May flowers or May showers?

Neal and I made pasta for our sixth month anniversary on Saturday.... So delicious and fun. It reminds me of play dough... Hehe. We did one beet based dough and one carrot based dough from a pasta making class I took with Annie Wagner Lefort for my birthday two years ago. Here is her website, full of homesteading ideas.... Www.leforthomestead.blogspot.com

I tried out a new yogurt recipe from my herbal teacher, Linda Conroy. I had been using the crockpot method, but I wanted to give her method a shot too... I'm going to have to work with it a few more times to get the consistency that we like, but wow was it tangy! Yum. Below is a picture of the yogurt being strained through a cheese cloth for a thicker final product. We use the whey in soups and breads for a little boost of protein. Here is Linda's yogurt recipe.... http://www.moonwiseherbs.com/cultured-milk-for-health-nourishment-and-fun/

We have been watching the water flow as it rained the last two days. Neal has some rain barrels set up to catch rain from the barn roof. We are also using a skill we learned in our permaculture classes: berms and swales (or mounds and ditches). The swale from the shed should ideally bring water from the shed roof to our vegetable garden and then the water will hopefully slowly leach into the berms to water the gardens over time. The wood chips are filling in the swales so we can walk on them without twisting an ankle. We still need to do some work with the slope of our swale so we actually are moving water from the shed roof to the garden. The less watering I have to do by hand this summer, the better!

Check out the pictures below to see some of the new growth on the farm. There are nettles sprouting up by the barn, raspberries leafing out, a cold frame teeming with greens (kale, lettuce, dandelion, and lambs quarters), and finally tons of daffodils in our fruit tree guilds.