Yesterday started out innocently enough...browsing the craigslist ads, we found some wonderful red raspberry plants! a LOT of red raspberry plants.....I picked them up, and then zoomed off to work to try to get them planted before the rain hit. We decided our new raspberry patch would be near the mini's pen, so I got out the tiller and started tilling....much to the delight of the minis. They lined up to watch as if this was the most thrilling spectacle they'd ever seen!

Pretty soon the sky looked like this...


and then THIS. We managed to get all 62 plants into the ground just as the first raindrops hit. We closed the doors and windows and sprinted for the shop! It was a doozy of a storm...but the berries got watered. :)

Minis got a new toy! They are fascinated with the Jolly Ball.

Little horses got their "pedicures" yesterday...after being released, post-pedicure, into the side pasture, Peter (the cat) discovered that chasing horse leads is a FANTASTIC way to spend an afternoon. :)

A few snapshots from last Saturday. Donna and Zach, our faithful summer minion, um, er.....slaveboy, no wait.....WORKER, that's it....anyway, Donna and Zach are painting the walls of our shop! For those of you that have never visited - our shop is awful tiny. It's 20 feet by 30 feet, and Donna and I built it ourselves (with help from a retired electrician/handyman friend). It holds our office, kitchen, and entire retail area. So...there's alot of stuff in a very small space, which makes painting really interesting. We move things from a section of the wall, paint, wait for it to dry, paint again, wait for it to dry again, then move everything back. Repeat.

Zach was, I believe, mildly horrified to have to paint walls PINK, but he did the job with enthusiasm and gusto.


John was constructing a manger for the mini-horses (six of them sharing the one existing one we had was just tooooooo many!).

Which ended up looking a bit like a coffin!!!
And last but not least....meet our new puppy, a rat terrier mix, named Monk! He loooooove the other doggies and kitties, and was terrified of Beaker until yesterday, when the 2 of them started this new game where they sort of harass each other. He goes up to Beaker and barks, Beaker lowers his head and sort of "fake" chases him off. Repeat.

(To be clear - Beaker is FULLY CAPABLE of chasing this little guy down and pinching the dickens out of him if he wants. He's a goose that's large and in charge. This truly is a game the 2 of them have devised).

2 of the babies! Baron on the left, and Delilah on the right. They're a few months apart in age.


Random grasses


Purple coneflower in the rain garden just outside our shop.


Our first tomato of the season! our veggies look so pathetic, but, hey. we at least have one tomato.


The veggies may look pathetic but the fruit looks AMAZING. Is this tiny pear just the cutest thing ever?


why do people call these weeds and mow them down? i think they're gorgeous. this is the ditch on our farm.

WE HAVE A NEW BABY MINI-HORSE!!

Christened "Baron" by my grandpa, here he is! Born late Friday June 27th or early Saturday, June 28th.


His mom, Dutchess, is a wonderful and protective mother. She has just now started to let him wander away from her a bit, and we can finally scratch and pet him. He's sooo soft!


And now all of a sudden Deliliah, the bigger baby, looks HUGE. here she is in one of her favorite poses. a true beauty queen, she adores basking in the sunlight.....

We have some new arrivals on the farm - Miniature horses! We've always had horses (or mules) on the farm - generally, a motley assortment of equines that for some reason needed a new home. I can remember a retired barrel racer, a jumping mule, and a few just plain horses and ponies. The last 2 we had, some of our long-time customers remember (and still ask about). They were old and mellow, and didn't actually want to leave the farm, so we took down the fences and let them roam at will, like really big dogs. But the last one passed away several years ago, and Donna has been waiting for the right time to get a horse or two on the farm again.


Well....a horse or two somehow turned into 3 adult miniature horses, one with a newborn baby, and the other two due to give birth!!! (The dark brown one in the top picture is due any moment now!)

Here's mom and baby. The baby is about a month old and is SUPER funny! She leaps, jumps, cavorts and generally has a fantastic time racing around being cute. They had names given to them at their old home, but, they don't seem to know them, so we're just taking some time and learning their personalities and figuring out what their names will be.


This beautiful girl has bright blue eyes!
The inter-species introductions were most humorous. For those of you that don't know, we have a total of 5 dogs that freely roam the farm, (2 are Maggies and 3 are Donnas), and a Canadian goose named Beaker that also roams at will, not to mention several (okay, lots) cats. Everyone generally gets along. Sometimes Beaker chases the cats, and sometimes the dogs chase Beaker, but it's all in good fun, no real harm is intended - it's mostly about pecking order and sheer onery-ness, I think. Oh, and Beaker thinks he is a person or a dog (we're not sure which), and does not identify in the slightest bit that he is a bird.

Anyway, most of the dogs are very large, and the horses are very small, so there was some initial inter-species confusion during the initial introduction. The picture above shows Ollie, a 110 lb mastiff mix, sniffing noses with one of the new minis. He sorta figured out she wasn't really a dog, but....the baby horse is only about 30 pounds, and prances around playfully. For the first day or so, all the dogs were trying to initiate playfullness with her in typical dog fashion - stomping paws, play-bowing, and racing around like dorks. She of course did not understand these strange motions. The baby horse thought they were really weird horses, and the dogs though she was a really stupid puppy. Everything has been resolved now, and Ollie and the baby have figured out that they can play games where she races around the pasture and he races around after; it's quite cute.