Fall is in the air.

Now that fall is in the air, we have a lot of projects that need to get done before winter. First, the 20 or so roosters that we still have around will need to be dressed (or un-dressed, so to speak) and put in the freezer. I did 3 of them 10 days ago, plucked, gutted and put away. I did 3 more last Saturday, this time I skinned them instead of plucking, as I have heard that skinning is so much faster. Not! It ended up taking exactly the same amount of time as plucking, and it was much more physical hard work. So, back to plucking.



A nice young man from church comes over sometimes to mow.  He was here, so he got the opportunity to help pluck chickens.  He will never look at a chicken dinner the same after this.  I am dipping the next "victim" in scalding water in preparation for the plucking.


Next, the pigs are out. Not out of our property, but out of the electric fenced area, about one acre. Over the summer the grass grew so thick around the electric wires that it weighed the wires down to the ground. So the pigs eventually figured out that it wasn't working any more, so they went exploring. So, right now, we keep the front gate closed all the time, even when we are home, so the pigs won't escape. For the time being, they have not tried to go through the barbed wire, although it wouldn't take much for them to do that. It's not too bad right now, but I can see that this is not a long-term solution, so I will have to mow down the grass that has grown over the electric fence so that it will be working again. I did spray the grass along the fence with Rounduup, which actually worked very well to kill the grass, but it didn't magically disappear like I was hoping for, so I still have to mow it down. Hopefully, next spring it won't grow back in the same spot. The pigs don't really cause any havoc, but it is a bit unnerving to walk out the front door and have two 500 pound pigs standing there on the front walk, staring you in the eye. The upside is that they are finding lots of good things to eat, so we haven't had to feed them nearly as much over the last 2-3 weeks. The other downside is, that they don't always hold it until they get back to their area, so we have to watch where we step. It's not quite the same as a dog.



It's bad enough having chickens in the front yard.  Pigs is, well, it's just too much.


Next, the hay needs to be stacked. I mowed the upper half of the property about a week ago, and it is dry enough now to stack on the haystack I made some weeks ago. Since I made it, rain and time have gradually worked on it, so that a 10 foot high stack is now about 5 feet high. I will also need to mow the lower 5 acres, as it did not get mowed and baled this year. The elderly fellow that used to do it with his grandson died this summer and apparently the grandson isn't interested. Which is okay, as I plan to start using the hay myself.

Next, the bees have worked their magic again this year, and I need to get the honey super off of the hive and extract the golden sweetness and get it put up in jars.

Next, the new hens are starting to lay. So, once the new roosters are in the freezer, I will need to move the hens to the lower chicken house for the winter, as it is insulated. The summer house is uninsulated and I don't want them to freeze. They don't have a nesting box, so they have been laying in the bed of the pickup truck and on the shelf in the tractor shed. We have been getting from 5 to 8 eggs a day for the last week, so we have given away a bunch of eggs. They build up fast!

Next, every time I go out to where the walnut trees are I nearly break my ankles on all the walnuts. This is walnut buying week, which we missed last year. So, I need to get out there and get them picked up and take them to the walnut buyers and see if I can get some cash for them, rather that just using them to fill pot holes in the driveway, which is what happened to them last year.

Next, the swimming pool is pretty much ready for winter, but I would like to put a leaf net over it to try to keep the leaves from accumulating on the bottom of the pool, which is what happened last year. We closed up the pool a few weeks ago when it got cold and took out the pump and drained the water out of the filter. Then the weather turned warm again and the water all turned green. So we added a bunch of chlorine powder a few days ago to try to keep it from getting too green until the weather gets cold again.

Next, since the weather is starting to get cool, I am going to start using the woodfired cookstove again, which is really nice on a cold Saturday morning. So that means I need to start cutting firewood. The huge dead walnut tree about halfway down the driveway still has several more branches that can be cut and split into firewood. Last winter I went the whole winter burning wood in the cookstove and the fireplace all on just one branch from that tree. The trunk at the bottom is about 4 feet across, and each one of the branches is about 2 feet across.

