Farm Pics

Here are a few pictures I took tonight right before chores.

Here are my beloved Red Bourbon turkeys. I started out with twelve this spring, but 12-3=9. The local hawks claimed three about a month ago. I was spittin' mad.

Something new I learned this summer: we have lots of wild yarrow growing around the ol' homestead. Now I won't have to buy it. Yarrow is an immune system booster, and sometimes I use it to make a tincture. The yarrow flowers look a lot like queen anne's lace, but yarrow leaves are more fern-like.

Here's "Buttercup". Notice she has the neck of a linebacker. Right after she was born, I was able to pick her up to move her. Not no mo'. She's huge. I think we should call her "Patty" (...as in...Hamburger Patty).

I finally set up a trellis for my pole beans. I like to grow pole beans. It's fun growing vertically. Nice change of pace. Behind the beans are some tomatoes. Both beans and tomatoes I didn't get out until mid-June, which is late. A lot of gardeners around here already have beans and tomatoes ready to eat. It will take mine several more weeks, I think. But I do have garlic, which I'll be digging up probably in the next week.

This is a picture of one of our "natural" ducklings. We have two. They are the first birds we have been able to breed ourselves without having to go through a hatchery. Cool. Except we decided this spring not to "do" ducks anymore. Not sure when we'll get rid of the ducks, but it's still fun having ducklings nonetheless.

Thanks for stopping by to visit. Blessings!

In a Bloggin' Mood

Baseball is now over. Boo! Yay! It was a long weekend last week with tournaments. It seemed we spent all our time at the ball field. Actually, we probably did spend all our time there. We played a total of 4 games, 2 of which were postponed one day, and re-scheduled the next. So it was really like 6 games. Since we haven't had any practice this week I am revelling in all this new-found time. Every evening I get a little bit more caught up on dishes and laundry. I'm not there yet, but maybe sometime in the next week, I hope. Woohoo.

We have a varmint picking off our chickens one by one. (*gory details ahead - go to the next paragraph if you DON'T WANT TO KNOW*) Some skinny creature has been breaking into the barn and biting the heads off our chickens. Sometimes he (she?) bites all the way through; other times, the head is just left dangling. Not a pretty picture, I know. We think it is a weasel or another mink. A while back we had the same thing happen and it was a mink. Now, as my husband says, it is an ex-mink.

It was a long, long spring with our cow, Ruby. We were first-time cow-milkers, she was a first-time cow milk-ee. She kicked. We kicked back. She developed mastitis, we stayed up half the night doing things to a cow we never dreamed we would ever do. Now I'm going to be honest with you. We've been getting farmier by the day over the last 3-4 years, but this experience was the first time we ever thought to ourselves, "This is just too much. Where do we go to resign?" We were also thinking, "I wonder how a humungous miniature jersey would taste as hamburger?" OK, we're just as human as anyone else. It was TOO MUCH. But we stuck with it. My thought was, maybe the worst is behind us, and we would be fools to give up now. So, we still have Ruby and "Buttercup" (a.k.a. T-Bone). They're both quite healthy now. But I'm not milking Ruby, either. That's because once we got her better, the calf started taking all the milk. That was fine with me, too, I needed all the time I could get for other things. This is a drama still being played out. Stay tuned for further updates.

I am, however, still milking two of our goats, which is providing our family's milk needs right now. It is just barely enough for the kids to drink, and not much else. I did make some great ice cream tonight, but I don't usually have enough to do that.

In gardening news: my spinach and lettuce have bolted. I've pulled the spinach, and am in the process of pulling the lettuce. Having been so busy over the last two months, I only just now got out my tomatoes and beans, and still haven't planted any peppers or zucchini. I do have some nice looking beets and cabbage, though. And chard.

The new guys: we bought a beef cow this spring - "Blackie". She is an angus/jersey cross. We also have a dozen Red Bourbon Turkeys, which I love. They are a heritage breed. That means they aren't profitable enough for the industrial turkey farms to raise, so they are becoming rare. I am hoping they will naturally breed next spring so that we don't have to buy our turkeys from a hatchery any more. That would be really cool. Plus, we are helping a rare breed keep from going extinct. I just hope they're tasty too, or all will be for naught.

Hopefully more blogs will be forthcoming. Baseball season is over and I feel like writing.

More Spring!

I have to admit, I'm getting a little nervous. I've been milking goats for over two years now. But a cow? If a goat steps on your foot, it hurts, sure, but is not that big of a deal. A cow? If Ruby stepped on my foot it would smash the bones in there to smithereens. Well, maybe not. But maybe yes! Ruby is due any day now. Pray for me! We don't even have our stanchion yet! But we will. And I'm so excited about CREAM. Here's our WonderCow, maybe only a day or two before L&D! ;-)

Remember our baby bottle goat kid? Well, now her favorite past-time is terrorizing the chickens. Loads of fun. Nothing more hilarious than watching frollicking kids.

My garlic is finally up. I must have planted it a little deep because it took longer than I thought it should have to sprout. But here it is! I think it should be ready to pull around the end of June.

And here's the peas, lettuce, and spinach I planted a few weeks ago. It's up too! I guess you can barely see the little sprouts in this picture, but they're there if you look closely! I also have a few baby asparagus shoots poking up out of the ground, but they are too young to pick this year. It will be another year or two before we can enjoy that.

