Welcome to the neighbourhood!

I was lucky enough to be able to buy three more girls from Deena Avery, and made the trip down to pick them up yesterday. 

 Being sheep - they took it all in stride.

 UH...we're somewhere new - HEY, GRASS!

The trailer took things in stride too, but came home with a lot of excess baggage...

Gordon RAMsey

DJA 47U

Meet Gordon - the man behind "Men At Work".  We purchased him from Deena Avery last year as a yearling.  Bred to 4 ewes, he produced 7 ewe and 2 ram lambs - very nice of him as we are building up our flock right now, so needless to say we were hoping for girls! We've been very pleased with his progeny and can't thank Deena enough for selling us this good ram. We'll be breeding him to 7 ewes this winter - with the continued plan to keep back the ewe lambs and sell any ram lambs as grass fed lamb.

Ewe lamb out of Gordon.

After this breeding season, we'll be offering Gordon up for sale and the hunt will begin for another ram of equal quality. 

If you're interested in Gordon or would like more information, contact us at info@sheepthrillsranch.ca

Men at work

There must be something in the water this year

or the weather, or all the manure, mulch, etc that we've added to the garden. The veggies have been going nuts. Officially the "veggie freezer" is full and there's still a bunch of stuff to wedge into it - what a terrible problem to have. ;-) 
Travis dug a hill of potatoes last night for supper and this is what we got. 

Over seven pounds of potatoes...

 including this sucker which weighed in at over two and a quarter pounds. 

 

Liquid Sunshine

Peach Jam!

Busy little bees

Yesterday we worked like these guys, 

and now all the hay is in, stacked and tarped. 

 

Fast Food

On  tonight's menu...Gnocchi with pesto, zucchini and cherry tomatoes. 

This is one of those 15 minute meals and features zucchini and basil from the garden, and cherry tomatoes from Whites, the local greenhouse where we get all  of our tomatoes until ours are ripe. 

Our tomatoes?

They're on their way.

Back to the recipe. Pesto is easy to make, it's just a matter of getting good ingredients - they'll do the work for you. I think it might actually take longer to type the recipe out than it takes to make it.

I used a mortar and pestle, because Travis gave me a big gorgeous one, but you can easily use a food processor or blender.  

Crush two or three cloves of garlic with a bit of course salt, pick the leaves off a big bunch of basil and grind them up with the garlic. Toast some pine nuts and then toss them in and keep grinding, add some good olive oil and then some good (as in real) Parmesan cheese and finish grinding it all up. I like mine when there are still some little chunks of cheese - a bit on the "rustic" side.  And that's pesto. 

Put a pot of water on to boil and saute some zucchini in a  bit of olive oil.  Cut the cherry tomatoes in half.  When the water boils throw in a bag of pre-made gnocchi that you bought at the grocery store, or use pasta. The gnocchi only take 2 minutes to cook, which is one of the reasons why I like them. 

When they're done, throw them in with the zucchini, add the cherry tomatoes and then toss in the  pesto. Stir it around till it's mixed together. Done.