Buttered bread, thinly sliced radishes and a sprinkle of sea salt. Perfection!

Look out, y’all. We’ve got a lamb who’ll charm your socks off.

He’s the one standing in the foreground, swaggering up to the camera with a smug little smirk on his face.

Meet Clark.

When he was born, he was the tiniest little thing, and wasn’t getting too much from his mama (she preferred his jumbo-sized twin, Lewis). We supplemented him with a bottle for a while, but he learned pretty quickly to steal sips of milk from whichever ewe he could get close to!

These three ewes this morning were having a little dustup/shoving match, and, in the middle of it all– while they were distracted with shoving one another– Clark zoomed in from the sidelines to get some milk while the getting was good!

Anyone who was here this past weekend can attest to his charm– and his tenacity. See, we’re still bringing a bottle out to Aldrin three times a day. Clark, however, is sure that the bottle’s his.

Are you sure that’s not my bottle? There must have been some mistake!

and later, a little more pushy:

You gonna finish that, Aldrin?

I have a feeling that, with his particular combination of sweetness and toughness, Clark will grow up to be a grade-A criminal mastermind. Or maybe a shady politician. Or, anything he wants, really– he won’t quit until he gets it!

Caballo Blanco’s Last Run: The Micah True Story from The New York Times. Best article I read all week.

Uncatchable from GQ. “America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went. It was a historic run—and now that it’s over, he might just pull off the greatest escape of all” If you read nothing else this week, read this.

Indians Feed the Monkeys, Which Bite the Hand from The New York Times

Longing for the Return of Dueling Pistol from The New York Times.  I could get more interested in the Olympics if Tug of War and Dueling Pistols were brought back.

Japan Tsunami Debris: Bones Expected To Wash Ashore, Oceanographer Says from The Huffington Post

Mother of God, Child of Zeus from The Virginia Quarterly Review. “Deep in the Amazon, mercury from small gold mines threatens to poison the rivers—and their people.”

A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now? from Religious Dispatches. “A reporter tracks down the remnants of Harold Camping’s apocalyptic movement and finds out you don’t have to be crazy to believe something nuts.”

Grace in Broken Arrow from This Land. “The story of a sex abuse scandal inside a Tulsa Christian school, where church leaders were in denial and where the crimes shattered the lives of victims and their families.”

Larry Hagman’s Curtain Call from Texas Monthly.

Eugene Polley, Conjuror of a Device That Changed TV Habits, Dies at 96 from The New York Times.

Green Roofs in Big Cities Bring Relief From Above from The New York Times. Love this!

Did you read anything amazing this week?

Today was the puppies’ first day on solid food and it was hilarious.

At first, they had no idea what that mushy stuff in the bowl was but once one or two of them caught on, it was pandemonium.

The pups will be three weeks old on Saturday and they are already enormous!

This is Gnocchi. He’s the runt of the litter and our hands-down favorite.

He seemed to be heading down hill last weekend, so I brought him in the house overnight and supplemented him with a few bottles of puppy milk replacer. By morning he was doing just fine!  He’s back out with his brothers and he is THRIVING! He was the first to understand that the stuff in the bowl was for eating.

Part of our adoration for Gnocchi comes from the fact that he is the only one of the pups that’s recognizable at this stage. The other 5 boys are completely interchangeable but Gnocchi is Mister Personality.

We may have one or two pups for sale when they get to be 8-weeks-old. Three (possibly four) have already been spoken for and will be going to live a sheep and goat farms. I was planning to keep only one but I’m leaning towards keeping two for Juniper Moon Farm. The truth is, I wish I could keep them all!

If you have a working farm and are looking for a livestock guardian dog, email me at susie at fiberfarm dot com.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I was really dreading our Shearing Day Celebration last weekend. I was sick with a nasty cold. I’d been out of town for the week leading up to it. I was expecting 11 house guests. There was nothing in the world I wanted to do less than have a hundred people over for lunch and shearing on Saturday.

And you know what? It was AMAZING! I had an incredible time. My guests had an incredible time. My staff had an incredible time. It was just a lovely and amazing event all-around.

Afterwards, I pretty much collapsed for three days. Fever, chills, brutal cough, runny nose, the works. (I’m only just back on my feet today.) But during those three days, I had a lot of time to think. Lots and lots of time to think. And I kept coming back to the same thing thing, over and over: My worst day running Juniper Moon Farm is better than my best day doing anything else.

I love this job I created for myself, this life I’ve built. I love everything about it. I love taking care of the animals. I love the community that has sprung up around the farm. I don’t necessarily love the shipping, or the money worries, or answering a million emails everyday, but those things are a very small price to pay for getting to live a life that is better than anything I could have dreamed up for myself.

