By Alena Mentink

Butchering our first duck came about in a rather unpleasant way. It started with a snapping turtle that the boys discovered on the sledding hill. The turtle looked harmless enough, but thankfully the boys knew better than to touch it. They thought it might be a painted turtle, like we have seen before, but since they were not at all sure, they left it alone. Shortly afterwards, the boys found one of our ducks sitting in the catch pwn injured The boys speculated that it could have been a raccoon, and Caleb mentioned the idea that it could have been a rat. Shortly after this, Dad came home from work. The boys showed him the turtle, the duck, and some rat traps Caleb had made with a maple syrup bottle, onions, and other things he had decided to try. After his tour, Dad put the clues together and came to the conclusion that the turtle had injured the duck. One of our favorite sayings is “Waste not, want not”, so Dad undertook the task of butchering the duck. Our family has never tried duck, so despite the circumstances, we are excited for the chance to try it.

Our entire family loves potatoes, and they are one of our most commonly used foods. What makes the potatoes even better is when they are our own, so this year we decided to attempt to grow enough potatoes to last all year. So far, Dad has planted 150 pounds of seed potatoes, which we hope will be enough to see us through the year. We have also transplanted some tomato plants from their seed trays to the garden. We never seem to have enough salsa, spaghetti sauce, and tomato juice to last through the year, so Mom planted somewhere around twenty-three tomato plants. Almost everything that needs to be planted during this season has been planted. The tomatoes in our green-house are blooming and some of the plants have green tomatoes hanging from their stems.  The peas in and around the green-house are slowly beginning to produce more and more peas. We have planted several different herbs this year and are very excited to use them. The only problem is that we don’t know what some of the plants should look like as they come up, so several weeds are growing alongside the herbs.

With the steady arrival of warmer weather for the past few weeks, we have taken a couple of trips down to the dam to go swimming. The water is much warmer than it was during the first swimming trip. In fact, even the babies have splashed on the banks and floated around on tubes. It has been fun being able to take a quick swimming trip to the dam and be able to stay for a couple of hours before coming home.

Another exciting event that happened this week was the birth of another calf. As usual, the calf was a boy. Dad found him lying in a muddy shed after a lot of rain and at first thought that he was dead.  However, he quickly discovered that the calf was still alive, but failing fast. Dad couldn’t figure out why the mom had it in such a bad place, when there were other shelters that were better.  Kailey, Caleb, Aiden, and I ran out to help him move the calf to the barn, where he could be cleaned and fed. For the next couple of hours, everyone rushed around to save the calf’s life. After he had been washed, warmed and fed, he fell asleep and we were able to return to the camper and eat our breakfast. Dad named the calf Survivor, because he went through a lot on the morning he was born and lived through it. Right now, we are taking turns bottle-feeding him twice a day. He is perfectly healthy and gets stronger and stronger each day.