Post by Leah Mack on Sept 11, 2007 7:06:55 GMT -5
Hi all,
It was so sweet to look back at my recent post about the averted medical problem and see all the notes asking how I'm doing and what is new. I felt so loved!
This has been such a BUSY summer. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but holey moley! This is our first summer in our new homestead, which is enough, but also our son turned two in July and that has really kept me on my toes!
We've been so busy in fact that we took the summer off from milking. For one thing, we had taken down our old stantion and are only now building the new one, so I was milking a half wild cow who was tied to a pole and antsy for her son while squatting on the side of a hill, with a toddler in the backpack half the time. Not a good arrangement. And then we were bottle feeding the milk back to our Jersey calf. Eventually we saw the light and just fostered the calf onto our cow (which was easy as pie. We must have a good cow.)
Last winter we milked inside this huge black metal tank that happens to be on our property. It was far from ideal. Now we have a shiny new barn and we are starting construction on the stantion now. Learned a lot last time around. Hoping to do a better job this time. Our current cow (hereford jersey looking mystery cross) has never been in a stantion so we'll have to work on that. We are planning to wean the calves and take back up with milking in the near future.
Meanwhile we also have a pair of baby guinea hogs (critical on the ALBC list) we are going to breed if we can figure out how to keep them contained. Also our regular pair of feeder pigs and a big chicken flock. We got ducks but we hated their personalities so we ate them all. It was our first experience with butchering. My contribution was to watch and try not to lose my lunch. My husband had no problem with it though. They didn't have much meat on them but the freshly dug potatoes we cooked underneath them were heavenly.
Also have two horses who have re-surfaced from my childhood coming, probably this week! When you throw in the big, new garden, the new orchard that has to be hand watered, the new well and the old decrepit house that needs work, building a barn and having our garage converted for my mother in law and all the day to day of cooking everything from scratch because I can't help being a health fanatic, life has been fabulous and computer time has been scarce. Good news is that I quite my part time job two weeks ago and now all my time can go to this homestead and family. Yay!
That's us in a (big) nutshell. I'd love to hear from some of you how your summers were / are.
take care, Leah
It was so sweet to look back at my recent post about the averted medical problem and see all the notes asking how I'm doing and what is new. I felt so loved!
This has been such a BUSY summer. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but holey moley! This is our first summer in our new homestead, which is enough, but also our son turned two in July and that has really kept me on my toes!
We've been so busy in fact that we took the summer off from milking. For one thing, we had taken down our old stantion and are only now building the new one, so I was milking a half wild cow who was tied to a pole and antsy for her son while squatting on the side of a hill, with a toddler in the backpack half the time. Not a good arrangement. And then we were bottle feeding the milk back to our Jersey calf. Eventually we saw the light and just fostered the calf onto our cow (which was easy as pie. We must have a good cow.)
Last winter we milked inside this huge black metal tank that happens to be on our property. It was far from ideal. Now we have a shiny new barn and we are starting construction on the stantion now. Learned a lot last time around. Hoping to do a better job this time. Our current cow (hereford jersey looking mystery cross) has never been in a stantion so we'll have to work on that. We are planning to wean the calves and take back up with milking in the near future.
Meanwhile we also have a pair of baby guinea hogs (critical on the ALBC list) we are going to breed if we can figure out how to keep them contained. Also our regular pair of feeder pigs and a big chicken flock. We got ducks but we hated their personalities so we ate them all. It was our first experience with butchering. My contribution was to watch and try not to lose my lunch. My husband had no problem with it though. They didn't have much meat on them but the freshly dug potatoes we cooked underneath them were heavenly.
Also have two horses who have re-surfaced from my childhood coming, probably this week! When you throw in the big, new garden, the new orchard that has to be hand watered, the new well and the old decrepit house that needs work, building a barn and having our garage converted for my mother in law and all the day to day of cooking everything from scratch because I can't help being a health fanatic, life has been fabulous and computer time has been scarce. Good news is that I quite my part time job two weeks ago and now all my time can go to this homestead and family. Yay!
That's us in a (big) nutshell. I'd love to hear from some of you how your summers were / are.
take care, Leah