Another Two Weeks

And still no calf.

She's not as swollen as she had been, but still more swollen than normal.  She seems quite content to hang out with Mildred and the goats.

Even when Max decides to climb on top of her. He's quite the little trouble maker.

Just trying to entertain himself, since he now lives outside full time.  Soon he will have his own entertainment committee.

Since these two little ones were born yesterday.  Sheila popped them out all on her own.  She did well with the girl right away.  The boy was very shaky on his feet, and even with us holding him up to nurse she was very impatient.  We brought him in yesterday afternoon, since he kept collapsing in odd spots and wasn't able to move quickly should a cow decide it wanted to step there.

After a couple of bottles of kid milk replacer and a bit of extra warmth he seemed to be getting more stable.  He went back out to nurse last night and got a good latch, then slept in the house.  After one last bottle this morning, he went back out to his mother.  Apparently through the night Sheila remembered that she'd had two kids, not just one, and was anxious to have him back.  He was much more stable, latching well, and the weather is gorgeous (+11°F!), so we left him outside all day.

At every check in he's been doing well, sticking close to his sister, nursing well, and even getting a little playful. We'll be keeping a close eye on him, but we're pretty sure he's out of the woods.

Sheila is doing well, and Mama seems to be quite a doting grandmother. 

Monsoon is doing well, growing well.  He's our full time night milker, on account of him not leaving us any milk through the day.  He sleeps inside with the goats at night, while Mildred and Nelly spend the nights outside.  Mildred is giving us 4-5L/day from just the morning milkings, and we leave a bit for him for breakfast.  It works well for us. 

The dogs and chickens get very little milk now, but still plenty of whey.  The milk we're bringing in is plenty to drink, cook with, make butter, and I'm still making cheese at least once a week.  I've started buying yogourt again.  I still make a small batch about once a week, but it's not nearly enough for Husband and the boys to take to school all week.

Our first four chicks moved out to the brooder box in the workshop this afternoon.  They're feathering in nicely.  The box in the basement needs to be ready for the next batch of eggs, which could start hatching any minute now- today is day 21.  I'm a little nervous with this batch though, as we had a power outage a couple of weeks ago.  Still, I'm hoping we'll have new chicks soon.

A shot from the road when we were out the other day.  The huge snow banks are melting away, fences are starting to show up once again, and even a few bare spots here and there.  Spring is coming.  We should be snow free within the next 2-3 weeks.

Which brings up a lot of things to think about.  First- the garden.  All of my garden plans I made in the winter are being thrown to the wayside.  The past couple of years of early springs had me dreaming and making plans that aren't going to be accommodated in this short growing season.  While our frost free date isn't until the first week of June, I tend to push the season a bit and actually have most of the garden planted earlier than that.  This year I'll be ready to have the peas in early, since we'll still have snow into May, and then need to do soil ammendments, greenhouse clean ups, and tilling.  June is looking like it will be a very busy month.

Starting the garden in June also doesn't give me much hope for a lot of the more tender crops, or the longer season crops this year.  I planted corn our first summer here, and it never made it over two feet high, lol.  I expect this summer to bare similar results.  So, I'm minimizing a lot of my previous plans- maybe a plant or two of squash and melon, no corn, fewer broccoli, cabbage, etc.  I'm undecided about the beans so far.  The first two summers (late springs/early fall frosts), I barely got three or four pickings off the bean plants.  So I could plant half the garden in beans to make the most of each of those pickings, or I could plant just a row or two to eat fresh for this summer and not worry about freezing so many.  I definitely won't be planting the dry beans.

On the plus side, I expect it to be a bumper crop year for berries, and low concern for forest fires.  All of that snow should keep everything moist.

On the negative, I'm losing nearly a month of prime firewood and construction season.  That greenhouse I was planning in the backfield- not going to happen this year.  Ah well, plans are meant to change.

For now, we'll keep puttering away at tidying buildings, getting ready for spring.

Meatless Mondays versus Raising Meat

I was up at some ridiculous hour the other  morning, and decided to go look up some videos on youtube (because we have crappy satellite internet with a 200MB/day cap, except from 2am to 7am.  If you want to do anything fun online- games, videos, music, etc- you have to get up in the middle of the night around here).  Anyway, I came across this documentary, Meat the Truth.  I don't know how to imbed videos, but hopefully the link will get you started.  If not, just search youtube.

Again, not a lot of new to me info, but still thought provoking, and worth watching.  As a general rule, when folks start talking about vegetarian or vegan diets, I just do the smile and nod.  Whatever.

