Ok I swear I didn’t want to talk about this one on the blog, I had a number of folks email letting me know about what was happening in regards to this one, that the cull was coming, I went- I read the owner’s of the flock website and little red flag after little red flag went up, and I really! wanted to have the offical other side but unlike the owner, the other side was keeping their side much more private publicly..
Then came the sheep napping, and I was so pissed I couldn’t see straight for about ten min, DH hubby got to listen to me rant and it was a true one, I went up and down from one end to the other, I try and keep a even balance on this blog between who I am and keeping some things private, but in order to understand why I say, I went from one end to the other, you need to understand that I am the type of person that votes, and lets them know how I feel on many polital subjects- not just once, and not just with one party..
I am the type of person that does not just send one letter, I have been known to write letters, call every single party till I get someone to speak with and not just provide my name and comment but want a followup letter back so that I know that at least ONE person has heard me. I have been known to call my MP on certain issues every single time they annouce on the issue. DH and I are both willing to go to seminars and marches, join groups we support etc. I have seen my man, take the day off work to go picket with a sign on the hill..
So I ran the from Big Brother Snarl, Snarl, share the whole story with the public and we have rights, covering ground on social media and how it can be used to both in a good an bad way, and how I could clearly see “issues” with a number of things that had a wicked amount of spin on them(by the owner of the flock, not the goverment in this case) and finally ended up in the…” needs and wants of one can NOT outway the good of all”
So when yesterday I read the next statement that a sheep has a confirmed case and then say the owner go all big brother, its not real, the results are not real, and its all a set up, and once again a read a very pointed and well done letter from Ontario Sheep Board (which in truth said it far more clearly and honestly then I could have) I was once again blown away by just how badly this could end for so many..
I pray and hope that whoever has this sheep has a clear proven line of direct from here to here and that they didn’t cross the path of any other sheep flocks, I hope that their being taken does not lead to many more sheep deaths in order to contain this mess..
And What a mess it is, I care for my animals, and in some cases it cross’s that line to a feeling of love and I would do everything I could to give them the best chance at it but sometimes you need to suck! it up and deal. I honestly feel for the person who had this happen to them, I have no doubt at all that their world has been flipped upside down.
However life often does not go as planned, and sometimes it sucks! and you are allowed to be angry, sad and have days where you cry but then you get the hell up and pull up your boots and get back to building and working your life… One foot forward somedays is all you can do, so be it..
Its not healthy or good to drag down the rest of us if you choose to stay in one spot and flail, which is how I see this personally, this person, these peaple took what was a personal stuggle with all the good/bad/ugly things that went with it and CHOSE to make it my problem and every other single sheep owners in ontario and in canada’s problem.. and let me tell you, I will stand up and fight for our rights as peaple, but don’t kick your mud into my pool!!!
I hope that they find that flock and soon, and I hope and pray that this mess will not lead to other flocks deaths and I also hope that it will not effect the market for ontario lamb both at farm gate sales and in stores.. but I see so many “maybe’s and what if’s ” that this could go anyway..
You see this is all my fault, when I made the list of “cool” things to add to the farm in terms of gardening, I put “Hardy Kiwi” on the list but the prices of this plant in the garden catalogs always keep me from ordering it, it gets put on the list each year but it always gets bumped down for something else that we could use more.. However that means that Dh see’s it on the list..
So about two years ago, he said.. we really should get those Kiwi for our zone, after all, you know what they say, plant now for food for tomorrow line.. and I just kinda did the ugh ok.. and they didn’t get ordered..
But for the first time ever, guess what was at one of our favorite garden centers, yup, really great priced looking lovely big pots of hardy kiwi, now its is of the “self-fertile kind” but I will still be ordering a male shortly and keeping him very pruned and small but if we are going to put the effort into the girls, I want the most bang for my buck, and the boy will make sure that we get lots of fruit, and that the fruit will be fertile, if we just have the self-fruitful females, we will get less of a crop and the fruit will be sterile.
This is not my own photo, it’s a stock one-off the net.
Now once I got home and had time to look up this hardy kiwi in my books and on the computer.. O-va.. what a project, each vine will require at least 15 feet or more of very heavy-duty support, and each one can with care and time produce upwards of 100 pds of small large green grape non-fuzzy kiwi fruit.. now that means I could get upwards of 400 pds of kiwi fruit per year.. now sure what I would do with it.. but first lets work on the support structure and getting them off to a good start and worry about what to do with the fruit afterwards.
