They Have The Numbers, We The Heights

Actually, they have both.

But they have kept out of trouble lately, and have eaten scores of slugs and ticks, so I am in a forgiving mood, appreciative of their beauty and hunger.

Giant Cheese

Yesterday I got four gallons of milk from the Fountain of Eternal Milk, and I made a big cheddar. Here it is getting pressed under 50 pounds of bricks for 12 hours, inside an old cider press that lost its twirly thing, and is therefore useless for pressing cider, but is excellent for being a cheese mold.














And here it is when it came out, with a tea cup for scale. The net is to keep the flies from laying eggs on it before it goes into storage in the cheese cage in the cellar for two months. So. I'll let you know at Thanksgiving how it turned out!

Giant Spider

I love these huge big spiders. They are a feature of late summer or early fall here, and I had just commented to the family a day before that I hadn't seen any yet, and I hoped there would be some. Then there was this one, hanging virtually over the gate to the summer kitchen. I'm afraid she's having a tough go of it, however: the torrential rain washed her web down, and since then it has been so chilly that she spends her time flattened to the underside of the beam above her web. It's no way to make a living.

Giant Frog

This enormous frog appeared in the little pond behind my office last week. She is rather larger than my fist, about four times the size of the previous record holder. Maybe the adolescent bullfrogs are sallying forth to occupy new puddles? I have heard no croaking, so I suppose she may be a girl frog? Or maybe migration is conducted quietly. Run silent, froggy. Run deep.

Brains!

OK, not really. It's actually a little loaf of paneer I made today using the blessed produce of the Fountain of Eternal Milk that I recently discovered down in the woods. I haven't made cheese in years, and I am so pleased to begin again. The smell of milk heating is simply divine.

Cider

My son is off school today and the apples set really hard this year—to the point where enormous branches are breaking off because they can’t hold up all the fruit—so we went out and picked five gallons of apples, mostly windfalls, to make cider. His processing job was to hack the apples to pieces, which he enjoyed very much. My job was to run the pieces through the food processor to turn them into tiny bits. Then we fed them into my grandmother’s old juice press, taking turns twisting the augur and holding the press on the countertop (it’s inclined to torque around and fly off). And shazam: in ninety minutes we had turned five gallons of fruit into exactly one gallon of cider. And this cider is delicious. The flavor is not over-sweet—it is tart and sweet both, and just right.

GOOSE FENCE UPDATE

The Administration advises you to leave your geese alone. You can spend as much time as you want, devising ways to improve their lot, and five minutes later they will discover that badly patched place where you overlapped the ends of two short pieces of fence, and they will all start coming and going that way in perfect happiness.

The Brain Trust

Here are some of the new fowl from this spring, cleaning their feathers. As it turned out, we did not have trios (one male, two female) of Pomeranian geese and Toulouses, plus five Blue Swedish ducks. We had one Pomeranian (female), three Toulouses (all female) and seven ducks (not all female), two of whom could be charitably construed as having once had Swedish relatives. Being unable to sex a goose—I can forgive this. Having white fence-climbing ducks running loose in your blue breeding flock, and packers who are not perfectly clear on the whole species difference between ducks and geese? No wonder the feed store changes the subject every time I go in and try to pay for the order.

And as it turns out, “silly” is a charitable epithet for a goose. We have had some enjoyable times lately watching the ducks and geese turn their baby pool into a mud bog is under five minutes using only their personal filth. It is mightily entertaining. But I would not ask them in for chess. I would not even ask them in for tic tac toe. The turkey has turned out to be not only more courageous than the rest, but an intellectual powerhouse by comparison. The other day I found her up in the Hen Room, quietly cleaning out the hanging feeder while her friends on the ground slugged it out with the sheep for the last three layer pellets.

Now I am pitting my wits against the Brain Trust’s lack of them to devise a way to get the birds through the summer pasture fence, somewhat torn up and no longer electrified, without getting the biggest Toulouse fouled helplessly and hopelessly in the wires. I do not especially want them outside the fence, but the apples are falling and no one can really expect them to keep away from that fabulous bounty, even if it is right at the edge of the fox-filled woods. So instead of keeping them in, I want to devise a way for them to pass in and out easily without letting the sheep go free. That way if the flock is pursued by predators, they can flee to the barnyard, where the sheep will rise in curiosity, thereby frightening off the goose-eating varmint by dint of the sheer size and hellishness of a Jacob. My first Goose Gate design involves a broken chair under the fenceline to create a little fence-tent passageway. I’ll let you know how it works.