Just another Day on the Farm

Ok, I know that some of you will be unhappy or upset or just why? when I announce this..

So here goes, We are moving Girl off the farm.. a number of reason’s to be honest, way way to much milk for our personal needs, way to much feed costs, and the biggest reason of all..

Girl is to big! I know that my horse’s weigh just as much as her but they don’t use their strength the same way as she does, they might lean over and nibble the grass but she will just break the fence down, they respect the gates, Girl has broken two of them in a short while, now instead of easy gate, I have full chains on them..

I am not set up for a cow that wants to break fence, I am not set up for a cow that wants to be pushy, I need my animals to work with what I have.

No offence to Girl in any way. and we love raising our own beef on the farm, and we do well raising a bucket calf to a year old, they don’t get to full of themselves, and I raise them to have a lot more respect then I did with Girl..

Which leaves us stuck on how are we moving her off the farm, while I adore the cross that she is, its not a sellable cross as a typical family milk cow, while she produced far more milk then I could use,  she can’t be used in a dairy, and cost on feed for her, makes her a very very hard sell as a family milk cow.

Which leave’s selling her into a beef herd, well first, again the cross is a good one for being a momma cow and she is proven but the only one locally that use’s that mix is Farmer R and he does not want her as he considers her a danger because she does not have the proper cow/owner flight bubble..

I won’t take her to the sales barn!

Which leave me with really one main choice.. freezer camp.. To say that I hate the idea of it is a understatement.. to say that it can reduce me to tears would be more right..

But when you can’t safely walk your own pastures without worry, when you can’t leave your farm without locking them up, because the cow once again broke the fence, broke the gate and lets not just herself out but the sheep and the horse’s..

What if last time, one the horse’s had been hit on the road, what if they have not gone next door where a friend lives and they could just be brought back home, if they had roamed, it could have been real! issues

We can’t turn our back on her, she is untrustworthy and when DH says.. she needs to go.. she needs to go!

Sometimes farming life sucks!

The turnips are thinking its spring, some type;s of squash are turning, my best keeper are the specetti squash and of course the butternut, my big main go to winter squash.

How’s the stuff in your root cellar holding? I figure I have around four hundred or so pounds in winter storage still available to me at this time, how about you?

Lets talk about pet care and being frugal, there are regular and routine things that your pets need and believe it or not, most things they need (thankfully) you can still get and use yourself, they do not point in fact require a trip to the vets to make it happen.

Now once a year or once every three year for the checkup and the rabies shot is important, in our county, you can get the rabies done at the rabies clinic, no exam, very very low cost once a year, worth considering..

Also if you have a your large animal vet coming out for a visit to the farm, ask if they will do the smaller critters at the same time, save you time, save you money and save the gas money and trip stress etc.

The basic’s for care are simple, good food, clean water, warm dry shelter..

Well sort of.. there is a little more then that, if you provide the above you are meeting the needs but you are not really practising frugal pet care..

Frugal pet care is different, if you want to be succesfull at it, you need all the above but you also need to daily little checks, smell breaths, check teeth, check ears, give a whole body massage to feel skin, look at eyes and gums.

You need to learn to read the poo’s, read the animals body lang, if you do this you will see small things that go off and can fix them well before you need a trip to the vets.

If your pet gets ear mites, good old fashioned olive oil or any other kind of oil will with a bit of work on your part clear them up, in a nut shell, the oil smothers the mites, killing them, and allowing you to gently clean out the outer ear as the inner sheds out the gunk.

If your pet gets worms, try and keep to a regular worming schedule, now most folks go to the vet for their worming meds and pay though the nose, and if you want to do that, fine but if not, hit amazon, go to the feed store, pick up your worming meds online, read the rules, ALWAYS! weigh your animal, measure twice and then use the product as it was meant to be and you are going to get as good of coverage as going to the vet.

Got a hot spot, catch it early and treat it, one of the biggest thing about frugal pet care, it will require you to be much much more active, you will need to clean, dry and put medication x times a day, typically if you want a pill once or twice a day and then let it work, the vet is the better call, if you have time, then frugal will work, you can make a bone broth to support the immune system, you can make a nice nettle tea for on the food that will act as a natural anti-inflammatory, trimming, washing, drying and using the correct herbal salve will with the animals natural healing ability’s get the job done.