So the big question is do we build a solid wood structure to hold it, or do we build a huge heavy-duty 6 foot high 3 wire overhead structure.. so any of you grow Hardy Kiwi, and if so, what structure did you decide on? Are you happy with it? What would you keep the same, what would you change? How long did it take you to get fruit? on the plants after planting them out? What is your favorite way to use the fruit?
Right now, I have two ducks sitting on big old nest’s, one is due this week and one is due next week, the one nest has 18 eggs and the other 15 eggs, typically the girls hatch out 12 to 16 little one’s.. So I am both really looking forward to seeing little fuzzies arriving..
Very excited that appleduck decided to sit on a huge nest this year, I think she is being a little hopeful sitting on 23 eggs but I am pleased to see that a second nest is also being laid and that a Blue Swedish hen looks to be going broody.. So that means I should ducklings that are swedish laying ducks (purebred) and half Appleyard/Swedish crosses for my regular ducks plus of course my other two big girls who will hatch me a lovely flock that will grow up to be freezer camped.
I’m not done yet, I have two rabbit does due this week as well, and I am expecting some pretty, pretty babies, I breed a solid chocolate brown doe with great bone and a truly plush coat to my lovely big broken blue boy. My second breeding is a lovely red broken who is as sturdy as they get to the same broken blue buck.. I should not only have a mix of solid and broken coats but I have upwards to at least four or more possable coat colors that could pop out in the mix..
Looking forward to seeing what they have in both numbers, colors, patterns and sex’s..
Between Friends moving and a little curb shopping, we added in these items to the farm on the weekend.
One small pop-up greenhouse
12 8 foot pen panels plus 2 gates
4 by 4 chick or duckling raising box
1 large glass wine making jug
2 1 liter brown wine making jugs
1 full new case of canning jars
1 large box of assorted canning jars, and box’s of lids
1 bag of assorted rags, and cloths etc
1 Green Large living room Chair
3 Pink livingroom chairs(that fit together, one corner with a side on each)
1 Full Size Sears Hide-a-bed with mattress couch(as you can see it is approved by hound and purrpot alike, I agree with them, very comfy!)
Went a huge two ring farm sale on saturday and bought enough that we needed to trips to bring it all home..
64 4 inch by 6 inch round cake pans
5-3 loaf bread pans
6 huge bun pans
2 French loaf pans
14 wire freezer baskets
40 Welded Wire Trays with 2 inch lips
Small Cast Iron 7 Egg or Po Pan
Small Steel 2 shelve Table
2 Med Size Water Troughs on wood bottoms with castors
So what do you think? Did I find some amazing things to add to the farm/house/barns, all total we spent less than $200 the whole weekend. Which items have you scratching your head? Which ones got you going, ya-lucky duck?!
Just a few thoughts on things that seem like they are odd one’s but in truth I think are Awesome deals!.. Lets start with those metal round cake pans, so some of them will end up as feed bowls, some will end up as measuring bowls in the steel feed bins, but most of them will end up in my house (or in truth more in my freezers), being 4 inches high and six inches round, they are perfect size for a two meal dinner, and they stack, so I am planning on making meat pies, a couple different Shepard pies, some homemade lasagna and lazy man cabbage rolls, a lazy man progies, along with fruit pies and five into round loaves of bread dough and five or so into fruit buns. This way when I leave the farm or its summer and crazy busy, DH can pull a bread pan out, thaw in the fridge during the day and bake-off when he gets home, and or for the meal ones, he can pull his choice out of the freezer, into the oven when he gets home and by the time he is done chores, it will be hot and ready with a full leftover second portion for his lunch the next day.. suddenly having 60 when looked at that way, and they will be so! useful.
Then comes all those freezer wire baskets, DH is going to make me a shelf for them to hang from and now I have open air drying and storage baskets for things like onions, and garlic and the list goes on!
So what idea’s would come up with if you had them? I would love to hear them?
That huge stack of welded heavy-duty 2 inch lips wire trays, Going to take them to the care wash and clean them up and in the summer, will lay one tray with greens, cover with a second tray and then clip them together and hang on the big tree branches to air dry massive amounts at a time on the good natural drying days, and then second, they are perfect size to fit my pantry shelves and with those 2 inch lips, they will work great to hold small jars in rows and keep them from shifting on the higher shelves, so that I can have them be the open rows where I can see everything instead of in the box’s etc.
