approaching Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice usually marks the shortest day of the year.  I find myself dreading it's approach a little since there is less and less daylight and you start to really feel it.  I notice it most in the mornings; it takes longer for the sun to rise so when I milk the goats at 6am, it's dark the entire time.  Just a month ago it the sun would start to rise as I would finish up.  

The nice thing about this time of year is the opportunity to plan.  I have breeding plans (Siren was bred in late October, due in late March.  Zada will be bred in a few weeks, due hopefully in late May), garden plans, seed ordering plans, seed starting plans, how to spend the tax refund plans, the next thing to cross off our list-plans.  Lotsa plans.  

What are your winter plans?

Orchard development

Forgive me y'all....I've had this sitting around in my "draft" section for almost a month.

We've been working (slowly) on building an orchard.  It started at the 9 acre lot with a couple each of plums, cherries, apricots, peaches, apples and pears.  That was all good until we put the lot up for sale.  Most of the trees we dug up and moved to the 5 acre lot.  Good thing too since we just sold the 9 acre lot  (celebrate!!!! sort of, I still have some mixed feeling about having sold it).  Not all of the trees we moved survived and I think we might have one or two more that still could die off.

Anyhow, so here in a couple weeks or less, my big Stark Bros order should arrive.  I added about 6 more apples, an asian (some call it an apple) pear, more cherries, beach plums, paw paws (or Indiana banana) and a few other odd ball items.  I couldn't be more excited to dig a bunch of holes!  That brings our complete orchard up to a total of 13 apples -mostly dwarf, 4 pears, 4 plums, 5 peaches, 1 nectarine, 1 apricot, 5 cherry, 2 paw paw, 2 honeyberry....I think that's all of it.  Anyhow, so when I include the berries we've already planted, that means we will have fruit from Mid-May through early November.  The season starts with honeyberry and strawberries and ends with granny smith and pink lady apples.  This satisfies one of my homesteading goals :)

I think we are going to scale back the chickens and other birds as we get closer to having enough goats to produce meat as well as milk, plus we want to add rabbits.....we are finding that birds are messy and hard to contain and while we like them, scaling them back as we bring in mammalian meat sources makes more sense.  This is our evolution.

Big Mean Tom

I killed Tom.  He was a big, mean, blue slate turkey, about a year and a half old.  Today, I will make sausage from him.  It will be delicious I'm sure!

I read a very interesting article in UU News (we attend a UU church....maybe I should do a post on that aspect of my lack of conventional faith?)  and it was a family with a mini farm like ours, she was killing animals she'd raised for food and trying to explain how she comes to turns with this in her belief system.  I get this.  I really do.  That big mean tom, he pretty much sealed his fate with me when he attacked my 4 year old son...and my friend, my husband, my neighbor....like I said, he had it coming.  I don't tolerate aggressive animals.  Anyhow, getting off track here, I'm not a vegetarian or vegan and nor do I care to be.  I do believe very strongly that we should respect the lives of all living creatures, even if we intend to eat them or a byproduct of their existence.  I think it's Joel Salatin who says something to the effect of...'They live a great life, with one bad day', and that's pretty much the philosophy I try to keep when rearing animals for food.

Thanks for reading.  I'll probably have more later.  I have this big turkey to get done today, can some spaghetti sauce and then I need to start working on some packets for my mozzarella demo at the farmer's markets (I have them two weekends in a row!).  Homesteading work never ends, combine that with housework never ends and you end up with my insanity.

Summer....whirlwind!

Summer has been crazy.  I wish I could say I've been endlessly busy but the truth is that lately my motivation has been lacking.
 
We had a big change with my son starting preschool last month, he's had some adjusting to do so I think we are finally to the point where the kinks are worked out.   He's a smart kid, I wasn't too worried.  But boy am I relieved to have him in school.  It's amazing how much energy he sucks out of me!

Our goat, Zada, freshened with a single doeling.  She wouldn't nurse her so we've been bottle raising her.  Unfortunately this girl so far has things stacked against her.  For starters, she has a third teat.  Most goat breeders are afraid of their reputation being ruined by admitting such a fault in their goats but I have no reputation so I'll speak frankly about it.  I don't know exactly how it happened other than a fluke, both sire and dam come from high quality show lines so they should have been a great match up- and if it weren't for that extra teat- she'd be show quality herself.  Except....we screwed up the disbudding.  Blah!  First off, we got to her too late.  We should have done it right in the first week.  Second off, we didn't burn long enough.  We were afraid of hurting her and new at it and we screwed up.  Not sure what we are doing now with it.  We have 2 options, one being a vet removing the horns surgically, the other being using a elastrator to cut the circulation off that way.  Anyhow, both dam and doeling are doing great.  Zada is giving us around 5lbs of milk daily (a gallon being 8lbs).

That brings me to cheese making.  That's one place where I've not been slacking.  I've made of course several batches of chevre, mozzarella....quick stuff...but I also put up a few rounds for aging of cheddar, gouda and fontina.  I really want to stock up the aging fridge with lots of good homemade cheese before we dry off Siren.  I just picked up some cultures for swiss so I think gruyere might be my first venture into Swiss style cheese.

I've been canning some garden goods too.  Corn, beans, need to do some tomatoes.  I have lots of tomatoes in the freezer waiting for time to free up so I can make pizza and pasta sauce.  Did a bit of applesauce, lots of jellies and syrups.  I wish I'd kept up on the garden better but it has been nice and productive for me even with all the weeds.

