Summer weather hit all at once last week. We awoke to frost on the ground, and by afternoon it was in the 80's. The kids had to break from their work hauling sand to cool off in the creek.


Spring births include 2 icelandic lambs, 1 ram and 1 ewe, both black at first, but the ram lamb is starting to look moorit (chocolate brown). Had my first taste of sheep milk today.. ewe . It wasn't as rich as I expected, and instead tasted almost sour with a bit of a chalkiness, or "powdered milk" flavor. My mare's milk was MUCH better.. that's good stuff, and makes fantastic kefir.

Notice how quickly the icleandic lambs grow. The 5 week old ram lamb (Danny) is in front in the picture below, and the 2 day old ewe lamb (Danielle) is in the background on the left. The following picture is a close-up of her.



We were also given 2 French Angora bunnies, much to Theresa's delight. They were horribly matted, though, so we are still working on getting their coats into shape. We named them Slippers and Mittens. Slippers has soft, velvety pink ears that look like, well, slippers, and Mittens has brown paws. Of course, we hope to make soft, cozy slippers and mittens from their silky hair. It was quite a learning experience determining whether they were boys or girls, but, after doing the research, we're quite sure they are both girls.



We put in a garden with a rustic twig fence and have just about everything popping through already. We also threw many seedballs, Fukuoka style, throughout the property. Plus, we planted raspberry bushes and strawberry plants (the plants didn't survive the shipping, so we have to replace them), built a round pen from aspen on our property for training the horses, built a rustic duck pen (still awaiting the ducks), filled our foundation with sand, built a test wall for the cob/cordwood mixture and started the timber frame on the house.

The rustic garden is on the left, and the round pen on the right. It is covered with felt that is a throwaway material from the local mill.


Here is the timber frame in progress:


We expect to start the cordwooding by early next week. If we work hard, we'll get it done in a couple of months. The guys will continue building the rest of the house while mom and kids do the cob mixing and cordwooding. Then, we'll mix the straw-clay slip infilling for the gable ends, plus a straw-clay slip insulation layer for the earthen floor. After that gets well tamped down, we will lay the earthen floor, hoping that we get to that point before it gets too cold to dry well. We also plan to make a cob bathtub and possibly a heated cob bench, if there is time this season (unlikely). Next summer, I want to build a cob garden wall around the front yard with a cob bread oven so that we don't have to heat the house up in the summer.

Yes, cob has become a fascination with me. I think I even convinced Andrew that it will be sufficiently waterproof. When my test wall was only a week old, he took a hose to it to see how it would fare. Several minutes of direct soaking didn't even phase it. Then, he put his thumb over the hose to get a direct pressure and even that took quite a while to do anything. Our mix is clay, sand, sawdust, psyllium powder, flour glue and EM's.

Here is the test wall being built. The logs are just scrappy old pieces of firewood and are not evenly cut, so the "real" walls should look much better.