An evening in May

This is what a Wednesday night in May looks like at Stone Soup Farm. 

No stories, no writing. Just pictures from a beautiful spring evening. 

The fuzzy chickens are silkies -- they're pretty useless, but awfully cute. 

Scout was helping to set up the new raised beds. 

The trampoline gets quite a workout. 

This is Shadow.  He's also useless, but cute.

sime of the starts that will go into the garden. 

Goat art.  They've eaten the brush as high up as they can reach. In the little shelter is an old iron stove that was used for canning in the 1950s.

This was a brush patch last week. They've done a pretty good job clearing it out! 

Our newest baby -- Chewvaca! He's awfully sweet. 

Leah. An angora goat. She needs a good shearing. 

Our baby goats. Boy and girl twins. 

8 p.m. and beautiful out. 

This is the garden where we're going to put the stuff that chickens will destroy: Lettuce, tomatoes, flowers. 

Running low

We've been doing the farm challenge of buying no food for three weeks now.

If we were just doing my original plan of going until June 1, this would be easy -- I've got it. But since I've decided to stick it out until July 1, things might get tough.

Coffee seems to be everyone's common ground. No one wants to see me run out of coffee -- my sister sent done for my birthday, a friend dropped some off, and I'm trading some tomorrow. And I have enough creamer stashed away to last until July. 

It's the other stuff that's starting to dwindle, though. We're out of chocolate chips, though I have lots of cocoa. Sugar is down to about three pounds. Out of soy sauce, which couldn't be awful. I traded a friend for a small bottle, but that won't last long. 

All of these are either staples or luxury items, depending on your point of view. You can certainly eat lentil soup and veggies every day and not need soy sauce or chocolate chips. But if you're trying to live for months, spices and chocolate are important! 

We're doing lots of veggies and lots of peasant food. The other night I had a soup with mushrooms, broccoli, yellow squash and onion, blended up with beef broth, and it was great.

We did a fancy fondue for Mark's birthday, which is where we used up a lot of stuff. Beef, pork, meatballs, mushrooms and cubes of bread, all fried in hot oil at the table and served with six sauces, and a chocolate fondue at the end with bananas, strawberries and marshmallows. We won't be eating that well again for a while!

Overall, though, we're in good shape.  plain, boring food: Oatmeal and eggs for breakfast. Leftovers for lunch. Veggies and rice and meat for dinner, or a crockpot something. I'm dying for something more exciting, and I guess I have to do that myself. I think I'll do some kind of Indian food tonight, just to spice it up a little.

Trading

We're at day 16 of the "buy no food" farm challenge, and so far, so good. We were a little worried because the boys and Mark are off on a camping trip this weekend, and that usually means at least one trip to the store. The boys and Mark are all gluten-free and dairy-free, and camp food is usually noodles, meatballs, pancakes and all sorts of stuff we have to put and replace with fussy GF versions so my kids feel like they're eating somewhat the same food as everyone else.

however, we've lucked into a great Boy Scout troop that has realized that if our three campers plus three other campers can't eat gluten, that's one-third of the people going. So they put them all in one group and they're bringing GF food for everyone and we don't have to worry about it. That's the first time in ten years of Scouts that food hasn't been a serious issue.

We have a ton of food, still,​ and we're eating lots of veggies from Gleaners. I've had people emailing me and asking what I have to trade. Pecans are a hot commodity. My aunt sent me a 30-pound box of pecans for my birthday, and I'm very happy at the bargaining power pecans have.

Clearly, we still have plenty of eggs, too. 

I got one pound of organic coffe last week, and someone else is bringing over another pound this week.

Mans someone emailed me and said they were looking for strawberries. No dice, I said. We've been out since September.  he said he had blueberries for me I came across them.

i thought that was a funny thing -- to keep on the lookout for strawberries. As if that would happen. 

Then another lady emailed me. "I have three gallons of frozen strawberries," she said, from their garden last year. "Got any pecans?"

So today, I gave up some of the strawberries and kept some. And now we have a gallon of blueberries in the freezer as well, and the kids are having organic fruit smoothies every morning. 

I almost feel guilty that this isn't harder. 

Maybe in two weeks,  when the meat starts to runs out, I'll be changing my tune.