Wednesday, June 15th 2011

Finally feeling better after almost two weeks of being sick.  What is it with the sickness this winter?  Everyone has been sick several times, so I was a bit broadsided with yet another illness in June!  the house has now been aired out and we are all spending at least an hour in the sun a day, so hopefully that will keep everyone well.

I finished processing the first 30 pounds of strawberries we picked.  It translated into 17 pints for the freezer and 2 quarts dehydrated.  Of course, we ate a bunch as well.  Fresh Oregon strawberries are the BEST!

Julie came over and we weeded the corn and replanted any that had died or been eaten.  The birds are eating some of the small plants in the garden, so I encourage the sun to come out and make them grow!

I realized that my sprinkler is a piece of garbage, so I am now in search of something that will actually suitably water the garden.  Yet another expense.  The sprinkler search is tricky because out water pressure varies so much from one place to the next that not all sprinklers work out in the big field.  I’ve got to get this remedied because the plants are getting thirsty.

The kids and I worked on cleaning out the loose hay on the ground in the barn.  This worked very well to use to hill up the potatoes that are now growing very nicely.  The potatoes are about 75% hilled and the barn is getting cleaned, I like how these projects supplement each other.

The cows finally made it out into the grass field, which I like.  I went out and drove some stakes out for them and they were out from 6am to 9pm.  They really liked being out in the tall grass with plenty to eat, hopefully it increases my milk production.

The fridge came back from the painter, and it is beautiful, a nice shade of yellow, and it’s got the Cast Iron Farm logo on the front.  It’s now sitting on the front porch, and people can come get milk and eggs from it without having to come into my house.  Yes, I like this arrangement very much.

I’ve been giving the goat pasture a rest for a while and the goats have been in, but I finally felt bad for them being in while it was so nice out and I let them back out.  There is plenty to eat again for them, and I think they will be happy.  Of course, it started to rain the second I let them out, but that’s life, right, oh no, it’s just farming.

The dairy goats were reassigned the task of eating down the blackberries in the chicken coop.  I suppose another day or two in there and they will get to go back out with the cows to work on the blackberries and the thistles there.

On my way into town to celebrate my birthday dinner (it was postponed because of illness), I noticed that a farmer had cut some lovely clover hay I’ve been watching (and admiring).  I stopped by on the way back and left a note asking if he’d have the hay for sale and also asking if he might consider coming on down to cut some hay in our field.  It was a bold move for sure, but I wasn’t getting anywhere by sitting and watching the grass go to waste.  Next year, it will be fenced some more, so it wont need to be hayed, but until then, it would be nice to have a barn full of hay for the winter.  Now if only we had a hay elevator to get the hay up off the constantly flooding barn floor.

We are approaching the solstice, and it’s lovely.  I love those cloudy 70 degree days.  Jared and I just went outside at 9  to sit and enjoy and admire our beautiful farm!

Cheese Curds

With all the milk we have around here, making cheese is almost a daily activity.  Way back when, I decided to perfect making cheddar.  I kind of get on cheese “hobby horses” meaning that I make one kind of cheese intensively and then get bored and move on to another type of cheese.  Cheddar was my hobby cheese for a number of months last year.  I instantly learned that making cheddar has one amazing side benefit–the cheese curds!  Just before you put the cheddar cheese into the press, the curds are sweet, salty, squeaky and savory all at the same time.  Coming out of the 100 degree whey bath, they taste AMAZING.  They quickly became a favorite snack around here, and every time I made cheddar, I purposely made more than would fit in the press so we would have leftovers to eat.  Eventually, I decided I didn’t like making cheddar as much as some other cheeses, and I moved on to gouda, Parmesan, montasio, manchego, etc.  You see, cheddar takes the longest to make, it has to age the longest, and I was having issues with the curds not knitting every time.  I was also having issues with mold ONLY on the cheddars during aging, so I gave up and decided to come back to it another time.

That decision would have been fine except for the LOUD clamoring from my family that they need cheese curds!  I started making batches of cheddar just for the curds.  It is an easier undertaking because I know it doesn’t have to be perfect.  It doesn’t matter that the curds get mixed exactly every 15 minutes, because we are going to eat them fresh, and if they are warm and squeaky in the end, we’ve achieved our aims.  Well, last week, I made a five gallon batch of cheddar only for the curds.  This overwhelmed everyone and of course we had tons of left overs after the initial squeak wore off at around the 36 hour mark.  I thought I was doomed to feed all that hard work to the chickens.  Then, a light turned on, and I started adding cheese curds to the things I was cooking.  It started first with some scrambled eggs as I was desperate to not throw out the cheese.  The curds got soft and melty and even took on some squeak again. After a full week of cooking with them (fried cheese, YUM), I dumped the remaining curds into a pot of risotto to get that final creaminess at the end.  Low and behold, this completed my revelation.  The cheese melted and was amazingly creamy and delicious.  I know aged cheddar gets sharp and delicious, but fresh curds have a sweet, innocent savory wonderfulness that I am now in LOVE with.