We have a running joke around here, that we are raising carnivores, except for #2, who we like to call 'the rabbit'.  When #1 and #2 were little they'd each eat half their supper, then sit and whine.  You could literally switch plates between them, and they'd both be happy.  The Carnivore and The Rabbit.  Times have changed, and I no longer have to pull teeth to get #1 to eat vegetation, or #2 to eat meat, but their preferences are definitely still obvious.

So I'm watching the movie, and I get it.  I get the whole 'vote with your fork' concept.  I understand the issues with 'factory farms'.  But that's not my life.  Not even close.

And then, "You can't call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat".

I am insulted.  I am annoyed.  I am really pissed off.

It's like those carbon foot print calculators that you can find online.  No consideration for heating your home with deadfall versus live trees versus oil.  No consideration for not even owning an air conditioner.  No consideration for growing your own food.

I have a big family, I have a big car, I have a huge carbon footprint.  End of story.  No consideration for the attitudes I instill in my children.  No consideration for at least 95% of their needs (clothes, toys, furniture) coming second hand.  No consideration for my car sitting in the driveway constantly for all but 1 or 2 days a month.

So, yeah, throw this at me too.  Why not.  I eat meat.  I am not an environmentalist.

I raise meat.  Not in any way remotely similar to factory farming.  I live in an inhospitable environment for growing my own food, and yet I garden.  Most of my summer is spent in the garden, for very little return.  Raising meat is much more natural in my environment than growing tomatoes.  My animals will eat the grass, the weeds, and the bugs.  I will not.  And not one of my critters drinks any where near as much water as 'they' say is required.  I have no manure overflow issues.  We call that stuff fertilizer.  The cows even walk around and spread it for us.

By 'their' theories I should give up on the chickens and the turkeys, whom I currently have to buy grain for, and eat strictly home raised, grass fed beef.  But I digress...

I do buy a bit of meat from the grocery store.  I don't ask where it came from.  I don't want to know.  Because in the back of my head, I already know.  But it's very little, compared to the whole of our diets, that it's probably doing more harm to me than to the planet.

So what if I stopped.  What if I just stopped buying grocery store meat cold turkey.  What if we ate only what we raise and hunt.   I could be a better environmentalist.

But I'm still insulted.

Spring Clean Up

It's tip free days at the dump this week, which also means spring clean up at our house. 

The first trip was mostly from my new neighbour's yard- my parents.  They cleaned up a bunch of stuff left by the former owners.  Our couch- a total wreck- and a few smaller items from here topped the load.  Furniture has to go to the big dump, and I got 'lost' on the way to the dump.  Not actually lost, I still knew where I was, but the dump wasn't where I remembered it 'should' be.  Nothing like driving up and down the backroads with a truck full of junk.  We made it there before they closed.

Day 2, I took two loads to our local dump.  I don't go at all through the winter, so I had quite a build up.  4 bags of garbage and 22 bags of recycling.  There was a bear sitting on the hill watching when we got there.  He ran off before we could get a picture though. 

The first time I went to the dump when we moved here was in the winter.  I pulled in to this fenced off area in the woods.  Everything was white and clean, covered in fresh snow.  They told me to go throw my junk in the pit.  Totally disturbing.  You couldn't tell it was a dump, except for the signs.  And there I was, tossing garbage in the woods.  In the spring, there's trash everywhere, stuff that's blown out scattered along the fenceline, and it smells like a dump.  In the winter I feel like I'm being unfaithful to Mother Earth, and I'm a bad environmentalist.  So I don't go.

Yesterday we spent the day cleaning up around the workshop.  There's still a lot of junk left by the former owners to clean up.  An old oil furnace that's been sitting in the workshop since we moved in got the boot.  I'm not sure if it came out of my house, or if they picked it up somewhere with plans to use it for something.  We found 3 5 gallon pails of used oil just off the yard, along with about 10 empty 5 gallon pails.  The empties will get cleaned up and reused.  The oil has been relocated to the garage where it will find a new purpose and get used up.  Some broken feed dishes, broken buckets, broken heat lamp bulbs, etc, were cleaned out of the workshop, chicken coop, and tack room.  Then we were off to the pasture.  I think I could spend half the summer out there and still not get all the bailer twine and netting cleaned up.  I filled 4 feed bags with it yesterday, and called it a day.

After this load gets dropped off, we'll still have time for one more walk about tomorrow.  The space we use is pretty well cleaned up now, so we'll be working back farther into the trees.  Who knows what trash and treasures await us there.

Enjoying the Sunshine

We have been having some amazing weather this week!  High teens, low twenties, lots of sunshine!  It feels like spring!  The nights, of course are cool, dropping below freezing now.

