Candy for lunch.

Eric called today and the weather in Talkeetna is perfect.  They are loading up the plane and getting ready to fly out to the glacier.  He sent me a picture of his "lunch".  This might be the only reason I'd ever go on a trip like this: candy!  He has a lovely assortment of KitKats, M&M's, Reese's PB cups, Twix, Take 5 bars, Snickers, cookies, rice crispy treats, etc. 

 Updates will be posted on Mountain Trip's website:  https://mountaintrip.com/trip-reports/

They are the June 4th trip.  

Looks like a few teams have already made it to the summit!

He's off!

 Eric got himself all packed up and is now safely settled into a hotel in Anchorage.  

Harvey really wanted to go too, but in the end opted to stay home.  I'm not sure he would have liked all the snow on Denali.  Hopefully in a few weeks we'll have news of a summit!

We're holding down the fort here.  

Not much new: chickens dug up my plants, Oscar has worms, and the buckwheat is taking over:)

Such is farm life.

Our new batch of layers are getting well-accustomed to Teresa's legs.  Sadly Teresa's pants are getting covered in chicken poo.  Such is farm life!

Freedom Rangers

We're switching it up this year.  We typically raise Cornish Cross chickens (aka: Frankin-chickens) for our meat each year, but this year we're trying out Freedom Rangers.  This breed grows a bit slower than the Cornish crosses do, but the meat is apparently very tasty!  

We also got a little smarter and decided that instead of buying a ridiculous amount of laying hens (giving us TONS of eggs at once followed by no eggs, resorting to spying with the game camera - see "The Chicken Detective" post) that we would buy small batches of hens each year.  This year we got 2 Araucana and 2 Welsummer chicks.  Both should lay fun colorful eggs, making them distinctly different from the current hens.  Now we just have to hope that none of them are roosters!

More PIGtures

The piglets are quite excited for their dinner each night!  The goat milk poured on top gets them really squealing.

Happy little critters.

Buttah!

Teresa's been saving cream off the top of the milk for 2 weeks now and yesterday we made butter in our Kilner Butter Churn (thanks again Ryan and Nicky for the great gift!).  We managed to churn almost 1 pound of butter!!  We love the pure white color of the goat's milk butter and the taste as well.  YUM!

The Star Grazers

First off, Eric built a crate of steel.  Imagine driving 70 miles per hour down the highway when suddenly your animal crate launches from the back of the truck bed and before you can process what's happening, you're already 1/2 mile down the high way!  Yes, this was the start to our morning.

We arrived safe, however, to collect our new piglets, whom we've decided to name the Stellar-Lunar pack, aka: Star Grazers.

Here's Dipper, Cassiopeia ("Cassi" or "Ope" - depending who you ask), Star, and Cosmo ("Moe")

They are certainly called "pigs" for a reason!