Well, It has taken more years then I want to say for us to go from when we bought this farm, with no fences other then a number of dog runs from the attached kennel building to have fenced off the Big Barn Pasture, the Corner Pasture, the Small Pasture, the Big Pasture, the Baby Pasture, and the Main Garden, we only have three more area’s to fence, and then we can work on cross fencing off the Big Pasture and then the Small Pasture into lots or maybe just maybe at that point, we will do with solar electic for some of the cross fencing.
Needless to say, we still have about an acre and half still unfenced or around 65 340 Sq feet, let me tell you, when you fence by hand, it takes alot longer then anyone thinks. However thanks to friends of ours we have been graced with borrowed built fencing panels for a number of years.
Which will allow us to make a 400 sqaure foot instant paddock at a time. So I am going to try my hand at using this to be moved across the remaining unfenced area thoughtout the spring/summer/fall in the methods talked about in one of my books on pasture management, not only will this mean that I will be able to move my flock around but, it also means that I will be able to rest my big pasture for however many days it will take me to finish a full round of the mini paddocks, which would be a very good thing indeed.
Updates will follow, will that space be enough for my flock for a day or will I have to move it twice daily? It means that there should be around 163 mini paddocks and so I can do two fully eaten mini paddocks a day and still get 80 days worth of grazing on them and ideally I want to give the Big Pasture at least a sixty day rest, before starting it on the same mini paddock eating, they say that I can double my pasture yeild, and increase my pasture qaulity on the same amount of land if I graze them this way.. so let find out if they are right!
Well, I have to admit that I needed and had a sleep day on the farm, it is interesting to me the difference between a town sleep day and farm sleep day..
When we lived in town if I felt unwell and really needed to go to sleep, you just go to bed, there is not much that can’t wait, If there is a sink full of dishes, they will still be there when you get up, if you need to water your plants, they really can wait till tomorrow, even if you garden in town, were as things might be ready to be picked that day, they will hold till the next.. and the same can be said to a point for house pets, o sure your kitty may think she is “so hard” done by because the water is still the same as it was in the morning when it was done, or that the food didn’t get its fresh topping up but in truth, she can either drink the stale water or wait for you to get up in six hours and then sit by the bowl and howl her protest..
But sleep days on the farm are different, they require you to get up, get dressed, slog your way out and do the chores before you can come back in the house, get undressed and crawl back into bed! Farm hounds and house purrpots all seem to be able to read the warning signs better then they did in town, they will all curl up and sleep with you, trying their best to be quiet and hoping that by pressing their warm bodies next to you, that you will get better faster!
Sleep day’s in the kitchens don’t change much from town to farm, not really.. its still fast food, open a can vs open a jar, or hubby you are making supper tonight, I guess it’s a little different in the fact that there are bowls of eggs to be used on the farm, where as they would not be seen in the same way in town.
Now for all your folks that have little ones, I imagine that it all changes again, depending on age and if they can help you at all or not.. All I know is that I really needed a sleep day yesterday and I took it, I slept the whole afternoon away, and it was lovely to say the least..
Hopefully I will be able to make up a few things that didn’t get done yesterday today, but even if I don’t, even if it takes me a couple days to get caught back up on the same level that I was at before my sleep day, I am not going to feel bad about it.
The farm will still be there when you wake up, and as long as everyones basic needs are meet before you went to sleep, then sleep a honest sleep and know all those extra’s can hold for a day!
While I have played around with growing Potato’s in towers, in strawbales and even in last years “sacrifice outside winter feeding area” the way we grow most of our potato’s is in our double dug 3 foot wide W planted beds.
With alot more work, you can start this with raw land or you can do the same process much faster with already worked garden soil.. now the downside of this is that its a tilled method,so for those that want a no-till garden only this is not going to work for you..
We follow the old (honestly I don’t know how old this method is but I have found it recommended for potato’s as far back as the 1800’s in books), lay down a sheet or tarp and dig out your first row of dirt, placing it on the tarp, have a a good amount of well rotted compost, sprinckle an inch or two of your compost on the trench line, then cut and flip the second row top side down into the line, repeat till the bed is done or until multiple beds are done. I don’t have a picture of this part so I snagged a drawing on it from a UK garden Site.
Personally we almost always double dig all our beds for the any kind of root veggies, I do it very different for above ground plants. It works in a number of way, by flipping the top to the bottom that has been lined with active well rotten compost, the top green dies to help feed the soil itself, and the roots are on the top and you can pull them out and gives you a helping hand on keeping on top of them.
Now is where we leave this method and move to another one, once I get my soil ready, I don’t want to ever! step on that bed and compact that soil down, and I consider walkways that are all done into garden soil that is used as a walk way to be a total waste of my hard work!