Perfect weather for firewood.  The cool nights serve as a reminder to get it done, NOW, before we freeze our asses off.  The warm days make us want to spend time outdoors, soaking up all that sunny D!

So, it's been a good week so far.  Three gorgeous days, three loads of wood (and 1 partridge!).  Hauled up, cut up, even piled in the basement.  I think we have more wood stored there this year than last.  Hubby & the boys built a slide for the wood to drop closer to the front end of the wood pile, instead of in the middle of the room, where the window is.  This allows me to pile wood the opposite direction than we used to, filling from the edge of the slide to the wall.  Before, once we filled three rows, dropping more wood in would knock a fourth row over, or the piler in the head.  Ouch.  I think the most we ever fit in before was 12 face cords.  This year, we're already at about 13 face cords, with room for another row and a half- about 6 more face cords.  If we have a mild winter again, that might be all we need!!  We'll still keep cutting as long as the winter holds- ideally we want a two year supply so it can dry and season properly- but it's very exciting to think that we may not need to open up the basement in the middle of winter, freeze out the house, and spend a day refilling the firewood!

Four more gorgeous days in the forecast, and then some rain. 

My peppers have aphids- in the house.  Weird.  I don't remember ever getting them outside.  Going to sprinkle with diatomaceous earth today.  The smallest pumpkin is now fully orange.  Two larger pumpkins are turning nicely.  The biggest one is still very green.  I hope it turns soon, before it really gets cold and I have to bring them in.

My first greenhouse is under construction!

My Dad did an amazing log cabin type of construction on it.  I wish I could have seen it in my head when he was planning it.  Up til this point I was really wondering how it was going to turn out.  Need to have more faith!

Starting to come together!  It'll be ready for plastic in the spring!

If you can strain your eyes a bit, that little dot way out there, just in front of the treeline- is a white tail deer!  Take a minute, right now, to figure out how the zoom on your camera works.  Trying to figure it out before the wild life runs away is a bad plan.  Honestly though, it is a deer!


Deer are kind of new to our area.  It's a side effect of global warming, the deer moving farther north.  There aren't too many of them yet, and a harsh winter could still wipe them out, but I'm hoping they make it. 

Speaking of global warming- what's with the news?  The new governor general starts off his career with a new action plan & report on global warming & it's effects on Canada.
Not too much in the news story there, but when I watched the news report on tv, and later a little blurb from George Stromboulopolus, I'm being made to feel global warming/climate change is a good thing for Canada.  Ok, I won't argue, in some ways it really is.  Increased tourism in the arctic, due to water travel/melted ice, longer, warmer growing seasons, all that land up north freed up for development...  There are many possible side effects that could be great for our northern climate.  But that doesn't make climate change a good thing.  First off, if our weather becomes so welcoming, and south of us becomes unbearable, do we really think those people south of us are going to roll over and play dead?  Come on people...  We will be invaded.  Oh, and with all that new coastline up north, won't that be easy, for foreigners to get in...  Hmmm...  Not pretty.  Our military is not nearly capable of defending us if the shit hits the fan.

So, back to the point...  Why is the media trying to tell us that we should embrace global warming?  Bad for the world is definitely bad for us, even if I could grow peppers right outside in the sun...  Crazy.  They're supposedly sending out education packets to schools, targeting teens as the new wave of environmental reformers, so it should be interesting to get #1's take on it all.

Nelly!  She was much more cooperative in letting me figure out how the zoom works.  Isn't she getting fat?  Love her!

A Farm For The Future

One of my online friends recently directed me to this film, A Farm For The Future.    It wasn't a lot of new-to-me information, but it was assembled in a very thought provoking way. 

Our aim here is to live sustainably.  To not rely on fossil fuels.  Because we're nearly at the point now, that we can't afford to rely on fossil fuels.  And they're going to get more and more expensive as world resources continue to decline.

I know that tilling the soil is bad.  Bad use of fossil fuels.  Bad for erosion and loss of top soil.  Bad for the pocket book.  I never thought about what it was doing to the life below the surface.  Bad, bad, bad.  But have I stopped?  Nope.  I didn't plant half my garden this year because Pig refused to work, and the rototiller broke.  I was thrilled when I bought my new tillers from the neighbour.  The kids have already tilled up most of the garden section that didn't get planted.  And I won't be planting there until next year.  So we just exposed a whole lot of soil to sunlight & erosion for no reason.  Why?  Because I thought it would help with weed control.  And apparently it will.  Given a few years, nothing will want to grow there at all.  I'll have dead soil.

