A Two Wheel Barrow Homestead

Yesterday in the city we picked up another wheel barrow. Our old wheel barrow is pretty much just a mixing and holding area for the cows sweet treat mix. Our cows are 100% grain free so we mix them up a special grain free treat for milking time. They love it. Here the old wheel barrow in its spot inside the woodshed. This wheel barrow has hauled uncounted numbers of loads of stucco, and it shows. It's got a bit of a wobble. It still works great, honest, it's just not quite reliable enough to haul heavy loads of stucco anymore..probably wasn't really last year either but Papa is good at making it work. It's been retired from stucco hauling and 'put out to pasture' as a cow candy machine. 

Here is the new stucco hauler, wood hauler and all around work horse.  J put it together this morning. Beautiful ain't she? 

So I guess in the world of the homesteaders...We are now a TWO wheel barrow operation 😉

100% Grassfed Holsteins

Papa and I have the only 100% grassfed dairy cows in our area, that we know of. Probably the only one in the northern half of our Province.  There was one about 6 hours from us several years ago but we aren't sure if it's still running. Most people don't believe that Holsteins can survive our winters without lots of grain and a barn (and we have neither!) and you'd be amazed at their reactions when they see our 'fat' holsteins. BTW we think Maggie is FAT, MOST farmers who see Isabel think she is the fattest Holstein they've ever seen... until they see Maggie :) In fact Maggie is so fat we think it might be hindering the AI attempts. I took these pictures this morning. 

Isabel, above,  is 6 months into her lactation. Her calf Ivan was born a few days before Christmas. She's giving about 12 gallons of milk a day average. Some days it's more. The pigs and chicks are loving the extra milk :) Until we got the chicks I made cheese almost every day for several weeks. The milk production went up with the arrival of green grass and we scrambled for a bit to find something to do with it, besides feed it to the 17 littler pigs who love it. (I say Littler because they are really not that little anymore! Most of them are around 175lbs with several of them 200lbs.) 

Maggie's calf Milton was a year in March so she's been milking for 15 months. She's still giving about 4, 4.5 gallons a day. We'll probably dry her up after chick butchering, IF the last AI attempt worked, until then her milk is going into the meat birds. 

Completed Sign!!

Pantry April 2014

Papa and Mr. E have been working on walls up and the pantry... Here are some pictures for you :) 

Papa is also almost done the wiring and our first inspection is Tuesday. For those of you who know us, we found out we have to have it inspected before our hydro company will switch the power over. So now we can't finish any walls until he gives it the ok. 

This is looking thru where the pantry doors will go. The bottom 3 on the right are pull out boxes on wheels for flour/sugar and oats. The face plates aren't on yet.

The little shelf to the left will open from both the pantry and the kitchen, thru the stud wall. The end wall in this picture will be my canning wall.

The right end cannot be finished at this time as we will need to be able to walk through the wall for a bit. The counter top is 2 feet wide and made of oak. There will also be shelves on the top which will be 18 inches wide and various sizes. I wanted a counter for work/mixing space and to store stuff like meat grinders ect. The counter is quite high as well which I really like. 

The pull out boxes, they will have lids and face plates yet :) 

 The drawers pull out all the way without tipping thanks to some very cool runners! 

The drawers are specially made for canning lids and rings. With drawers on the bottom for canners.

General Update. Nov. 2013

I went on the computer to the blog tonight to make sure I don't forget how to blog. It's been a bit crazy around here you see and I'm still trying to get my feet back under me and remember that there are other things to do besides school, butchering, and housework and parenting.. well when the kids are asleep anyway. SO here you go... general update of our life.. crazy as it is :)

We've had two birthdays, which reminds me I need to change my about me again. E turned 7, and I already blogged about that here. And G turned two and we had her party last week. I'll hopefully post that soon. Other than that fun we've pretty much been busy putting up the animal harvest of the year.

