Departing Horses & Future Farm Plans

 We made some tough decisions lately, choosing to sell a couple of our horses to get a younger more suitable trail horse capable of long rides.  One of our bucket list goals is to participate in the Chief Joseph's Trail ride, and for that we need trail horses that can do a week of near 20 mile days.  Unfortunately, Jesse has gotten past her prime and with a touch of arthritis rides like that would be too punishing.  Maze is an athletic horse with excellent endurance, but she moves out faster than the slower trail horse we'd prefer.  Both amazing horses, but they'd just become pasture ornaments if not going on rides with us. This move gives them both what they need, and we can't be happier with their new homes.

Jesse 

Maze

Now we can focus on our future horses, working with Apollo and getting him under saddle, and getting a new trail horse to handle all of our summer adventures and hopefully an epic adventure on the Chief Joseph's trail ride.

We have been daydreaming about all the improvements we want to make on the farm to allow us to work more with our horses in the winter and hot days.  Our biggest project/goal is to build a covered outdoor arena.  We've been looking at ClearSpan canvas covered pre-fabricated buildings and have seen a few in use in our area.  We've been working towards getting serious about building one, along with an outdoor arena area with good footing.  But we also need new fencing, lots of rock and sand, and all sorts of other things; so a little money is the only thing standing in our way.  

We'll keep pushing forward, dreaming, and working towards those goals!  

Beef Processing 2024

 We just finished having our beef processed and have filled our freezer.  We started with three feeder calves about 19 months ago and finished with approximately 1,600 lbs of beef.

We're taking a little break from growing out more calves for now, as we have some fence work needed, and worrying about cows getting out of the pasture isn't fun.  We're also shifting more of our attention to working with and riding our horses, and that also takes pasture space, and they're a bit easier to keep fenced in--generally.

As usual, we hired Farmers' Helper for handling the mobile slaughter and cut-n-wrap processing of our beef, they simply do the best work around. They're great to work with, but getting on their schedule is the only problem as they're always booked out so you have to get on their schedule as soon as you get your feeder calves started. 

The cost of growing out your own beef doesn't really pan out unless you can produce some of your own hay, the cost of feeder calves, processing, and care will put the cost per pound into a price range that's not affordable for most, so the real benefit of growing out your own beef is knowing how your cows were cared for and having customers that appreciate well cared for grass fed beef.

We'll likely regret not getting more feeder calves now by the end of this year as our beef supply runs out, so our focus will be fencing so we can get back to growing out more beef.  
 

Apple Harvest & Processing 2024

 The apple harvest was another success, and lots of work.  We filled 3.5 crates and could have filled another but ran out of gas.  Well, the last tree was mostly too small to deal with because we didn't thin them out as we should have.  This winter will be pruning and getting better prepared for next year's work.

We washed, crushed, and pressed apples over three days to finish with 105 gallons of juice.  We canned 45 gallons of straight apple juice and started 60 gallons fermenting in our big carboys.  We've been so busy and have had tons going on so canning apple sauce and dehydrating apples didn't happen this year, just too much right now.  Hopefully, next year we'll be prepared for some canning and dehydrating.  Overall though, it's been another good apple year for us!

Honey Harvest 2024

This year we harvested 144 lbs of honey from four of our seven hives, which is about 96 pints.  It's interesting how different each year's harvest is in quantity, color, and consistency. Three of the hives are new, so we chose not to harvest from them, rather let them build up their colony in prep for next year.

This year's harvest appears runnier than previous years and I wonder if that was influenced by the heavier spring rains, since the sugar content in the pollen dictates the consistency and color of the honey. I found a great video on YouTube that explains why some honey is thicker than others if you're interested.

 Personally, I prefer the natural state it comes when we harvest and don't mind if some is runnier than others, so I doubt we'll ever attempt to set the honey by adding a set starter.  But never say never, we shall see.

This year we've decided to move our hives, so after we pulled the honey supers I setup two new areas along our southern pasture property line, which is closer to a hazelnut orchard and blackberries.  It will be interesting to see how, if any, changes are seen in our honey production or health of the hives.  Our old setup was out in the open sun more, so I had some makeshift shade, but the new location has trees. It's a much nicer setup and we're hopeful it will be better.

Once we have all the hives moved it will be time to winterize, quilt boxes and candy boards will go on top of the hives to help them regulate moisture and provide resources for the winter since we took most of their honey stores. We'll post some pics after that's all done.

Hay Harvest 2024

 

This year's hay harvest was better than expected, we ended up with 500 bales from the approximate 15 acres we cut and baled.  We didn't have the money to fertilize or seed last fall or this spring, so our expectations were low on how much hay we'd actually produce.  

