Amelia's Baby!

Our little ornamental peach tree in full bloom!

Just when I think I have this farming thing down I get a curve ball. 

On Saturday morning I checked our three pregnant goats.  They all ate their breakfast well.  (Sometimes a goat won't eat if they are in labor.)  Amelia and MiniBell did not seem to be in labor at all and went out to graze... but Milky Whey seemed a bit uncomfortable.  She kept getting up and down and changing position alot.  Often a sign of labor.   Her udder was full and tight and her ligament had been very loose for a day or so already.   So, I had Carolyn go out, check on her and observe her every hour.  About the third time Carolyn went out to check, she came running in saying... Milky Whey was fine but Amelia had her baby!  We had not even been checking anyone in that pen! 

It is Amelia's first time to be a mom...

and she had one very healthy, adorable, sturdy buckling.

He looks a lot like her!

I took him away, milked out Amelia and bottle fed him the colostrum.  We will be selling this little guy as soon as I am sure he is nursing well and dehorned.

Amelia is one of my experiment crossbreed goats.  She was the daughter of one of my wonderful full sized La Mancha milkers, Twinkie, and a very good Nigerian buck.  Her udder is nice for a first freshener and her teats a good length for hand milking.  She gave about 20 ounces of colostrum and is milking about the same amount morning and night right now but her milk has not come fully in yet. 

Her full sister, Mini Bell, is due any day, as well as I guess, a very uncomfortable Milky Whey.  So... busy, spring, farm life has started back at full throttle.  I will be milking three goats twice a day once they have all freshened.  The only baby I might keep this year is a baby out of  Milky Whey, if she has a strapping large doe born to her.

I love spring on a farm.  The trees are getting buds and little green leaves.  The grass is growing.  My dad and William are supposed to mow this after noon for the first time this year.

First tulip of the year in my yard about to bloom!

First asparagus!

Garden helper and inspector.

I pray all is going well on your little patch of ground where ever you are around the world.

Blessings and Happy Farming!
susan

A Beautiful Springish Day!

Today was a beautiful day.  It felt just like a perfect temperature spring day.  We had to take the day off from home schooling and go out into it.  I cleaned out many of my raised beds and started preparing them for planting.  William and Zeke helped me with two of them, we got a lot done.

I had planted two of these barrels with bunching onions late last summer and wow did they grow and get happy thru the winter.  I have been harvesting them as I need them in the kitchen and they just keep multiplying.

We had a few unusually harsh spells this winter.  Much of the things I could usually winter over outside died.  But while I was cleaning all the dead stalks out of the mint bed there were little new mint leaves emerging!  So we still have mint!

I also cleaned out all the dead ferns from the asparagus bed and found this two inch tall little guy.  ;)

I am planning on making a chick order this week.  I am still sticking with White Leghorns.  As they work the best for our large family on our tight budget.  The feed to egg ratio just can't be beat.  I always keep 2 or 3 Silkies around for hatching out eggs as well.

Our chicken area has not had a break from chickens for at least 13 years.  So we decided to get a whole new flock this go around and give away our current flock in a month or so and let that whole area have a good rest.  While it is empty, we will repair any fencing and the coop in places and clean and disinfect things really well.

In the goat area of our farm we are eagerly expecting kids soon!  I gave away my goats that were in milk last fall so have had the first break in many years in milking.  I have missed the fresh milk but on this particularly colder than normal winter, I was grateful most  mornings not to go out and sit and milk twice a day.

Milky Whey should freshen first.  She was much wider than this but as you can see in the second picture her babies have dropped down almost into position.  :)

I think the next one that will freshen is MiniBell.  She and her sister Amelia are a mid-sized goat.  A cross between a full sized LaMancha and a Nigerian Dwarf buck.  It is both Mini Bells and Amelia's  first freshening and I can't wait to milk them.  Mini Bells first new little udder is coming down and growing as her due date approaches.  No, she is not about to get sick.  I could not get her to stop following me so I could photograph her so pulled some privet down for her to eat.  I caught her with her mouth open!

 Her little udder, growing larger every day.  I am very happy with the teat length of both her and her sister.  Great size for hand milking.

Amelia is Mini Bells twin sister.  (Amelia was born with the Nigerian Dwarf ears.)  Amelia must have been bred a bit later as her tummy is not quite as big.  She would not hold still either.  Here she is battling for privet with her sister.

 Amelia's udder is just coming in now.