Meatball the 3 year old steer we brought home, hung for two weeks and cut and wrapped and frozen. One simple sentence but a heck of a lot of meat and work since we did the entire thing ourselves. We sure are enjoying having beef again though :) OH and we bought a new meat grinder.. it's amazing!! Gobbles up the meat quick as a wink! Super quiet too.. Papa and I can chat while we work with this grinder.

6 pigs have hit the freezers, some for us, some for others. We have 4 more to do. There is a tote of sausage on the back porch waiting for Papa to smoke from our last butchering marathon. About 130 lbs of it. Pork pepperoni, summer and Mennonite sausage. Tastes great, we tried it all :) At one point we had a production line going. Papa cutting pork chops with the electric meat saw, J bringing them to the butcher table, L, E and R using canning rings to scrape the bone chips off and passing them to me to have the fat trimmed and do the final bagging. 10 chops to a bag. 12.5 bags. 3 pigs worth of chops. I don't see the point in packaging it in small packages.. I'm rarely going to get out just one bag. Normally I do two. Then we have leftovers :) I know.. we like to eat. We like to eat MEAT!!! lol. Papa's got bacon making in the back room and more frozen waiting to be sliced. Slicer is likely next on our to buy list as the place in town were we've always gotten it done can no longer slice it for us. Slicing bacon by hand is HARD WORK!! I don't mind work but 20 sides of bacon is a bit much to hand slice.

As we are butchering there is a lot of hides and innards and things in the lagoon.. which means we are seeing Eagles again. The kids have been taking pictures of them. So far there are only two but we are hoping we get the 8 or so we had last year later on in the season.

Term one of home schooling requirements 'to do' list was saved by a patch of cold weather.. kids couldn't spend much time outside so we actually almost finished the work for Term 1 before the deadline.. I don't feel to bad that we didn't. We only missed one assignment which is awesome work as we got 12 weeks of science and Social Studies work a mere month before the end of term. Some crazy changes to the curriculum in the school we go through. This term we are, hopefully, done with the changes and it will go smoother.

 R is reading and doing so wonderfully. She loves it and has been pecking away at her term 2 work for awhile now as she flew through her reading program. I'm really enjoying J's set up this year and he is too.. his system is a bit different now with his grade 4 teacher and we both like it.

S is doing really well. He's got cheeks :) Loves his jolly jumper. Tried banana's and HATED them. Sleeps long stretches at night, often is only up once around 5 or 6 am. And is in general a very happy smiley giggly little boy. He loves to laugh. If you laugh near him he bursts into giggles. Today I put him on his belly on the floor and he scooted.. later on I did it again and noticed he is bringing his knees up in order to move forward. Crawling is not far off. He has great hand eye coordination and rarely misses when he grabs things or shoves things in his mouth. I was going to wait until 6 months for solids but Papa's work has a Christmas Party that I want to attend so I will try him on cream of wheat soon. Just so I can go to the Party and Grandma will have something to feed him if she needs too. With the other boys I normally started solids at 4 months but S just isn't as hungry as L and J were. He's no where close to the constantly hungry J3 was at this age.. mind you he's only about 14 lbs and J3 was something like 20lbs at this age. S really is a Griggs :) J3 takes a bit more after my side of the family. I tried banana's just to see if he was really interested at all and he really was not. I'll likely wait another week now and try again. If nothing else I'll send it along and Grandma will have it if she needs it. The party will likely only last about 3 hours and we'll be near Grandma's house so I can go nurse him if I need too. And no I won't be leaving him a bottle.. I've not bottle fed the 1st six and I don't plan on starting with the 7th ;)

I realize I'm skipping around from family to farm but this next thing is both :) We got a couple more piglets to raise up on bottles. My uncle's pig had too many again and he brought two little female, gilts, piglets over Monday afternoon. We named them Sausage and Chops. The smaller one is Chops.. she's got attitude! They weighed in at 1.5 lbs and 3 lbs Monday when we got them. We are going to weigh them each week for a while and see how they grow. They are super cute. Sausage does seem to have a problem with her legs but it seems to be getting better as she gains strength. They were a week old when we got them, but very small. I put a glass square pan of milk in their tote tonight and I can hear them drinking it!! The pan is heavy enough they cannot get their little pig noses under it and tip it out!