Our almost last batch of birds for the season, I'm taking to a local processor.  Its my way of giving us a break.  We've so far done them all ourselves and that's an experience all it's own, but there is something charming to letting someone else do all that dirty work and coming home with pretty packages ready for the freezer.

Forages and new plantings

Still searching the property for the wild edibles.  There are really a lot, some I didn't even realize were edible...like Canada thistle.  We have a butt load of plantain, thistle of course, pigweed, lamb's quarter, burdock (root), mulberry, raspberry, chokecherry, dandelion....plus many more that I've either forgotten already or haven't made my acquaintance of.

Over the last couple weeks I've planted about 6 raspberry starts and 5 blueberry bushes.  I still have a grape cutting started to get in the ground and coming this week, honeyberries and goji berries.  I'm getting all my antioxidant bases covered.

Just a blip-

I found wild black cherries in our tree row!  And purple dead nettles!  I know, not that exciting but the amount of nutrition in those two plants is crazy.  Antioxidants and minerals galore.  More to come as I figure out how to use them

New Year....whoa, wait. It's May already!

My first post on here was in November.....and here we are May.  Yikes.  So I guess I'll fill in with where we are this year on our attempts to be more prepared.  It's kind of tricky with some of the trees and perennials because we haven't been here long enough to reap from our efforts.

My goal this year- double the garden, make better use of our wild forages, make more cheese, can more goods.  Get my 6 month food supply in place before winter.  Plant more perennial food crops.  I think much beyond that is too much for me to handle with little kiddos in the house.

Garden:  Seed starting, lots of it.  Those seeds are being hardened off now.  We expanded the garden to double it's original size so we now have lots of room.  I haven't measured with a ruler, just one foot in front of the other and figured it to be about 16'x24'.  That space, I'm dividing into 4x8 blocks and companion planting as well as doing some double dug sites for crops that really set up deep roots.  Block 1: potatoes, 2: kale, chard, 3: contender bush beans, cabbages (6 different kinds), 4: 8 different carrot varieties planted with radishes and marigolds, 5: sweet corn, more beans 6: lettuces with onions and beets.  That's the first third in. I still have to work in squash, nightshades, more corn, a grain section (trial, I've not grown grains before in a garden) and sweet potatoes.  I'm hoping between companion and succession plantings that we'll have plenty of goods to can for the year.

Update, I filled in some more plots: watermelon and melons on hills with radishes and nasturtiums with marigolds in between the rows.  Then squash planted in the same fashion, cukes as well.

Berries: I just ordered honeyberry (4) and goji berries (2).  We lost all but one of our blueberries in the drought and all of the raspberries we planted.  The strawberries made it fine and look great so I'm expecting to be swimming in those.  I planted some ben lear cranberries, but it'll be awhile before we see anything out of those.  I also put in an aronia berry in with all the front stone fruit trees.  The grapes look good but it too early to tell if we'll actually have any grapes.  I did take a bunch of cutting to try to root.  So far I have one rooted to plant but the other 10 I started later haven't done anything yet.  I bought a couple Chicago figs but it might be years before we see anything from those and I think we'll need to put them in pots.

Orchard: We lost 2 apple trees last year with the drought, 7 remain.  2 of the 7 are ones that were here when we moved, the other 5 are very young...so not expecting to see much in the way of apples.  3 pear trees, all survived, one flowered but I'm not expecting anything out of it either.  2 cherry, I believe one is sweet, one sour so I need a pollinator for them.  2 plum, no blooms, 1 existing old apricot, loaded with blooms and they didn't get killed off this  year so here's hoping that's another fruit I'll have to stash away.  4 peach, no blooms.

Maples: We made maple syrup for the very first time this year.  It was so easy, just time consuming.  We ended up with right around a gallon which should keep us for 6 months or more.  I figured that the equipment was paid for by the savings of that gallon, but we pretty much broke even.  We'll be id-ing maples for next year's tap so we should have even better ROI.

Poultry: We borrowed an incubator this year from a fellow homesteading friend and we've been hatching non-stop since it's arrival.  5 goslings, 1 duckling, 12 chicks.....the plan is that boys go to freezer camp, girls going the laying crew.  Should be good quality protein for us.  I have in the incubator now turkey and more ducks eggs. Our  fresh eggs sales help offset the chicken/duck/turkey/goose feed.  Part of this self sufficiency thing has to include animals that pay their way either in grocery bill savings or by product sales.

Rabbits? : The plan was to add rabbits this year, but I'm having doubts that we will.  Things are just moving so fast and I kind of hate to move rabbits in with summer's heat coming soon.

Milk:  Ahhh, we finally have a milk source.  Her name is Siren.  She's a dairy goat.  Actually she's the second goat we purchased this year.  The other one is Zada, bred to our buck, Sonny, and due in July.  Any boys will go to freezer camp, girls we'll add to the dairy crew.  The other great thing about goat's milk is of course soap.  I'm planning to head to the farmer's market this year with goat milk soap and other goat milk products that are legal in Indiana .

What else.  Hmm.  I think being the wife of the house I tend to worry most about food and nutrition preparedness.  My husband tackles things like guns, ammo, home repairs,.....we have that going on too.