I must admit that I was loathe to give up on making cheddar because I like it’s unique flavor in cooking, but I’ve now figured it all out.  If I make cheddar and stop at the curd stage, we have an ideal situation.  Most importantly, we can eat curds to our hearts content.  I don’t have to worry about a failed knit or mold, which relieves the stress of making such a long, involved cheese.  After the curds have lost their squeak, a few more days aging in the fridge and I have a delicious cheese that works well in any oven/casserole/melted cheese dish.

This works well for us.  I’m excited to get a bit more cheddar flavor in my life without having to worry about failure and oh… the deliciousness.

Planting Time!

During the dry spells between all this wet that we have been deluged with lately, I’ve been working on some tilling for the garden. Earlier in the year, we raised a batch of pigs on some pasture. We didn’t ring them, and we let them dig at and eat the grass down. After the pigs were butchered, we put chickens out to finish up the job. What we got in the end was a nicely fertilized patch of ground that only needed some tilling (and some holes filled in from the pigs).

I made it out to get some tilling down and managed even to get some of it done this week while the ground was dry enough (we even tilled some in the rain).

Yesterday, I managed to get the first parcel completed so that we could get some things in the ground for the garden. As soon as the tilling was done, we planted some zucchini, spaghetti squash, onions, carrots, beans, etc. I’ve got over half of the space planted out already! Looks like I’ve got the tomatoes hardened off even, so they are going into the ground in the next couple of days as well.

Of course, we are expecting MORE rain through the weekend, so my planting will be halted again, but that means that the things I got in the ground will be getting the water they need to sprout!

Additionally, I finished up some raised perennial herb garden beds. Before we moved to the farm, I had a garden for 4 years that was mainly culinary herbs and things. I pulled all the plants out of the ground at the old house and was trying to decide where to plant them. I FINALLY decided to build some raised beds similar to the ones that I had so that I could put the plants in their final places. Needless to say, they are all very happy with their new home (I filled the raised bed with the muck I took out of the cow barn during the spring cleaning).

I see lots of tasty things to eat in my future. Spring is such an exciting time, and I am so happy that I got to move my old garden into it’s new location that highlights just how much I like it.

Spring Surprise

We’ve had the wettest March on record followed by the coldest and the wettest April on record.  Now, May is acting like March roaring in like a lion, boy do we have wind today.

Even though we have lambs and baby bunnies and baby goats, it still doesn’t feel like spring around here.  Today, between the wind and the rain, the kids and I were still trying to get out and get some things done in the garden.  As we were working away, the sun came out and a chicken came out of nowhere with 7 chicks behind her.  This chicken has been trying to go broody for a LONG time, and I kept finding her nests and stealing her eggs.  I guess I missed out on the nest this time!  The chicks are a mix of Astralorps and Easter Eggers!

It was so lovely to see the mama out with her chickens, but I was scared to death all day that something was going to find them and kill them.  With three dogs and two cats running around, it was a distinct possibility.  I was planning to get some chicks next month to replace the flock I currently have, so we just headed out and picked up some additional chicks to add to the flock.  We’ve now got 19 little birdies under the heat lamp in the barn, much to the kids and my delight!

Chicken Butcher

We started a batch of meat chickens back in January.  Every other year, we have raised the same old cornish cross drones that are so popular in the meat world.  They grow sickeningly fast and are not hardy at all.  This year, I decided we were going to grow a heritage breed called Le Poulet.  They are a breed developed in France.  They grow more quickly than the 16 week dual purpose birds, but they finish out beautifully.

We started with 100 chicks.  However, due to mishap at the feed store where the feed was switched out on accident, I lost 60 or so in a period of a few days.  We came down to the wire with 42 birds.  Of course, I decided to do right by them and feed organic and or locally grown food because I wanted to produce the best chickens I could produce.  Of course, in the middle of the grow period the feed store increased the price of the feed by $10 per 50 pounds!!!  In the end, I certainly learned a lot, but the chickens that came out were fantastic.

Of course, in the spirit of do-it-yourself, I decided that I was going to butcher all of the chickens myself, rather than take them to the processor.  The processor is not inexpensive (and very fast), but I was already very upside-down on the chickens because of the feed increase that I opted to try to reclaim some expenses.