Finally, some daffodils and forsythia. We're having beautiful weather this spring. No big ups and downs like last year. Hopefully that will mean a better fruit crop this year!

You might be thinking right about now: Gee, Amey, you do about everything! Heh heh heh. Boy have I got YOU fooled. You don't know how many dishes I have piled up in the sink or how many "stacks" I have about the house. If I measured the laundry needing to be done I would have to weigh it by the ton. But my boys have been to ball practice, my animals are happy, the refrigerator is well-stocked with eggs, and I read to my children today. All is well with the world.

Early Spring is Here!

It's been a long time since I've had to use one of these. Our "senior" doe (Daisy) had her babies on Saturday. One of them was extremely weak and underweight. Her mother would have nothing to do with her, so we have to bottle feed her.

We were keeping the baby in our kitchen full-time right after she was born. Now she's starting to spend all day in the barn and nights in the laundry room in a laundry basket. This is a picture of her. For some reason in the picture she looks like the goat from outer space. Don't worry, her eyes are actually normal. For goats. Yes, I have a goat in my laundry room.

This is Rose. She's next - due to have babies sometime between this weekend and the middle of next week. She had a difficult delivery last year. We hope she has an easier time this year. It's hard to tell from this picture how big she is, but she is getting huge. Don't tell her I said that.

These are some birch trees we planted between our house and the pond several years ago. Our trees are finally starting to grow to be a nice size. As you can see, the grass is brown and the trees are bare. For now. Six weeks from now, things will look a lot different.

We spent a lot of time outside today because it was so nice. Things have been very muddy so far this year, but it is finally starting to dry out a bit. Although I hear we are supposed to get more rain tomorrow. I did something wild and crazy this afternoon. I planted some peas, lettuce, and spinach. This is a picture of the bed I planted them in. I got this idea from Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. We'll see how they grow. I have never planted this early before.

Finally

Well, we finally had our first frost this morning. I don't remember ever having the first frost so late! We still covered up our tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini. They're still producing! We covered them again tonight, but I know eventually we'll have to give it up.

I also had my first big post-farmer's market grocery shopping trip this weekend. I hadn't bought any vegetables from a grocery store at all since last May. It's been great! We were able to cut our grocery shopping trips to once every 2-3 weeks. We'll have to start going more often now, but it was great while it lasted. Next year hopefully I can preserve more produce so that even after the season is over we still won't have to shop every week. The only problem with that is we only have so much freezer space.

One thing I really enjoyed doing this year was growing our own celery and then drying it. We can't stand to eat celery just plain (raw), so I just dried all of it. I use it in recipes and in making stock. So my jars of dried celery should last us all winter.

One neat thing about the farmer's market is that you feel daring enough to try new things from time to time. This year we tried chard and kohlrabi. The chard especially is very good. You cook it much like you would spinach, but its flavor is a little milder. It's delicious with a big slab of butter melted over it and a little salt.

Long Time No Write (which gives me license to ramble)

Well, it's been awhile since I've written here, so I thought I'd check in today. Time has been flying by. I'm not sure where September went. It zoomed past at the speed of light. Now here we are finishing up the first week of October with nary a frost in sight. We're still eating zucchini casserole once a week, and the tomatoes are still blooming. I brought in the rest of my cabbage last weekend to make our family favorite: cortido (Latin American sauerkraut). This weekend I am drying chopped celery from the garden. Despite all this good eatin', I've really been neglecting my garden dreadfully. I haven't been watering it like I should! We've had very little rain this year. We have a volunteer squash plant in the old garden where we throw the compost. I think it might be a butternut squash. The biggest one isn't ripe yet, but I'm crossing my fingers. The big question is: when will we get that first frost?

On the critter front, our little farm hit its maximum number of occupants towards the end of August. Now those numbers are dwindling. We butchered one group of chickens the end of August, and the second group will be done in another week or two. Our two steers and one lamb went to the butcher last week, and we've also done 3 turkeys. Besides that we have lost 4 ducks and several chickens to outside causes. One of our ducks got hit by a car during an unauthorized road crossing (serves the bird the right for wandering off the property). Of course, we'd rather eat them than have them get hit by cars or devoured by wild animals, but there's not much we can do about them going across the road. Other than...eating them before they cross the road.

School is humming along, and I am making the necessary adjustments for the new school year. I gave it three weeks, found some things that needed changing, and we're working on that now. We just finished Week 4 of our school year. We have school for three weeks, then take one week off. We do have school in June and July, but then we take August off. That makes 36 very full weeks of school.

I enjoy having my kids home with me every day. That way I can micro-manage their lives. Just kidding! No, actually what I like is that we are putting into practice something that I have always felt intuitively but never really fully realized until fairly recently: that is that the healthy home should be one in which all members of the family contribute to the household economy, and there is as much producing as there is consuming. As Americans, we are all already very good at consuming (that is after all the American way). What we need more practice at is producing. You know, being productive. Making needed things and maintaining what you have so that you don't have to buy another one.

Speaking of being productive, I feel really productive these days. I usually get up at around 8:00 (anything before 8 is TOO EARLY). Now with our daylight hours dwindling, when I get up in the morning and go out to milk the goats, the sun has just risen over the horizon. It makes me feel like a real farmer, up at daybreak, and doin' the chores. Yee haw.

Well, I guess that's enough rambling for now. Back to what you were doing. Something productive, I hope. ;-)

Public Enemy Number One

The Dreaded Tomato Hornworm