Single Digit Nights

The New Year came in accompanied by an arctic blast and temperatures well below the freezing mark.  Thankfully our calves have been gaining weight, and no longer look like bags of bones.  They have soft full winter coats, and despite hanging out in their enclosure for an extra hour on exceptionally chilly mornings, they are the first to venture out to graze.  Not surprisingly, the goats would stay in their barn all day, and often do, grazing on hay to their heart's content.  But the pigs...  The pigs are a new addition, and while they have a healthy layer of fat for insulation, they are so sparsely hairy, we worried a bit about their comfort.  Of course, the population of wild pigs never seems to suffer for cold winters, but still - we want to be good pig guardians.  They stay huddled in their very well insulated enclosure until the sun is out, only braving the wind at the sound of Johnny's voice announcing breakfast.  And who wouldn't come running for stale cornbread, cabbage leaves, and warm milk - oh boy!

2015 New Years Resolution

It's not uncommon for one of us to be overheard remarking, "this would be good for the blog".  However, it seems I posted only once in 2014, and not much more in 2013.  This makes for perhaps the world's worst blog.  In fact, just because I have a blog account doesn't make this a blog without regular postings.  And so, in 2015 I resolve (again) to post regularly.  Weekly, to be precise. 
Part of my hesitation has been time, but the other half of my hesitation has been feeling egocentric.  I fear appearing like a know-it-all or show off.  But one reason we got into farming was to preserve the quickly dying knowledge and skills of farming and to pass this on.  Our blog is one way to pass on our successes and failures to those with a range of knowledge and interest in increasing self-sufficiency.  It is in this vein of passing on our farming trials that I resume the blog.
I'll start with a year in review (or the past 6 months) in pictures:

Calvin grinding our field corn to make cornmeal

Cheese waxed before aging in our cheese cave (aka storm cellar)

A win-win: we got a breeding pair of pigs, a heritage breed known as American Guinea Hogs.  This small breed of pigs eats grass, including Bermuda grass and its roots, allowing us to clear a patch of ground for our garden expansion.   And soon they will be breeding age, giving us pork in the future!  Mmmm BACON!

Johnny & Stan build a water tower for the tank that holds water from our solar well.  This gravity-fed operation now has more water pressure. 

Johnny and friends Dave, Mike, and Russell make fire with the world's largest bow-drill!

We made FIRE!!!

We hired our neighbor to hay our pasture to feed our animals for winter.  They payment is he takes majority of the hay, but leaving us plenty for our goats and the pigs too.  Yes, these pigs eat hay. 

The orchard

Thanks to our friends Emily & Michael at Three Springs Farm, we added some blueberry bushes this year.

Strawberries and asparagus were also new in 2014.

We added a new goat paddock in the pasture with excellent grazing, but the goats feel a bit anxious without their shepherd, and look for her at the gate. 

To our farrier's delight, we traded Atticus to a neighbor for some round bales of hay.  Karen misses him, but he kept trying to kill her goats. 

 

Half bushel baskets of potatoes

Unlikely friends. 

Goat trauma and drama

I've always heard folks complain that their animals wait until the worst possible conditions to bring new life into the world, but I hadn't experienced this first-hand.  At the start of over two weeks with high temperatures below freezing, our first goat of the season kidded just one doeling (girl baby).  We isolated the momma and baby goat in an area where we hung a heat lamp to keep the baby warm.

As an aside, I didn't plan on having baby goats yet.  Our buck didn't have access to our does 5 months ago.  So how did this happen?!  Ah, in my wisdom of keeping the babies nursing so I only had to milk once daily, the bucklings (baby boys) impregnated my does.  Oops!  This year, we will have to castrate our bucklings.  Sorry boys!