So, I invited a friend over to butcher the chickens she was getting and we got to work, each with a baby on our backs.  Let me tell you, butchering chickens is emotionally and physically demanding work and at the end of the day, we had 16 done!  Add this to the 5 that I did last weekend and it seems that we are making progress here on finishing up the chicken project.

In the future, we will be doing chickens, perhaps in smaller batches.  Until then, I’ll be enjoying some good eats!

One of Those Days

It’s been one of those days.  You know, one of the, fire won’t start, rabbit scratches, flooded barn, raining like mad, slip in the chicken manure, wet pants, screaming children kind of days.  And, somehow, yet I have managed to make it through.  The chores got done, the house is slowly limping along getting warmer and there is a nice big pot of soup I like to call “Leftovers from the Fridge Soup.”  We are all alive, and though we are slightly grumpy and a little wet, we’ve managed to make it through.  I like to think that I’ve taken this slump a little more graciously than at other times.

The water level in the barn creeped up another inch while I was out doing chores, but at least this time the hay is sitting on a pallet, so though it is annoying, it’s not the end of everything.

I’m told this endless winter will morph into Spring this next week with sun and temperatures in the mid 60s  oh… and no rain predicted!

Until then, I’m going to sit by the fire, do puzzles and enjoy the wonderfulness that is my offspring.

Sometimes it Takes Cookies

Sometimes, I am in the place to blog and write a lot and other times I am not.  I must admit that it has been a big struggle for me over this past winter to share my projects and my reflections here or anywhere.  So much has happened and so much has changed that in many cases, I don’t even know where I stand on certain topics.

When we moved, we left a house vacant behind us.  Despite the fact that we didn’t live there, we still had to pay the mortgage on the place, and as of this month, it is has been on the market for 10 months.  It has been a long journey, but it’s been VERY stressful.  Jared and I have had many conversations about our position on the house and what to do.  Luckily, we’ve had an offer on the house, and it looks like it will close this week!

Additionally, though we have a pretty clear understanding where our projects are headed, things don’t always go as desired, ESPECIALLY during an unexpectedly long winter.  The winter has dragged on and on and with it the problems have perpetuated.  It has been hard for me at times to accept and assimilate where things went wrong, and it’s not always to share because it often shows my own beginner oversights, not something I’m proud of.  Though I have been around farming and livestock my entire life, that doesn’t mean that I know everything or even anything, nope, not by a long shot.  Ask my sister, she gets several phone calls a day with requests for advice.

And so, today, in the height of frustration about our vacant house, a pile of laundry, dishes approaching sky high, a rabbit that abandoned her kits, a goat that got loose and screaming kids, I gave in and decided to make cookies.  The kids and I got out the ingredients, and let me tell you, it worked like magic.  Everyone seemed to get happy again, and right as I was devouring a nice warm plate with my fresh, raw milk, I got a phone call that the house was in fact going to close this week.  Perhaps the happiness that comes with just giving in and baking cookies with the kids can counteract anything bad.  Somehow, I didn’t even mind the typical blustery spring weather.  We combated the wind and rain by building a nice warm fire in the wood stove and devouring cookies.

Of course, I’m hoping that things get easier and my desire to communicate to the world at large increases.  Maybe I won’t have to carry so much on my mind.  Until then, I’ll be eating cookies and trying to enjoy the company of my two little people and my farm.

The Long Winter

We’ve started on a lot of new projects since we moved in October.  October is the time of year when the last vestiges of the warmth from the summer fades into fall.  The breezes are cool, the nights are cold, the rain starts to fall and winter is near.

I usually don’t mind the winter so much.  Snow is fun, rain is tolerable, and the grey skies usually entertain me.  I tend not to do too much complaining about what winter has to bring.  Try as I might, I have not been able to refrain this year from wondering why the bloody hell is winter dragging on so long?!?

In the past, I have been really good about posting on my blogs.  In fact, I have been continually blogging since 2004.  This winter has driven me to thought and contemplation and little about sharing.  We have been through SO much this winter.  First of all, we moved, which is a crazy thing in and of itself.  Immediately after moving, we had work to do on the house.  For the first two weeks we lived in our new house, we had contractors coming and going non stop.  The doors were left open and the dirt on the floor was plentiful.  We even made a giant mess outside because we had to dig a new well.  With all of that over, we started to realize that to keep the livestock in, we were going to need to do some work outside.  I went to work repairing the barn and we had to get some fencing put up.  It all started to come together, certainly, but it was exhausting work.

