Did you say you were busy?

Before I beat myself up too much about not posting, I looked at previous years to see how consistent I was in June. Not good. In fact, I actually posted twice as many times this year in June. It's a sad catch 22 -- I'm so busy in June (and July) that I don't have time to write about all the things I'm doing!

Saturday and Sunday, Katherine and I did soap making and spinning demonstrations at the Pontiac Heritage Days festival. She spun up seven balls of Latte's fiber, which I will be using for my afghan when I get back to knitting in the cooler months. (Don't you just love her 1840s work dress?) I made three batches of soap, including lavender-ylang ylang, lemongrass, and orange essential oils.

Monday, we sheared the rams. Other than Margaret getting whacked in the kneecaps by Rambrandt, it actually went pretty well. Then we moved the sheep from the east pasture to the west pasture. That did not go as planned, but we did eventually get all the sheep over there. The frustrating part was when White Feather decided to take her lambs back to the east pasture. She just won't leave, even though there are no sheep left over there. The two old llamas are staying with her, so hopefully they'll be okay.

We've been busy making cheese and picking mulberries, cherries, and black raspberries. We've made raspberry pound cake, raspberry crisp, mulberry muffins, and raspberry-cherry jam. It was Jonathan's first foray into jam making, and it turned out quite well. Today I also made yogurt and buttermilk, and I made two loaves of multi-grain bread. We'll use one of those loaves to make French toast for tomorrow's breakfast.

The herb garden was in desperate need of weeding, as well as the vegetable garden and the flower gardens, which we worked on yesterday. Thank heavens for this nice cool weather we've been having lately! But we still need to get some more transplants into the vegetable garden. And being one to never quit, I've bought my annual supply of lavender plants to kill. Seriously, every year I buy lavender plants, put them in the herb garden, and watch them die. If anyone out there knows how to get lavender to not die, please let me know. My dill, parsley, sage, rosemary, and lemon thyme transplants are all thriving nicely.

The person who contacted me about becoming a homesteading apprentice disappeared -- never emailed to let me know that she was no longer interested. That was disappointing, mostly because it delayed me from posting an ad on Local Harvest, which I have now done. Hopefully, someone will contact me about that. In case it isn't really obvious, we could use a couple extra hands around here.