I arrived this morning at approximately 11:30am, having left Brooklyn at the same time that Kari left for work. When I pulled up, Jonathan was in the middle of making cheese with a guy about my age who’s just starting to work at Bobolink a day or so a week. While working on the cheese, he was chatting with a woman who’ll be working at the farmer’s markets in New York.

After some lunch — where I met Bobolink’s full-time employee and two of the other interns — we finished the cheese making process and cleaned up. Then a bunch trooped out into one of the fields to check up on the state of the grass and meet some of the cows.

Next up was moving some temporary electric fencing around to create a new grazing area for the sheep. There are four total - one ewe, a ram, a wether, and a lamb. They’re not being milked or anything right now. They seem rather ornamental at this point.

After the sheep were taken care of it was back out into the field to move the bulls and dry ladies onto another pasture. Tomorrow at milking they’ll join up with the rest of the herd. This was mostly a smooth process, except for the one-week-old calf that refused to cross the little brook and ran the opposite direction and back to the field we’d just moved them all from. It took some doing - and a van - to catch him and get him into the same field as his mom.

We ate dinner together — there were seven of us including two of Jonathan and Nina’s children — which was nice. I really like the fact that group meals are a central part of the day. The fact that all the food was really good helps too. And that’s not even mentioning the bread and cheese which accompany pretty much everything.

After dinner, I helped Jonathan round up some chickens to move to a more secure room in the coop. This was pretty funny for me…I don’t think I’ve ever handled live chickens before and I was surprised at how fast some of them could run — especially the little grey with white speckled birds. Moving them is an attempt to thwart a chicken killer who has been breaking into the coop every night for the past couple of weeks and killing indiscriminately. We’ll see tomorrow how well this works. Apparently, about half the chicken population has been killed in the past two weeks. No one’s really sure what’s doing it, thought the speculation is cats or weasels.

So far, so good. I know it’s only day one, but I get the feeling this is going to work out pretty well. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the summer.