2014 Spring Fever

I had no idea that I haven't posted since July 2013! Yikes! Sorry I am so behind. I thought I'd at least posted some pictures, but it seems I was mistaken.

We are expecting some babies soon! Daisy, the goat, will be kidding any day now. Rooter, our 8 month old gilt, will be farrowing in about a month. Sunny, the boar, jumped the fence one day in January when she was in heat. Never underestimate a 250 pound boar and a snow drift that has melted/frozen over so many times that it is like a rock. Huck and I had to really put all our muscle power into removing the drifts from both sides of the fence. Talk about the workout of the month! It didn't work either. He was right back over that fence the following week, this time because he wanted their free-feed instead of waiting for us to come around and give him his breakfast. Luckily we were already selling and butchering pigs at that point, so we simply removed the feeder and started feeding the 3 left (this includes Sunny) every morning and night, along with Buffalo - who so kindly remained in her own pen.

We aren't sure yet if Buffalo is pregnant. She is much bigger, quickly approaching 500 pounds, so it is more difficult to tell if there are any little ones growing in there yet. I never once saw Sunny mate with her, though I saw him get a chance at Rooter several times that first day he jumped the fence. We can see for certain that she is going to farrow.

We may also have a pregnant cat, or two. You just never know with those guys.

Buffalo snuggling with Sunny in her hut. They are currently together in case she isn't already pregnant. Poor Buffalo. I do believe she is a bit OCD. The last time we removed Sunny from her pen, she did THAT to her hair. The trouble was, they were also beating each other up with regularity. If she is NOT pregnant, and does not get pregnant again this time, she will become sausage. She is supposed to be our breeding sow, but has shown no signs of heat so far (though that doesn't mean we didn't miss it).

Rooter: Why does this cold white stuff keep showing up? If you don't know her, you wouldn't recognize the baby belly she has going on right now. She is due in about a month's time.

Who wouldn't want to buy this handsome Alpine? He's up for sale! Go to the Sales page for details.

Look at Daisy's kid belly! She just dropped in the last 12 hours or so (you can tell because the hip bones suddenly become noticeable again). Her milk bag is also starting to fill out and the ligaments at her tail are loosening more and more every day.

Daisy just looks uncomfortable, poor gal.

Daisy's twin sister Ginny was saying "Hey, over here, over here" while I took pictures of Daisy. I separated them earlier this week so that Ginny wouldn't hurt the kid(s) when they arrive. Ginny is the "lead" doe, of the sisters.

Cat Alley! They like to hang out near the goats because of the mice that climb underneath my milk room and all the little birds that come in and eat up the yummies off the ground. They keep themselves fed, that's for sure!

Ginny: But I just wanted a nibble!

Ginny: Fine. No nibbles. Guh.

The bookends.

The chickens were looking at me like "Yea right, we aren't coming out til that white stuff stops showing up again! Or you throw out some more scratch, that'd work too."

A dog and his cat, errr, friend.

We have GRASS. Oh but wait, we also have more snow. Again. That's Wyoming for you.

I am Paws, the Basset Hound. Feel sorry for me.

She's all puuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Our loving kitty. The other two, not so much.

Hog Haven

The time came, and we finally got our breeder hogs! My husband has been salivating over this day for awhile now. He is a huge bacon fan. I also happen to have a daughter (the one in most of the pictures featured on this post) who loves all things pork, but won't eat other meat (other than boneless fish or shrimp, as long as she has LOTS of tartar sauce to go with it - just learned this little tidbit at dinner tonight). I call her my little porkatarian. They are both the happiest beings on our little acreage right now.

Meet Buffalo and Sunny (Buffalo is the bigger one - she's about a year old and due with babies at the end of August). Sunny is about 5 months old and weighs around 90lbs. Buffalo calculates to be around 300lbs by measurements - but I did point out to my husband that we don't yet know how a pig (ours in particular) carries pregnancy, so we don't know if the girth measurement might have boosted the approximate weight or not.

Buffalo seems to be thinking "What, my feet were hot."

This isn't one of our pigs. She is a 20lb weaner (just been weaned from mommy) pig that we picked up for someone that is West of us. She'll go to her rightful owners tomorrow. They bought her as a feeder pig, I do believe.

Same little weaner pig (I've been calling her Miss Piggy). This picture is to show comparison size versus my younger daughter in the picture above with our two hogs.

