Autumn has officially arrived
and we're enjoying misty mornings
and cloudy afternoons.
Temperatures are bracing
and we've had our first hard frost of the season.
As Nick Carraway observes in The Great Gatsby:
We're enjoying some splashes of color
but we won't reach peak gorgeousness until mid-October.
Birds have been passing through for weeks now, including some swans on nearby Spring Lake.
It's breeding time for the goats.
The McCann Farm is well into the season
(Chill, a MeadowWild alumnus, is looking terrific)
and Mojo and Draco are eager to begin
keeping their eyes riveted on the ladies
but the girls have yet to show much interest.
They would rather stroll down Red Oak Lane
devastate the rose bushes and beautiful day lilies
and dance the occasional Tarantella.
It shouldn't be long before they're more in the mood.
Cheeky (who won't be bred this year)
recently accepted a couple of awards for milk productivity.
With the harvest season, MeadowWild has shifted into Little House on the Prairie mode.
Barb has preserved a winter's worth of kale
leeks
and Roma tomatoes from Northern Harvest Farm
and continues to experiment with goats' milk cheeses
and goats' milk soaps (including agate-inspired bars).
This year's super-bumper crop of apples
has caught the attention of local connoisseurs
who are out boldly marauding at all hours
and only reluctantly scamper away when humans approach.
Before the deer and birds get them all
we're dehydrating bag after bag for the coming year.
Visiting season is drawing to a close. For some reason, MeadowWild doesn't attract many callers during the winter.
We took advantage of a fun visit from friend Kathleen to hike in Jay Cooke State Park (blessedly free of bugs at this time of year)
and tour Duluth's Glensheen Mansion.
This turned into a working holiday for Kathleen, who was roped into stretching goat mozzarella for the lasagna
and collecting goat poop samples for the annual fecal testing (some fun!)
Momma Kitty has discovered that the spools the goats play on in their meadow
make a great vantage point for locating mice and voles.
Not to be outdone, Dustin left the first indoor mouse of the season on the kitchen rug -- a half-digested mess.
He uses the study desk as a vantage point for locating
the best napping spots.
And now that furnace occasionally kicks in
he makes a bee-line for his favorite beds near the heat registers.
