Farm Fresh Goodness

Fresh sweet potatoes, beef ribs and onion rings.How much better can it get?

Sweet potato harvest is under way

The trees in the orchard down back are absolutely loaded with peaches.

We actually went through and thinned a bunch of them out because the branches were on the verge of breaking :P

Don't they look delicious?

And don't forget about plums!

Oodles and oodles of plums.

these are just a few of them.

I think

Gabriel pitted more plums than he ever wanted to see :P

And we made lots of jam.

Lots of very pretty jam :)

Milk: it does a garden good

At the beginning of this spring, Gabriel and I were in a frenzy trying to plant enough vegetables to satisfy the appetite of a multitude of bugs and still have some left over for ourselves. This is the third year that this land has been farmed and while the soil health has increased, so has the bug population. Soil health is what many organic proponents claim will keep bug depredations at bay, while I don't dispute that, our soil apparently isn't to that point yet. We couldn't keep up. Diatomaceious earth-no good. Concentrated garlic spray helped a little but just couldn't keep up due to rains washing it off. I've never seen anything like it. All of our crops were being decimated by bugs. We were beginning to despair of being able to grow anything naturally.

One day we were visiting our friend Stewart and he asked Gabriel if he'd seen the latest Acres USA magazine. Gabriel of course replied that he hadn't (we're way too cheap to subscribe to a magazine),

turns out there was a very interesting article that month and here's the bottom line:

Insects can't digest the sugars in milk.

When milk is sprayed on a plant, the plant is inedible to the insect. It either must go away or else eat and die.

It sounded incredible but hey, we've got plenty of milk, might as well try it.

If nothing else the microbes in the raw milk will enrich the soil. After all, it's not just minerals that plants "eat", it's the dead soil microbes that ate the organic matter we added.

So Gabriel began dowsing the garden with diluted milk. Amazingly enough, the plants immediately perked up and the bugs seemed to almost disappear. Coincidence? After all, it's just milk for crying out loud! He applies it about twice a week when it's dry and every time after it rains. It probably is beneficial as a foliar feeding as well as bug repellent.

We're not the only ones having success with this though. A lady who had really bad cabbage worms sprayed her plants and the worms went away.

Recently my sister was having trouble with squash bugs in her garden and sprayed hers with milk and voila! problem solved!

This is not to say that we don't have any bugs whatsoever anymore. Gabriel says he found two squash bugs yesterday ;)

i would like to note though, that everyone (that I know of) who has done this, has used raw milk. (we use goat milk and the others have used cow). Not being a scientist or anything, I don't know how much difference (if any) the milk being pasteurized would make, but still, I encourage everybody who has a garden to try this method of bug control and I'd love to hear your feedback on how it works for you.

Sheep

A while back we traded a pig for 3 lambs. They're Dorper, (they're the two on the left, the larger ones are Tunis) which have hair instead of wool. They shed when it gets hot enough, saving us alot of effort. Shearing would only be worth while if we had a good way to utilize the wool, which we don't. Because I'm not very fond of lamb, we'll wait until these are Hogget. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_and_mutton If you're in central Texas and would like a Dorper lamb, give Deb' a call at 254-879-4686.

Soybeans

They're everywhere aren't they? Soy is used in an incredible amount of foods, in various forms. It's almost impossible to avoid soy in animal feeds and I was only able to do so in our pig feed because the addition of milk and whey makes up for the lysine that would otherwise be lacking. According to Wikipedia, raw soybeans, including edamame, are toxic to all mono-gastric animals. While I have known of the dangers of soy for some time, I'm posting on it now because it was brought to my attention today by an employee at a local feed mill commenting that he's extremely allergic to soy. Even the roasted beans bother him, but handling the raw ones make him really sick.

So if you didn't know that soy can be dangerous, consider this your warning.

Plums, plums everywhere

The plums are ripening and boy are we covered up! We've been making plum jam and jelly like crazy....... and we only have half a dozen trees!

Some of the bounty out on the porch

(along with a basket of onions)

Gabriel pitting plums for jam

Getting closer to the pot ;)

The finished product

And we'll do it all again tomorrow :)

New additions

Our milking doe population went from three to five yesterday. These two, Sweet Tea and Oatie, belong to a friend and I have no idea how long we'll have them but I'm enjoying the chance to make more cheese as long as they're here.