Oh, there were hard times. Believe me- there were some very, very hard times! Sleepless nights. Fear. Lots of fear. But I amazed myself by refusing to give up. By getting back up every time I got knocked down. I wouldn’t trade those times for anything because I know what I am capable of now. I know how to make myself heard. I know that set backs are temporary.

The purpose of all this is not to be all braggy-braggy but to tell you something very important. Are you ready? There is nothing special about me. Nothing that makes me any more capable of following my dream and seeing it realized than you are. The only difference between me and you is that  I got a head start.

I don’t know what your dream is, but I know the only thing keeping you from realizing it, and that is YOU.

But that ends today! Today, I want you to take one tiny baby step towards your dream life. Just an itty-bitty baby step. Something that isn’t scary at all. Sign up for a class. Dedicate an hour a day to writing. Or painting. Or splitting atoms.

By breaking the process into tiny, manageable steps, you can stop dreaming and start doing. And you should never underestimate the power of doing, of creating momentum. Of showing yourself that you take this thing seriously.

So. Take a deep breath and tell me what your dream is. Then tell me what baby step you are going to take to get to it. Don’t worry! I’m going to be right here beside you while we get this done.

Garlic Scapes: mean we’ll be harvesting in less than a month!

Baby Peas: eat them straight off the vine!

Bell Peppers:

That Tomato‘s getting bigger:

Corn’s coming up nicely:

With beans planted in between each row of corn, to a) add Nitrogen to the soil and b) hold on to the corn, keeping it from getting blown over in a thunderstorm:

And we’re still eating two salads a day!

Adelaide

Boy Flock

Alabama

Buster

Cosmo and Cassiopeia

Orion

Cini

Little Draco

Callum

Sweet Aldrin

Corvus and Canis

Catalina, Liberty, and Snow

Charles Lindbergh

Beautiful Dora

Capri and Diane

Lovely Cordelia

Such a great reminder! $15

Hero Fingers: Ordinary Fingers Transformed Into Superheroes

Birds made from Legos.

Homemade Furniture Dusting Spray

Recipe: Tandoori Chicken. This is very, very good.

Love this beer poster! $20

This baby outfit made me laugh. $25

Waldorf Wooden Farm Play Set $80

How to clean and re-grease your Kitchen Aid mixer. Step-by-step instructions, y’all!

What is making you use exclamation points this week? Share with us!!!

We spent this past Sunday afternoon recovering from our best-ever shearing party by selectively harvesting some new potatoes.

If you’ve never dug potatoes before, let me tell you: it is absolutely a ton of fun. It’s just like a treasure hunt, except a) you already know exactly where the treasure’s buried and b) the treasure is POTATOES.

We had planted the whole bed rather densely, and, really, it needed to be thinned. So, Sunday, we thinned out half the bed. We’re saving the other half for next week.

This is how you harvest new potatoes:

First, you pull up the top of the plant. You’ll find it growing out of the old seed potato (it’ll be easy to tell which one that is, since the seed potato starts to disintegrate around this point), with tuber-laden roots sticking out in all directions.

 Then comes the fun. After putting the easy pickings in your basket, you get to sift through the loosened dirt with your hands (and a pitchfork), in search of the light-colored flash of a rogue potato. It’s like digging up treasure, or panning for gold. You’re muddling along in the dirt, and, all of a sudden, you find a tiny edible thing! It’s fantastic!

We thinned in two-foot-wide swaths, working across the length of the bed. The tops of the plants should fill those cleared spaces back in pretty quickly.

 It was a lovely afternoon, cool and breezy, and the work was a real group effort– no one wanted to be left out of the fun of digging!

 After sifting the soil to a satisfactory degree, you hill up the loosened dirt around the remaining potato plants themselves. This gives them a little extra support, while encouraging them to send out some more tuberous roots a little higher up the plant.

 And, here you have them: our beautiful, delicate, precious, delicious, little pommes de terre.

 How much did we get from thinning out half a bed that’s been in production for, at most, a month and a half?

That’s a lot of potatoes, folks. I’ve been looking forward to these potatoes so much, and am thrilled that we were able to get enough to keep for ourselves and to share.

Have you all started harvesting from your gardens yet? What are you looking forward to eating?

I also learned that immature lima bean pods do not taste like lima beans. They are nothing like eating an immature pea pod. They are actually rather horrifying and require a palate cleanser. I hope I do not make this lima bean mistake again soon.

The garden is situated in a field behind the house, but it is back across a stream—a stream crossed by a cute—but little—bridge. The garden is way too far to run a hose from the house. I thought a pump system would have to be installed to bring water up from the stream or, more likely, bucket after bucket of water would have to be dragged across that bridge—totally impractical. I was very surprised when Erin told me a great solution was in place.

