Hi There Hammy

I finally got my paws on some wheat grass seeds and planted them in a little pot outside. They tripled in size overnight so the bunnies got to have a picnic in the living room!

There are teeny, pinky-sized mushrooms popping up in the yard this fine morning…

My parents have a rather large snake skin they found in the garden hanging by the front door.

Oh the things that pop into my head when I’ve got time!

It’s 350.org global action day! Sterling celebrated by having an upcycling workshop, trail crew,  grain threshing, leaf raking and bread oven baking.

The product of all that leaf raking!

I went down to the farm and helped Andy, Abbie, Rihanna, Sarah, Erin, Jackie and Josh thresh the grain Andy grew all summer. Here is the process…

Undo a few bushels and gather them in a circle with their heads pointing inward…

Take some flails (that Andy made last night!) and thresh the heck out of those stalks. You’re separating the grain from the straw… here’s a video too!

Then you gather the straw into a pile for bedding later and pour all the grain into bins.

Then pour the grain into another from a height so that the wind will carry away the hulls and chaff that you don’t want and the grain falls right into the bucket. Repeat.

After a few hours you’ll have 5 bags of grain and a smile as big as Andy’s… Happy 350!

This cucumber decided that it wanted to do it’s own thing this time. Huh.

As you might imagine, I spend many a minute staring at the cucumbers trellising their way into the world on our front stoop. The actual vegetables on the vines are still quite petite and so, knowing that the cucumber plants I put in the actual ground were so much further behind than the ones in my Tupperware bin, I would occasionally glance at them… maybe poke some of the bits this way or that depending upon where I thought they should grow towards. NOT TODAY. I poked around as usual when I caught sight of this enormous would-be-pickle crouched in the shadows! The vines are still so much smaller than their boxed counterparts that I’m beyond bewildered as to how this behemoth came into existence.

SNAP. That’s a big pickle baby.

Surprise! Our cherry tomatoes turned out to be yellow tomatoes… and tasty too!

So, I started an obsession with pickling things over this past winter. Something about trudging through three foot snow drifts made my brain start to crave books about canning. Luckily the library is well stocked and it was pretty easy to start researching whatever it was that caught my fancy (pickled grapes, anyone?). And, fortunately or otherwise (I’ll let you judge for yourself) seed catalogs started appearing in our mailbox. I always love poking through them and usually have no overarching planting schemes in mind… until this time. I flipped straight to the cucumber section and picked out a nice packet of pickling cucumbers and I even found a nice paste tomato that started a spaghetti sauce researching binge.

Now, several months later my cucumbers all died within three days of settling into real dirt outside. So, I trotted down the road to the Saturday Market and bought a flat of six for $1.50 (it was a flat of six containers but it turns out that each container actually held two plants… that’s TWELVE cucumber plants!). I didn’t want to plop them all back in the same place the last cucumbers met their untimely ends in, so I put half of them in an Ikea tupperware bin (the lids don’t lock onto the bins making them practically useless for cramming things into so I didn’t feel much of a twinge when I drilled drainage holes in the bottom) and crossed my fingers.

Here’s the mildly rag-tag “container garden” that’s camped out in the parkinglot. Basil on the far right, depressingly stunted cilantro next, tomatoes in the next container and the wee ones in front, and lastly, cucumbers climbing their way up a trellis in their cozy, useless-for-storage box!

The basil is doing just fine… so far.

Still achingly small tomatoes. I hope they do their tomatoey business before those snow drifts descend again!

And here’s the second half of the garden. Joe and I carved an area out of an old, overgrown vegetable garden on the other side of the parkinglot and planted the cherry tomato plant I bought from the Craftsbury Academy’s plant sale, two acorn squash ($1 for two at the Saturday Market!), three bell peppers (free from the Ag. Program at Sterling) and the other six cucumbers. Linus has been unwittingly indispensable, that blue bucket is full of bunny fertilizer just chillin until we need it! How exciting…

An acorn squash-to-be!

So that’s the garden. In other interesting news down at the lower dorms, Steve is keeping seven of the meat rabbits from the barn out on pasture to compare their weight to the ones still cooped up in the barn.

He refitted a chicken tractor with wheels and scoots them around next to the potato patch.

A California bunny with muddy-red paws… which are perfect foreshadowing. I was buttering my toast this morning and, glancing at the parking lot out the window, saw a delightful little white rabbit calmly meandering around. All seven bunnies had gotten out AGAIN. Between three people we caught six after about and hour of chasing and scrambling… the seventh is nowhere to be found but there’s a mysteriously large pile of white fur in the driveway. The rabbit above squeals like a wounded pig when you grab him. It’s an utterly terrifying sound.