Umm.. house.. nothing to report.. still there, nothings happening on it.. too BUSY BUSY BUSY putting in the meat harvest :)

Kittens.. seems like Daisy's kittens didn't make it. Never did see them but she's not skinny like she was last time, actually she's in superb shape, which makes me think they didn't survive. She must have abandoned them. Which is sad but there is nothing we can do about it so I'm not letting it get to me. Fluffs kittens are older and fine.. each one has been door trained. Some took longer than others. The little brown female got past J a couple of times but we did eventually teach her not to rush inside the minute a door opens. I won't have them in the house.. there are enough of us in here as it is :) 7 kids, 2 adults and 2 little pigs. Not bad for a two bedroom trailer with a addition!! Anyway now with her 3 kittens we have Daisy, Midnight, Fluff and the kittens are Caramel, Mischief and the so far unnamed orange male. Our last orange male has disappeared and we've not seen him in months. A good reason to keep a breeding female around.. cats don't seem to last long up in the north woods with the coyotes and wolves and eagles.

Papa is back to evening shifts. Noon to midnight, Wednesday thru Saturday. Which means I get less sleep then I would if he was on a normal shift but that's ok :) I like to see him at the end of the day and S often isn't in bed for the night until 11 anyway. I am taking my vitamins :) Dr. Nicole :)

Anyway. As always we are busy busy busy with family, farm, work and harvest. Some things get put off for later while we deal with more seasonal things.. for example I normally potty train right after their second birthday.. which G had almost 2 weeks ago now.. and no I'm not potty training her... I'm not going to either until later when butchering is done. It's not fair for any of us to do it now so we won't. It won't hurt her or me none to wait.

So things to look forward to on the farm is the end of pig butchering which should be not this weekend but next weekend. Isabel's calf which is due around the 23rd of December.. She's been AI'd to a Brown Swiss so we are hoping for a heifer. She sure is cranky these days and chasing Milton and Patch around a lot. Patch is still a scrawny little runt of a steer and both Papa and I have wondered if we did ourselves any favors when we got him from the dairy. We actually had him tied under a roof the 1st time it snowed as he was not looking good at all. He recovered well and is in with the cows now. He does have a nose for trouble and got out several times before we realized he could open our man gate by the milking area. Now the gate is bungied shut and he tries and tries but can't wiggle through anymore.

Oh right, the woodshed.. Pretty much done.. we got 6 inches of snow when Papa had two more piece of tin, one on each side, and the ridge cap to put on so neither of those are done but the snows pretty much off the roof now so he might get to that soon. We are loving the extra space and the wood dry and right by the house!!!

Our phone had a problem with our electric fence one morning when we had a dump of fresh snow so it's no longer working and we are phone less. We are looking into a cell phone to replace the home phone and hope to get that all figured out this weekend, but in the mean time are communicating mainly through Imessage and FB.


I have to say though that I LOVE MY LIFE. I'm not complaining as I write this. I'm explaining. I'm not whining. I'm winning my battles that are near to my heart. I'm taking a stand for what I believe to be right and doing it. If I wanted to whine I could tell you that I've been out of my yard 3 times, besides church, in the last 6 weeks and I miss the contact, however small, with the outside world. Another good reason to take my vitamins :) But I don't want to whine. That is not why I blog.

 I blog for my kids. Like a scrapbook. Which reminds me G has been saying some pretty funny stuff lately! I want to remember how Papa and I make pancakes the morning of the first snow, we kick the kids outside and make them pancakes while they play in the snow and then when breakfast is ready they come in and we eat hot pancakes and drink hot chocolate and talk about the wonderful world God made for us. (And yes I know that's a long long crazy sentence but that's me :) Say it really fast and a bit breathless :) )  I also blog for you.. the reader who actually made it to the end of this book. The Aunt Linda's. The family far away and nearby. The Momys Ladies.The random person who found our crazy life by accident and enjoys reading these rambling posts. The old friend. The large family curious person who wonders how we make it work. The odd person we have that random chance encounter with at the store. So thanks for reading and HEY I know your out there so leave me a comment or two and prove it :)  


Well I feel like I've written a book after my recent silence. I hope you enjoyed it. I will try very hard to sit down at the computer more often and keep you lovely people updated.. and post pictures.