Bridge to the Garden

The solution is none of the above methods, and it is simple, elegant, perfect.

The stream incorporates a lovely little waterfall. A hose has been set, open side up, in the waterfall. It runs from there to the garden.

And it works! Water pours down the waterfall and enters the hose. When the garden-end spigot is opened, there is plenty of pressure to water the garden. Low-tech, simple, and free—beautiful.

Water flows from the waterfall straight down into the hose.

The hose exits the stream...

...runs through the woods...

...and waits in the garden, ready when needed.

Gratuitous goat photo

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and I found both Emily and Andie hard at work and in good spirits. Emily took the brunt of dealing with the recent deaths and illnesses, but she has years of experience working with animals, and seemed to be able to take this in stride as a sad but inevitable part of farming.  I was so glad to see the two of them upbeat and energetic.

I began searching for Arno almost as soon as I arrived. I had been very worried as to how he might be doing without Agnes. I had a tough time finding him—he is one busy goat. He is very grown up now and is doing just fine—Agnes raised him well. I finally found him palling around with a bunch of the other goats; he then moved on to rambunctiously charging back and forth with all of the sheep (only a few sheep are at Hudson Valley for the summer). Emily and Andie confirmed that he is doing quite well. Below is a cell phone shot of him–my camera acted up. Arno is in the center of the shot, almost head-on to the camera (um, phone).

Arno

Katie, the fourth goat with listeriosis, had been doing very poorly and was close to being put down. However, she has had an abrupt and well-nigh miraculous turn-around and is doing much better. She has her own pen at the moment for TLC and rest.

I also found out that Miss Linda is doing fine—both Odette and Ophelia had reached the point of not being very reliant on her, so Ophelia’s passing has not had the terrible impact on her it might have at an earlier date.

I’m so glad I went to the farm this morning. I had been a little afraid, but what I found there was all good and life-affirming. All of the animals looked healthy, happy, and relaxed (and the people). The garden update—well, that will have to wait ’til another day!

I wish we could have a whole second herd of goats with his gorgeous natural color.

I just wanted to take a moment to show him off to all who have not met him before. I was just about awestruck the first time I saw him…I had assumed Angoras only came in white, but it turns out they also come in shades of black as well as red. As far as I know, the farm does not have a red Angora…yet.

Death is very removed from my everyday life–people die isolated in hospitals, hidden from view. It is easy, in a way, to forget that death exists and is coming for each of us. While nothing makes the loss of these animals “worth it”, I am grateful for this lesson in mortality and the reminder that life is finite and precious.

One of my most important pieces of jewelry is a set of Tibetan prayer beads, each bead carved into the shape of a skull. I suppose it sounds quite morbid, but it serves as a reminder of mortality and the fleetingness of life. One of my coworkers was killed recently, in a brutal, horrific car crash. The morning of the day she died, she sent out one of those sentimental e-mails on how unexpectedly death can come, and the importance of appreciating what–and who–you have now. That e-mail, and the knowledge that she was living each day to the fullest, has been such a comfort to those she left behind. She was well aware of the preciousness of her life. I think such an awareness is a gift, and it is the lesson, and the reminder, I choose to draw from the passing of Agnes, Chipotle, and Ophelia.

Ophelia gets her bottle (while Odette waits her turn)

Ophelia gets snorgled

I have an unreasonable fear of canning, stemming from childhood memories of exploding jars in my grandmother’s basement. I can’t imagine how she managed to make those jars blow up, but it has been instilled in me that canning is dangerous. This puts me at a distinct disadvantage when the garden bounty starts pouring in.

I was thrilled to discover refrigerator pickles–yummy, easy to make, and they keep in the fridge for weeks. And no canning! (Must be refrigerated, and they will spoil eventually.) Today I did a bare bones version:

Slice a bunch of cucumbers into a bowl.

Boil together 2 cups white vinegar, 2 cups sugar, 2 T kosher salt. Pour over the sliced cukes.

Put in fridge and wait at least a day (if you can) before snacking. I waited until they were barely less than burning hot before snacking…

If anyone has a great refrigerator pickle recipe to share, please do. I’m sure there are much snazzier versions than the above…

Susie did not lean toward cold loving crops when planting, and those seem to be the only crops doing well around here. I took a meander around her garden the other day and found the watermelon longing for heat:

That is my pen next to the melon plants for scale and it is hard to see, but it is actually pointing at one of the mushrooms(!) that has sprung up in the garden.

Susie’s garden fascinates me because she has planted many varieties I’ve never tried.  I am endlessly interested in what other people plant. Some of what she has:

Potatoes: Kerr’s Pink, All Blue, and many others.