Next, the pond is nowhere near as full as it should be. I have finally concluded that it will have to be drained and re-built. It fills when it rains, but then the water leaks out again until it gets to where it is now, which is about 5 feet of water. It should have about 10-12 feet of water. I don't know for sure where the leak is, but I am pretty sure it is in the area of the big bedrock rise in the middle of the pond. The fellow who built it the first time told me that that could be a problem. What he should have done is to dig out all the bedrock that sticks up in the middle of the pond and then seal it at the bottom, but I assumed he knew what he was doing. So it goes. It's really too late to do that this year, as it has to be done when it is dry, so that will have to wait until next summer.

Next, it will be deer season soon, and there are lots of delicious looking deer around the property, so I am hoping to convert a few hours of hunting into about 100 pounds of venison.

As you can see, there is about two weeks' worth of work that needs to be done this Saturday. I am planning to retire in about 3 years, and I am accumulating things to be done after I retire. The way things are going, I will have to live to 100 just to get caught up on projects that should have been done BEFORE I retired.

Summer is about gone. (8-7-14)

(August 7, 2014) I have not been doing much of anything with the farm this summer. I have a pretty good excuse, as I crashed my bicycle July 13th, got a severe head injury and a broken right collarbone, spent 3 days in the hospital and had to be off work for 3 weeks to recover. As I am right handed the broken bone prevented me from doing much of anything on the farm. Brenda has been helping with feeding the livestock, but there is a very long list of work projects that haven't been done as a result of my disability. Right before the crash the foster kids got adopted out, so we don't have any foster kids right now. We plan to get more in a few weeks, after we get back from a planned vacation.

I got my younger son, Adam, to help butcher one pig before the bike crash, so the meat is in the freezer. Unfortunately, as this is the first time for this, I did not think to pack the meat in ice like I should have. So, the meat was way too warm for way too long in the freezer and now it smells bad. I don't know how much of it is still safe to eat. There is about 300 lb. of meat altogether. Since my injury prevents me from doing any heavy lifting I have not been able to pull it out of the freezer to check on it to see if some of it is going to be edible. Live and learn. The remaining pigs are the Large Black sow and the Hampshire cross boar.

The sow gave birth to seven baby pigs a few weeks ago, but they didn't make it. I think that she just wasn't giving them enough milk to survive. So, hopefully she will have another litter in a few months and she will do better this time.


One pig was white with black spots almost like a Gloucestershire Old Spot.  One was black and white like a Hampshire, and the other two were brown and white.  As mom is a Large Black and dad is Hampshire/Yorkshire half and half, there must be other genes floating around in there somewhere.


The 25 chickens are doing great. About 6 of them are hens and the rest are roosters. They are now big enough to butcher, so as soon as I am cleared by the doctor to start using my right arm again, we will start butchering the roosters. I plan to keep the hens, to replace the ones I have right now. They will be old enough to molt in a few months, so when they stop laying they will be next in line to butcher. We actually started out with 60 chickens but for some reason a bunch of them decided that they didn't need to go inside the hen house at night. Well, it didn't take long for the raccoons and possums and foxes to find out that we had a free buffet line, and they went away. So, the ones we have now are the ones who stayed inside the hen house every night. I guess that even though there is plenty of space for 60 chickens to roost in the hen house, they felt crowded.




This is Brenda's new solar powered clothes dryer.

  So, you ask, how is it going with the solar panels? Well, it is working well, but not perfect. That is, our electric bill last month was $95. On the one hand, it is a very small electric bill considering that the whole house and all the appliances, air conditioning, water heaters, everything is electric. Sure, it would be nice to have an electric bill that was $0, but on the other hand, there was no practical way for me to know how much electricity the house was going to use under normal conditions before it was built. So, the best I could do was to use our electric usage from the previous house as a guesstimate. I could have made the solar panels larger, as there is room for 6 more panels on the roof of the workshop, but that would have been expensive, as the current (no pun intended) setup uses the maximum number of panels for that system. Adding more panels would have required a whole new hookup system, electric meter, monitoring system, and so on. Generally speaking, you want to produce less electricity that you use. The reason is, that the electric company can produce electricity a whole lot cheaper than I can. My electricity is expensive, theirs is cheap. So to produce extra electricity would be a waste of money. The object is to produce just a little bit less than I use, but it is very hard to know exactly how much we use until we have lived in the house for a few years, and we wanted all the contruction done at one time.