One week later, we came home at 8pm to find that June, our white Saanan, had also kidded.  She was hugely pregnant, so I knew there should be another baby coming any minute.  I kept checking on her every 20 minutes.  After several visits, I called our vet, who instructed me to get out there and pull her baby out ASAP.  "I've never done this before", I explained.  He walked me through the process, and Johnny provided a strong, much-needed pep-talk.  With arms washed and lubricated, I reached in, found the two (back!) legs, and pulled her breech baby out.  June started licking it clean, but it never took it's first breath.  I felt June's belly, and realized a third baby was still inside her.  Johnny held her again while I reached way in this time, and helped her deliver a second still-born.
This was, of course, challenging and sad, but over a week later, I'm happy to report that momma and baby Annie are doing great.  There are now a total of 4 babies, all staying together with their mommas and our billie goat.  If you think you've got cabin-fever in this cold snap, think of 8 goats in 12x14 room all snuggling together! 

Makin' Granola while the Sun Shines

The weather this spring has been so erratic, one never knows if it's safe to plant those summer plants that are susceptible to frost.  We finally set out our vulnerable peppers and tomatoes, only to learn it's supposed to hit the 30s Thursday night.  On the bright side, it's always a good time to take advantage of a sunny day to make granola.
While this can be done in the oven, using the sun's heat is more environmentally friendly.  We build a solar dehydrator, which works great as a low-temp oven for baking granola and granola bars.  You could easily stick a cookie sheet in your car as well, which is not only "green", but also clearly the most inexpensive option; and some folks find that ingenuity irresistable. 

I mixed oats, local honey, a little oil, local pecans, and local peaches that I dried last year together with some spices and other goodies to yield a gallon of goodness for only a full day in the sun and pennies per serving compared to store-bought granola.  Let your imagination and taste buds lead a solar cooking adventure in your backyard, or sedan...

Meet and Meat Block Party

Warning: graphic pictures to follow!

A few years ago we bought a couple of bottle calves: one for us, and one for Stan, who lives on adjoining land.  Stan was hoping his two brothers would follow him to Oklahoma for a stint.  Much to his dismay, one got married and moved with his wife to Romania to live in one of the few places in the world where traditional subsistence farming village life is still the mainstay (check them out at http://www.provisiontransylvania.com/.  His other brother decided to study in Norway rather that at NSU at the last minute, thus leaving Stan, one man, with an entire steer to himself.  Hmmm. 

We butchered our 18 month old steer in December of 2011.  Stan's steer stayed with us and kept on getting bigger, and bigger, until...

Stan doesn't live here full-time, but rather comes in bursts.  During his current visit, he decided to finally take care of his giant steer.  As much as I appreciate learning and doing all the hands-on work of feeding myself that I practically can, I have already had the pleasure of taking part in butching cattle for meat at the home - twice!  I figured this was plenty.  And, we still have plenty of beef in the freezer from our own butchering 16 months ago.  But, I was alone in urging Stan to take his animal to the slaughterhouse.  And in true Stan fashion, he invited all the neighbors who have not gotten together for a gathering of this magnitude or duration - well, not since we moved here in 2009, at least. 

Johnny tied up the steer.  Mike Brown showed up with the firearms, a 9mm, and shot the steer.  Curly lifted the animal with his tractor, where we proceeded to dump all his internal organs in to the back of Stan's pickup truck.  And believe me, we needed the pickup bed to contain them all.  I started to worry there wouldn't be much meat after all upon seeing the gigantic pile of guts.  HA!

 Next, Curly carried the carcass over to Stan's place where the rest of the butchering took place.  All hands were on deck to skin the animal.  And all were full of valuable advice on the best way to tie off the bung, amongst other tricky tasks. 
 The animal hung outside overnight in the gloriously low-30's temperature to cure until the next day. 

The group worked steady cutting the meat off the carcass into managable sized chunks - following the natural muscle groups.  The meat was freed from it's tough outer silver skin, tendons were removed, and the meat was cut into steaks, stew beef, roasts, or ground using Curly's electric grinder.  Genevieve and Calvin put the meat into packages using Curly's vacuum sealer. Johnny kept busy sharpening knives in between cutting meat.  Mike Thelander showed up on the third day with a delicious stew he made from the meat to nourish us through the final day of butchering and processing.  Jack Gandy, a cattle rancher, even showed up to share stories and photos about hog hunting and bachelor buck groups grazing on his rye field.  It was a big time had by all, and I learned a valuable lesson:  many hands really does make short work.  Not only that, but it isn't work when everyone is hanging out and visiting; sharing stories and getting reaquainted.  And much good eating will follow for everyone who helped, thanks to Stan, for nourishing our bellies and our souls. 

