Shepherd's Garden

 First of all, for those who didn't know, it was Moragh's birthday on Monday (Nov 19th), which was also our first day at Shepherd's Garden, our third woofing host farm! And, she totally forgot it was her birthday until Emily reminded her. The picture above is her "I'm the birthday girl" pose.

Shepherd's Garden is located in Harvey Station, New Brunswick, which is about halfway between Fredericton and the Maine border, ish. Both times we drove into Harvey have been at night but it seems like a nice little town and reminds Emily a bit of Rustico (a town on PEI near where she grew up). The farm and buildings on it date back to 1864 and with 65 sheep plus assorted other animals, it is both our oldest and largest wwoofing host farm so far.

We've been really lucky with clear, frosty weather these past two days. The property is beautiful and we look forward to exploring the lakes and ponds some afternoon.

Buckwheat is wondering why the pats have stopped.

 Now, the animals :) there are so many here for us to love! There are two housecats, two unnamed barncats and two dogs. Buckwheat is an older tortoiseshell/tabby female who has decided we belong to her now. We can't be in our bedroom for two minutes without her showing up on the bed. She has no regard for personal space and even as we write this blog post she is taking turns standing on Moragh's stomach or Emily's chest, looking for attention. Which she gets. She has us all figured out. Rex is the other housecat, an orange tabby who is so laid back he tends to fall off the couch and just sleep wherever he lands. He wears a green Christmas bell to warn birds of his approach. We don't see him as often but when we do, he is also in-your-face with the snuggling. Picture of him soon.

Maude, Moragh, and Blue.

 There is a slightly senile border collie named Maude and an Australian shepherd named Blue. Poor Maude has many idiosyncrasies but is very pretty and sweet. Blue is probably the happiest and most obedient dog we've ever met and lives to be outside with the sheep. They both love Moragh, as all dogs seem to. Playing on the porch is a morning routine.

The mature herd, waiting for morning mash.

Our work here revolves around taking care of the animals and also - our favourite - getting firewood ready for winter! Each day starts with morning chores: three different sets of sheep (male lambs, female lambs, mature herd) get hay and mash (brewer's mash actually, from a local microbrewery), the horses come in for oats and hay, two sets of chickens need feed and water, eggs need collecting, and the barn cats get a bit of dry food.

A male lamb!

This picture is for Ayden. Sheep have long tails!! Sheep with short tails have been docked.

Moragh with Bud and Bailey.

Did we mention the horses were Clydesdales? Their names are Bud and Bailey, and they're huge. Their hooves are the size of dinner plates. They are very mild-mannered though and we're excited to get to know them better.

Ted and Louise, our hosts here, raise two different kinds of chickens, meat birds and laying hens. The meat birds are no longer with us this season but there are two sets of laying hens on the farm right now. The birds in the picture to the right are younger birds, about to come in to their first and most productive year of laying. They are sleek and quiet and live in an enclosure in the large barn.

The other set of laying hens have just finished their first year of laying and are all going through a major moult. They live in a separate shed between the barn and the house. They are scraggly looking and loud and little bit crazy. We love them. In the morning they crowd the door waiting for the grain bucket to show up and when it does, they all start carrying on with this noise that sounds like they're saying "ohhhhhhhhhh maaaaahhhh gaaaaaaaaad" over and over again. We now join in. So if you're outside the shed, we all sound crazy. These hens are being sold and will be replaced by the younger set soon.

There are also 11 Highland cows! They are so sweet and shaggy. They don't need much care right now, they keep to themselves in the pasture.

woodshed we intend to fill.

Other than animals, we've mostly been doing firewood. Emily strung an electric fence yesterday, and today we dug a hole to find a leaky pipe and helped load some sheep on a truck, but mostly, it's been the wood.

At least the view is nice. This is the end of the really long lane, where the wood splitter is set up.

Name one thing you don't want to find inside a log you are splitting.

Our answer: live, but hibernating, black ants.

SO. MANY. ANTS.

This is how we keep in shape around here.

We are having lots of fun, and keeping very busy. Ted is great at planning a reasonable and structured day and making sure we participate in all aspects of the farm. We hope to update soon with some anecdotes about our experiences here!

