for a group shower the church was giving to new moms. So I was up till 4 icing the cake and helping Andrew get ready for his trip. I got up with Jonathan and Andrew at 5:00 t0 make them coffee and was then able to sleep until 6:30 when I needed to get up to decorate the cake. After Jonathan got home, he had to milk the ladies and try and work with the new heifer that delivered this week to get her milked. I left for the shower and didn’t get home till 4:00 after running errands. Jonathan was asleep when I got home and I crashed as soon as I could. It was a good day of blessing people and making connections with new people and potential customers from church but I was exhausted.

Friday was a rainy day, thankfully because we needed a down day to do the essentials only and then rest. Jonathan spent a lot of time updating our website  and adding a few more filters for new customers. We  have received several new customers this week with no personal connection and so we feel the need to set up a few more safety nets for ourselves.

Saturday we had a work day scheduled for the afternoon. Since it was so rainy in the morning no one showed up, for the second month in a row, even though the afternoon turned out to be beautiful. A new customer came by to see the farm and her son enjoyed running around with Abigail. So we were able to catch up on a few things around here after our busy week. Now we can enjoy our day of rest, knowing that we have had a full, busy but blessed week.

Thanks for participating with us in our farm adventure. We appreciate it.

It took long enough but a few days of true spring weather finally arrived this week. The first of May brought more snow but the last few days warmed up nicely with beautiful sunshine. The nights are still cool but finally above freezing. The crab apple blossoms are several weeks behind as is the pasture growth. We have been limping along trying to rotate the cows through the pastures that didn’t get grazed last fall to give the new pastures ample time to develop nice tall grass. But we are running out of places to put them while we wait for our overdue spring. Even the farmers around us have not been able to get into their fields. The benefit of the delayed spring is that we have not had the month of ticks that we experienced last year.

Because of the warm up this week, we tilled the garden and moved the seed starts out to  a simple green house like cover. We also moved the batch of chicks and ducklings we received last month out on grass. This is good timing since our first flock of Freedom Ranger broiler chicks arrived this week  and needed to go in the “chick shack.” “Prince Lammie” sleeps outside now as well since it is warm enough.

There has been a lot of work this week but it has been nice to finally be able to work outside without getting wet and cold. We are weeks behind on outside projects so it feels good to finally be accomplishing some of them.

Yesterday was another first on the farm…boiling maple syrup! We finally collected enough sap to make it worth the effort of boiling it down. We built a fire in our fire pit and Jonathan built a grate over the fire for the pot to sit on. Then I sat there feeding it wood all day to keep the sap at a rolling boil. It was a great experience, fun and educational at the same time. It was a little like camping days from our past, cooking over and sitting by a warm fire on a cool day. We started with about 10 gallons of sap, which should make about a quart of syrup. But since we are making it for our own use and we have a limited number of trees to tap, we decided we wanted to stretch it a little farther. So we boiled it down till we got enough amber colored liquid that was a pourable consistency and sweet maple taste. And obviously the only thing to do with freshly boiled maple syrup is to make pancakes to pour it on. And that is exactly what we did…DELICIOUS!!!