Gabriel really likes them because their teats are much bigger than our other goats' so he can milk them much more easily. He's always had trouble milking the three we have because they're much smaller. 'S'wat he gets for having big hands :P

Happy pig :)

Prickly Pear

Well, I guess cactus ain't all bad after all :)

Pigs eating beets

I can't help it, I just like pigs. They have such interesting personalities, I have yet to find any cattle as interesting as the pigs. Here I'm feeding the last batch of beets.

3 little pigs

This little piggy went to market... she and her sister are for sale, they're approximately 75 Lbs each now, grown quite a bit since this photo. They're half Yorkshire and half Tamworth, that's her mother that she's following. Doesn't exactly show off the best side of Tammy... I'll have to work on my photography skills.

Strawberries!

It's almost time to get out the jelly jars.......... and the shortcake recipe.......

Oh yeah, It's strawberry time! WooHoo!

Can't wait to start picking, and picking, and picking, and picking :)

Pastured pork

We bought some pigs last november and put them on pasture. They haven't grown as fast as they would in a confinement system of course, but I daresay they've been happier and healthier. The amount of rooting that they do seems to be proportional to how often we move them. The higher the pasture is, the less damage they do to it. But even in tall pasture they'll root around stumps, fence lines and low swampy spots. They dug up 3 stumps that I didn't even know were there! I've read that it used to be a common practice to let them clear new pasture, farmers would even drill holes next to trees and fill them with corn to encourage the pigs to dig them up. I haven't tried it yet but I certainly intend to. If you're interested in raising a pig or two yourself, I highly recommend Sugar Mountain farms blog, Walter gives alot of information on how to do it and he's the one who inspired me to try. We've had good success without the hormones, antibiotics and chemical medications normally used.

We have 3 piglets, or larger feeder pigs available for sale. Alternatively, if you don't want to raise them, we sell hogs by the whole, half or quarter, based on hanging weight at the butcher. You'll tell the butcher what kind of cuts you're looking for and will pay them their fees, $25 kill fee and 46c per Lb. cut and wrap fee.
Prices by the pound:

• Whole hog - $2.75
  Half - $3.00
  Quarter - $3.25
  

Sizes differ signifigantly, so whether you want a large hog or a small one, we can accomodate.

New Addition to the farm

Cornish pullets.

Cute huh?

Poultry Update

I'm just amazed at how fast our ducks have grown. When we got them at the end of February they were such tiny little things.....

.....and had a tendency to fall asleep on their feeders :)

Now they're just HUGE!

These Pekins are getting really close to butcher weight.

Interestingly, the Khaki Campbells have a much higher pitched "quack" than the White Pekin ducks

I'm looking forward to the day these girls start laying! Duck-egg omelet anybody?

Tuesday's to-do list

Weed potatoes!

I can't believe how quickly the weeds are coming up and taking over.

In fact, I'm on my way out to the shed to get a hoe right now :)

Good Ol' Fashioned Bacon

I love to prepare and cook things that are a bit out of the ordinary and while bacon is by no means unusual, home-cured bacon definitely fits into that category.

We've been experimenting with a few different curing methods. Well, okay, we haven't gotten all that adventurous. So far we've only tried the standard brown sugar/salt method and a variation with black pepper. We also did the standard open-air curing and we tried the zip-locs-in-the-refrigerator method.

We Loved the black pepper variation and prefer the open air curing to curing in the 'fridge.

In the future (like, maybe the next time we butcher a hog) we'd like to try both maple (and/or honey) curing and smoking the bacon.

In any case, the basic curing is very simple, tastes great and is good for you. Next time you pick up bacon at the grocery store read the ingredients and you may decide to try curing it for yourself ;)

Gabriel trimmed this piece of pork prior to adding the curing mix.

Here you see the pork ready to begin curing next too all of the ingredients.

three parts brown sugar, two parts salt and one half part black pepper.

Rub this all over the pork and shake off the excess.

I snapped this sloppy photo while the pork was curing.

We lined cardboard boxes with parchment paper, sat those on a tarp and let it cure for seven to ten days. We did this in our spare bedroom closing off all of the vents and opening the window.

You can also put it in zip-loc bags in the refrigerator. It works just as well but doesn't dry out as much making it harder to work with when you go to slice it.

The finished product.

After the seven to ten day curing period the bacon can be frozen. Because salt dries the meat as it cures it becomes less prone to dangerous bacteria and so it really doesn't have to be frozen. As long as the parchment paper is changed (or preferably the meat is hung so it gets air circulation on all sides) and the meat is turned so that it doesn't stay wet on the bottom it

should be fine.

I recommend freezing it however because the longer it cures the saltier it becomes.

Plus it's always better to be on the safe side when it comes to meat.