I smell a rat...

We finally found a rug and coffee table we liked to round out the living room!

before

after

I took to the greenhouse and gave it a heavy pruning. I should have been keeping it pruned all year but the goats and house upgrades and and and... kept stealing my attention. 

I learned a lot this year, and since I already told Hugslut I'm not getting new animals next spring because I'm going to focus on the greenhouse and garden, next year, I should have the time to put into properly pruning and trellising to prevent the manic jungle mess I got this year. I am bringing in lots of golden cherry tomatoes and plenty of cucumbers. Soon it will be time to tear it all out and plant a fall garden of spinach, carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, and green onions.

I had noticed a rat around the barn occasionally and then one morning about two weeks ago Honey had a BITE on her! Best I can figure, it got rolled over on in the middle of the night and bit her in self-defense because it is just the one bite, but... well now, I didn't mind a woodland creature sneaking in to finish off some spilled goat feed while they were out playing but I will NOT stand for injuries to my livestock. Honey is healing up with no infection thanks to twice a day first aid, but she keeps scratching the scab back open so it's taking longer than I'd like.

If you watch the top left corner at the beginning of the clip you see the rat dive into the hole as Star hops down off the milk stand. I had no clue it had been hanging out in there when the goats were around because it ran whenever we were headed to the barn.

hole	template	wooden plate
patched

In addition to patching the hole it was using as a door, I put out a trap under where the hole used to be (which did catch the rat in just a few days). To make sure no future rats could make their way through the patch I put a layer of old screen to hold everything in place, a bunch of bent iron wire from cutting fencing for the barn wall, doused it with spray-foam, and quickly capped it off with a custom cut piece of wood held in place with 3 screws. That's not going anywhere. And as a bonus, the barn is going to be less drafty in the winter. :-)

Speaking of less drafty, today we had the followup Home Energy Assessment and we'll know in about a week or two how much money the government's gonna give back on the upgrades. We would have done it either way because solar + insulation + draft filling means our next winter power bills should be drastically less... but the rebates mean we got our butts in gear to get it all done this year instead of dawdling.

Unfortunately the window replacement doesn't count because we only replaced the part that was broken (the sealed, argon filled glass), which was the part that makes it energy efficient, but because it wasn't a full, new, energy star window..... well, I'm starting to wonder who lobbied to make the rebates that way.

We've been in touch with some other local farmers who might be interested in an RPG game. Keep you fingers crossed for us. It seems everyone's always so busy but I'd really love to get to know some more people.

I suppose that's all for now. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear more about or if you have any random questions. I love chatting about our little farm.

Star and Honey reaching and wrestling for the tastiest leaves on a hike.