Then & Now #3
This post is part of a monthly series, Then & Now, that uses photos to show the development and changes taking place on the farm.
March 2021
With winter starting to abate I was ready to get outside and WORK! What’s the best way to shed cabin fever all at once? Go out and demolish the Bejeezus out of something!
I pried up the boards off the trailer front porch and cut through nearly all the nails holding the thing together with a sawzall. Then I threw a cable around it and yanked it down with my truck. Salvaged as much wood as possible and threw the rest on the burn pile. I did similar to the deck in back of the trailer. Now we have got some free project lumber!
I also dealt with multiple overgrown trash piles, consolidated down to the one shown here in front of the tool shed.
With the warmer evenings and nice light, I had a lot of fun photographing the animals.
Forrest.
Possum.
Clarice.
Vernon, and Flaura (named after my Granny) with the guineas in-tow.
Theo and Millie. Millie really likes to be photographed.
Doggos doggos doggos…
Ursa, about 6 months old here.
Roxanne. Aka, Roxy, Roxomoxoa, Squirrel.
MacGyver. He was a stray and got hit by a car. Rachael did surgery to try and save his leg, but had to amputate it. He had such good energy despite going through all that. So we adopted him.
Ember, aka Emmy, aka Creeping Em, aka Emmy Batwing (because of her ears), aka Emmy BedBug.
Ginny (Virginia). Ginny-Loo, Ginny-Loo-Hoo, Ginny-Hoo-Tee-Hoo, Ginny Spinny (she loves to do donuts and race around).
Ginny had also been run over and had a busted pelvis. She was abandoned by her former owner at the clinic, most likely because he couldn’t pay the bill for surgery. She was a bag of bones who had been laying in a puddle of her own pee. But she recovered strong and is 100% living her best life on the farm. The most joyful dog.
Ruby Jean was another adoptee. She likely came from a beagle puppy mill. Her mom had died of worms. Clinic staff adopted her two surviving siblings. We bottle fed her and raised her up into the Holy Terror she is today.
In March 2021 we had our first non-bird critter born on the farm. Daria gave birth to this little ram that Rachael named Onion.
This old freezer was abandoned in the hunter’s shack. I hauled it up to the house, cleaned it up, and plugged it in. Nothin. I thought maybe the compressor was bad.
Turns out, it was just the temperature control wiring was all boogered up with corrosion. I directed wired that puppy and it kicked on! Ordered a thermocouple/temperature controller online, set this bad boy up in the crawl space under the house, and voila! Meat freezer for next to no expenditure.
Work also began clearing pasture land and building this shelter for the pigs. My neighbor gave us some old tin roofing panels, and we had a few lengths of the sturdy wire mesh panels (actually they are cattle panels) laying around. I got half rounds for free from a local sawyer, and used wood reclaimed from the trailer porch and deck to build this. All I had to buy were fasteners and four 4”x4”x10’ posts, and later a couple of gates.
We had some beautiful blooms on our young fruit trees, but a frost later nailed them pretty bad and the fruit yield this year was small.
Definitely can get some epic sunsets this time of year…
Porchpic early March 2021:
March 2022
Porchpic early March 2022:
The more things change, the more they stay the same….
This year it was the pear trees’ turn to bloom too early…
…and then get nailed by a hard frost. Ho-hum.
Don’t want to jinx, but maybe the peach trees wised up this year and bloomed a little later, trying to miss the frost…
Three more baby sheepies dropped this month!
One of the best feelings is to come into the barn at night or early AM to check on the girls and a new lil hitter is already nursing away!
This little eweling we named Shallot. Her half-brother is Onion and her half-sister is Vidalia.
Emerald was the last to go, giving birth to twin ewelings. We haven’t named them yet. First we’re gonna have to figure out how to tell them apart, other than one being slightly smaller than the other. Here’s the littler one of the two…name suggestions?
Our hay was cut on our neighbor’s farm. He let’s me borrow his 1970 Massey Ferguson tractor to bring bales down to our pastures. Besides needed a jump-start and sometimes tire inflation, this ol’ hoss turns over and WORKS! It’s barely big enough to pick up these giant round bales though. Have to go up steep hills backwards if I don’t want to pop a wheelie.
We’re almost out of last year’s hay. Hopefully we can make our stockpile stretch until the sheep and goats can be put out onto rotational grazing. The cool season grasses are coming up well. But I want to hold back as long as possible to get a good strong stand of forage going before grazing. One of the lessons-learned from last year is to not graze forage too early - it takes too long to recover and is very easy to overgraze. Grass growing now is using its energy stores saved from last season - the soil is still not that warm and the days are too short for enough photosynthesis to drive strong forage growth. But the new green sure looks pretty after the dry winter! Here’s Ginny lounging in the fresh new grass.
Another project this month was to build a pig loading chute. I got a stack of grain bin panels for free leftover from a millwright job site a few months ago and used two of them to construct a curved chute.
We need to load and unload the animal trailer at this angle given space constraints in this part of the farm. It was tricky trying to make the chute come out relatively square and plumb when the terrain, pig shelter, etc. are not flat, square, or plum at all!
The end of the chute is angled so that we can tilt the trailer down to make it easier for the pigs to step on and off. Will be testing this soon as we have plans to process two more pigs this spring!
The goats are seen here enjoying another big milestone project completed recently - a new ~1/2 acre paddock. We’ve been working since the fall to clear overgrowth, prep the barn, and fence in a spring pasture for mamas and babies during kidding/lambing season.
This means more forage for the animals and less area for me to mow - win-win!
Another project this month - shearing.
Forrest has the best fleece of the bunch!
Last year we didn’t get to shearing until May and it had already gotten pretty hot by then. This year we’re trying be ahead of the season a bit, and hope to do another shearing in July/August to help the sheep feel cooler while still getting a good growth of fleece through the winter for next year’s wool.
Persela’s first shearing. She did really well.
Our shetland ram, Moh, before his first haircut.
Moh all sleeked-up and ready to woo the ladies come breeding season.
In addition to shearing, Rachael docked tails of new lambs (necessary for hygiene) and castrated two boy goats and a sheep that we’ll raise for meat. As with all things we try to keep animal discomfort to a minimum. The live a really good life here. (They are certainly well fed!) Our motto is “all good days, and one bad day.” But I suppose in the case of castration it could be “two bad days.” Still I get attached to the animals and when it comes time for processing I’m really sad.
Goat-snuggling’ is on the regular here at Magpie Hollow!
Another project this month was to make ready for a decent-sized vegetable garden.
I tilled up the backyard and fenced in an area that will come out to about 1,000 square feet of growing space. Our soil is pretty bad, so I tilled in a generous amount of compost made from straw and animal poo scraped out of the barn. I wrote a bit about the garden and in general why we’re undertaking these kinds of homesteading projects in a recent post.
Rounded out March projects with a first attempt at rendering lard kept back from the two pigs we processed last year.
I cut up about 10 lbs of pork leaf fat and boiled it at 200-250 F for 2.5-3 hours.
I poured the liquid fat through a strainer. It had the slight yellowish tinge you can see here. It cooled overnight to a fairly white solid.
Hopefully this lard will be of good enough quality for pastries and pie crusts in addition to pan frying. The yield was 8 pints.
When Roo-Bot’s not out raisin’ the Devil she likes to sleep in my office windowsill.
