wORKING WITH THE LAND
LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT… er… ALMOST EVERY MINUTE
Thank you for stopping by! I hope you enjoy the stories of our adventure. Feel free to have a look around. We are exploring a number of farm-business opportunities, so please let us know if you are interested in any of them. For now, we are proud to offer you pork. You can pre-order a half or whole hog. Just fill out the form, and we will contact you with further details!
It happens to everything…
For various reasons, I have been struggling with my chores over the last several weeks. However, routine made things go smoother. For example, when taking the lambs to their pens in the morning: graham crackers. Yeager literally will walk in your shoes on the way. About every 30 feet... piece of graham cracker. This worked for two months. And then it didn't. I drank Coke from 13 years of age until I was about 36. Then I stopped and switched to Mountain Dew. At least I lasted more than a couple puny months. We have moved on to a strategy that I hope will last much longer. I now put a handful of grain in each pen, shake a bucket, and we all run (I drive the Gator, of course) [...]
Yes. I’m kind of pathetic…
Tiffany hates it when I say it this simply, but our lambs grew up in our house. She feels it brings up images of the lambs running wild and mass amounts of urine and feces around the house. That last part was not the case, but the truth is, especially for Maple, that they lived in the house. It was quite a while before we were comfortable letting Maple outside by herself. She just followed us around the house, and tried to eat the indoor plants if we turned our back on her. As a result, the lambs are more like puppies than they are like livestock... especially Maple who was babied even longer. One might think that Yeager would be the more babied, since he showed signs of illness [...]
The Cancelled Eleventh Plague
I think there may have been an 11th plague that was going to be called down on Egypt, but Moses asked God to skip it. That plague was an attack by wasps and hornets. Locusts was a plague? Please. Wasps and hornets would rate as one of the highest plagues ever. Only the deaths of the first born would top it. I remember wasps and hornets as a kid in Southwest Missouri. I got nailed a number of times on the farm, and when we moved to town I was mowing someone's lawn, which resulted in me disturbing a yellowjacket nest. I took off running. It turns out that yellowjackets can fly faster than a scrawny 14 year-old boy can run. They finally left me alone after I ran about [...]
Meep! Meep!
Since we moved to southern Missouri, we have been fascinated with an unexpected variety of wildlife. Yes. I am talking about the nemesis of one Wile E. Coyote. When I was young, I sympathized a bit with Wile E. However, having shot at and missed one of his brethren that was killing my chickens by waiting in the yard for the coop door to open, I have changed my mind. Now that we have spent time with the roadrunners, we are definitely on Team Roadrunner. That's right. We have roadrunners. The Missouri Department of Conservation has written about them and their arrival in the 1950s. You can find good pictures of them on the internet... not just the one of our famous friend from Loony Tunes. As I mentioned, we [...]
Formaggio Success!
It has been over four months, and I decided it was time to give it a shot. If you haven't read the earlier post(s), back in early March, I made a parmesan cheese wheel from goat milk. I have been anxiously waiting for enough time to pass to try this first wheel, and hopefully give me confidence for the rest of the wheels in the refrigerator, and encourage me to explore further. I really want to make a swiss and a blue cheese. I thought it smelled incredible. However, there is clearly something I need to learn, or some tools that I need to find and learn to use... it is next to impossible to cut the wheel into wedges. Ultimately, we have to score the wheel, and then work [...]
The Battle Has Begun
If you saw the above picture before, you may have read about Laverne introducing her kids (Ivanka & Barron) to roosting on the antlers of the European mount above the french doors that go to the kitchen. Now let your imagination fly like our rooster Donald escaping from our newest rooster that is twice his size. When it was just Laverne, the rug outside the doors would rapidly generate a stalagmite of poultry fecal material. Adding Ivanka and Barron resulted in a mountain that grew nightly like a volcanic island rising from the sea floor. Tiffany had enough of that. She hauled a ladder out there, and put a towel over the antlers. That would surely dissuade their roosting. Barron politely accepted this sign of being unwelcome. He didn't go [...]
All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. – Proverbs 14:23