No whining about winnowing

As our last post of long ago mentioned, we harvested all our winter wheat last summer.  Here it is April, and we're still processing wheat, an activity we do in bursts as needed.  And since we do still shop at the grocery store, I don't NEED to thresh and winnow wheat every week, as I planned to do. 

Despite the day-long chore of many hands that is harvesting wheat, threshing and winnowing is an even more labor-intensive chore.  I used to think the word combine (pronounced COM-bine when, in this case, referring to that huge piece of agricultural equipment) was synonymous with all the evils of conventional, large-scale industrial monocropping agribusiness.  That is, until I learned that what a COMbine is: a machine that combines the tasks of harvesting and threshing and winnowing grain.  Hey, what a novel idea!  HA!  But for the home gardener, this is not only prohibitively expensive, but also all-around unnecessary.  Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of options for the modern back-to-the-lander.  But, by some lucky happenstance, I married an incredibly inventive man.  Check out this apparatus: 

So, we still thresh the wheat.  This means getting the wheat berries loose from the hulls.  First, we take a shock of wheat (see next to the barn), put it in a pillow case, and beat it repeatedly for a few minutes.  This breaks off the seed heads, and ideally you're left with just wheat straw.  Next, you twist the pillowcase closed, and rub your hands together vigorously with the wheat seeds between your hands.  This loosens many berries from the hulls.  Then you pour these into the contraption you see at your right (or a modified 55-gallon drum), insert your leaf blower, and simply sit back and wait.  The chaff blows out while the wheat berries are simply tossed around in circles inside. 

After it's all said and done, we really don't need to even use the bucket method to let the wind blow away the last little bits of chaff.  We do two bundles of wheat at a time, which will yield about a quart of wheat berries; more than a quart of flour. 

Wheat Harvest

Thanks to a former nutrition student of mine, Johnny and I decided to try growing wheat three years ago.  This summer's harvest came in early - in late May, ripening surprisingly quickly. 
We put wheat and/or field peas in as a cover crop on our acre crop field each fall.  We till this in early in the spring, leaving a small plot of wheat to ripen.  This plot is only about 18' x 180', so just over 3000 square feet.  The past two years this plot was about half wheat and half weeds, yielding a pickup truck load of wheat.  This year our plot was weed free, and we got 3 pickup truck loads!   We hoped to invite some folks out to help, but our hand sickles didn't arrive in time.  Luckily, we had some die-hard friends who had their own hand tools and showed up at our place at 7am to cut and bundle the wheat - many thanks to Russel, Terri, Dave, Stan and Amy!

We let Dave drive home with his truck full, and kept two pickup loads for ourselves.  This should provide enough wheat berries and thus flour to bake a loaf of bread twice per week. 
We thresh on a weekly, as-need basis.  This is the most time consuming part.  This year, with everyone's help, the harvest only took about 3 hours, but threshing and winnowing (to separate the wheat berries from the hull) takes a while.  We store the wheat on our screen porch, and grind it in small batches in a coffee grinder.  Dave has already made whole wheat biscuits for his family, and his daughters enjoyed them.  We were lucky to find this year's wheat resulted in a finer, lighter flour and is easier to thresh than other years.  Thanks farmers' coop!  We gain greater food sovereignty each year as we expand our farming operation, but I still find that wheat products are what I purchase at the grocery most often.  The favorite dish of the elders where I work of cornbread, beans, and greens with a side of buttermilk is starting to make a whole lot of sense to me.  This meal is nutritionally complete, consists of crops that are either easy to grow in drought and cold, or easy to preserve without refrigeration, and inexpensive if you did have to purchase these foods.  Fortunately, they are delicious too!