My husband has been working very hard for the past 3 weeks straight to build our hog pens. He had hoped to do it in June, when it would have been much cooler, but his employer had decided he should work from 5:30am to 6:30pm until the very last day of the month. The money may be nice, especially for when he has to take any time off work (he used his vacation after our son was born), but it left us with very little time to get the hog pens built. They will have nice, large areas for their living quarters. Sunny will be separate from Buffalo. She'll have the biggest area and pen, for raising her young.

Our year old hens are keeping cool in the shade. One of the Reds looks like it has a white stripe across it's back because it is wearing a "Hen Saver"

These are the chicks. They are now 9 weeks old, I believe. The white with black feathers has a White Plymouth Rock mom and a Rhode Island Red dad. Pretty neat, huh? You can also see the blue bands I put on the female chicks so that we know which ones NOT to hatch next year.

The chicks live next door to the year old birds so that when it comes time to add the 8 female chicks to the coop there won't be too much hub-bub. The cockerals will stay apart because they will be dinner at some point. The husband wants to free-range them without a fence - I'm thinking about it.

The chicks have about 7 or 8 more weeks before the pullets should start laying eggs. We can't put them with the older chickens until they can eat layer feed. According to the books, the layer feed has too much calcium in it and should NEVER be supplemented for chick starter/grower feed. Good information to know. So glad we read it again (for maybe the fiftieth time) when trying to figure out if we could start doing a 50/50 starter/layer mix for feed. I also had to switch my one year old hens from the organic feed to Nutrena pellets (antibiotic-free, but not organic). I finally concluded, after 2 months of mystery, that it MUST be the feed that has been giving them runny poop and making them pluck their back and wing feathers. I tried everything else, including putting "hen armour" on the birds that were getting themselves ready for the crockpot. I could never find any evidence of mites, lice or worms but still treated (with only all natural items, such as herbs and diatamacious(sp?) earth) and there was no change. Once we changed the feed (well, it's still a mix because it's only been 2 weeks and you don't want to change too quickly or you risk making them very sick) their poop went back to normal, they seem to be putting more weight on (they had started looking smaller), and the feather plucking isn't near as bad as it was. Hooray for small victories!

I love my Toggenburg does. Notice how they are laying out in the open while everything else is hiding due to the heat? They are not just heat tolerant, but very cold-hardy as well.

Here are the Alpines, hiding in the shade (you can just barely make out Navasha at the back of the shed and Prong is laying under the giant spool).

The goats are doing well. Prong seems to have stomach issues here and there, but I did a trial-and-error run with him and finally we figured out that probiotics fix the issue. I have decided to start my search for a future Toggenburg buck and will sell Prong next year, especially if the stomach thing continues. I am not being cold hearted, or huffy about pure-breds, I simply do not want to pass on any genetic issue that might possibly be a reason for his health problems. Since I am going to replace him, I might as well do it with a breed that is better suited to our weather than stick with these Alpines that don't seem to fair well too far in either direction.

My Great Dane guarding the hay (or maybe she's just keeping cool). ;-)

The Basset Hound guarding the chickens (or maybe he's just keeping cool). Hehe.

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Here are the goldfish that keep our stock tank clean. A couple "water bugs" have taken up refuge and swim around in there too. They look like little sea turtles. We consider them part of the tank now too.

What do you do with the leaky tank that is no longer being used as a chick brooder and still has the wood shavings/chick poop in it? I use mine as a base to pour soil on top of and plant CORN seeds! Yum! Only been a month since I planted, and look how wonderful they are doing (though a bit crowded - more survived than I had thought possible. Is it true, is my yellow thumb getting a little greener?!?!?!).

Front view. You can tell that the left side is the first to get sun in the morning. By the time the sun starts setting, it hasn't shown on this side of the house since around 3pm (maybe earlier).

Here are the potatoes from the tub inside our bedroom. They started to grow all on their own, no water or soil, a couple months ago. I had forgotten about them being in the bucket to keep cool after I had my son in January, so they just stayed there rather than being put somewhere dark. Kind of neat to watch mother nature do her thing.

My husband has been hard at work making these hog pens up out of oil field pipe (very, very, very, incredibly heavy). He's doing the last little bits now and then we can move the hogs into their permanent home.

Informed Consumerism

I highly recommend everyone be an informed consumer. It is so easy to go about our lives not looking at the ingredients of processed foods and just pretending that there is no problem, nor will there ever be a problem, with our food.

