Our first all-Sunnywood dinner

While we have been consuming our garden produce and goat's milk all season, I think we may just have eaten our first all-Sunnywood meal: roast chicken, roasted French fingerling potatoes, fresh goat's milk, and a slaw of cabbage, carrots, and scallions. This meal also marks the first time we have eaten our own livestock.

A little bit of cordwood; a lot of farm

We are finally laying up cordwood for the first time this summer. We still need to fill in the four panels that surround the fifth "bay" of the house's timber frame structure. However our decision to create a farm where there was none---when Sunnywood the cordwood house project became Sunnywood the fully diversified farmstead project---means that the demands of the farm keep getting in the way.

Tarp Wood

Tarp livestock shelters, tarp hay shelters, even a tarp-wrapped outdoor shower. The person from whom we bought this land, who happens to be an abutting neighbor, was careful to include deed restrictions prohibiting mobile homes and overhead power lines. She must be kicking herself for not thinking of tarps.

The Coop de Ville and a half mile of fencing

The chicks, which have now begun to look like smallish chickens, have been in the completed "Coop de Ville," as Joe calls it, for about two weeks. We have installed a small pen covered with netting in the front where the young birds can get used to the outdoors and their surroundings while remainng relatively safe from hawks. Eventually we will need to let them range around the farm and take their chances.



They were pretty surprised by the big, bad world at first, but they got over it. 

We have been feverishly installing fencing so that we can go fetch our sheep. The grass is so tall, and needs grazing desperately! For a variety of reasons, we have decided not to use electric fencing. We are taking Gene Logdon's advice regarding a small pasturages and starting with good perimeter fencing, using stock panels and metal posts. We need to keep predators and neighborhood dogs out as much as we need to keep sheep and goats in. We will figure out how to carve it up and rotate animals as we go forward. We have completed nearly a third of the necessary 2460-odd feet so far. But fencing during the height of black-fly season? This is either evidence of, or the cause of, our complete mental deficiency.