My new niece, Little Miss Paige. 5 pounds and 13 ounces of perfection. She was ready to get on with it already and arrived a few weeks early.
Rafe playing guitar with Daddy.
Rafe playing Daddy’s guitar.
The cattle are definitely Matt’s enterprise. The meat chickens and laying hens are definitely my enterprise. But the pigs are more of a gray area.
When we’re talking about how much it’s going to cost to feed them as the price of corn goes up (and up), Matt refers to them as my pigs.
When someone’s talking about how extraordinary they taste, they’re our pigs.
Whitey Ford is looking mighty tasty, don’t you think?
We have 3 whole steers that have not been spoken for yet! They are due to be butchered the 27th of this month, but if we don’t find takers for them we will (very sadly) have to take them to the sale barn.
Just seems like such a waste of tasty, lovingly raised, antibiotic-free beef. And no added hormones, either. (Ahem. Not allowed to say hormone-free, because of course being mammals they have naturally occuring hormones, blah blah blah.)
So if you’re interested, please email
themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net
And I hate to say it, but Christmas is just around the corner. Last year we had a couple who purchased a quarter for each of their grown children as a Christmas gift. Which I thought was a really swell idea. Meat, the gift that keeps on giving!
Okay, end of sales pitch 🙂
Cleaning the chicken coop is about the last chore on my fall To Do List. Rafe came in to help when I was about done. I wore a handkerchief over my mouth to cut the dust, but I still ended up with a hacking cough the rest of the day.
This chore brings back memories of cleaning the old building on my parents’ farm where I kept my 4-H pigs.
(And yes, maybe my dad did send me out there in the dark one night when he found out I hadn’t checked on my pigs in a day or three and maybe I did go tearing back to the house screaming and making my parents think I’d been attached by a wild animal when my flashlight beamed across a nightcrawler, of which I was deathly afraid.)
Which always makes me think of Lisa, my best friend growing up. She was a “town kid”, but somehow I managed to rope her into helping me scoop poop and wash my pigs for the fair. (Hi, Lisa!) I know she reads this from Waverly, which is far enough away that I can’t rope her into much of anything anymore.
Anyhoo.
We scrape the chicken coop down to the floorboards, haul the old bedding off to compost, and start over with fresh wood shavings on the floor and clean straw in the nest boxes. Through the winter we’ll keep adding layers of wood shavings. Lather, rinse, repeat next year.
Don’t these nest boxes, with their fresh golden straw, just say, “Come, lay an egg in me.”?
Today’s grand egg total? Two. Last time I counted we had close to sixty hens.
Slackers.
There’s Miss Silkie in the picture. People always ask me if we still have her.
The next task will be to catch as many of the hens as we can that are roosting outside of the coop, and shut them up inside the coop for a few days to help them remember where they’re supposed to make their egg deposits.
This is the new area Matt put together for the gilts a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes the things we do around here in order to raise animals get to be very survivalist. This picture shows several strategies that I’ve dubbed “commando farming”:
1. (Very) used port-a-huts. I can’t believe we’re going to farrow in these things in March. It’s going to be interesting. The upside though, we didn’t take on debt to put up a farrowing barn or hoophouse instead.
2. Situate the port-a-huts on the south side of the corncrib for protection from the wicked winds of the north.
3. We had cornstalk bales made last week, and some of these have been stacked two high on the west side of the port-a-huts to block those cold westerly winds this winter.
4. Matt constructed these pens with old livestock panels found for us (free) by our junker friend. (Well, we repay him in hot meals and desserts 🙂
5. The tank off to the left was another freebie find. We don’t have automatic waters, or heated waters, so in the winter water has to be carried by hand twice a day. This tank has been a lifesaver, freeing Matt from hauling water in 5-gallon pails.
Way in the back is Madeline (in the pink coat). She’s been giving Matt a hand with pig chores every day, morning and evening, which has been a real help to him. She can take care of them by herself when necessary. She really doesn’t care for the cows, or the chickens, but pigs (and flowers) seem to be her niche on the farm.
The other cute thing in this picture is 2 of the 3 little black piglets hanging out beside their mother’s pen. They were weaned a couple of weeks ago, but up until this week we let them free range and they spent a lot of their time near Sarah. It seemed to help ease the separation process a bit.
Halloween brings treats not only for the kids but for the animals, too. Our pumpkin patch friends sent us home with a wagonful of leftover pumpkins to be enjoyed by the cows, calves and pigs. The girls have fun smashing them open for everybody.
They just get scarier every year.
A witch. A pirate. And Napolean Dynamite’s girlfriend.
Rafe decided toilet paper rolls make good round bales of hay for his farm animals.
Argh! What is it with Blogger? I’ve been trying to post this for 8 days now!
Sometimes digging potatoes, especially sweet potatoes, can become a bit of an archaeological exercise. They grow every which way but down. Or they grow intermingled with each other.
We had an okay sweet potato harvest this year. I think we ended up with a bushel basket full. A mole had pre-harvested a section of the planting. And where the sweet potatoes had been planted next to broccoli there was a noticeable drop in yield. Apparently there’s some sort of hostility between sweet potatoes and broccoli.
Matt’s prize this year was a 4 1/2 pound sweet potato. He literally carried it around with him for a week showing it to everybody he ran into. I told him to be careful who he waved that thing at. It’s a little obscene.
For some reason it seems to me that the best use for this particular tuber would be to make it into sweet potato pie.
