Fall again

Well, it's definitely beginning to look a lot like fall again. The summer plants are dying out and the leaves are becoming more brittle. Tomorrow's high is once again predicted to be down in the low 60s and I love this stuff! I love the cool breeze in the morning, and I love being able to throw on some long sleeves and just wear them all day long without worrying about spiked heats. Fall colors are on the way and that means we needed to clear out our garden to make room for some mums.

I've included a picture today of the pumpkin plant we started at the beginning of the year. It's a perfect example of the shortage of bees and other pollinators, because this plant flowered all summer and went without any fruit. Not because it was sterile, but because I literally never saw anything crawl or fly by until it was already into late August. Luckily, our plants out at the parental unit were more successful. Jacob had a vastly successful planting of sweet corn after the first set was flooded out and our pumpkins are turning a good, solid Halloween orange.

County fair is coming up this coming weekend and I can't wait. Lambs and steers look good and it's a great time to have a fair. Look for me as press staff once again, pit passes and inside track for the horse races!!!

Piggies!

I went out for my second visit to the farm where my project will be taking place, and it's all starting to seem just a little bit more real. Work with literature, designing, planning and the like can become so abstract and the chance to get hands on and take pictures and conceptualize where things will really be was pretty exciting. I went through the simple stuff such as claiming a locker to keep some things in, meeting the farm employees and designing the main ideas of how this is going down. Right now I'm still held up by people who haven't completed their animal handling training requirements so hopefully we will get a move on pretty soon.

We also dropped in to see the little piglets. If I had seen my first pigs as piglets, I think I would have a much more happy impression of pigs. They are so cute and little, almost fragile looking like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. But little pigs grow up to be mean biters, cannibalistic towards their neighbors and aggressive towards anyone. And don't think that they were any better in the wild. Old Yeller might be a Disney movie but the vicious wild pigs in it are totally straight to character. Thankfully we found a solution for this, and it's called bacon.

Speaking of bacon, I helped with the Ohio Lamb Chef's Day this week and got to experience new twists on many old products. I love lamb for it's unique taste, whimsical rearing grounds (the definition of beautiful pasture was coined when someone saw lambs grazing), and for its ability to eat anything and turn it into food for me (best thing about ruminants). But I loved lamb even more after getting to eat it prepared by a master chef. And this chef wasn't just a master at preparing food, but a great guy to work with and help. He explained everything so simply and yet got such amazing results from relatively unskilled volunteers. Very impressive and my personal favorite from the day was lamb bacon. I will try and remember to take a picture and give a description of it when I fry up the leftovers that I have in our refrigerator now.

Mike Rowe on castration (duplicate post)

Nothing more needs said other than I think this is a great talk by Mike Rowe. Listen to it, and think about how it applies to the misconceptions that we have about what is really better for the animals. And who better to know what's good for animals than the ones who take care of them 365 days a year. He also has good thoughts about the labor force in the US.