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.