The Granary Heats Up

The weather was unseasonably warm this weekend - 50 degrees and it's almost December! - so Rog decided it was a good opportunity to get the little woodstove installed in the granary.

The stove is a pretty little antique parlor stove (or will be pretty when painted and re-chromed) Cadence found on Craigslist. The granary is so small and essentially one room, so the parlor stove should be adequate to make it comfortable. This photo was taken looking up from inside the building as Rog lined the chimney opening in the roof.
Both of us were extra cautious about Rog working on the roof (since my ladder accident a couple years ago that resulted in broken wrist and ankle). For extra security, he tied a support rope from the other side of the building and he nailed boards across the shingles to create treads. I spotted him whenever he was up there.
The chimney must extend two feet beyond the peak of the roof. Our stove is in the southwest corner of the building, which meant a very tall chimney.
Once the chimney was perpendicular, two guy wires were attached from a girdle around the chimney to the roof. They are called "guy wires", but actually they are metal tubes.
Rog connected the chimney to the stove just as it was getting dark. Then we built a small fire in the stove to see if it worked. What do you know? It worked! It is going to be a cozy little building.

Thankful for our HomeGrown Feast

Today was a quiet family holiday, but we all concur, maybe the best Thanksgiving meal we have ever eaten. The star of the feast was the bird, one of Cadence's 9 turkeys she raised from day-old chicks. We sold all the turkeys except two, one for our Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. This was a smaller hen, about 20 lbs.

Next year we will start raising the turkeys a bit later-- by harvest time, the toms were huge - two of the toms weighed 50 pounds (about 40 lbs. dressed.) You need a pretty large oven for such a big turkey!

Cadence took charge of roasting the turkey.
She brined the turkey for a day in a saltwater concoction that contained carrots, onion, celery, and herbs, peppers and fennel from our garden.
This morning while Cadence prepared the turkey, I made my family's traditional sausage stuffing, using pork sausage from Sara's pigs and sage, thyme and marjoram from our garden. Rog made his famous sourdough bread.
The roasting turkey smelled scrumptious and emerged perfectly browned. (It also tasted divine.)

Rog carved the turkey. Sara read a poem. We gave many thanks - especially for this feast, our animals, our bountiful little farm, and each other.

Then we toasted ourselves for our hard work and dived into our delectable farm-grown feast:
Turkey raised by Cadence
Stuffing with Sara's pork and herbs from our garden
Potatoes from our garden
Rog's sourdough bread
Wild cranberries from our woods
Salad with dressing containing wild elderberries we gathered
Pie made from our garden pumpkins, eggs from our hens, and maple syrup from our trees

Yum.

I have one more thank you: Thank you to our friends, neighbors, customers and everyone who has supported us in this farming endeavor. It is wonderful to feel so much encouragement and enthusiasm, even from friends we have never even met!

The Art of Sheep Herding

My friend Larry just sent me this video, with the comment that this is what Scottish Highlander shepherds do when they get bored. Amazing. Not sure who is more talented here, the shepherds or the dogs.T

Another Crazy Idea?

You just never know what you will find on Craigslist. Yesterday Cadence found a listing for two young water buffalo heifers for sale.

Yes, water buffalo. And she almost has me convinced that a couple of water buffalo would be wonderful livestock for our tiny Minnesota farm. Water buffalo are gentle, hardy and give very rich milk, ideal for making mozarella cheese [In Italy, mozarella cheese traditionally is made made from buffalo milk], which would fit well in our pizza farm venture - but more about that in a future post. These water buffalo were from a petting zoo and the owner said they were extremely tame and friendly. So today, Cadence and I drove three hours to see them. By the third hour of driving we were wondering why we were spending our entire day on what was probably a wild goose chase...
We were expecting a midwest farm-sort-of-petting-zoo - perhaps a pumpkin patch where kids could touch baby goats and sheep. We were taken aback to drive into the farm yard and see a camel. When we met the owner, Kevin, and told him we didn't expect to find a camel he asked if we had seen the giraffe!
He took us into a very high barn that opened out into a large yard where a giraffe was out enjoying the unseasonably mild November day.
When he saw us, the giraffe came over to the the fence and leaned down for a treat. How magical to feed a giraffe a cookie!