I really want to get Calfy bred for fall/winter milk but she has not come into heat at all.  Neither has the other goat I was wanting to breed for then, Plenty.  I might get a break from milking again next winter if I don't get one or both of them bred soon!

Here is Calfy.  Very curious about my cell phone camera.

I really love goats and think that they are wonderful creatures.  They have great personalities.  Especially when bottle raised.  They are very functional on a small farm for forage control, fertilizer, meat and milk.  Great little animals!

Pray your spring farm planning is going well!

Blessings and Happy Farming!

susan

 

Busy Week On the Farm

Living on a small farm can be very busy.  Sometimes, I feel like we just never have an extra moment at certain times of the year.  This is one of those busy times of year.  I not only have our twice daily milking and normal barn chores but baby goats to bottle feed and the garden.  The garden is a wonderful thing to have and we love having it.  It saves us a lot of money and is healthy eating for little monitary cost.  Only hard work. :)

But when things are ripe they are ripe and we better either eat them, preserve them or make them into something and it can't wait.  So a "not so busy week" can quickly turn into a busy one.  Some years certain plants will do better than others and over produce.  Last year it was green beans.  We were over run.   We ate them about every way you can think of.  Daily.  They were good but by the end of the season we were pretty green beaned out.  :)  The deer got ALL of the green beans this year.  So from  year to year you just never know how much of anything you will get.

This year it is tomatoes and peppers.  We have been blessed with an absolute abundance of them.  They are on plates and in bowls all over the kitchen.  I got smarter this year and bought a lot of those two and three tier plate racks at thrift stores and so am now going up with our produce to take up less counter space.

We have made two small batches of Chili Sauce with the extras, so as not to waste anything.

Needless to say the family has eaten a lot of tomato dishes and tomato sandwiches.  They have also eaten a lot of peppers different ways.  Praise God the uses for tomatoes and peppers are just endless.  From spaghetti sauce to salsa.

We also had to butcher five chickens on Monday.  I will spare you the intricate details of butchering but show our "butchering set up" for the curious back yard farmers that are thinking about doing it and don't have the nerve yet.  If this little country wife and a few kids can do it you can too.  Our set up is efficient but not expensive or fancy.  When I needed to learn how I "googled" it.  Read tons of ways to do it and did what made the best sense to me.   I am not going to be showing terribly gory pictures below but if the thought of butchering and seeing the equipment will make you feel bad or uncomfortable you might want to skip the rest of this post.  :)  Blessings!

William is my squeemish young man, so his job is to heat the water up to the right temperature (145-160 works best for us) and bring it out to us when we need it.  He also does the final washing off and picks out any small pin feathers once the bird is pretty much clean before I wrap them in plastic wrap and bag them in freezer bags.

Above is our scalding pot.It is just an old large water bath canning pot.  It was left here in a pile of junk by the old owners of this property 14 years ago.  It has been very useful.

 Above is my fancy butchering set up.  My killing cone is a large plastic white vinegar bottle (bottom and top cut out) screwed to the wall with a garbage bag under it.  My non-porous table that is easy to wipe down and keep clean.  A trash can.  A clean large bowl for carrying the clean birds up to the house for William to do a final go over.  A bottle of vinegar and water  and paper towels for quick clean ups.  My knife and sharpener and a pair of kitchen scissors.  The bale of chips is just to hold my bowl this time.  :)

These two ropes hanging down is where we pluck from.

Seriously, this is all you need except for a chicken/rooster of course and some running water, plastic wrap and freezer bags.  Not to hard or bad really.

I never wanted to start to butcher our own food.  It took me becoming knowledgeable about what happens to our food and how it is handled.  How many chemicals and things go into everything and also a health crisis to make me realize we had to do this to have pure food.  I have an auto-immune disease that requires me to eat food that is not sprayed or contaminated in any way.  I have to know what is done to the food I eat or I have horrible symptoms that make my quality of life not very good.  So I am grateful that I have learned this skill and live where I am able to raise some chickens/roosters to do this.  We give our birds the best and happiest chickeny life they could have. 

We feed them well.  We treat them with great care and they lack for nothing.  They have a purpose and are valued.  We are grateful to God for them and butcher them in the most humane way we can.  That's my two cents on it all.  :)


We sent three of the five birds to freezer camp after a rest in the fridge. But the kids excitedly slotted the two biggest ones for being bar-b-q'ed  for movie night this week.