So its at this point that we grab our big long handled rakes and make free form 3 foot wide raised beds in the garden. So you start at the top of a bed and you use your rake to pull the walkway dirt up onto your raised bed area, only once that is done, do you step onto the pathway and then pull from the other side. Three feet is ideal as you can stand on your paths and reach the middle from both sides, it also means that you can then choose a number of different seed/planting styles depending on what you are growing.
We did get in a very early row of seed potato’s in one bed done for a total of 28 plants, We filled in the walkways with straw to help keep weeds down, and over the next two or three weeks, we will pull all the starting weeds and once the potato’s pop up, then we will do our first cover on the top of the bed and will build the hills as they grow from there. I will add in a one more extra to the bed just before I do my first strawbedding hilling, which is to cut down fresh stinging nettles, and lay them on the soil before I cover it, I am not 100% certain why this makes such a difference but let me tell you, if you grow nettles, give this one a try and see if it makes as big of a difference in your garden as it does mine!
So, tell me what is your favorite way to grow your spuds?!
So two days ago on the CBC, while I was washing floors for the billionth time, I was very interested in the story of what was happening in regards to fallout from Jamie Olivers showing of just how meat scrapes are processed off in large factories, and I was quite amused that the person defending it, was sure to just call it “Recovered Beef” and that it was very important that consumers understand that .
Now before I get to some thoughts on this, I would very much like to point out that according the Wikepedia Pink Slime page..
Pink slime is not permitted in Canada. In a statement, Health Canada stated that: “Ammonia is not permitted in Canada to be used in ground beef or meats during their production.” Such products also may not be imported, as Canadian law requires that imported meat products meet the same standards and requirements as domestic meat.
Canada does allow Finely Textured Meat to be “used in the preparation of ground meat” and “identified as ground meat” under certain conditions.
This really got me thinking about meaty bones, which has lead to this post.. when I have my lambs done, I don’t have him clean my bones, they are just cut clean and left that way, this means that the lamb/hoggot bones that I get back are very much like any meaty bone I would have from my own home self-butchering..
Lets look at some typical meaty bones, now I could have gotten a bit more off with time and a good knife but this is typical for the shoulder bones, they don’t come of near as clean for me as does other bones.
So would you want to “throw this much meat away” I know I would not, when I boil off a cooked chicken, I typically get at least a cup or two of chicken bits, same with duck and even more with turkey, when I do a leg of lamb, typically what is left on the bone is enough for a big! pot of soup to be made..
While I don’t want Pink Slime, and I do totally understand that meat scrapes in a big butcher shop should not be compared to the meat scraps that I get from my own small butcher but! this would be a amazing amount of wasted meat if it was just taken out of the system as a whole..
So what do I think should be done!, I think we should have a “use the bone” socal media blizt, and by this I mean if the bloggers and twitter folk can have this huge effect on getting the news out that “We don’t want Pink Slime” I say Awesome!
However, I don’t want to see those meaty bones going to waste, and I don’t believe that the meat left on a bone after the process is dog food (sorry Jamie, but If that is true, then I have been eating “dog” scrapes for my whole life), so I say.. lets start our own grassroots movement.
Lets all post about meaty bones and just how awesome they are! and give recipes to back our claims!
There are a couple choices on how to use those bones, you can make soups and stews in which case you do a slow simmer on the meaty bones, drawing out all the marrow goodness and cooking till the meat falls off the bone, and its excellent eating that way but its not the only choice you have.
You can also roast your meaty bones with a bit of broth or water till the meat is fork tender pull of, and it can be used for sandwhich’s, potted meats, or anywhere else you would typically use cooked meat for, after you have taken the meat off, don’t forget that those roasted bones will still make you excellent bone broth for later use!
Lamb Soup with Greens
So what say you? Do you use your meaty bones in your kitchen? What is your favorite recipe? If you do blog about this, please come back and link it up to the post, I look forward to hearing what you come up with?
Hi Folks,
I love blogging and trust me that is not going to stop! but I often have just little things I want to share, fun, silly or interesting tidbits at least to me but not nearly big enough for a proper post, and I also often have many “one off” or “odd” or “funny” photos in regards to the critters, the farm or our little trips off the farm, that just don’t match up with the different blog posts I am working on, and so I have whole files filled with great photos that just beg for sharing!
There will be cross linking with what is written on the blog, and most likely a few reposting of some of my favorite bloggers or interesting news stories with comments..
So if any of the above interests you, feel free to use the link ! If not, no worries, the blog will move along as normal 🙂
Just another Day on the Farm 