Charentais melon.  Heirloom variety, reputed to be delicious. Can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

Moon and Stars watermelon. This is one I have grown, with its beautiful speckling of the fruit and even the leaves. Makes me happy just to look at it in the garden. I don’t have much watermelon space and this year I have Mountain Sweet Yellow in my garden, exquisite flavor and it ripens in our tough Northeastern area. (Well, maybe not this year.)

Crystal Apple cucumber. An heirloom white cuke. Looks a bit like lemon cucumber to me.

Black Beauty zucchini. I am open-minded, and I will try this if Susie has any to spare. Meantime I will try to convert her to my all time favorite zucchini, Costata Romanesco. A low yielding zuke—and I believe that is a virtue in a zuke—lots of blossoms for frying and a reasonable amount of fruit. Costata has a delicious nutty flavor. When I bring them to work people actually fight over them.

Boston Marrow Squash. Susie has come up with yet another nifty heirloom, a pumpkin this time.

Peppers: King of the North, Healthy, and others.

Tomatoes: Trophy, Brandywine, Suddoth’s Brandywine, Green Zebra, and others—I’m hoping that between the two of us, Susie and I can have a little tomato tasting this fall.

Susie has many other plants—all look happy but a bit behind due to the rain and cold. Well, not all look happy: the potted tomatoes up by the house were attacked by the chickens and had to be moved within the safety of the garden fence:

A couple of innocent looking chickens:

I am already straying from the garden topic–I want to share this video shot soon after Agnes had Arno. Arno is goofing around, while Agnes never lets him get far from her sight. Very typical of Agnes’s conscientious mothering.

Agnes and her Arno from Linda Campbell on Vimeo.

During farm visits, Arno always seemed to be having adventures while Agnes kept a watchful eye on him. Thank goodness for his strong, independent spirit. He is a resilient little goat.

My friend Grace and I were nosing around at the Fiber Farm a few weeks ago, checking out Susie’s plantings. We saw a little bit of deer damage starting on the shrubs in front of the house. That was no surprise—deer are absolutely rampant in this area, a formidable opponent to gardeners everywhere. The poor things have lost most of their natural predators and seem to constantly be on the verge of starvation. Unfortunately, that has led to great boldness on their part and widespread destruction in practically everybody’s gardens.

Anyway, we were looking around when we saw a most intriguing planting under a tree. An intense back and forth ensued as we tried to identify the plant, which had not yet flowered. Our first thought was tulips, but that was clearly impossible—these plants were in easy reach of any deer passing by, and tulips are deer candy.

Back home I discovered a similar mysterious planting in my back yard. I plant stuff all the time and then forget about it, but I couldn’t figure this one out. But all became clear once it flowered:

Susie and I both successfully grew tulips this year! How Susie did this, I just don’t know. Apparently she is under the protection of the plant gods. I, however, happened to put deer repellant down in the area of the tulips—pure chance, I was trying to protect other plantings there. A deer repellant that can protect tulips is a powerful repellant indeed!

For years I did not use deer repellant at all. Too expensive for one. Then I started using a homemade repellant. It was clear to me the stuff would not work—after all, if it did, everyone would use it.

And then, a miracle. I continue to field questions from the neighbors as to why the deer don’t bother my lilies, my hostas, all my plants that normally would make up a deer salad bar. My recipe for homemade repellant is below. It is important to start application early in the season, before deer have gotten in the habit of snacking at your house every day. (They will even teach this snacking habit to their children, and pass down info about how tasty your yard is from one generation to the next.) I apply repellant weekly, and rotate the homemade spray with a commercial repellant from week to week. I like to use Deer Solution as my commercial repellant because it happens to smell like cinnamon, but any spray should do in the rotation. You just don’t want the same thing every single week—the deer will get used to it.

Deer Repellant

2 eggs

1 cup skim milk

1 cup water

2 TBS liquid dish detergent

Beat the eggs a little and strain them through a sieve. Straining them will help keep them from clogging your spray bottle.

Mix all the ingredients together. Store in fridge in a spray bottle, and apply to plants weekly, or after a heavy rain. No need to let the eggs or milk turn bad and start to smell! It works fine with fresh ingredients.

Some people like to add a little vegetable oil to encourage better adhesion to the plant leaves. Brad Roeller of the Cary Institute has done lots of research on deer damage. His green landscaping tips can be linked to from this page, including his own version of homemade deer repellant.

A final word of caution—deer will eat anything if they are hungry enough! I hope you have great luck if you try the repellant spray, but unfortunately there are no guarantees…

Anybody have any favorite tips for dealing with deer?

And now for today’s unrelated goat photos: