More on Latte the Calf

I was able to get Latte the newborn Jersey calf to stand still for a few seconds.

Strike a pose, Latte!

Latte is a sweet, energetic, rambunctious lil' gal.

Piglets!!

This weekend, we had piglets!!

They are so small and so cute and so pink-ish.

 Mama Piggie (aka, Poomba) gave birth to two healthy, happy, squeaky little pig babies. They are just about the cutest thing ever. Well, definitely top 2.

Mama and babies are doing great.

Recap of Chicken Butchering Weekend

On Sept. 20th of this year, we took 23 meat chickens from coop to freezer. By "we," I mean myself, the wife and kids, Wife's 7 siblings, and some of the siblings' significant others.

The experience exceeded our wildest expectations.

Two chickens, mid-pluck, proudly displayed by six volunteers and led by Thing #1 (lower right).

It was a beautiful day, everyone was excited, and we accomplished our goals.

WARNING: Very graphic depictions of chicken evisceration to follow.

Trade and the Myth of Self-Sufficiency

I remember dreaming, three years ago, how cool it would be to be self-sufficient - to close our little 5.4 acres off from the would and live in a complete cycle according to nature, giving back to the land and being given everything from it in turn. To draw my water, my power, my food, my herbal remedies, my fibers, and my joys from the earth.

In other words, I dreamt of being completely self-sufficient.

I'm glad I woke up.

Yeah, I don't ever want to feel like this guy.

In reality, self-sufficiency is a myth. We humans are simply too needy.

Catching Up: Gardens

Oh, the gardens. My Achilles Heel this year.

Watermelons, cantaloupes, green beans, tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers.

The pigs and chickens have done a great job tilling and rotating through. We've had lots of sunflowers and melons grow, and our tomato plants have done fairly well.

But, there's a long way to go yet.

Catching Up: Rabbits

The rabbits have been beyond disappointing thus far. Since acquiring the original buck and two does five months ago, we have yet to produce a single litter.

I've tried every trick in the book. I tried breeding at different times of day. I swapped the buck and doe cages so them could smell each other first (in fact, I did this every day for a week with no success). I took her to his cage, and him to her cage. I took them to a neutral, unused cage. I changed their feed. I restrained the does. I did everything but crack a bottle of wine and turn on some Barry White by the fireplace.

No kits. Zero. Nada. Niet.

I really wanted to be enjoying some rabbit dinners by now. So, yesterday, I bought a new buck. Meet Cap'n Jack Sparrow:

Cap'n Jack Sparrow is our new New Zealand white buck.
He's 2 years old, proven, and has only one eye.

I also bought two extra does in an apparent rabbit close-out special.

Last Milk

Well, until November, anywhoozles.

Bridget chows down her last bucket of oats before I milk her out for the last time
until after she calves.

It was kinda sad, but I'm also ready for a break.

Chicken Problems (and Potential Solutions)

Chicken problems. We've had 'em all. Let's start with the older chickens and work down, shall we?

Problems #1 and #2: Food Ran Out and New Pecking Order...At the Same Time

About a month ago, I had a small 4-day interruption in layer pellet availability at the same time I introduced the 8 new Araucanas to the flock. The 23 laying-age chickens had been laying between 14 and 18 eggs pretty regularly for the previous month, but then sharply went down to around 8-10. The food interruption and the new pecking order disruption were blamed for the egg drop.

The flock flocked for fresh feed.

Turns out, those factors were not entirely to blame.

Catching Up: Chickens

My blogging has really taken a downturn these last few weeks. There's been a lot going on that I should report out on, and I figured the best way to do that was through some individual catching-up posts.

And where better to start than with our chickens. Oh, the chickens. They have been driving Wife and I CRAZY this past month.

After the raccoon attack, I took the 8 new Araucanas and introduced them to the existing flock. Every went very much according to plan, very smoothly, etc. Some of the Leghorns even jumped into the chick introduction pen with them. It was pretty funny. I topped out at an 18-egg day about a month ago.

A cool day's dozen seems a distant memory, what with the molting, pecking ordering,
and feed-running-outing going on.....

Then, the egg production took a SHARP turn down. We went from 13-16 eggs a day to fewer than 8. I believe the reason was a perfect storm of them running out of pellets while I had no car to get more for 5 days, a poorly-timed molt from our Australorps, and a disruption of the pecking order on the lower end due to the new Araucanas. At least that's the prevailing theory.

Baby Chicks, Round 3

2014 has basically been the year of the chicken.

From the first January chicks, to switching to fermented chicken feed, to the impulse Araucana buy, to weathering raccoon attacks, to focusing on integrating birds of different ages, to processing my first chicken for dinner, to this latest endeavor: 25 new egg layers and 23 new meat birds.

The dark ones are egg layers, and the light ones are meat birds.

So yeah - we have about 50 chicks now.

Getting Ahead of Food Prices

I read recently that for some families, food prices have doubled in the last few years. I believe it. I don't have figures of our own family, but I do know that food has taken a disproportionately larger and larger percentage of our money each year. It is the fastest growing expense.

Even the national news outlets are coming around. See here, here, and here.

These are only gonna keep on climbing.

So with that, I believe there are 4 major things that influence food prices (listed after the jump), and none of those are in my control.

What IS in my control is my land, time, energy, and effort to produce my own food.

Chicken Collection

We integrated eight new chickens, all various colors and varieties of Araucana/Americauna, into the flock this week. We now have 31 chickens.

