With the start of our annual winter fear fest, we started pulling down the last of the hay from on top of the barn. It was there that we discovered what a fine and glossy-coated herd of mice we’ve raised. These were the fattest and healthiest mice you can imagine. In fact, they were living happily in our hay and eating our hormone-free, antibiotic-free feed. They opened several bags that we’d hoped would keep the cows over the winter, and a few bags of llama and general live stock feed. There was one bag that was eaten down to 1/2 of it’s original 50 pounds. Obviously we’d become lax since we’ve never had a mouse infestation of this size before. The answer is larger feed bins and barn cats, I’m afraid. The llama will stomp mice if he can see them, but he can’t reach the rafters.
Back in the kitchen we did a pre-winter cleaning and made gallons and gallons of no-fry re-fried beans. That’ll keep us from getting too lazy and eating in town. Also, there were 7 jars of dill pickles (we always give so many away) and some really great pure made.
Our second chicken.
Someone had asked me how to know what a llama or alpaca is thinking. Here’s a good example. This pictures is a llama, Lief, happily sharing his morning hay with Brody. They get along like that.
Here is a picture of what it looks like when the llama is done sharing. See his head? The neck is arched, ears back, lips in the air? The horse was soon covered with green, slimey spit. Of course Brody decided he didn’t need extra hay that much. It was a real surprise for the horse, since he’d very politely shared his own breakfast with Lief.
Ray came home early today to round up the Cornish Crosses and the Australorp rooster for slaughter. He drove them down to another farm that has a plucker. We’ve decided plucking feathers by hand is for the birds. Minus driving and catching the rooster, the entire process was done in the time it would have taken us to pluck the feathers of one bird. To the right is a picture of some of the birds in the refrigerator. They will age in the fridge for a couple of days before moving into the freezer for use in the next year. You can really tell the difference between the rooster (middle) and the Cornish Crosses.
We’ve been harvesting and hosting harvests for about a month now. The blackberries are spectacular this year. These are invasive Himalayan blackberries. The native species is a little sweeter, has a bit more seed in it and will be available all September. If we leave any for you!
Yesterday was spent canning. There was lots of help and fun in the kitchen.
Today we pulled in some of the harvest. The corn wasn’t as abundant as we’d have liked, but in reality, we don’t eat much corn. There are three tomato varieties, onions and a few cloves of garlic ready for storage. The potatoes did awesome.
Ray’s been working for the good of the house this winter. You can’t see because there is a human-height pile of wood in front, but the wood shed is full of split wood already.
Our friend Heather introduced us to the way that gardens are done these days. Even large scale farmers are doing this. It’s actually easier, so we’ll go with it for this year, anyway. So we won’t till next year, we’ll just put our compost on the rows we already established. We’ll put the shavings from the apple tree trimmings between our rows (either that or that’s where we’ll till to keep the weeds down). This way we’ll have walking paths and not be giving too many weeds our hard-earned manure.
It’s that time of year again. Now we have raspberries that need made to jam. Lots of stuff in the freezer that will be great later.
These little guys came back from the brink after being stepped on and having a small drought. Thank goodness for tastely little troopers.
The biggest challenge to living out here and keeping a real life with everything a real life has to offer is getting things done in a timely manner. Mother nature has her schedule, the boss at the paying job has a schedule, friends have schedules, and we all have a laundry list of items to get done each week, season, year. Some things start to slip. They might not be done right when they should. Like thinning the apple trees or putting down a new layer of gravel on the driveway. So we only weeded half the garden. *shrug* Things being the way they are, we chose the half that had veggies. It seemed a reasonable solution. We also haven’t been putting the big animals into stalls at night; this way we don’t have to clean any stalls but the chicken stalls. Besides, the big animals have a llama to protect them. Why won’t horses just run off coyotes already?
While Ray went to our favorite organic dairy/farm to help out with their chicken slaughter/dressing today Kari started the first cauldren of jam. With a little help from the littlest memeber of the family, we’re well stocked on plum jam for the year.
Ray has begun getting the weeds out of the garden. It’s had to wait a little bit, but just look at these results. We have more lettuce than we can reasonably eat. ( I will not be making cream of lettuce soup. I’d rather give away a couple dozen heads. Cream of Lettuce soup tastes like chlorophyll to me, anywya.) There are new broiler chicks in the barn. We’re not taking pictures since they won’t be with us long.
We awoke to an escaped cow. The horse is a little rough sometimes on these little guys when he plays, and they almost always find a way out of their pen when he pressures them. For a little while, the unnamed cow will hang out mowing the back yard.