Hamingja - Heritage Farm and Nature Preserve

09/14/2026

The Haskap Lads, as we call our Rouen drakes, are out in the yard but never stray far from “the ladies”. There’s a glimpse here of our one new duck hen, “Yacky Duck” and the young drakes too. The louder quacking comes from the duck hens.

09/13/2026

Fossa (Icelandic hen) and 2 week old Chicklet

09/13/2026

Ari had his daily cracker and now he’s back to his yummy hay!

09/13/2026

Not every set of Scottish pipes was made to be heard across a glen. Some were made to be heard across a kitchen. 🎶

The Great Highland Bagpipe is the one the world knows, and it is loud because it was built to be loud, for the hill and the parade and the field. But Scotland has always had a quieter family of pipes as well, and they very nearly vanished.

The Scottish smallpipes and the Lowland or Border pipes are bellows blown. A small leather bellows is strapped under the player's arm and laced to the forearm, and the air comes from there rather than from the lungs. It sounds like a technical footnote. It changes everything. Dry air instead of wet air means a reed that stays in tune all night. No breath going into the bag means the player can sing while playing. And the whole instrument is pitched low and sweet enough to sit in a room beside a fiddle without drowning it.

These were the pipes of the Borders and the Lowlands and much of the north east too. Town pipers were employed by burghs. Families of pipers served Border houses for generations, the Hastie family at Jedburgh for something like three hundred years. The repertoire was dance music, song airs, the tunes of an evening indoors.

By the early twentieth century they were effectively gone. Piping had been reorganised around the military and the competition platform, and the bellows pipes had no place there. For decades they survived mostly as objects in glass cases.

Then in the 1970s and 1980s a small number of makers and players went back to those museum instruments, measured them, and started building again. Today there are thousands of sets in the world, and the music that had been silent for the best part of a century is being played in kitchens and back rooms and folk clubs from Hawick to Halifax. 💙

A tradition does not always die when the last player stops. Sometimes it just waits in a case for somebody's grandchild to come and look at it properly.

09/13/2026

Before there were pumpkins there were turnips, and before anyone said trick or treat, Scottish children had to earn it. 🎃

The custom is called guising, from disguising, and it is old. On the last night of October, children blackened their faces with soot or burnt cork, turned a coat inside out, borrowed something of their mother's, and went from door to door around the close or the village pretending to be someone else entirely. The disguise had a purpose. Samhain was the night the boundary thinned, and if something was abroad that should not be, you did not want it recognising you.

And here is the part that has been quietly lost. You did not get anything for simply turning up. You had to perform. A song, a poem, a joke, a party piece. Scottish children learned a verse specially, stood in a stranger's doorway and delivered it, and only then got their apple or their nuts or their penny. The treat was payment, not tribute.

The lantern was a neep. A turnip or a swede, hollowed out with a kitchen knife by an adult because the flesh is brutally hard, then carved with a rough face and a candle stub set inside. Anyone who has smelled one will never forget it, because the heat cooks the inside of the vegetable and the whole thing gives off a scent somewhere between a Sunday dinner and a bonfire.

Scots and Irish emigrants carried all of it to North America in the nineteenth century. There they found the pumpkin, which is enormous and soft and carves like butter, and the neep never stood a chance.

So the world got Halloween from us, and then sold it back. 💙

Somewhere in your family there was a child with a sooty face and a scraped out turnip, standing in a doorway in the cold, reciting a poem for an apple.

09/13/2026

We had a terrific time at the Leslieville Block Party yesterday! Reconnected with neighbors and met new friends! It was super fun to share stories and also awareness of our little Soay Sheep! Here’s John trying his hand at spinning with the new little electric spinner. Soay fleece is so short, bouncy and light. It’s a challenge to work with when just learning like we are!

09/12/2026

Yay! Rocky Wolf Ranch!! ❤️

09/12/2026

Come and say hello at the Annual Leslieville Block Party 10-3 today! 😃🐑

09/12/2026

Leslieville Block Party from 10-3 today! Come down, join the fun and say Hello!

09/11/2026

Not all info is accurate here but this pretty much sums up our sweet little sheep! People do have them through out the UK and in a few farms in North America. We are one of those with our sheep having their Scottish Roots on the island of Soay!

🐑 When the last families left St Kilda in 1930, they took their dogs and their cattle with them. They could not take the sheep on Soay, and nobody has managed to since.

Soay lies just west of Hirta in the St Kilda group, forty miles out into the Atlantic beyond the Outer Hebrides. It is a steep grass topped rock with no harbour and no landing worth the name. On it lives a flock of small dark brown sheep that are the most primitive domestic sheep left in Europe, closer to what the first Neolithic farmers brought north than to anything on a modern farm.

They are tiny, quick and quite unlike a farm sheep. They do not flock properly, they scatter when pressed, and they do not need shearing because they moult, shedding their fleece in ragged handfuls every summer the way a wild animal would. The St Kildans did not shear them either. They plucked them by hand, a practice called rooing. 🌾

Nobody manages them now. Nobody feeds them, breeds them or counts them for market. When the population rises too high for the grass, a hard winter takes a third of them and it starts again. Because of that, the Soay flock has become the longest running study of a wild mammal population anywhere in the world, watched continuously since the nineteen fifties, and it has taught us more about how populations rise and crash than almost any other animal.

But stand back from the science for a moment. St Kilda was inhabited for thousands of years and evacuated in a single morning in August 1930, at the islanders' own request, because there were no longer enough of them to hold on. The village street is roofless now.

The sheep are still there. They were there before the people, they outlasted them, and they are still doing exactly what they were doing when somebody first carried them ashore.