Time Gets Away from Me!

After the commercial potato harvest was finished, we swung full tilt into shipping season.  A lot of long days and 7 day weeks.  I did take a day off to go to the horse auction with an old friend and make some purchases.  I bought a saddle pad, a mini potbelly pig, and finally, near the end, I bought a horse!  She is far younger than I meant to buy, but she is a sweet girl.

Miss Pepper is a registered paint, but as you can see, she is kinda lacking in most of her spots!

She started off pretty mellow, but we have found over time that she has been getting increasingly nervous, and somewhat barn sour, as she gets pretty freaky if you take her outside her usual haunts.  She has a pasture mate who is a real bully, and she is low girl on the pole.

Just after New Years, we took her to my daughter's 4-H leader for a few hours, and worked with her in the arena, and hope to do it once a month for awhile to get her back to the calmer horse I bought.  Lynn, (4-H leader) and I agree that the best thing for her is to have her at a place of our own, with an enclosed ring or riding area, so we can work with her in a safe environment.  As soon as I brought her home,. our landlord changed his mind about letting us keep larger animals, so we have been boarding her down the road.

Having a horse is a huge investment.  Her purchase price of $425 is nothing compared to her hay bill.  She panicked in November when we had her out, and took a chunk out of her pastern with her hind hoof, and the vet bill set me back $293 when it got infected.

I do love going to muck her stall, feed and groom her.  I love how she has settled into a routine, and waits at the gate in the evening, and when the door opens, walks right in, and into her stall.

I am reading all I can, and I ask Lynn about 8000 questions about care and training every Thursday while Maddie is riding.  I hope that we can add a friend for her that is a older horse, and that we all become comfortable horse owners.

So, the search is on for a new home.... 

Catching Up

Looks like I have fallen a little behind!  With Garden harvest, Fall Fairs, 4-H, and 12 hour work days, I will update the blog tomorrow.  Today was my first free to do my own thing day off in a month!

Garden Overload

Meaty Birds!

We are starting a heritage breed meat flock!  I found a woman selling chicks just the next town over, and on Monday we are picking up 6 Black Jersey Giant hens and a cockerel from a separate bloodline, so we can breed them.

The new additions will go in with the laying hens for now, to be moved to there own henhouse, where they will eat grower ration instead of layer ration like our RIR hens do.  They will be able to range as well, but are also docile and able to take being largely confined during the winter.
Jersey Giants are a slow growing bird, the original slow food, taking about 10 months to hit their dressed weight of 8-10lbs!  Now that is a big bird!  We are now on the prowl for an incubator or simple plans to make one.

I am so excited to start on this venture!  Shawn just decided that he can't bring himself to raise Cornish-X, as every time we go to work with Madeline's Angus calf, we see them laying down eating and pooping, or lurching a few steps before giving up and laying down.  He said he just couldn't invite people out to the farm to see our birds growing, and be proud to be selling barely moving, crap covered birds, just because they finish quick.  With the Jersey Giants, we can breed them, where you can't with Cornish-X.  Ours will produce true to breed.

Now I think I can get the kids to willingly do a little more in the way of farm chores, if it means they are actually raising more than a veggie.

Harvest Begins

Wow!  I guess it has been longer than I thought since I updated.  The garden has been producing well, and I have begun to preserve some of the harvest for winter.  I have blanched and frozen 28, 2 serving bags of beans, made 6 quarts of pickled peppers, and 2 quarts of dill pickles.  Shawn also started selling some of our excess to a high end restaurant in town, and they have taken 70 pounds of baby carrots, 15 quarts of beans, 3 quarts of beets, 10 pounds of cucumbers, and 40 heads of butter crunch lettuce.  We haven't made a fortune selling, but the money has come in handy, and has only been produce that we have an over abundance of.

We also ended up with 4 new hens that we found free on Kijiji.  I believe they are a little older than our original ladies, but are still producing well, so all is good. The man we got them from said that they free ranged, but here, for the first few days, they barely ventured outside of the coop, hanging around the feed tray.  You could tell which eggs were theirs, the yolks were pale, like grocery store eggs.  They have begun to venture out in front and behind the barn, and when Parker discovered a horned tomato worm in the garden, we gave it to them, and they about lost their little chicken minds!

I have 2 dozen eggs in the fridge.  I ate 4 eggs yesterday!  Poached on toast for breakfast, an omelet for lunch, and a poached egg on brown rice served on a bed of sauteed kale.  Yesterday was our first time eating kale, and it was pretty good!  Kale is a super green, and we will be eating it as much as we can while it is still producing.

I found out you can steam and freeze chard, so now we don't have to worry about eating all that we have in the garden while it is still fresh....we are going to have a lot of veggies stored for the winter!  I think it is high time I went out and got some photos from around the farm.  So much has changed!

Veggies

The garden is coming along great.  The hardest part is the waiting.  The lettuce varieties are ready, and we have been eating salad every night.  I'm sure we'll be sick of it soon, but I am trying to no buy any veg from now til next spring.  I better cross my fingers that the stuff that stores or freezes produces well!
The tomato plants are like shrubs, covered with green globes.  There are tiny little cukes on the vines.  The carrots are almost big enough that we can thin them by eating baby carrots.  The cabbage has bounced back from rampaging chicken and a flea beetle attack.  The beets and turnip are well on their way. 
The spinach and arugula both succumbed to the flea beetles, so we have replanted, and the seedlings are doing better.  As soon as we notice that the beetles are back, I break out the organic bug spray, and it seems to knock them back.

There have been a few disappointments this year.  The peas are growing slow.  They should be about done by now, and awaiting a replant.  Instead they have been slow to grow, only about 8 inches tall.  The herbs in the other garden closer to the house have barely come up at all.  The cilantro was slow, and then only about 6 plants came up.  The rest never even germinated.  We tilled the soil, and reseeded.  So far, the basil has shown itself, but thats it!  I was dreaming of food seasoned with my own herbs all winter.  At this rate, I'm going to just buy some potted ones and put them on the window sill!

New Reading

"The practical advice in this exhaustive reference tool includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more."

How farm geek have I become??  I totally want this book as soon as it hits the shelves in November!