Jared and I recently watched an old Kary Grant movie called “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.”  It was a great movie about this couple that moves to an old farmhouse but there are SO many problems with the house.  Living in an older house definitely has it’s quirks for sure.  Jared and I have taken them all in stride, often with a laugh.  Our hot water heater doesn’t have enough water for two showers in a 3 hour period or one of them will be cold.  Many of our outlets are not grounded and are only two prong plugs.  The water pressure in the shower is somewhat like trying to take a shower in a light drizzle.  We even have a very mysterious problem where the light bulbs blow out within a months time.  We have been through about 8 boxes of bulbs since moving!  Many little things like that and learning how to heat a house with a wood stove have definitely kept us on our toes all winter.

Then, there are the problems with the livestock.  When it rains, it POURS!  No need to get into gory or sad details here, but suffice it to say, I’ve had my FAIR share of bad luck.  I could go for another 5 years with no bad luck and still have gotten more than my fair share.  Unfortunately, I think that bad luck is really just my own stupidity.  Call it learning or bad luck or what have you but it’s been downright sad around here.  We’ve lost lambs, goat kids, kits, etc.  Each time I tell myself that it is going to get better, but the problems keep persisting.  It all came to a head when I headed outside to discover one of my adult goats had dropped dead with no explanation.  She was not ill the day before, in fact, she was my fattest, happiest, healthiest goat.  I was shocked and devastated.  But, the truth is that these things happen and what is done is done and the only thing I can do is work to improve everything that I can right now to reduce any more bad luck.

Then, suddenly on Thursday, the sun was shining and it was like a MIRACLE had happened.  The farm was a completely different place.  That one sixty degree day did a lot to restore my spirit.  I got out and groomed my Angora goats and trimmed their feet.  I even got them washed down.  They had recently been shorn and they had come with a bad case of lice.  I was actually able to wash the lice away and treat them to prevent any more.  They went from looking like sorry overwintered goats covered in mud to gracious, beautiful animals that are going to give me a beautiful fleece come September!

I got to do a whole bunch of other work as well.  I cleaned all the muck out of the barn and put it in the garden that I am about to plant.  I even picked up all the loose straw and hay all over the barn floor and took it out with some rock and some scrap fleece to reduce the mud in the goat pen.  And what do you know.  Not only is the goat pen free of mud now but the green grass is actually starting to grow and they look like happy goats.  I even put another nice layer of straw down in the shed for them so they are living in luxury!

I even got to head on over to the bee hive to check out what was going on.  The bees were very busy.  We’ve got two flowering plum trees in full bloom right now and they are working away collecting nectar.  I can only imagine what the apple trees are going to give to us this year with the bees buzzing around the orchard helping them out.

Things are definitely starting to look up around here.  I was convinced that if I wanted to be a farmer that I would be slogging around in the mud and the cold and the lice.  It turns out that that is the case only half the time.  The other half of the time it’s sunny and warm and the kids run around naked blowing bubbles followed around by jumping and leaping goat kids.  Dare I say that spring as sprung?

Pig Butcher

It’s been six long months and the passing of time was made known by our pig butcher this week!

We got three weaner pigs the week that we moved to our farm.  They were cute, almost cuddly and sweet.  I’ve been reading a LOT about farming, especially farming in the Provincial region from the turn of the century.  Back in those days, no matter what else a farmer was doing, he kept a pig.  The pig ate all of the scrap from the house and dug up the garden space.  These pigs were revered because they are delicious, and some part of the animal found its way into virtually every meal for many months.

I’d like to think that our farming method mirrors that.  We believe in the co-dependence of many small projects on a farm.  The pigs fit so well into that vision.  Firstly, they were put in a future garden spot.  Not only did they till up the land for me, but they ate all the roots from the grasses growing in that spot.  It can now be a garden and then be planted back to a cover crop in following years.  They also provided fertilizer for the space in the ultimate in recycling.  The pigs partook of what we deemed the “pig bucket.”  We collected every scrap of liquid every kitchen scrap, every bit of left over food and fed it out.  They got at least a bucket every day from the kitchen, sometimes more.  These lucky little porkers ate all the windfall apples, pears and figs.  We moved right as the fruit began to fall and what we couldn’t make use of, the pigs consumed voraciously.  Most luckily, the pigs got raw milk, clabber and whey.  These are all benefits of milking two lovely cows and making cheese.  Since I make lots and lots of cheese, the pigs got gallons upon gallons of whey goodness.  In fact, they’ve only been gone for 48 hours and already I have 5 gallons of whey sitting around while I figure out who to feed it to.

In the end, they were big and they were eating a lot.  Their carcasses finished very well, and it was a pleasure to see the fruit of all my labor.

