Sugar Creek Farm

Nine years.

The middle child.

Drew a picture of herself and Rafe in the “Things That Are Hard” column of her school worksheet.

Wrote Outside Chores under “Things That Are Easy”, and Inside Chores under “Things That Are Hard”.

Calls me out when I’m being neurotic…and is usually right

Mostly a Daddy’s girl.

Recently gave up dance after 5 years of lessons, to take horseback riding lessons instead. And is loving every minute of it.

Has been trying to figure out where we would fit a horse on this farm.

Has had the same best friend (Julia) since the first grade.

Wants to be an artist when she grows up. (Though Mom thinks she ought to be a lawyer, what with her amazing skills at making a case, i.e. arguing)

Smart. Sassy. Helps make our lives complete.

Love,
Mom

Edited to add: Please contact us for pricing info.

Just wanted to give an update on what we have available from the farm. If you’d like to place an order, or just ask a question, contact us at

themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net

Beef
We have a couple quarters still available for October 30th, a couple quarters for January, and all the beef you can eat still available for mid and late November. We can also take orders for smaller “beef bundles”.

Chicken
Chickens will be available at the end of next week. As the saying goes, don’t count your chickens before they hatch – or before they’re butchered. But at this point I expect to have 20 to 25 extra’s available for sale. We had lots of pre-orders for chicken this year, which was awesome! I ended up raising an extra 25 birds to be sure my death loss was covered.

Pork
This year’s pork was sold out quite a while ago, but I have started the list for next year. Unfortunately, with the losses we suffered out of this latest litter, we’ll have less than half the pork available in March that we usually do. So if you think you’re going to want March pork, it will be best to get your order in as soon as possible. We will sell out quickly!

This time next year, however, we should have plenty of pork available. That will be the first batch out of our new gilts and boar. Everyone that’s come out and looked at them seems to think we’ve got some high quality breeding stock, and that the Chester White/Berkshire cross is going to make for some mighty fine eating. I will also take pre-orders for this September ’07 pork.

Busy week here, as I prepare to travel to Chicago tomorrow for work. Since I work at home, I only get to see the people I work with about once a year so it’s something to look forward to.

Silage wagon

Silage bunk feeder

This year’s drought cut our hay yields drastically. So Matt’s going to purchase corn silage from my dad’s cousin to feed to the cows and bull. But we had to have something to haul, store, and feed it in. So a trip to the monthly Gilbert’s Sale Yard yielded these buys. Hopefully they will pay for themselves in short order with the savings in feed costs.

They certainly don’t look like the type of girls that would rip the head off a baby pig, do they?

(The gilts, I mean, not those innocent-looking chickens.)

Oh well, I still love them.

Today two of my favorite people share a birthday!

My dad…

Photobooth, 1974?

Me & my dad, I think 1972

…and Ann, my best friend from college

Me & Ann, spring 1990.

Happy Birthday, Dad and Ann! Love you guys!

This happy little tomato is now a happy quart jar of spaghetti sauce.

Frost possible for tomorrow night, going to have to dig out all the spare bedsheets and cover the tomatoes that remain in the garden. And bring in the eggplant. And peppers. And melons. Supposedly sweet potatoes should be harvested before frost kills the vines, but we didn’t do that last year and they were okay. Drying beans should be okay.

I foresee a lot of food preservation coming this week.

Matt played football. His brother Rick played football. Rick’s older boys Adam & Andrew played/play football. Both Matt & Rick were kickers, amongst a lot of other things. (The beauty of playing small town sports – you get to play both offense and defense!)

It seems like all of a sudden Rafe is extremely interested in sports. Basketball, soccer, football, baseball, wrestling. In the course of the day he plays a little bit of each of them. He’ll start actual team soccer this week, and this winter he’ll be able to do the wrestling club’s clinic. Right now he’s running around the living room in his underwear and a cape, playing some kind of ultimate fighting/football game he’s made up.

Matt bought him a football tee yesterday, so I had to post these pics for Uncle Rick. Rafe may end up following in his dad’s and uncle’s footsteps. Except that he seems to be a lefty.

Even though the sun has returned, it’s like some stubborn little black raincloud insists on hanging right over our farm.

We lost another piglet today.

Apparently he got out of his pen and into the JLo’s pen. They killed him and ate his head off.

And then there were four.

It’s downright depressing.

So let’s end on a happier note and show pictures of some things that haven’t died yet. Mrs. Duck’s 3 little ducklings! About a week after she hatched out a couple of Chuck’s, she hatched out 5 ducklings. Not sure what happend to the other 2.

It’s hard to get a good picture of them because they’re always trying to run away from me. One is mostly yellow, and the other two are brown and yellow. They make me smile every time I see them waddling around out there!

As I mentioned yesterday, Sara stepped on one of her piglets and left a gaping open wound on its shoulder. We’re so lucky to have my brother, who not only works for our vet but also has much more hog experience than we do and farrows many, many more litters than our 2 (soon to be 6!) per year.

This little girl took getting stitches much better than Rafe did.

She’s a cute little thing! We don’t normally name our butcher pigs, because they all look alike. But this one, if she has a recognizable scar after the stitches come out, will probably have to be “Lilo”.

Fatman didn’t think she was that cute.

Some years I’m so ready for the end of summer, ready for nothing to pull me outdoors anymore, no more lawn mowing or flower weeding or garden harvesting. Time to curl up under a warm blanket with a good book. Nest.

This year, however, isn’t one of those years. And the cold, rainy, gray weather of the past few days has just left me feeling blech.

Winston went off to the hog buyer today. The butcher hogs went off to the locker. The garden has that end-of-the-summer look about it.

Sara farrowed 7 piglets on Saturday. She layed on one, and stepped on another leaving a rather large gash on its shoulder. Thank goodness for my brother, who came and stitched it up and administered tetanus toxoid and antibiotics. Now, since we market our meat as “natural”, we’ll have to mark that piglet so we know its had antibiotics and don’t sell it. It’s doing fine but last night Sara layed on another one, so we’re down to 5 piglets. There goes our revenue stream for next March.

So we’ll be culling Sara after the piglets are weaned. Besides her apparent loss of mothering instincts, it would be difficult to integrate her with the 3 new gilts without a lot of fighting.

And of course today being the day it is.

I think maybe I’m just grieving.