Celebrating Five

This was a big week. Gabriela turned 5 and yesterday and today were full of festivities. The best part being the family gathering down at our campfire last night for dinner and smores. There was music and laughter and in true Gabriela fashion she brought all of us gifts for her birthday. Five is such a wonderful age. It was good to celebrate.

In other news, the farm is lovely, becoming more bare with the coming fall. We have harvested winter squash and pumpkins and are clearing our fields and laying cover crops which will add nutrients back to the soil, winter rye in one field oats in the other. The tomatoes are starting to come down and the days have been full of great blue skies and clear crisp days. The apples in the orchard and the wild ones all around are producing and filling in the air with the fragrance of decomposing swetness.

Apples everywhere!

We are canning and preserving and weeding in preparation for next year.

tomatillo salsa

This is a time of closing doors. The work of the season is over. If frost comes we allow them to take what it will. Now are the days for Kale and Collards and those beautiful greens that only get better once the frost has come. The leaves here are begining to turn, fall comes quickly here in New England...our calf has been given a name...Moses...somewhat appropriate due to his foster child state...though we all think maybe naming a calf after a person who has liberated people from captivity is not the best idea. He is still sweet but as we move him in every evening away from his mother, so we can have some milk...he's begun to kick up his legs and try out himself as liberator. So from Swissy to Moses...really I think it was safer calling him swissy...

moses being brought in for the nights

our other cows have come back from being with the bull and their calves with them...it is good to have the farm full and alive with their mooing. There is a month and a half left. It is strange to think the season has gone so fast. Tonight the moon is full again as it has been the past few nights filling the farm with moonlight.

The night walkers