Birthday Extravaganza!

As one gets older, birthdays seem to loose their excitement, but today thus far has been extremely fun.  The activities are as follows:

1.  Sleeping in.  

While this for us typically means sleeping until 6am, it's still nice not to have to rush out of bed in the morning.

2.  Opening gifts.

Presents included warm winter gear and dental picks (a popular choice on everyone's birthday list).  Needless to say, some tooth scraping was done before moving on to anything else!

3.  Cutting and decorating the Christmas tree.

This year we went a little more traditional and rather than cutting down an ugly tree from the yard, we went to a local tree farm and cut our own tree.  We are rather pleased with the result.

 4.  Eat lunch.  

No your eyes are not playing tricks on you.  We had a very healthy lunch of Banana Cream Pie and hot chocolate.  While Teresa's hot chocolate had marshmallows adorning the top, Eric chose whipped cream instead.

We'll see what the rest of the day brings!

Winter Harvest

We were a bit slow on the harvesting of carrots this year and quickly found ourselves in a bind.  About 2 weeks ago we had out first snowfall the night before Teresa was planning on picking the carrots.  The raised bed was completely covered in snow and the soil was frozen solid.  Eric covered the carrots with plastic in the hope that the sun would melt the snow, but this past week has continued to see multiple snowfalls and temperatures in the single digits!  Needless to say it was becoming obvious that the ground was not going to thaw again until the spring.  Yesterday, Eric wandered out through the snow into the garden with a shovel.  He shoveled snow to clear the top of the veggies, and then proceeded to dig into the frozen ground with a shovel.  The result was rather successful...

A December carrot harvest!  Better late than never!

Say "Cheese!"

Experiments in how to best use a relatively abundant supply of fresh goat milk continue.  Most recently, we added soft chevre cheese to the repertoire.  Preliminary taste test results are encouraging.  Who knows what else we can whip up?