Wishing you all well,
Emily and Moragh

Videos Unrelated

There should be two videos included in this post. If you can't see them, perhaps you're using an Apple brand device (iPad, iPhone, etc). Try it on a PC and if you still can't see them, we probably messed up.

The videos are completely unrelated but they're all we have the energy to upload right now.

Heading West

We're on the road again. Destination: Harvey, NB.
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Mish Mash, Mish Mish Moshy

Sarah McGuire, that blog title is for you. :)
This blog post is going to be a mish mash of the last bits of our time here...we can't believe it went so quickly!

To the left is the long awaited photo of inside our little cabin. Those are handmade bunk beds just inside the door. Sorry for the mess everywhere, we don't spend much time in there and when we do it's freezing and all we want to do is change in and out of pyjamas without getting hypothermia. There is a little heater that you can see on the floor but it takes about four hours to heat the cabin and when we turn it on and go to sleep we wake up in deadly heat. It's a toss-up between roasting and freezing and we usually take the cold (inside the sleeping bags warms up pretty quickly). The lamp you can see by the bed is (wait for it) a unicorn patterned touch lamp. Unbelievably awesome. There was also an Aladdin themed lamp in there, with Aladdin, Jasmine and the Genie on it, but we had to give it to the goats.

That's a picture of the other side of the cabin, taken from the corner by the beds. The air mattress is blocking the view to the toilet in the corner (there is no wall or partition or anything, just a simple see-through shelf and as close as we are, it's a lot easier to go to the bathroom when you can't see anyone else). It's a simple toilet with no tank, flushed by pouring rain water from an outside barrel into the bowl. The water pump for the sink isn't functional yet either, so we carry water in a jug from the house up the hill every day. The entire cabin and most of the furniture in it was built by Betty and her family and a score of wwoofers.

Pet pictures! The dogs here are great. Always a source of entertainment. Here is Moragh playing with Zada and Bam Bam...they are both going after a little squeaky pig that Moragh has in her hand. Bam thinks she is the big dog. Zada could fling her to the road and back but she always plays tug of war on the little dog's level.

Zada also likes to drive the truck.

Smelly, smelly man-goat.

We've had a few goat adventures in the last couple of days. Betty has five female goats, two with names. Marney is the oldest and her daughter is Sammy. Sammy has a cyst on the side of her neck (a contagious condition called caseous lymphadentitis) that needs to be drained every so often so that it doesn't rupture on its own and spread to the other goats. So we lanced it and drained it for her.  She flailed and tried to kick and bite. Was one of the grossest things we've ever done. No more details.

We also gave de-worming meds to all the goats as a routine precautionary measure. Grab goat by the neck, restrain head, shove plastic syringe into corner of mouth, inject goop, step away and watch as they struggle with it. Sammy got her meds right after we drained her cyst and she was so mad at us that after she swallowed the goop she curled her upper lip up over her teeth and stared us down.

That same day, we took a trip to a neighbouring farm to pick up a billy goat for some quality time with the ladies ('tis the season). He reeks. So bad. So rank. Betty tried to warn us but we were not ready. There are no words to describe it, except perhaps to tell you how he gets so smelly - in Betty's words: "he sticks his pecker out and pees all over himself." Seriously, everywhere. Especially his face. Then he sticks his tongue out and snorts at the lady goats and thinks he is super studly. The smell is musky waxy thick, kind of like the after-taste of goat cheese in perfume form. We can smell him from across the farm.

It's like we shrunk dozens of orange socks.

Tuesday, we went to Betty's mother's house to pull her carrots for her (her name is June, she is 83 and lives alone in a beautiful house she built herself and she still plants and tends a huge garden - she has pictures of black bears on her front porch too). As it turns out, Moragh is a weeny carrot advocate and wouldn't let us throw out the tiny ones that June didn't want. So we took them back to Betty's and spent about two hours sorting them and taking the green tops off...and then we threw them in the WASHING MACHINE.

Yes. Yes we really did. Betty learned this trick from the Mennonites. Once you take the majority of the soil off your carrots, you can throw them in a wash cycle with some dishcloths and scrubbies and they will come out sparkling. And you'll never have to peel them, and they will stay fresh for longer. Who knew??

