Preparations are Under Way

Clock is ticking! Saturday morning we go live with our Second Annual CiderFest!

First step is getting the propane stove in the shop… fired up!

It gets cold sometimes, when you are cutting up apples and grinding and smashing them all day, and the ability to warm your little fingers from time to time makes all the difference. Especially when your fingers are really little.

We also took out all the cardboard boxes from two years of packages, filled with sawdust and wood scraps.

That made a happy little bonfire in the orchard.

Of course the floor and counter needed to be swept, and the trash taken out.

All set up to be a shopkeeper, with his suspenders and his tool pants.

Not directly related to the CiderFest, but still needing to be done, we cleaned up the north pasture. The cows and sheep have eaten it down as short as we want it to be, and we will not be putting animals back on it, likely until February or March.

The geese also like to eat their fair share of grass, especially the tender growing tips, so they got banished as well. Winnie started chasing them, but she couldn’t keep her eyes on both of them at once.

So Ellie and Seppi took over.

Those two are a bit of a dynamic duo on the farm, when they are not sworn enemies.

After Daddy rolled up the electric netting into bundles, they carried them to the barn to be stored away.

Ellie is big enough to carry one of the 50 footers by herself.

Seppi thinks he should be, but he can’t carry it too far without dropping it.

Sad cows. They want more grass.

We’ll probably rotate them onto the lane and the food hedge area as well, since those are really sacrificial grass anyway. We will probably also butcher the sheep after thanksgiving to save on fodder over the winter.

We continued the clean-up efforts by picking up some of the chunks of firewood that came with our chip-drop wood chips and putting them on the firewood pile.

This is a two-child job.

They got it tilted down, but they couldn’t roll it over the soft ground, so Daddy had to take over from here.

That’s what Daddy is for, after all.

Three more days, then we cider!