Goat Slaughter

A few friends of ours had a goat that they loved but had become overwhelmingly unruly. So, they made the hard decision to slaughter him which we gladly helped with and offered them space to perform the work.  I only took a few photos of the whole ordeal because most of the time my hands were in a state not fit for holding a camera. :)

 

Some of the folks that keep bees on our property know a thing or two about slaughtering and butchering so they came out to show us the ropes. 

 

After butchering all of the meat and sharing it with a few friends, I took the skin, scraped it, soaked it in limewater, scraped all the hair off and then stretched it out to dry. When it's all done we'll use it to make new drum heads for some drums we have here. 

 

This whole goat slaughter adventure won us much good-natured ribbing from some close friends who drew this photo of us. Actually, quite an honor in the strange circles we run in :)

SuperAdobe bench update #2

 

Again, not exactly related to our adventures at the homestead but we've made significant progress on the bench that we started last year.  It's taken on a somewhat different but more creative form than we first imagined. The serpent dragon on the top is a real hit with the kids at the preschool it lives at :)

Still to come is a final layer of smooth plaster that we'll embed decorations of various sorts into. 

There are lots more photos of our work on this here.

Spring Additions

 With spring here, we have all kinds of things popping up

 

The Trillium are back again for their yearly show. These deep red ones are beautiful!

 

Some of our beekeepers  set up 5 new hives this year, a welcome addition!

 

This is Jack. He came to us with nowhere else to go. Now he's our top mouser and earning his keep quite well.

  

The figs have just started to form but they're getting bigger every day.

History

 

This is a photo that I took at the County Assessor's office. They kindly pulled out all the info they had on our parcel and I found this gem from 1962. Our parcel had been colored in with green colored pencil after an ordinance (ORD 629) was passed declaring it Residential-Agricultural (RA) land.  If my understanding of county history is correct this was around the time that the county first started cataloging all of it's land into a zoning system.