Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

A few weeks ago we found a day old kitten in one of our sheds. It’s mother had moved the rest of the litter but missed this little one- so we took it to the house, bought kitten formula and a bottle (all readily available at Tractor Supply) and started feeding it.

First it drank barely a teaspoon at a time, but the amount gradually increased. By the time it’s eyes opened, it was drinking nearly 2 tablespoons of formula at a time. We had no problems getting it to pee, as long as we rubbed it with a wet paper towel before feeding, but for the first few weeks we had real issues getting the kitten to poop and its belly got horribly distended.     Nothing we tried worked until Jeff finally decided to give it an enema – we used a tiny disposable pipette (the kind that is used for sampling beer or wine) and a tiny amount of enema solution – and this worked!!! We kept this enema treatment up for nearly two weeks and then the kitten got over whatever issues it had and is now doing fine.

We found the rest of the litter two weeks ago in our garage and took one of them to keep ours company. They were about 6 weeks old at the time – so now we have two happy, active kittens living on our back porch.  They are such fun to watch and play with!

 Every year we try to make it up to Penn State’s Ag Progress Days – this year we went for the first day of the event.  The day started with rain, fog and overall miserable weather, but by the time we got close to State College, it cleared up and the sun came out.  We saw of lot of machinery, watched some demonstrations, visited most of the Ag Science exhibits and enjoyed the food.  Our favorite is still the honey ice cream (just like at the farm show).

Sprayer that resembled a bug

Some huge machines!

Obstacle course

Corn maze with clues

The 4th of July is always a significant day – and a good day to re-read the Declaration of Independence. 

This year also marked our first day of “real” berry picking, meaning we picked all of the fruit bearing rows on both sides.  We ended up with 40 lbs today and combined it with the 5 lbs that Sam had picked two days before.  Our sole purpose was to make jam.  Did I mention that we had become desperate for blackberry jam?  Our stockpile had actually run out – this has never happened before.  So we filled our 22 quart stock pot with berries and heated them, then ran them through the food mill, using the berry screen to remove all seeds and made 7 batches of low sugar, seedless, deliciously tart blackberry jam. Yay!!!  We ended up with 27 pints and a bowl for use right now. (there were 12 lbs of berries that we could not fit into the pot – we froze those for later)

Our 4th of July feast included fresh buttermilk biscuits (used the Alton Brown recipe, which is great) with blackberry jam, grilled sweet potatoes, zucchini and mushrooms, as well as grilled chicken – and red beets and baked potatoes.

And the other important news of the day was that CERN announced the observation of a particle “consistent with long sought Higgs boson”

Seen during a recent trip to DC:



Morning run past the Washington Post Building

At the Fancy Food Show 🙂





Michelle’s Kitchen Garden at the White House



Once in a while we get really lucky at estate auctions and today was one of those days.  Not too far from our house was a sale that had tools and wine/beer making equipment – what are the chances for that! 

Jens and Jeff spent most of the day in Perry county, but it was worth it – we got an automatic wine bottle filler, about 600 clean wine bottles, a bunch of carboys, a crusher-destemmer, stainless steel milk buckets (good for fermenting beer), a lime spreader which pulls behind the tractor and Jens also got some nice tools!