Eh??!!
Our farm stand is run as an honor stand. And in five years of selling hundreds of dozens of eggs I haven’t been short changed once. Really! A true testimony to the goodness of people and our wonderful community.
I do occasionally get notes like this in the payment lunch box, ” I only had a $20 and bought 2 dozen eggs and took $5 change. Lunch box box owes me $5. I will just take 1 dozen extra eggs next time”.
I read these notes and smile!
This is Snowball. The ewe I obsess over. All you Mama’s out there can feel her pain! She has a month to go before she pops and she is literally twice the size of everyone else.
Very pregnant Snowball - Ouch!!
All the sheep have been switched over to alfalpha hay and a sheep grain ration. This type of feeding is for their last month of gestation and for their first month of lactation. The alfalpha is like sheep cocaine and they LOVE it! It seems to be giving them some extra energy because I keep on catching Caroline “pronking” after the cats like a little lamb.
One of my big chores this weekend were the weekly scraping out of the winter chicken run. It’s about 500 pounds a week of, ummmm, disgusting mess. Winter can be a drag in the manure management department. All three of our compost bins were full so Mark took the most ready to use and hauled it up the driveway a tractor load at a time to the garden to mellow out some more before we put it down.
I also hung up a bit more fencing for the last remaining pasture that is being “sheep proofed”. I have one 200′ foot fence line and one gate to go before it is done.
Mark is getting ready to make new farrowing pens for his Girls. Turns out the old spot is just too wet so he’ll use the part of the hay barn that is three sided. I helped hime move stuff and re-arrange so that he can start working on it.
Lastly, I started a big batch (212 ounces of lard worth) of soap. I’m really mad at myself because I don’t think it will turn out and if it doesn’t I’ve wasted a huge amount of effort and precious lard. I was super careful with my measurements and tempertature control so I have no idea why it doesn’t look right. I’ve poured it off to settle for the next 48 hours so hopefully I’ll be proven wrong and it will turn out great!
And, I bought a Lotto ticket since I think I have enough stuff to to around here. Someone else should do my office job!
A few notes from this week. What to do with about 2 pounds of apricots that never really got sweet enough to eat? Grab that packet of pectin from the pantry and make some freezer jam.
Which would have turned out perfectly, but I forgot that you have to follow the recipe EXACTLY. I’m never that exact when cooking so now I have some not quiet set apricot jelly/syrup. It is good on toast, waffles and as a sauce for fruit salad.
After Mark got all of the pork back from the butcher he cut up about 40 pounds of lard for me to render for my soap making. In two bouts of lard rendering in my gigantic pot outside I now have about 25 pounds of lard. Hand milled soap is on the horizon. In preparation for more soap I ordered more fragrances from my fav online source: Bramble Berry.
Lastly, you just have to love Google images and the stuff you can find. I wanted to see how big my ewe’s udder should be close to lambing. Yes, I admit to my continued obsessing over my ewe’s and our first lambing. So after looking at numerous images I can rest assured that even though Snowball is huge she is not truly bagged up.
OK – technically the girls are not sows (but gilts) since they haven’t had a litter of piglets yet. The whole family spent the morning at Farmer Joe’s and learned a whole LOT!
It was easy to get the pigs in the trailer since they were used to be fed in there so Mark just threw in some bread, they hopped in and he closed the door. We then all piled into the truck for the hour drive to Joe’s farm. We were going to Joe’s since he has about 6 boars and half of them are purebred Berkshires – our preference for a piggy boyfriend.
Before unloading our sows we had to help move the goat family who was hanging out in the enclosure.
Horns make for easy leading!
Then after we unloaded the girls we went up to choose the right date for our breeding. So, my question to you is, how do you move a 350 pound boar from one enclosure down the road to the next one? Why, this way of course!
The Ole Head-in-a-Bucket Trick
I couldn’t believe how well this worked. Joe put a bucket on the boar’s head which of course made him start to back up to get away from it. Then Mark grabbed his tail and used it to steer him and down the lane they all ran. I managed the gate and he was in there in about 2 minutes!
With the boar and the gilts together not much was really happening. Except this picture.
Not Quiet Right
Which at first glance one would deem as a success. Until you realize that it’s Black Betty on top of the boar! So we repeated our bucket and tail process to run another boar down in with the trio. We’ll leave them with Joe until he sees some successful breeding.
Then we got some real hands on lessons for how to handle basic hog farming medical procedures. You may remember a post from last year were Mark and I had tried unsuccessfully to fix a prolapsed rectum in one of our pigs. One of Joe’s pigs had the same problem and we got to assist him with the whole procedure and see the techniques and tools needed. I looked across at Mark and he had a huge grimace on his face the whole time. I’m sure I looked the same way.
Next we watched a piglet castration. This is something we’ll definitely have to learn to do on our 2-3 week old piglets. It’s going to take some real getting used to since it seems so invasive. It surely just must be me since after the fact the piglet wasn’t really even bleeding or seemed to bothered by it.
I’ve been doing a fair amount of obsessing over the girth sizes of my ewes… especially Snowball. She is just so big and has so far to go. Her nether regions are starting to look swollen like they are under a lot of pressure. Her teats are also getting very big and maybe she’s bagging up a bit. While I was in the pasture with them I went through my daily ritual with Zorro – llama kisses. The girls wanted him to kiss them as well, but he wouldn’t oblige them
Our Daily Ritual - with Cailinn looking on
This is our first winter in our new farmstead and also our first time over-wintering so much livestock. Oooooooh, a double learning “opportunity”. Here’s what I found out so far.
Chickens
My pet peeve in this situation! The set up is a very large shelter (12′ by 12′) and an even larger outside run. Only a small portion (about 13′ by 13′) of the outside portion is covered. Here’s my findings with this set up. The entire facility is on a downward slope so I’m constantly fighting off wetness. Wet + chicken poop = stinky muck which I despise! The shelter I’ve been able to keep manageable by banking straw around the backside of the coop which was leaking. I also turn the deep bedding more often than normal to keep it fluffy. The outside portion is a different matter all together. I’ve resorted to this final solution to give them an outdoor run that is not a stinky quagmire; portioned off a section that is covered and banked it with straw bales to keep water flow out and then scrape out wet poop twice a week. Much better!
Sheep
The little flock (and Zorro) are doing great. Their run in stalls are working well and they are content. I had thought that I would bed them down with straw, but I find they pull and waste so much hay that I just leave that down for bedding. Since the hay and straw prices are so similar I not allowing myself to fret about it too much. I had guesstimated that I would need 2 tons for the flock through March and I’m about right. Unfortunately, when the hay was delivered I couldn’t get it all stacked in the main hay storage for the sheep and put some in an empty stall. I knew this stall had a roof leak, but was hoping to avoid getting the stored hay wet. Well, we went to unstack that hay and 7 bales had got wet with some mold. DRAT! I can’t feed this to the sheep so Mark will use it as hog bedding instead of straw. A good repurpose – but I’ll likely have to buy a few bales of hay.
Pigs
This is Mark’s department. I think their run is, well, a pig pen! They are happy as clams. And they have a new addition. Mark decided that he will be taking them to a boar to be serviced and was fussing over how to get two large sows trained to hop into a trailer for hauling. So, he backed the trailer up to their gate, bedded it down with straw and started feeding them their bread in there. Now he has some nicely trained pigs!
Farmers can get a lot of complaints as developments and more people looking for a quiet, rural area start to settle around them. Many of these new comers don’t know what all is included in a rural, farming area and tempers flare. We, knock on wood, have been lucky so far. But this sign a friend sent me says it all!