Tiny knicks and cuts can be treated at home using common sense..

Grooming and bathing at home are going to save you a lot of money compared to sending them out, get good quality shampoo’s, invest in your tools and you will soon find you are able to be a very good groomer.

I know someone that pays 65 dollars every six weeks to have their dogs bathed, and nails done, and then every second time, they pay another 40 to have them clipped.. include the gas to drive them to and fo, and the costs of the extra’s, they need their anal glands expressed and that costs more, they need these drops for their eyes or their ears, they need this mix to sprinkle on the food and the list goes on.. Hundred and Hundreds spent on each dog and give that there are more then one.. it adds up to thousands per year!

You can easily save hundreds of dollars per pet per year if you are willing to do the work yourself.

Well, I will admit it,  I am feeling the need to take stock, I need to take my clip board and I need to do inventory on my cellar, and pantry’s, I need to do this for a number of reason’s,

A) The most basic, I need to see how much I have in storage compared to what I “Should” have in storage..  this is just solid stewardship.

B) I have changed the way we are eating as we are currently on a Fertility Diet, and this means that not only do I need to look at my cellar with a different eye but I need to plan it in two ways at the moment. I need to split my food storage into two slightly different ways of seeing and thinking about things..

1) Long terms storage for “what if”, now typically my what if is based on working to control of the rising food costs, I still like to have a min of two years of certain things, right now, we can afford to pay for my fertility diet but I would be a fool to not continue to plan for the “what if my husband lost his job” or the “what if we had a bad garden season and I got nothing from it due to a storm or ?”

This means that while I currently are limited or not eating certain foods, I can and will continue to store them, using them sparely but still very much wanting them, examples at the moment would be rice, wheat flour, pasta, jam, jellies, (made with lots of sugar) sugar etc

2) On the flip side, I need to have a much better understanding of what I currently have in terms of root cellar, canned veggies and fruits along with meats.. because I am looking at being on my fertility diet for a min of one to three years..  This means that I need to lot more veggies put up, I need a lot more use it in the next six months fruits put up in very light or fruit juice, in order to keep the costs of buying fresh out of season.

C) This information will be what allows me to plan my garden season for 2014, this is very important to work to help keep costs down. With the huge increase in cost in herb’s, medication, tests, we are already outputting hundreds of dollars per month on the quest for fertility health and general health combined with weight loss, finding a way to lower down the food costs would be a very, very! welcome thing indeed.

D) Need to find a ways to increase the odds of not losing food, this year alone, across Canada, I have watched there be, floods, storms and quakes, plus cold, bitter, BITTER< DEEP >COLD.. and while I have some things in place, I find my plans lacking to a point..

Each of these need to be addressed and considered and then ideally better plans put into place, and ideally each plan needs at least one backup plan.. which hopefully to a point will allow overlap, example a old fashioned properly done hanging lamp will throw enough heat to keep the cellar above 0, but its risky because it requires flames, and I don’t feel like burning my house down, so its a backup to the backup, I can use it if I truly need to but I don’t want it to be the first line of defence by any means

So has any of the many, many recent nature related issues in your neck of the woods or in your country made you stop and think? If so, what are you planning on doing about it?

Coconut Cabbage Salad

• Half a head of hard green cabbage chopped
• One apple, chopped in, green if you want it to blend, red if you want a color boost
• 1/2 cup of dried sweetened cranberries
• 1/2 cup of coconut shredded
• 1/ 4th cup of almond slivers or sliced
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tbsp. of mayo
• 2 tbsp. of coconut syrup

This is truly just a awesome and amazing tasty cabbage salad, Big Brother brought me back a small bottle of coconut syrup from their trip to Maui and this is the first thing I have done with it 🙂

It never fails to amaze me just how much folks are judged by how they look.. It was a interesting weekend in so many ways, I will get into lots of details on the horse blog, as I took not just one but two  clinic’s this weekend, one day was all about equine dental and hoof training and care, the second was on Mounted Search and Rescue.

