Day 11   An Amish Community Market, an 'English' community market, and more beautiful Vermont countryside.  Susan is a great tour guide (and cook!)

                                                                                Susan bought this yesterday at the trading post.  I had to post it!

        

This is a barn with some Amish selling produce and baked goods and things that they made like aprons, and pillows.  It also is the home of an animal rescue place.

                                                                                    

Some rescued mules.  Look at the size of those ears!!  

                                                                                

                                                                                   

They LOVED being petted.

They weren't even feeding them anything at this point.  They were just loving the attention.  The girls here said that they were being trained as volunteers at the rescue organization.

                                                                                
 

Some of the goods that the Amish ladies were selling.  The lady (an English woman not pictured) who runs the market and the animal rescue organization is also spearheading a fundraiser to help an Amish family who need to pay an estimated million dollars for the care of a young boy in the family.  Susan is participating in this community event.

                                                                                  

At the other market we visited,  Susan and I bought some tea from a homesteading family in the area.  They raise pork and lamb and chickens and beef and sell it.  He says that his kids were mad because the bacon that he made sold out and they didn't get much of it! Their practices in raising this meat sounded very healthy -- as close to grass fed and free range as they could get.  The pigs were allowed to stay outside most of the time and were fed slop (the family's leftover food) as well as grain, and the lambs were kept outside as much as possible too except when they got into the neighbor's garden then they had to be put in the barn for a while. The wife makes wreaths at Christmas time, and the husband (pictured here) is a history teacher as well as his duties homesteading.

                                                                        

        

                                                                                
 Went for a walk down the road just before dinner:             

The trickling brook was about the only sound I could hear besides a couple of bird and soft chirping of crickets.

I love these pointy topped (that's the scientific name) evergreens in Vermont.

Looking down on the forest floor from the road.  Lots of ferns.

This was a nice grouping of ferns, a moss covered stump an a young spruce tree.

I imagine deer bedding down for the night in this little clearing.

Some things I picked up on my walk -- I thought very artfully arranged until Susan had another idea:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Ok,  This does look prettier. But it's not a fair contest.  Susan is an artist.  See her watercolor below:

                                                                                    

Beautiful!  She painted this with watercolors from a photo she took.

Tomorrow -- to Shelburne Museum just south of Burlington, VT.