Busy Saturday

This morning I attended a class at the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware called Cow Talk. It was presented by Sylvia Zimmerman and was geared toward teaching people what they need to know to get started with a family milk cow and small-scale dairying. The bulk of the presentation was concerned with identifying positive traits and locating cows to buy. I learned some things I didn't already know and came away with the firm belief that we should be looking for a dual-purpose cow. Mrs. Zimmerman specifically recommended Devon, Shorthorn, and Dexter. The reason for this is that we want to produce milk with grass alone and all the dairy breeds have just had too many generations of being bred for high production on grain diets. Certainly there are people who are doing 100% grass dairying with traditional dairy breeds but they mostly using a lot of annuals for high-brix grazing.

Also I want to say that the Stratford Ecological Center is the coolest place I've been to in a long time. I took home one of their calendars and there are classes and other activities that I would like to attend just about every week of the year. We're an hour drive away so that probably won't happen but I will definitely be over there more times this year.

When I got home from Delaware, I planted onion seeds. Last year we tried to grow onions from seeds and ended up starting them too late so they weren't ready to plant out when the time was right. This year we're starting about a month earlier. I only planted about 240 seeds so this will be a crop that we will be expanding in the future in order to produce all the onions we use throughout the year. We've never had a really good crop of onions before so growing one will be a good first step. I planted Alisa Craig OP, Clear Dawn OP, and Red Bull hybrid.

Finally this evening we celebrated our daughter, Katie's, 8th birthday which was yesterday. That reminds me of a couple things from the recent past.
1. Last year at this time I posted about Katie's birthday on this blog. It was one of my early posts which means that the Liberty Farm blog has been online for just over a year now.
2. A few years ago we tapped maple trees on Katie's birthday. That seems really far-fetched since our high temperatures here have barely broken 20 degrees for nearly two weeks and our lows have been hovering between -8 and +3. I don't tap trees until the temperature hits 50.