This post is being guest written by Gabe, age 7.  Here are his thoughts on day three in the great wild north.

Me and Alex got up at 5 o’clock in the morning.  By 6 o’clock we had already fed the rabbits, the geese, and given the baby calf her bottle.  Then, we made some bunnies do the hula dance.  By 8 o’clock we were eating biscuits, sausage, and eggs.  We petted lambs and sheep.  There was a barn in the back field that had blown over.  We needed to take it apart.  First we took out some nails that were holding in metal roof plates.  Then we walked home.  The men stayed and worked.  

There is a legend that the two men that lived in the farmhouse before buried their money somewhere in the woods, under the shed, or they hid it in a bucket of paint.  Me and my friend Alex searched over half the woods trying to find the money. 

By the time we were done with that, we were eating lunch.  My dad wanted to eat roasted grasshoppers.  Kinda gross. But he didn’t get to do it.  By this time it was almost bedtime, so we went in to our tent that we had set up, and went to sleep.  One of their three dogs slept with us. 

Lucy was up bright and early on Friday morning.  I think the sun rises earlier up there - because by 5:00AM sunlight was streaming through the windows.  Lucy and Amy were up and about, while I slumbered, blissfully unaware of the legion of mosquitoes munching on every inch of exposed skin.  Amy came in and shook me just before 6:00AM and whispered, “Nate - Stephan is waiting for you downstairs.”  Anybody that is up and waiting (Waiting!) to get started at 6:00AM is the real deal, let me tell you.  So I slogged out of bed and tumbled downstairs.  Stephan said, “Good morning!!”  Way more cheerfully than I was ready for, and followed that up with “We have to cut grass for the cows while it’s still wet.  They eat while we are milking.”  No problem, I thought.  I can cut grass.  Just point me to the mower.  When we got outside, Stephan handed me a scythe - pointed me to a patch of tall grass, and I broke my first sweat at 6:05.

I cannot believe that whole fields used to be cut that way.  Who needs the ab-lounger when you can just go out and cut hay for half an hour.  My obliques and lower back were definetly feeling the burn.  My first attempt pretty much just knocked over a huge swatch of grass, but we managed to salvage enough to keep the cows happy.  After that, we let the cows out.  The following picture is also the debut of the promised “huge straw hat” which I love and I don’t care if you all think it looks stupid.

I’ll post picture of the actual milking another time.  After breakfast, we spent the bulk of the day fencing in a new pasture for the goats, sheep, and cows.  You have to rotate animals around to different pastures so that the grass has time to recover.  Otherwise, they’ll chomp and pound it into a barren mudpit.  It was a hot, sunny day.  But I had a secret weapon.  That’s right.  My hat.  It kept me cool and happy.  And clearly I’m in good company.

Exibit A above, Exibit B below

By the end of day one, I was already turning into a real farmer, as evidenced by my rockin’ farmer’s tan.  I had Amy take a picture to document the extraordinary transformation.

Yeah.  That’s a chainsaw behind me.  We’re men.  Real men.  With tan arms and pasty white torsos.

The first video post of 2008! We have a lot happening this year: rabbits, chickens, fruit trees, kids everywhere… find out what\’s happening in our 2008 season update.

This is the new manifold plumbing system we’ve installed in the house.  Set up more like an electrical system, it’s designed to minimize the cold water flushed from the system when you want hot water.  They say you can save up to several thousand gallons of water per year by using this system, so we’ll see how it goes!

When you’re renovating an old house, one problem always seems to uncover another.  Such was the case when replacing a pane of broken glass in our new mudroom.  We had found a colony of ants in another of the walls, but we weren’t quite sure where they were coming from…

We closed on our new house and we’re deep into demolition, repairs and improvements!  Here we show some of the improvements we’re hoping to make and some challenges of renovating an older home.  Stay tuned for more posts on energy efficiency, home repairs, starting a garden from scratch, and of course our rabbits.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by kimballsi with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

This post is a little late in coming.  It’s video of our second litter just days after being born.  Since this video we’ve actually slaughtered and eaten four of the five from our first litter (shown at the end of the video), and these little guys are growing quickly.

Our rabbits in their new digs. Their new home is better designed for them and for us. Also notice our first litter at 8 weeks old. They’re practically full grown!

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by kimballsi with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

Our potato crop took up a quarter of our garden for the whole season last year, so we’ve decided to try growing them above ground this time.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by kimballsi with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.