Since a lot of the carrots we took back with us were pitifully small, we decided we would juice them. Best. Decision. Ever. The juicer is the most fun kitchen implement we've ever used. We have a video on Emily's phone that we will hopefully upload soon.  You simply stuff a chute full of whatever you want juiced, turn the juicer on and use the "food pusher" to push the vegetables/fruit/roast beef/cake down into the blender part. A magical fan (we think) blows liquid out one side and fluff out the other.

Carrot-man! With an apple hat.

Carrot fluff comes out the consistency of wet, superfine sawdust. And it was very shape-able.

We made a batch of pure carrot juice, and also a batch of carrot-apple-lemon juice, which was gone in about two hours. So delicious.

Moragh was really into it.

By the way, we actually finished moving all the split firewood into sheds for the winter! 16 cords of it. For anyone who doesn't know, a cord is a unit of wood that measures 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. In essence, we moved 2048 cubic feet of wood. What we had left over was about a cord of unsplit wood, which we finished splitting today. Not by hand, thankfully - the splitter ran on gasoline and slowly drove a huge wedge down a platform and by sheer force drove the wood apart.

This log is doomed.

Stage 1...

Stage 2...

Stage 3

Emily was pretty into it too.

We'll be very sad to leave here, we've become very attached to Betty and her human and animal family. We loved cooking for everyone and have learned many new recipes while we were here. All good things come to an end though, and we are looking forward to continuing our travels!

We'll leave you with pictures of us on our favourite toy here.

Emily trying to look dudely and failing so hard

That's the pile of wood we split in the background!

Update From the Barn

Our friend Sarah who we met in Cape Breton has come to visit us in Antigonish! And turns out she's a goat hoof expert! We are cleaning and trimming goat hooves this morning. Did you know that goat's hooves are just like big fingernails?? Underneath their hooves looks like two fat fingers and a large fingernail over top. We are cleaning the dirt out from under their nails and trimming the ends if necessary. They hate it so much.
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Carpentry (or something)

Titten has made Emily his slave.

We forgot one of the house-pets! Above is Titten, an old marble tabby Tom who has Emily wrapped around his little paws. He sits back on his hind legs and waves his front paws in the air when he wants attention. How can you say no??

Before we started. The roof doesn't quite reach the walls.

Anyway, we've been busy the last couple of days with some carpentry projects Betty wanted to get done before it snows. She recently added a lean-to onto her goat barn as a feed storage and milking area, and asked us if we would seal up some of the gaps to make it more wind and snow proof. The goats find it unpleasant to be milked in a freezing, drafty area.

After. Gaps mostly sealed, need to finalize it with some caulking.

Emily good carpenter.

We also patched some gaps in the roof between the original barn and the new lean-to. Emily was elected roof climber, and took it very seriously.

"Do you see it? Is it there?"

Turns out it's difficult to pass supplies back and forth with someone on a roof, so instead Moragh passed Emily things through the hole we were patching.





Also, we learned it's hard to use a hammer in a space about three inches high.

The planning stages. Always the hardest.

Lastly, we attached a winter-worthy door onto the lean-to to replace a half sized gate that was used in the summer. The door already existed as part of the original barn, and as with most things built for old barns, it was heavy as hell. We had to build a door frame that would support it and also create a snug fit to keep the wind and draft out.

Moragh Jang, skill saw-er extraordinaire.

We don't have any "before" pictures because no one was in the mood for photography. We believe that carpentry projects should be mandated as tests of relationship strength. We almost killed each other. There were arguments, tantrums, and on one occasion, tears shed. When two forces as stubborn and opinionated (and inexperienced in carpentry) as we are meet, bad things happen. We were not proud of our behaviour, but in the end we were proud of the finished product.

We added the 2x4's on either side as well as the red piece above the door, plus a few support pieces.

We built a rudimentary handle and added latches on either side of the door as well.

The hole in the plank looks like a rat!

Annnnd a little pig for good measure :)

We had a day off here today and relaxed, but tomorrow we are going to set up at the Farmer's Market and try to sell some of Betty's crocheted rugs! Looking forward to it. We love markets.

Until next time!

Sushi

We found sushi. In Antigonish. Good sushi too. Heavennnnn. Crazy weather here, thunderstorms and torrential rains. People driving off the road :/ ...we promise, no ditching the car tonight.

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