One week into May

It's all about transplanting and potting out now. Everyone is moving into the fields: onions, scallions, collards, beets, strawberries in the South Field; lettuce and potatoes in the North Field; cows into the Middle Field to eat the winter rye; sheep in the field by the pond; chickens moving their way through the orchard. And if they're not moving outside, they're moving into pots - tomatoes, tomatillos, sage, lavender, basil, all seeded in rows in wooden flats, are now sligtly bigger than a blade of grass and growing happily in pots all over the greenhouse.

The Tunis ewe was limping last week. On Saturday morning I gave her a second treatment of bleach-water-in-a-bucket. Don had told me to lead her inside the barn with grain and then to grab her leg and stick it in the bucket, ideally for five minutes. She needed no coaxing to come in once she heard the grain, but when I grabbed her leg, I held on for dear life - she wanted nothing to do with the bleach water. I held her chin up with my other hand which helped a little, and eventually she resigned herself to the treatment. She's a tough cookie, that ewe. Triplets first and now a foot infection.

My bread rose on Friday. This is big news. Making dense, hard bread was all fine and good back when I was surrounded by Germans, but now that I'm back in the land of Wonder Bread, I'd like my bread to rise. And it did: three hours on the counter in front of the window and that puppy was ready to get up and walk on its own. It was perfect - a whole wheat pepper cheese bread hot out of the oven just in time for lunch, a smorgasbord of leftover soups with salad rescued from the compost buckets (picked up from the coop and intended for the pigs). Making millet porridge (excellent, by the way, with craisins, yogurt, crushed hazelnuts and applesauce) for breakfast instead of scones and scrambled tofu gave me an extra 30 minutes to make the bread dough. There's nothing better than my hands in soil except my hands kneading bread.

And did you know that the roots of a beet are pink?