Where the heck has this month gone? It seems like it was Nov. just the other day, and now it’s almost Christmas. The weather might have something to do with everything, I’m not used to the changes it’s making since I’m new here, and even though I grew up in Ohio 25 degrees the other morning felt pretty cold.
It’s starting to freeze in the mornings now (hence the 25 degrees) which brought up a whole lot of new issues to deal with… actually just one and thats the water. Blowing out the hoses, turning some lines off, making sure the heater in the well house is working, remembering to bust the ice on the watering troughs for all the animals…
The milk from the goats has steadily been drying up these last few weeks. Whenever you breed them (these are all basic things I’m having to learn) they’ll start drying up naturally to save energy for the baby so you can either milk them and get hardly anything or dry them all the way up. It’s still somewhat worth it now, and we recently got a cow that we’re milking as well.
Other than a lot of maintenance things there hasn’t been tons to do so I’ve been rereading Anna Karenina, which is quickly becoming my favorite. Even though it’s well over a hundred years old, depicts drawing rooms and society we no longer have, and set in Russia it’s still enormously relevant. One of the main characters even talks about crop rotation and grazing techniques that I read in Joel Salatin’s book several months ago; agriculture really has a timelessness to it. I would recommend it to anyone who can handle 400,000 words, which you probably can.