William and Carolyn love to cook together and made their movie night meal.  They had chips and other stuff with it too.

God is so good to us always.  I am grateful for all He helps us do and get done around here.  For all He has shown us how to do.  It really is a wonderful way to live. 

Gods many blessings and Happy Farming!
susan

Gardening Update

I have had such a good time gardening this year.  We have actually had regular rains this year for the first time in years.  Praise God.  This is the second year I have been using the raise beds and it really is so much easier and more productive.

I did plant the smallish ground plot down at my dads end of the property this year.  The beans didn't do well and the deer ate half of my okra plants already.  sigh.  Hopefully those deer will be thinned out during the next hunting season.  Last year we had at least 12 deer living on the property.  They ate most of our pears and my whole garden plot we planted down at my dads end of the property.  I planted the plot down at my dads end of the property this year knowing we only had about 6 deer left after hunting season living on the property now.  If they finish off the plot down there again this year, I will not replant it.

The raised beds have done well last year and this year.  The soil is so rich that the plants just really get huge.  Especially the tomato plants.  I have to keep cutting them back.

With all the rain we have been having I have had a lot of issues with leaf rot and leaf mold on the lower branches.

Squash bed and Strawberry bed.

Zucchini bed

One of my pepper beds

Asparagus bed.

 Onion barrels.

Grapes.  These grapes I planted last year on a fence.  They are Concords.  It is a toss up if they will do well in our area.  I have three rows of muscadines in the middle of the property.Those were established and here when we moved in 14 years ago.  They always produce well and do the best in our area and climate.  I thought I would just do an experiment with the Concords.

I pray you are enjoying your gardening and farming this year!  Blessings and happy farming.

susan










 

Tying Up Tomatoes PT2

Everything in the raised beds are growing nicely praise God.  I thought I would show everyone the progression of what it looks like when you tie up your Tomato plants as the growing season progresses.  How the wrapping around of the hemp twine looks as the plant grows.  I use hemp twine because it is study at the beginning of the growing season.  Is soft and gentle on the plants and very easy to wrap around the plants as they grow.  By the end of the growing season it has stared to biodegrade and you can literally pull it down with out cutting it when I am stripping out my garden beds.  I just toss it on the composting pile with the rest of the plant.  I don't have to work to separate it and throw it away. 

When I did my last post about this, here, I showed how we used T-post to hold up a pole and then plant the tomatoes directly under the pole.

Then how I tied the hemp twine over the pole and a little loose loop around the bottom of the plant.  I started wrapping the twine around the plants but in that post the plants were still so short I only got one or two good wrap arounds.

Well over the last few weeks every day or so I go out into my garden and as the plant grows tall enough to wrap the twine around again I do so.  I also pinch off any sucker in the branches at that time.  The plants have grown very tall now so I have wrapped the twine around many times now.  As you can see.

Doing this gives total support to the main "trunk" of the plant.  If I have a plant that has two main trunks I drop another line down from the pole above and start the wrapping process on that as well.  Or if any branches start to get to heavy.  Same thing.  I drop a line down from above to give support. 

The rest of the pictures I am posting today are just the progress of some of the rest of my raised beds and how they look now that we are a few weeks into the growing season.

Tomato plant on the left (had extra and had a space there.  Put it in a cage next to a little fence to tie it to for any extra support.  In the front of this bed is squash and training up the back trellising is cucumbers.

Pepper plants. I plant garlic or onion all over in all my beds where ever there is a space as we always use so much through out the year.  It is also said to keep away some pests.

Asparagus bed over looking squash.

The front small raised bed is an herb garden.  If you look all the way to the back raised beds you can see spinach and beets.  Usually spinach is done by now but it has been unusually cool for this time of year and it was still growing and had not bolted yet.  I took these pictures a week ago.  I actually finally pulled it all out now and we are working on eating it!  As I had planted pepper plants amongst it thinking I would have harvested it all before now and it was stunting the growth of my pepper plants.

My potting bench with some succulents on it.  Over grown mint to the left.

My little gardeners in training.  They are out there weeding.  I was walking up into the house after milking the goats and could not help myself from taking this picture.    I built Zeke and Carolyn each an 8x4 raised garden bed several years ago side by side.  They are allowed to grow anything they want in it.  They keep it all up themselves from weeding to watering.  Carolyn chose mostly flowers this year.  I was surprised.  Of course boys like to eat so his is all food.

I pray your growing season and life is going well.  Blessings and happy farming!
susan