Good Night and GOD BLESS!!!!

CORN!!

                                 

                           We bought a couple of boxes of localish corn, around Billy's pond, 

            and friends of ours picked it up in the city for us and we ate like kings for a few days :) 

We also decided to do an experiment and  freeze some. 

No blanching.

 Just cut it off the cob and freeze in bags. 

We did it team work style!! 

The kids shucked it, G (picture above) brought it to me and I cut the kernels off and bagged it. 

So far we have had to limit ourselves HUGELY as this is the best corn EVER, besides fresh on the cob, and we are already making plans to do TONS more next year!! 

In other words.. it was a HUGE success and we are loving it :) 

Oh and if you were wondering, this is a catch up story, these pictures were taken Sept 16th :) 

Rye In The Pig Pen.

Beautiful isn't it??

Remember this??   Yup that is the same pig pen :) Just taken from a bit different angle. 

It is amazing what a month can do :) 

This is the same general area but facing slightly to the left. It is not doing quite as well as it had pigs in it a bit longer then the first pen and it was their winter pen but it is coming along nicely. 

The Chicks On Grass :)

It's a family affair :) 

J, L and E caught almost all the chicks and put them in the crates in the barn. Papa and I put the crates on the trailer and we drove them over to the yard. This worked MUCH better then any other year and we are very glad we got the crates. This and this is how we've done it in the past both have proven to be more trouble then anything and I think we've finally got this figured!! 

Filling up waterers before letting chicks out. 

Their protected area.. which they aren't even using as it's warm enough! 

Note: the wheel barrow is how we mix feed with milk to be able to feed it to the chicks.

They love this feed mix! 

Oldest and Youngest helping :) She loves them. 

Chickens chickens everywhere!! Oh and kids :) A friend stopped by and his little girl helped unpack the chicks. 

I love this picture. If you squint you can see the cows in the back behind the house, the laying hens loose on the yard, the calves in their pen in the left and Tucker by the trampoline. If there was a cat and a pig we'd have one of each critter in this picture. 

E took this picture of  holding a chick. It's a great picture!! 

Happy chicks on grass!! 

G and Papa having a quick cuddle. 

Happy happy happy chicks.

A great picture of Tucker.. he really didn't care about any of this chick mess.. still doesn't.

We bought those crates last winter for this very thing and they worked GREAT!! 

Chip LOVES chicks. He worries over them, walks around the pen constantly and just totally enjoys every minute of them. If one gets out he worries about it until it goes back in. He loves all babies but really chicks and Papa are his too favorite things. 

Lazy dogs, chicks checking out the fence :) 

Papa and I sat in the pen and watched chicks for about half an hour after we let them out. Relaxing. 

This little chick kept getting into trouble with the fence so Papa picked it up and told it to behave and put it on his lap. I snapped this picture quickly and was glad I did as she did NOT stay long!! She had attitude!! 

We are much happier with the chicks this year. We bought unsexed Cornish Giants and we have big cocks, a bit smaller hens and only a few road runners *those little throw backs to the plymouth rocks... normally these are about 3% of the flock and take longer to grow into a good size if they ever do. 

Just one more note :) Cornish Giants are a cross breed of a Cornish game bird and a Plymouth rock. 

The same way a Mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey :) 

Surprises On The Front Porch :)

One day last week E came screaming into our room in a most excited manner and woke me up from my nap :) 

Daisy, our not so bright cat, had just lay down on the front porch and given birth to a kitten right before their very eyes. 