I wondered whether the giraffe was full-grown or would get even taller (I estimate he was about 15 feet). The farmer said he expects -and hopes-he grows another foot or more, or he would have saved a lot of expense by not having to build the building so high.
We stopped to meet the camels. There were three, but this one was the friendliest. His nose was velvety soft and he seemed to crave being petted. In the summer Kevin takes the camels to county fairs and gives camel rides. This time of year the camels appear in some nativity pageants.
I asked Kevin how he got started in this business. He said he had a pet raccoon as a kid, then a second raccoon, and it grew into this. He obviously loves animals and they all seem to be extremely well-cared-for, calm and gentle.


He had many other unusual animals, including capybaras, kookooburras, an African eagle owl, Jacob sheep, llamas, an ostrich, the most darling baby bison, and this zedonk (a cross between a zebra and donkey.)
We were totally smitten with the sweet water buffalo heifers and now will have to contemplate whether this crazy idea is the right move for us.

Foggy Friday Morn

The past few mornings have been very foggy and the days have been freakishly balmy for late November --getting up to mid 50's. No complaining here about that- Makes it much more appealing to get up early when it is barely light out and tackle the chores.
Geese browsing by the tire swing.
The big rock in the fog.
It didn't really seem cold enough for frost, but most of the plants in the prairie were glazed.

The Dreaded Day

The thick, gray fog matched our heavy hearts as Cadence and I drove the turkeys to the processor at dawn this morning. Hilltop Poultry is at the crest of this long, steep hill. Everybody is very friendly there, but after delivering our turkeys and the last few roosters today, we will be glad to not have to return for almost a year.
The big challenge was figuring out how to transport these big birds (the toms are about 40 pounds.) We ended up lining the walls of our little 4 x 8 trailer with scrap plywood, stretching plastic garden fencing across the top (covered by a tarp held down by bungees) and closing up the back end by screwing on a wood pallet. It was a Beverly-hillbilly-ish construction, but it did the job. Cadence put in some straw bedding and then she and Rog put the turkeys in the trailer last night.

Turkeys are very sweet, gentle, ungainly birds when they are walking around, but when you try to lift them they panic - they are amazingly strong and a whop in the face with a wing is very painful (speaking from experience!) You could easily wind up with a broken nose, but nobody did.

We had to wait a bit before we could unload the turkeys- here they are in the trailer. They were very calm, just wanting their breakfast, I am sure. It is probably not very professional for a farmer, but we cried a bit.

None if us ever expected to grow so fond of the turkeys. They turned out to be such easy-going, trusting creatures. They are very beautiful in a kind of homely way--and awesome when the toms turn all blue in the face and their wattles and snoods flush bright red. They followed us everywhere. They were curious and funny, but much smarter than everyone says, just easily baffled. When we arrived back home the farmyard looked so empty and quiet.

We are now officially done with all our harvesting of animals and garden veggies--other than gathering a few eggs, we won't have to harvest anything else until the sap starts running in the maple trees next spring. Whew! This has been truly the hardest aspect of farming.

How're we gonna keep 'em "Down" on the farm?

Both of our dogs have been hanging out by the back door, longing to be out. It is deer-hunting season and yesterday a big doe took refuge in our little woods, hiding out by the big rock. Cocoa was beside herself because she could see the deer through the windows and we wouldn't let her out for risk of chasing the deer and/or being mistaken for a deer by a hunter.

This year I found two blaze-orange bandanas for the dogs so they wouldn't have to wear those humiliating orange t-shirts. Cocoa's bandana is getting pretty muddy; Nutmeg managed to lose hers the first day.
Nutmeg is especially morose because she is being forced to rest for a couple weeks. She has had a recurring limp all fall. She is stiff in the morning, heads out on her morning rounds, and returns limping. I was pretty sure it must be arthritis (been there) but over the weekend she was in significant pain and unable to put any weight on her back right leg at all. I took her to the vet this morning.

Sure enough, the vet diagnosed arthritis. Nutmeg is her own worst enemy--she just doesn't know how to pace herself- she thinks she is a young pup or something. The vet said we should try to make her rest and recover for a couple weeks (right!) and give her pain meds as needed (which I worry will just make her feel better enough to run harder) and try giving her glucosamine. The vet pointed out how Nutmeg's spine is out of alignment and her leg muscles are unevenly developed because she has been compensating, probably favoring that leg for a long time. Apparently there is a dog physical therapist nearby who has an underwater treadmill to help dogs with such problems! I'll have see how that fits into our budget. Maybe I can persuade my trigger point therapist (he is a dog lover) to teach me how to work on dear old Nut.