I strongly believe in the sanctity of life.  Some might not think that that statement goes hand in hand with someone who eats meat, but that is not so.  We grew the pigs and respected them.  They had a good life and now they are sacrificing for us.  The way for me to honor that sacrifice is to not make waste.  As the mobile butcher was working away getting down to the carcass of the animal, I was busy rounding up five gallon buckets.  Every time they cut a piece of the animal off and walked to throw it in the rubbish heap, I got their attention and pointed to a bucket.  And so it went on until they had seen that every bit of the animal was staying on the farm to be used.

This goes right along with the French tradition which is in fact my inspiration.  The tradition of keeping every bit of the pig and making use of it is the basis of respect for that animal, it’s also thrifty and not to mention delicious.  I’ve spent the last two days cleaning guts, cutting apart organs, dehairing, rendering lard, etc.  The recipes I’ve read that include these lesser used body parts all drool over the fact that these are in fact some of the most delicious parts of the animal.  I don’t doubt it considering that in many cases it takes DAYS to create them.  The melding of the fat and collagen into a beautiful sauce has me drooling now.  I think that with all the love and work that I have put into saving and using all of the animal means that I’m going to have some pleasurable meals in my future.

It was a pleasure to raise these pigs.  There will be more of them here at Cast Iron Farm, that’s for sure.

And That’s Life

If nothing else, farming has taught me better how to accept the ups and downs of life.  Farming, especially with livestock has so many surprises, good and bad.  It is so nice to ride a high and enjoy all the wonderful things that can come from this life, but there are also some hard times.

I’d love to stamp my feet and scream and roll around on the ground and make a general big fuss of things when something doesn’t go my way.  That would be so mature, wouldn’t it?  It seems to work for my kids, but since I tell them all the time that they need to grow up and learn to deal with the blows in life, I too have to grow up, toughen up, learn from my mistakes and march forward.

But that can be SO hard sometimes.  Here’s today’s example.

I noticed a few weeks ago, that my calendar was saying that the lambing window was starting soon.  This went right along with me noticing that two of the ewes in particular were starting to really bag up.  Looks like we could have another round of babies here on the farm.

For the past week, I have expected to walk out every morning to some lambs from my moorit ewe, but alas, nothing was happening.  This morning after doing chores and finding no babies, I sat down and looked at the dates again and found that she wasn’t supposed to lamb until Thursday, so I decided to leave her be and stop worrying.

Of course, that meant that she was going to lamb immediately.  I walked out this afternoon to do chores and she had just dropped the second lamb.  The first was laying in the straw not cleaned off at all, and I was suspicious.  The second the second lamb was out mama bolted off and clearly was going to have nothing to do with them.

I rushed over to discover that lamb #1 had been neglected and was not alive anymore but I had walked in at just the right moment to save #2.  I got the slime off it’s nose, tickled it, held it upside down and got it’s airway clear.  I then rushed it into the house, got an old towel and started to work on it very vigorously.  He (yes, a ram) immediately started right up!  Hooray.

I managed to get him dried off and I took him back to mama.  She’s a first timer, and she wanted nothing to do with him.  She was not interested in him at all.  I decided to take him in again and get him warmed up before trying to nurse again.  As soon as he was standing up trying, I took him out to nurse, but he was much smaller than the other lamb, and he was needing some help.  Mama who was not interested in being a mama wanted to eat her alfalfa, and she didn’t really want to take care of the lamb.

I decided to milk the colostrum out for now and bottle feed it to make sure he gets some then see if he perks up to nurse.  This seems to be doing the trick.

Now, the fact that I saved him is good news, and I am so exciting to have lambs around for me and the kids to enjoy.  I’m incredibly bummed that I lost a lamb though.  I set up my breeding program to get a variety of different colored lambs, but I was MOST wanting a black ewe to use as foundation breeding stock for the future.  I bought a really nice ram with a fantastic fleece this year.  He had some black in his background, and I was hoping that my girls would give me some black.

BUT, of course, my very first BLACK EWE had to be the one that I lost.  I am beyond bummed about this.  This makes me feel like I want to dance around stomping my feet and complaining about the rough hand of cards that I’ve been dealt, but I’m trying very hard to act like an adult here.  These things happen in farming, that’s just life, and no matter how big of a fit I throw, it isn’t going to change the fact that I lost her and she’s gone, and the only way to move on is to focus on the future and the other four ewes that are going to throw me some very lovely lambs very soon.

The bright side is that I now have a little black ram dubbed Snuffles downstairs in a laundry basket calling for my attention.  He’s here and he’s got the will to live, and I think I’m just going to bury the bad and run with the good I’ve been dealt today.