I suppose if my writing were good and attracted readers, and if I had amazing things to write about that peaked interest, I might be a good blogger. But alas I'm a bad blogger, either too busy to commit the time and effort for posts or lacking the whit to conjure up tantalizing or important topics enticing followers. I never intended my blog to be the real attraction, it's merely a web space to share info on our homesteading and farming adventures. Besides, we're not a 'commercial' operation, we're just doing stuff.
Since last winter's fence work and the progress on our round pen in the spring, we've done a few things. Maybe more than a few things, like: storing hay for winter, building a goat pen, acquiring a few goats, breeding a horse, processing honey, hatching quail, building a quail grow-out hutch, losing a dog and a horse, canning peaches, started a batch of peach mead, growing the cow herd with a new heifer and a new steer, and now we're getting into the apple processing season. We did a bit of riding the horses, routine maintenance, and a little fishing in-between. Most of what we do is seen in real-time on facebook with posts to our individual pages or our farm page, so posts here or sort of redundant some of our farm fans.
This year we opted to buy more hay in the spring to get us through the winter feeding for our horses and cows. We'll likely need to get more hay, but ~400 bales should be a good start.
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| Putting hay up in barn |
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| Cleaning up after stacking |
We also picked up a few dwarf Nigerian goats to start a small herd of milkers so we can make goat cheese and soaps from goat milk. We had to build a goat pen to accommodate our new farm family members.
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| Bunk feeder |
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| New goat pasture |
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| Fenley, Maple, and Granger |
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| Double trouble, our does |
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| Homemade gate latch |
It seems we're always adding new animals to the farm, so why not a new horse. Last year we tried breeding our maiden mare, but she just didn't take. The stud owner gave us another shot this spring so we opted to have our paint spend a few weeks in their pasture to ensure she naturally cycled into heat; and well, that seemed to work. Thankfully the stud owner was patient with us and our mare took finally! Her foal is due end of April, beginning of May 2020.
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| Placental attachment to uterus ~40 days |
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| Anya, our prego paint mare |
Last year we started a hive, but didn't get any honey. We're new to bee keeping so we expected a slow start. We also believe that was partly due to the crazy yellow jacket season we had and the impact they had on our hive robbing it. In fact, for awhile we feared they killed off the hive to the point it wouldn't last over winter. This spring we added another hive and had high hopes for the old hive because it was very active, but it turned out they made a new queen and the hive swarmed. Hard lesson for new bee keepers. They left behind a lot of honey though, so we harvested that and it turned out our new hive of Italian bees were super producers and we were also able to harvest from our new hive too!
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| Filtering raw honey from extractor |
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| Our new labels |
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| Over 3 gallons of honey harvested |
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| A grey fox came to help clean off the frames |
Since having a lot of animals is something we planned on doing on our farm, I decided to hatch some quail. They're small and don't take much space to manage so I thought it would be an easy endeavor. I bought 3 dozen fertile eggs and ended up with 20 quail chicks hatching, so it was a fairly successful hatch. I chose cutornix jumbo brown quail as they're the fastest growing and largest quail suited for meat and egg production. I had to build a grow-out hutch as well and we're hoping to have farm fresh quail in the near future. I'm collecting what I hope are fertile eggs already in hopes of hatching another batch soon.
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| Eggs ready to begin hatching |
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| Quail chicks in the hutch |
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| Grow-out hutch near completion |
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| Quail fully grown at 8 weeks |
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| Our first quail egg! |
Along with all the positive things we've been doing, we've had to deal with some rough patches. In the late spring we lost one of our dear family members, our little chihuahua Autumn. She got out of the yard and crossed the road and was hit by a car trying to get home. It was heart breaking and a loss we still haven't gotten over with. She was a special part of our family and taken too soon. We also recently lost one of our horses, Cody. He unexpectedly passed from colic/twisted gut and wasn't an easy thing to deal with both emotionally and physically. Cody was only with us a year and he had just started to really bond, so it's been difficult.
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| Autumn, pure love |
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| Cody boy |
Keeping busy helps distract from focusing on the sad days, and thankfully we have lots of good memories which helps us cherish the time we had with our loved animal family members. We have plenty to do and preserving food is one of those things that keeps us busy. On the weekend Cody passed we had picked up a few cases of peaches so we had lots of canning to do. We got so caught up in canning them we forgot to set some aside to make a batch of peach jam, but that didn't stop us from starting a batch of mead. With all the honey we harvested I set aside enough to make a six gallon batch of honey wine, and why not add some of those peaches for some flavor. Peach flavored honey wine!
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| ~40 quarts and 12 pints of canned peaches |
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| Peach honey wine fixins |
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| Measuring potential alcohol, 12.7% |
We've also been busy with working on growing our cow herd. Earlier this spring we added a Hereford heifer calf and more recently new an Angus steer. We now have five cows in the pasture with two pregnant heifers. Our limo heifer, Becky, is due mid January and our jersey-belted cross heifer is due end of February. We're hoping for a couple of bull calves but will be happy with healthy calves. We're planning on running 6-7 cows on the pasture on a regular basis.
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| Cow Belle, our new herd heifer |
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| D2, our latest Angus steer |
That brings us to apple processing season. Recently I finished making a few new apple pallet totes so we can harvest our apples and move them around more efficiently. This past week has been raining so we've only gotten one tote filled so far almost finishing harvesting one tree. A few more trees and couple more totes to go, then lots of cutting, crushing, and pressing for cider! We'll set aside a few cases of quality apples to make apple sauce, dried apples, apple pie filling, and apple butter. Lots of work in the next couple weeks in front of us. That should have us caught up on our doings for now. Keep checking back and maybe I'll start posting more frequently!
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| Shaking apples from top of tree |
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| Loaded trees |
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| Moving pallet of apples around |
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| Just a pallet of apples on the porch |