This is NOT the case. There is a huge problem with our food, and it is all thanks to Monsanto and the mad scientists that made their "super crops" a reality.

Doesn't it sound like the plot from a bad B-movie from the early 90's? It does to me! It would have been called something along the lines of "Mutant Crops Attack."

I would also highly recommend buying organic, GMO-free AND local when possible (if you are like me living in a very rural area - this will not always be possible, sadly enough).

Photo courtesy of RawforBeauty.com

Please watch this 17-minute video. It is less time than a sitcom on television and it will help everyone see what is happening with our "big crops" in today's world - especially those of you who may not have your eyes and ears open yet. I understand, truly I do. I was an uninformed consumer for a long time. Then I had children. More importantly, I had a child with severe allergies. I have to look at everything closely. When does she thrive best? When she eats fresh fruits and vegetables that are organic. When does she do poorly? When she eats processed foods that contain any soy, corn or canned tomato products. There isn't a coincidence here... Just watch the video and see for yourself.

Our Common Roots GMO Video

Farmers also need to step up. Not just farmers, who I know have a massive heartache ahead of them while trying to get away from Monsanto (watch the Food, Inc. documentary to see the pressure and force with which farmers are harassed by Monsanto and their goons), but also land owners who allow farmers to use Monsanto products on their land.

There is nothing more disappointing to me than listening to someone complain about the corn products that effect them so negatively, followed by the revelation that said corn products are grown on their property. It is beyond my ability to understand how someone makes everyone around them suffer for their own health problems and then reveals that they earn an income (the amount may be miniscule, that isn't the point) by growing (or allowing it to be grown) on a piece of land they have control over.

If each and every land owner does not take a stand, all of our land has nowhere to go but down. These GMO crops are spreading like wildfire due to the wind and natural pollination by local insects and birds.

rawforbeauty.com

There was an article just written about a GMO wheat being discovered growing in Oregon, when there has been no GMO wheat crops approved yet to be grown in our country at all. Now there is a huge investigation being done in several states.

If you watch the video, you will also learn that crops are being found in Canada, where none were yet approved to be grown. All thanks to mother nature doing what she does best...

Another wonderful point in the video is that our honey will also be affected. I hadn't even considered that before. This is why I open my eyes and ears to everything. I can get so focused on one point that I forget the other portions that will suffer too.

That is my 2-cents on the issue. I highly recommend being informed, not just for yourself but for the future of all living creatures. You are free to decide if it is worth it to you, but please at least take the time to watch the video to see if it is something you might, just possibly, think you want to be informed about.

Chicken Hatching Fun!

Our chicks began hatching Sunday afternoon! It has been so exciting! There are 11 hatched so far, out of 20 eggs total (a few I think were duds - but because this is my first time I left them in there, checking regularly that they weren't smelling funky and rotting, just in case I wasn't seeing what I thought I was seeing when I candled them).

A Rhode Island Red rooster breeding with White Plymouth Rock hens is called a Red Sex Link. The cockerels should be yellow-er in color when hatched, and the females may vary more, but should all be more red than anything else. So far, I know which ones are which. The full RIRs are the ones with the darker stripes down the back - that is what all the RIR chicks looked like that we got last year. Can you see which ones are which in the picture? Hint: There is only one full RIR so far (in this picture) and one cross cockerel.

Here are two more that have only recently hatched.

I have a feeling only 1 of the remaining eggs in the incubator might possibly hatch now. It has pipped, and I've heard it chirp a few times, but it still hasn't emerged. The others I haven't even seen rock, let alone pip. They may all be duds.

*Soon to come - picture of the 11 chicks currently in the brooder, just as soon as the Little Man wakes from his nap. He's currently sharing space with them for a day or two while we build a door for the shed that will hold the brooder outside. Pictures will come of that soon too!

A Steer on the Homestead? Could be!

It looks like a steer could be here in the near future. I have very little beef left in the deep freeze, and the elk and deer have also dwindled down to nothing but ground (and I am looking forward to buying pork fat from the butcher so I can make lots of sausage! Posts to follow).

I grew accustomed to having beef on a semi-regular basis, so we decided to go ahead and go in on half a steer with my husband's best friend. I like mixing the ground beef with ground deer and elk since those two have very little fat in them.

http://www.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/f/flapjax/177.jpg

That is a Scottish Highland breed. The last one was called Steve. I think we'll just call all soon-to-be-dinner cattle Steve from now on. The girls always referred to any beef we had as Steve when we were eating it (they only met that steer once, but it stuck with them). We ate Steve stew often during the winter months. Tasty!

