Nettles Farm

The work I have been doing with Poulet Bleu and chicken workshops received some recent press: The Wall Street Journal just after Christmas, and The Huffington Post two weeks later.
I got a puppy in September, a Lagotto Romagnolo named Stella (the truffle Smella), named for the character in A Streetcar Named Desire. STELLLL-A!!! We are training each other in the art of being and having a dog.....neither one of us has been here before.... and the learning curve is steep. I enrolled her in a truffle hunting class, which we are just beginning. I went truffling with a fellow named "Animal", a forager with a Lagotto named Austin. We found $100 of good black and white truffles (he had a drug truffle scale, $20/gram) over an hour of trudging through underbrush in the pouring rain, in a public forest near Issaquah. The drive back home was infused with the warm, comforting aroma of truffles, so pleasant I was surprised by the experience.This quickly inspired me to get serious with Stella.
The goats have found a new home. Rosy was going after Stella. Nico was going after all children, lately with more purpose. They are together on a hobby farm in the county. I miss them and so does the feral cat that, unbeknownst to me, was living with them on the sly. I have been feeding the cat for the past year and a half, hoping to make friends with it (you can see I was lonely...I hate cats), and it would show up unexpectedly and I would put the food bowl closer and closer to my back deck. It was so skittish that if I looked its way it would bolt. Finally, the cat, whom I named Cosette from Les Miserables, because she was definitely a survivor, allowed herself to eat from the bowl on the deck. When I rehomed the goats, Cosette started showing up more and more, and I would see her in the goat pen wandering. She spent a lot of time with the chickens, too, and I finally realized that she had been spending all of her time on the farm, with the animals. When I got Stella, Cosette could not get enough of her. Over a few months Cosette, who turns out to be a boy (he must have been just a kitten when I first fed him), continued to engage Stella and to be passive and inviting. The result is that they are best friends, and all without a single word being spoken!

I hope you find the time to come for a restful stay sometime soon! We'll all be waiting.