Now I meets some very fine ladies, and some excellent instuctors, and I had a good time and let me make this perfectly clear, I did not in any way feel unwelcome, and in fact I expect that if I was to run into at least couple of the ladies just in general life, we would stop chit-chat and if I ever went riding to some of the local events, I would feel that the weekend of getting to know them would be enough that I would be willing to head off alone and feel comfortable for the day.

But having said that, I am a people watcher, both for other and for myself and wow the amount of looks, and judgement that was taking place over the two days hit me and stuck me a bit..

They were there to read, body shifting, eyes lowering, eye rolling, crossing of legs, crossing of arms and even worse, the curl of the lip at times,  Only one got to me, there was a person, that to tell the truth I liked, but he took one look at me and dismissed me.. It was not even a underestimate, it was a clear dismissal, I was not worth his time..

I think it surprised me a bit, but I wanted him to answer two questions for me, and when I want info, I am like a dog with a bone, I will get it.. He blew me off AGAIN, the eyes went up and down my obese body and he just “knew” I was not worth answering, I smiled, and engaged again, this time he blew me off on my question based on cost!  That! was were my temper sparked..

You see I don’t really give a furry rats behind if you want to judge me based on my body, its mine, it does it job and I am blessed with remarkably good health all things considered, but to decide at a glace that I am poor pissed me off, I am frugal, and I will admit that I do drive a old paid for vehicle, and yes, my clothes are well worn and I don’t much do makeup etc, but that just means that when I WANT to do something, I do have the funds to make it happen or I will tighten the belt, save and get it done..

So I know I got the steel in the eye and my voice got just a little grr to it, and I said, I would like the name of the company offering the course,  he said, its for folks of advanced level..  folks that have spent time in the bush.

I had a choice, walk away or give a lesson, on judging a book by its cover, I could have gone girly and given info in a flirty way but I was beyond that, so I started asking him questions, one the first, he looked at me funny, but by the fifth one, as I pressed for more details and dismissed his basic’s by answering them, he finally!!  blinked and the head went back, the shoulder’s softened and he said, where all have you lived mam?

After I answered him, he went Oh, and suddenly, he wants my contact and the information I was looking for flowed forth, and it was useful and I am grateful for it, I will use in the future.

However, I watched more minor but there interactions between the rest of the folks at the clinic’s, Why do we all judge and I am not better, I did it myself, there was a person at the one that asks what I don’t consider newbie or even basic, I consider it common sense, and it bugged me that so much of the time was taken up answering questions that a month spent with your horse would give you the answers.

I think that was one thing that really struck me, the clinic’s were filled with women, and the instructors in both cases were men, the one day it was a younger man who was highly skilled in his trade and he was like going to collage and getting a really good school lecture with question and answer, he flowed like a river but his bottom line was simple

Spend time with your horse and listen to them, if they understand what you are asking of them, and they choose to act out, take the time to figure out why, rather then assume they are being bad or willful!

The second clinic had three but the one did most of the horse stuff and he was a trail rider, packer and while living in Ontario was western (alberta an B.C.) though and though, Loved listening and learning from him..

His message was simple, your horse is always learning, its only going to be as good of a horse as you help make it by doing things with it, and here was the big one, it will only go as far as your trust in it will..

That is a true statement if I have ever heard it.. If you ask your horse to do something, and you think it can’t, the odds are darn likely that you will fall, if you ask your horse to do something and you believe in they can do it, 99 percent of the time, they will prove you right..

I would love to think that one day, we will be judged by our actions instead of our looks but I don’t think that will ever truly be the case..

So tell me, when was the last time that you were judged just by looks, no time taken by the person to even try to see if you had the knowledge or skills to do it?

Well, Saturday I headed off for a really good equine dental and hoof clinic, and today I headed out to a horse search and rescue clinic (it had good points but not quite as good as the one yesterday) and then this afternoon, headed out with friends for the first horseback ride of 2014..  The weather broke and I think most horse folks took advantage of it and did their best to get out and ride today!