The spring rains kept us out of the field a little longer than the past few years, so we didn't start cutting until the 2nd week of June, when normally we'd have been done by then.  The extra rain helped with production, but hampered harvest a little as we had a small storm front roll through catching us with bales on the ground still.  We had put up about half of our harvest in the barn when the remaining bales in field got rained on.  We had to wait a week while the bales dried before we could start bucking again.  We turned each bale over by hand to ensure they dried and wouldn't mold on us.  Thankfully, the sun cooperated and our bales dried and we got the remainder put up.

We also shared about 50-75 bales with a neighbor that's helped us buck hay in the past.  They feed a few steers on their pasture and could use the feed to help with growing out their beef.

Bale Count

John Deere 224WT Baler in action

Another hay season in the books, our baler held up and we managed to buck all the hay off the field.  We did lose our hay rake just before finish the last bit of field.  One of it's rake arm bears burned out, so now we've got to work on replacing or repairing the rake before next spring.  There's always something.

Our Pork Experience - Leveling Up

Back in 2017, one of our first homesteading adventures was buying four piglets, aka bacon seeds, to raise our own pork.  We decided on pigs as they don't require a lot of space to grow out, and are ready for slaughter in six months.  So, it's a relatively quick turnaround time for meat in your freezer.  We also had an old cow pole barn we were able to easily convert a portion into a covered run, and with a few hog panels made a nice attached outdoor area for them too, giving them plenty of space.

As newbies we ordered a ton of feed, in bags from a feed store, thinking we were getting a good price and keeping our costs down.  Little did we know there were other options in the area where we could have purchased a 1-ton tote of grower feed for half the price we paid for our bagged feed.  That was one of our first mistakes, the 2nd mistake was the place we chose to process our pigs.  We asked around and got good references for a slaughter/processing business, but little did we know the great references for the place apparently created a bit more demand for their services than they could handle.  We delivered our pigs to the slaughter house and quickly learned after slaughter our pigs got set aside because one of their bigger clients had a priority order.  Poor communication with our cut orders, lots of mistakes, and bacon missing from one of our customer's orders really had us bummed.  They found the bacon in the freezer, but their smoker schedule was booked so our customer didn't get their bacon for another month.  The entire experience had us questioning our decision to raise our own pork and motivated us to look for another processor to take care of our beef.

Thankfully we discovered a mobile slaughter operation for our steer, Farmer's Helper, and they've been doing such excellent work for us that it gave us new motivation to try raising pigs again.  This time we purchased just three bacon seeds, Berkshire-Yorkshire crosses, and built a small hog hut and setup a pig run in the area we've been trying to get a garden established.  We're hoping the pig manure is going to give us the fertilizer component our garden area needs, a mutual benefit from raising pigs.  Unfortunately, COVID had an impact on the meat processing industry which had our small mobile slaughter operation booked out farther than our six month finishing period, so we had to settle on nine months before we process.  We were worried about the cost vs benefit of growing the pigs out three more months, but it all worked out.  Our pigs finished out nicely and the processing job Farmer's Helper did for us was awesome.  The pork is fantastic!

We're getting three or four more piglets this spring and our next adventure is slaughtering and processing our own pig!  We'll continue to use Farmer's Helper for our customer's processing, but we're gearing up for the big DIY pork!

  

Early Spring Honey Harvest

Last fall we had one new hive of bees we started in the Spring that produced like gangbusters!  We harvested nearly 36 lbs of honey in the fall and we left a frame partially full of honey for them to over-winter with, but unfortunately the hive didn't survive.  It's our second hive loss in two years, and as new bee keepers it's been disappointing and somewhat discouraging for sure.  

Our first hive did well its first year, and over-wintered successfully.  However, in the Spring the hive decided they needed a new queen and she apparently didn't like our setup so she swarmed with the colony.  We didn't actually realize this until after the fact because we weren't watching the hive well enough to see that they were producing a new queen.  We might have been able to prevent the swarming had we watched more closely.

Our second hive didn't survive Winter because I left too many frames on the hive and they couldn't stay warm.  We should have winterized the hive better and removed another frame or two to consolidate the hive.  Frustrating to say the least, and a costly learning experience.  We haven't given up though.

Another thing we learned from this last experience is that it's a good idea to have some honey harvest for the Spring rather than sell or use it all in the Fall.  We'll see if we can work that into our normal harvesting practice.

This past weekend, we harvested about 25 lbs of honey from the frames that were left behind.  We'll clean and prep the foundations and frames for two new packages of bees for hives we're starting back up this Spring.  Fingers crossed we improve our bee keeping skills to maintain some hives for a least a few years successfully for a change.