Another Rainy Harvest Day...

It’s another rainy day in this harvest season, which is 4 weeks old as of today. We’ve endured a lot of showers this harvest, which is quite a contrast to last year’s endless summer. When it was so warm in May, I expected another endless summer – but now I’m wondering if that was it. Hope you enjoyed it.

Rain during harvest just makes me sad. I hate sending the kids out in it. And it creates a lot of questions and decisions to make… Pick or not? Will the quality be good enough for the product we are packing? How much mold will come as a result? What can we do to minimize the impact?

However, we are at the tail end of harvest, and these issues are less pressured since most of the fruit has already been picked.

I’m thankful for all the excellent resources we have to assess the weather of the day. I have several sites that I visit, and try to average out the info to predict when the rain will come during the day. Looks like today we will start with rain, then have a break until late afternoon. Predictions are not for rain steadily.

So the kids will go out in the field…and I will watch from the house while drinking coffee, and feeling badly for them.

It’s tough being the boss.

Yesterday we learned that the company which receives raspberries for juice will not be taking any more fruit this year. We usually finish out our season with a few days of picking berries into barrels for juice. The last week of harvest there is not enough fruit to justify running the processing plant, but still enough to pick, so we pick into barrels for juice. Not sure what we will do now. And we are fortunate that we do not pick most of our crop into barrels. There are others for whom this is a greater blow.

Oh, Farming! You grow your crop, pick your fruit – the expenses are all the same, even if you don’t have a place to sell it! But as I’ve said before, no one is forcing us to farm.

In other news, the all goaties are still present on my Little Cheerful Farm. It seems I was wrong about when you can wean kids and send them away from their momma. Not 8 weeks – 10 -12 weeks is the preferred age. So Dexter and Abner are still with us, and their delightful new family comes to visit them and add fun to my day! Yesterday we attempted to take them all out of the pen on leashes…EXCEPT Momma Imogene did not think this was a good idea and would not budge a step toward the gate. She was calling out alerts to the kids so they were not keen on stepping outside either. We only succeeded in creating a rodeo with a swarm of little goats flying around the pen. I know when I’m licked, so the leashes came off, and we tried to regain our preferred status by generously passing out the raisins. The Foursome all have their collars on now – which basically acts as a goat handle – and they look so cute!

And I am, officially, the owner of Little Cheerful Farm as I have become a bona fide member of the American Dairy Goat Association. I have a registered herd name, and can register any babies that have registered parents. I will be registering Little Cheerful Clementine. Doesn’t that sound good? And it’s true besides!

I think I’ll hang out with Clemmie and her brothers today. I could use a Little Cheerful.