(See, to prove my point my 6 year old just walked over and said "Oh, is that Steve?" LOL!)

Time is of the Essense... or not.

It never fails. Once you have children, you lose a lot of that "me" time that was once found in abundance.

Well, I went that next step and took away even more "me" time so that I could provide fresh, organic eggs and [raw] milk to my children on a daily basis. My poor toe nails are more un-polished than polished these days (and by un-polished, I mean there is paint on them - but it's chipped so much that more nail is showing than is not, hehe).

Don't mind the crooked toes - I have a tendency to run into things and break them. My girls take after me, poor dears.

I don't regret it, but I do realize that sometimes I don't look much like a woman, let alone a woman who cares what she looks like. I don't necessarily believe this is a bad thing, but having moved to my wonderful State from California, where everyone cares about that sort of thing, it's still an odd state of being sometimes.

I tend to go to the post office wearing a raggedy, torn up shirt (or flannel) over Carhartt or Dickie's pants (or holey jeans, if they aren't holey in any "wrong" places yet). The lovely thing about the oil-field town is that there are other women there who look even dirtier than me. But the truly nice thing about it is when the nose-in-the-air women are out and about and don't look too thrilled to see my outfit. Makes me smile every time. I work hard and I have no shame in that. I don't want to look all gussied up daily because then I wouldn't want to get my hands dirty (or my shoes, which are usually covered in goat poop, chicken poop, horse poop, rabbit poop, prairie dog poop, and every other kind of wild turd to be found in our desert). I'm also not the gussied-up type.

Some days I would love to dress up and get all fancy - and then I remember that it takes a lot of work to get that way and I appreciate my life even more.

I love being a backwards girl. I was always a tomboy, so this is nothing new for me. There are just less people around to judge me for it than when I lived in California.

My house is the same way. Especially in the summer. There will be dirty dishes galore next to and in the sink, dirt clumps on the carpet, and rocks in the kitchen every summer. We have things to do and little time to do it. Because this is when my house will always be the messiest, this is also the time of year we have the most visitors. Irony. Gotta love it.

I make no apologies or excuses. I do not say "please excuse the mess" when people arrive. You either deal with the mess or you don't visit. Either one works for me. I prefer to be outdoors when I can be comfortable while outdoors; in Wyoming that isn't very often.

Now, if only I could get my 3 month old to cooperate so I could spend even more time outside right now... Things to do, things to do... Naparoo, naparoo...

Rebekah Teal is a former city-girl-turned-farm-girl who writes for Mary Janes Farm magazine and blog. She did an article for the April/May issue listing 6 "riches of country living that I've discovered." #4 just happened to be about how her looks no longer mattered like they did in the big city. #6, neighbors who are ACTUALLY neighborly - even though they don't live nearly as close as the neighbors in the city! I've only recently started getting this magazine, and some of it is a bit too frills for me, but there is a lot of good information too. Don't be surprised if I share a tid-bit here and there for you.

Fromage Blanc - i.e. fancy cheese name for easy cheese

After reading a blog post on The Prairie Homestead a few days ago, I decided to take her idea of using fresh milk to make this cheese: fomage blanc.  It is very simple and easy. I just used a fresh half gallon of milk from yesterday's morning milking, added some rennet and mesophilic culture, put a piece of cheesecloth on top and held it in place by the half gallon jar band (I used a canning jar). This morning it was ready to be drained for 6 hours.

The half gallon jar I had the milk in for 24 hours; draining the cheese into a pitcher.

I'm going to use it in place of cottage or ricotta cheese in lasagna when my in-laws arrive this weekend. Mmmm mmm good!

The completed cheese after it's been chilling in the fridge overnight (next to some homemade fresh french bread my neighbor gave me yesterday - it was delicious). I might have to make more fresh cheese now so I can eat it and still have some left for the lasagna!

I could use the leftover whey to make ricotta. I think that I will set this one aside and use it for cooking. I will be making salisbury steaks (actually, they've already been put together and formed, just awaiting a thawing from the freezer) and mashed potatoes. The whey will be good in place of milk in the potatoes and gravy. Yum!

For the full instructions and measurements to make fromage blanc please go to Jill's recipe here.