Stunted

 We have beautiful cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, basil, dill, kale, beans and sweet peas on the stand today...and then we have some of the more 'unique' produce in the house for us to eat. 

The smallest ripe cantaloupe I've ever seen:

 Cucumber - still tasted good!

Teen egg next to a normal egg. This is from one of our landlords' hens - they're almost 5 months old.

Giant aquaponics tomato.

We had some repeat visitors this weekend so we must be doing something right! On Saturday we went tubing down a very lazy and relaxing river where they had recycling containers floating right in the river for any drink bottles. So environmentally aware! We also made pickles and pesto, picked pounds of raspberries and prepared a giant feast. 

Homemade rosemary french bread

Delicious beef roast for dinner - Nathan bought grass-fed beef through his work. 

We finally have enough mint to make mojitos - raspberry mint mojitos are dangerously good.

We found some eye spray and hoof spray for the lambs so we started treating them last night. The eye spray is purple and the hoof spray is blue...it's a good thing they're behind the property where people driving by can't see them. I'll take some photos...

Extracurriculars

We were away from the farm this weekend because the sheepdog failure was busy being an agility superstar. Ryan ended up in 3rd place on the podium at the Regional competition! 

(photo by Liz)

All the plants looked like they were given steroid injections while we were gone. How did they grow this much in 3 days??

Softball sized cantaloupe.

The broccoli that I was sure was going to flower didn't - it just kept growing, along with this zucchini. I sliced up the zucchini, dipped it in egg and some panko bread crumbs and then fried it to have with our burgers. It was pretty good. 

Cucumber and lots of weeds. 

Fred and Barney (the horses) were also away for the weekend and when Jim (their owner) brought them back, I came outside and saw this:

I think Denise just wanted to get a look at herself in the mirror. 

Addiction

After giving the lambs almost a week to settle in, we decided it was time to get them to like us. They've stopped running away from us when we walk by  (it didn't help that we had to grab them on day 1 to check Ewean's gimpy leg - she had been limping but seems better now) but we want them to come running to us (and I want to pet them...and halter train them...). 

Day 2 of training and now when we go outside we see this: 

This was all thanks to the magic of Farmyard Crack. No, I'm not talking about my low sitting farm jeans: I mean sheep grain. We bought some to use for training and we started off yesterday by dropping a bit into a bowl for the lambs every time we walked by them.

Both Ewean and Oprah (her formal name is still Eweneequa but it's a bit of a mouthful) are still jumpy but are now eating out of our hands. Oprah is definitely the leader of the two - she is the first to stomp angrily when the dogs get too close to the fence, and the first to investigate anything new. Ewean doesn't investigate as much but she also seems less suspicious of everything.

The problem is, Farmyard Crack is equally loved by everyone. It's really hard to stay still and try to get nervous lambs to come over to you when you're trying to shoo chickens off of you. Especially when those chickens can get most of their bodies through the fence to try and eat the grain.

Sheep training helpers. 

That Farmyard Crack is something. When I stood up to walk down the driveway I saw this coming towards me:

This following me:

And I heard a pleading "baaaaaa!" next to me.

The cooler weather has slowed everything down in the greenhouse but it's still mostly looking good.

Baby cucumber

 Lots of Kale.

Cantaloupe. Apparently when you grow melons vertically they need to be supported in a net of some kind since they get too heavy for the plant. One YouTube video suggested using brassieres...I'm not sure if these tiny melons will need training bras first?

Itsy Bitsy Watermelon.

Not so itsy bitsy tomatoes. 

The tomatoes look fine but the folliage does not. I really hope this isn't Early Blight. I think the humid days in the greenhouse combined with cooler nights hasn't been great for tomato plants. Two of the plants in the grow bed have most of their leaves affected and the big Sweet Million plants have their bottom leaves affected.