Happy Fall!
Cow Adventures
We got our Scottish Highland Cattle in May, and they promptly spooked and went through the fence and out into the woods. It was ten 
days
before Quimby saw them again, but he tracked them every day to be sure they
did not cross any roads. They stayed in the woods until one day Quimby
found the cows in a field on the next farm, and he closed the gate!
There was a new bull in the field next to them, and I think he was the main
attraction. He was too busy eating to even look at us as we walked down through his field (giving him a wide berth even so!), to get to fix the
fence. He had ten heifers plus our two adoring him! I got several
pictures of our cows. This is the best one attached.
On Tuesday, Quimby and the two Yoder boys, Daniel and John, started
building a corral under the trees in our field.Quimby, with lit
tle help from me, finished it later in the week. A few days later, our two cows had slipped through between two posts that were 6 inches apart and got in field with the ten heifers and the bull. Quimby took the portable corral that he had borrowed from up there and he and the cow owner got our cows into it, near a gate. The next morning, the former owner of our cows came with his son-in-law and trailer, and they got our cows into the trailer. They brought the trailer to the barn, switched the hitch to our tractor and we took them across the dam and put them in the new corral, where they stayed for a few weeks until they got used to us.
We are naming them Frick and Frack. Now they are eating out of our hands,
and are free out in the field.
Biggest Teacher Training Ever!
This year the Grades Training had 22 participants! Everyone found it productive and enjoyable, including the staff. Dates and details for next summer's Trainings will be available in March. This year's schedule is still available on the Seminars page on this site for your information.
Taproot Farm Progress
Our garden was a great success this year, despite the drought. We now have a freezer full of vegetables and the canning shelves are loaded with pickles and tomatoes. We are still eating from it, because we have not had a deep freeze yet. Once again, I had fun with my scarecrows! They work!
Quimby is logging again, this time to build a bank barn into the hill over near the cattle corral. I worry about him felling trees, but he is so happy doing it that I need to just pay attention when he is up there
or go up with him! We have had to pull down several of the trees, because we wanted them to fall in a different direction so that they would not injure other trees. Here I am working the come-along to pull down a big tree. In the background is our hunting shack.
And here is the tree after it fell.
The barn will be built into the hillside so you can enter both stories at ground level. The lower one will be for the tractor and the cows in really bad weather. The upper level will be for hay storage, and maybe barn dances?!!! It will be 24 X 30..
This year Quimby cut the hay with the brush hog, and then borrowed a hay rake to rake it into windrows. Then we raked and stacked it by hand, with the help of our extended family at the reunion over Labor Day weekend. It wore them out! But it was fun and the kids got a lot of free hayrides out of it!
Don’t forget: we now have e-books!
Now you can order books and have them come as e-books; save shipping!
Just click here to order: http://www.waldorfwithoutwalls.com/books/ebooks
Waldorf Gallery of Main Lesson Art
Waldorf Today, a must have, free online magazine, now has a gallery of main lesson book art to give you ideas. They are the best that can be found in Waldorf Schools, so don’t expect that your child’s art will look like these! Here is the web address: http://www.waldorftoday.com/gallery/main.php
The Working Mom – Can She Have It All?
My fourth year med student grand daughter sent me the link to this article, entitled Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, under Hilary Rodham Clinton, in which she describes how and why she had to give up that job to tend to her family. The article gets to the root of a problem that up until now has been politically incorrect to even discuss! Here is the link to a very good read! http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/