Dead soil, like I likely have been fighting with since we moved in here.  Dead soil, which is likely the cause of the buttercup field in the pasture.  The previous owner plowed & reseeded that section repeatedly.  None of my pasture has the root structure seen in the film, like the healthy native grasses growing there.  But my lawn does.  My lawn grows like crazy.  Why?  Because it's been pretty well ignored for years.  Sure, it's a mess of weeds.  Who cares?  It has amazing root structure.  I've been trying to kill the front lawn to turn it into a flower bed, and three summers haven't made much headway.  But I've never tilled it.  I don't care enough about flowers to put any real effort into killing it.  I just cover a section with old card board boxes and car floor mats and leave it like that until it looks dead below.  Then after a few months I plant, or transplant, flowers into it.  Because I don't cut the lawn, and the front lawn is too small to fence off for the critters to eat.  But the grasses keep coming back.  They move in from the edges, and reappear in what looked to be dead.  Interesting.  This year I also planted my leftover zuccini, and all of my tobacco into it, what with the garden tilling issues...  And they grew like crazy.  Much better than expected.  Much better than the garden.

There are spots all over this place with similar structure.  The "oats" field.  A clearing out back that grows amazing, tall, local, green grasses.  Because it's been ignored for years.  I had planned to eventually plant oats there.  I think I'll skip that idea.  I think, in fact, I'll go harvest some seed there to try to revitalize the buttercup pasture with.  The back 'pasture'.  It's a clearing left from the last time this place was logged (before us).  It's becoming over run with alders right now, but it was very lush and green as well.  Smaller spots too. 

Is the secret to good pasture land just a matter of letting nature take it's course?  Is it really that easy?  Time will tell.  As we get more sections fenced and let the critters out to munch, the growth of alders and forest will be slowed, or stopped.  It never occurred to me that I wouldn't have to eventually seed it all with hay.  Hmmm.

I've read about forest gardening before, but seeing it in action is a whole different perspective.  I tried growing pumpkins between the apple trees- all very young- to keep the weeds down a couple of years ago.  The grass and weeds grew like mad there, and I spent more time weeding the pumpkins than the garden.  What if I use that section behind the house as a forest garden?  The section that was supposed to become the goat pen, but they don't seem to care for it.  There was a lot of dead fall, and a lot of dead standing trees there when we moved in.  We cleaned them all out.  It already gets lots of bird and bug attention, with cherry trees growing along the edge of the back yard.  There's a small clearing in the centre with lots of sunlight.  Hmmm.  I will definitely have to try this next spring.  I wonder if the taller trees will help protect against early/late frosts?  We'll have to see.  And then, what if I just don't bother weeding it?  I mean, I'd still need to weed around my veggis, giving them the advantage over the wild life...  but the pathways, areas I haven't planted, the undergrowth once my veggies are taller...  If I just left that stuff do it's thing, it wouldn't be hurting my prospects, and may in fact be helping them?!  Seriously?  Could it really be that easy?

The film, definitely worth watching, if you're at all concerned about food security, the environment, or small scale farming.  Definitely worth watching.

Forest Management

We live on 120 acres in Northern Ontario. The property had been logged about 7 years before we bought it, nearly ten years ago now. As a result we have huge scruff piles- piles of wood wasted by the logging company, because it didn't meet their size or type requirements- in various locations. We cut a lot of it for firewood the first two years, but now it's too old and rotten to be useful. We had two large clearings- about 20 acres- that the logging company had made. I had planned to grow oats in one and hay in the other. Now they're the beginnings of a new forest. Mostly covered in alders- these weird bushy little trees that die off after 5 or 10 years.

Between the two clearings there's a patch of poplar forest, maybe 10 acres in size. It was probably the result of a previous logging. The poplars are too close together, can't get enough sunlight, to grow up into big trees. The smaller ones are starting to die.

We've decide to fence off this section as pasture for now. It could be many years before I'm ready to plant those oats, and the horses will help keep the alders and brush down in the meantime. It also gives us another section of pasture to keep us from having to buy hay in the summer.

Before we fence it off and move the horses in though, we've started cutting out some of the larger poplars. Thinning the bush. The smaller poplars will get more sunlight, and a better chance to grow up. We'll get some winter wood, and some poles to build with- repairs needed on the garage lean-to, and still need to build a proper wood shed.

Around the outside of our pasture we also have some woodland and clearings, up to the trail that cuts through the centre of our property. We're planning to fence off along the edge of the trail, to also give us more pasture. In one corner we have the beginnings of a pine forest, but it's also having the same issues as the poplars. The trees are too close together to grow up. Another section to thin out. Hopefully in years to come we'll achieve a nice mixture of mature trees and pasture.