Well now it’s been a while since I posted much, so I thought a quick update would be in order!  The intern, I mean my brother has left.  We worked on quite a few projects for the three weeks he was here, but I sure would have liked to have him around longer!  We made some pretty good progress on the new cattle handling facilities we decided we needed here if we were going to be doing much work with cattle (which we are).  It’s not quite finished yet, but we should be getting a new squeeze chute pretty soon and then I’ll be wrapping that one up.  He cut up a couple cords of firewood while he was here which surely was a good help, and we replaced the glazing film on the greenhouse.  I’m pretty excited to see how the new Solawrap poly works in there this

winter.  Retrofitting the new film was a BEAR!!!  I really think it will be worth it though.

Allie the heifer is now Allie the cow!  We had our first calf on the Traditional Catholic Homestead on the 29th of August.  It is a heifer calf and she came into this world without a hitch!

Things slowed down a bit after my brother left, especially after I cut my knee with my chainsaw!!!  I felt pretty dumb about the whole thing, but I guess it was either pay attention to the saw or pay attention to the tree that was falling the wrong direction!!  I really should have been paying attention to both, remember folks safety first.  Thank God it wasn’t worse.

We’ve had our first couple of frost up here on the homestead in North-Central Idaho so things are really slowing down in the garden.  My experiments with microclimates seem to be working well since we still have tomato and pumpkin plants outside that weather the frosts well.  Thermal mass and solar aspect are a couple keys to extending the season up here.  We’re into our Indian Summer now so hopefully we’ll get enough warmth to ripen the last of the garden produce.