They had been on the porch setting up this surprise for me when it happened.

What great kids I have!! 

And Daisy?? Well she went on to have 3 more kittens in the old outdated carseat we kept on the dogs crate for the cats to sleep in. One was this little orange kitten who stole all our hearts. That night Papa moved the carseat, kittens and all, into the new house, we couldn't leave them where Tucker could get at them, and found out the next morning that Daisy had some sense after all and moved them out of harms way. Turns out Tuckers figured out how to get into the house. We were a bit worried as we couldn't find them and Daisy seemed to be around a bit too much to have just had kittens, but Saturday morning after chores Papa came bursting into the house to tell us that he saw Daisy go above the ceiling, on the insulation, of the house and he's pretty sure that's where she's hiding her kittens!! YAY!!! 

The Calves Are Out On Grass :)

The cows think it's wonderful!! 

So cute to see two great big milk cows go gaga over two little cute calves!! 

The cows even sleep by the pen now! 

J, L and I set the fence up and then J and L held the fence up, turned off!, while Papa led the calves one at a time to the fence and I walked behind them as 'motivation.' Milton did quite well on the lead but little Patch fought and fought and fought!! When he finally did get in the fence Papa sat down and let him tire himself out on the lead rope until he stopped fighting it. J ran to turn the fence on and we watched while the calves learned electric fence. 

Milton checking to see if Papa had anything to eat. 

Yum.. green stuff!! 

Ah.. this is what we were looking for!! They are about a month apart in ages.. Milton being older. Patch is very small though for his age. I wonder if he will catch up! We shall see! He sure has attitude!! 

Bird Houses :)

Well this weekend we had a extra day and we got a couple extra things done! 

One was the bird houses got put up! YAY!!

L under the tree with his birdhouse. 

J3's bird house.. he was asleep when we put them up but he knows this is his. 

Each birdhouse has a letter on it.. J's has his name as it's short enough to fit :) 

E supervising Papa putting up her bird house.

J chose one of the last pine trees on the place for his birdhouse! 

One of the extra 3 went in this big old spruce tree beside the house! 

One of the few trees Papa and I want to keep around the house.

R wanted hers on the chick barn. 

There is also one on Papa's shed and another poplar tree right behind the house.

8 new bird houses! I was a bit worried we'd be too late with Spring all of a sudden showing up but there were birds fighting over at least two of the houses the next day!! YAY!! 

The kids are very excited to see if their bird house gets chosen and if the birds like the locations they picked! Time will tell :) 

I will HOPEFULLY keep you updated.. I'm able to sit for short periods of time these days but it's going to get even busier around here for the next oh.... 6 months :) lol. 

Chicks Are Here!! May 3/13

Papa's home with the chicks!! 

Trek to the chick barn! 

Waiting for chicks :) 

Empty brooder.

The new watering system! 

Hard boiled eggs, milk and Willards water. Good first foods for chicks!! 

Grit.. also know as stucco sand :) 

This years feed has CORN in it :) First time ever!!! 

G's first look!! Love at first sight!! 

Awww!!!! 

She was so excited she was clapping and squealing! 

They are EVERYWHERE!!! 

J had the job of keeping G sitting and helping her pet chicks.. not pick them up by the heads! 

My job was to pick up all the more lethargic ones and make sure they got a good drink. Man they are smart! Caught onto those waterers super fast!! 

Papa taking chicks out of boxes!! 

Figured that out right quick!! 

Happy kids holding chicks!! I love J3's face.

Chick jungle J!! The chicks loved his boots! 

R is in LOVE!! 

L loves the chicks too.. but as he mentioned.. 'they are so cute now, but one day we'll have to butcher them.. I don't like that part!' Such a soft hearted boy. 

G is surrounded!! 

Ok numbers, we ordered 400 unsexed Cornish giants and we received 416 chicks!! All were alive when they got here!! Only one looks a bit down and has a weird wing.. so we'll see how it does. They are also all pretty much the same size!! Maybe two or three that are a bit smaller.