To the left are seven of the new chickens.
To the right are 2 Red Stars from the original chicken purchase.
Outside the pen (behind the T-post) is the chicken introduction pen.

It's a very diverse and colorful flock. We now have the following breeds (and quantities) "in stock":

Thoughts on "Prepping"

Don't prepare to survive hard times, prepare so that you don't even notice them.
-CajunSunshine, from homesteadingtoday.com

I think this statement above perfectly sums up my thoughts on the prepper/survivalist topic. Some of the agriculture and livestock sites I frequent are also hang-outs for some hardcore prepping types, so I see a lot of comments involving doomsday predictions, a sense urgency on stockpiling silver, links to nuclear-safe 55-gallon food-grade teflon-coated stainless-steel storage tubs, ammo discussions involving where to buy the cheapest 10,000 rounds, and so on. Topics like WSHTF, TEOTWAWKI, solar flares, magnetic reversals, global economic crashes, UN takeovers, biological warfare, and so on.

It seems there are 100 different ways in which the fabric of Western society will break down and collapse in the next 5-10 years.

My goal is to carry on so I don't notice any of it.

Basically how I feel.

So how am I preparing to not notice the hard times?

First Blue Egg!

Yay! One of our Araucanas finally started laying. We got blue egg #1 today!

Our first blue egg ever adds a great splash to the daily collection.

And, as chance would have it, Thing #2 decided to catch that very chicken this weekend.

"The System"

I was fortunate enough to capture almost the whole "system" in place in one picture:

Left: the first product garden.
Middle pen: The pigs.
Right pen; The chickens.
Foreground left, the cow cart.
Foreground right, Bridget.
Also, that is a hose, not a large green snake.

It's especially exciting because, although this picture doesn't show it, there are a dozen or so "wild melon" plants growing where the pigs just vacated. Although, we did feed them extra watermelon and cantaloupe innards.

I hope for rain this weekend. I'm going to sow the garden with some seeds, but the soil needs to be wet.. I'm thinking carrots, sunflowers, tobacco, green beans - things that can be sown in larger section. The transplants will go to the "old" garden.

Oh yeah, and we reversed the flow of the system. We were heading (from that angle) left, but we're now moving right, and the chickens are going first. The chickens' egg quality declined (paler yolks), and they severely compacted the soil rather than loosen it. So now they lead and scratch/trim the grass, readying it for the pigs to go deeper.

I can't wait until the "system" hits its stride.

Late June Garden Progress

Or lack thereof.  :(

With all of the animal hubbub, the gardens have been a bit....er, delayed this year. We have some great sproutlings going, and some tomato plants and lettuces doing really well, but a lot of other stuff is MIA at the moment.

Tomato plants, round 1. We have a few little tomatolettes growing.

Rabbit Update

I was very much hoping that this update would include pictures of kits from Skittles (which were supposedly due last Wednesday/Thursday). Alas, as it turns out she did NOT have any kits. So, yesterday and today, I am re-breeding her to Coconut.

In two weeks, we'll find out whether or not Starburst (our second Californian doe) is pregnant or not. We bred her two weeks after Skittles, and with a 30-day gestation, we should finally be seeing kits in a fortnight. Starburst is the only "proven" rabbit we have, so I do hope it's not Coconut that is the, ahem, weak link here.

Starburst, left, and Coconut, right, lounging with ice packs.
We've replaced the ice bags with frozen plastics containers. They chewed both.
We now freeze bricks to keep them cool.

It's also been getting quite hot, so we've been freezing bricks to set out in their cages at mid-day. They sprawl out and rest their heads near the bricks like clockwork, so I know it's helping them maintain temperature in the Southern heat.

I also worked on getting the rabbitry one step closer to being done.

When White Eggs are Weird

...you know you have a backyard flock. Our first Leghorn laid this weekend. The white egg seemed very out of place amid the varied shades of brown.

Where's Waldo the Leghorn egg?

It's very exciting to see the newer chickens start to lay. Soon enough, some blue eggs from our three Americauna/Araucanas will appear. We have 8 more of the blue eggers in the chick-u-bator, so by the late fall, we'll be getting a good healthy mix of brown, white, and blue.

All we need are a few olive eggers and some copper marans.....soon......

How Much Milk is 2 Gallons a Day?

A WHOLE FREAKING LOT. That's how much.

This is one day's worth of milk from Bridget the Jersey milk cow.
On the sides are two 2-liter jars (no handles). Inside that are two 1.7-liter jars.
In the middle is a 1-liter jar. For those keeping score at home, this is about 8.2 liters.
That's approximately 2.16 gallons that we got. On Sunday.

It doesn't sound like a lot of milk, until you have to start finding room for it in the fridge.

Sure, All the Healthy Beverages

I am the healthy beverages guru.

As I write this, I just finished my home-brewed ginger water kefir, and am staring down a tall glass of raw paleo chocolate milk from my grass-fed cow.

Left, raw paleo chocolate milk. Right, my empty ginger water kefir cup.

Today, I have also consumed a raw milk kefir smoothie (with banana and cinnamon - YUM!). I also have had glasses of cherry kombucha, strawberry and mixed berry water kefir (made with organic sugar), more raw chocolate milk, coffee (black, with only some Bridget cream added), and some plain ol' filtered water.

It all started when I got a cow. It'll be fun, I said.  :)