Self-taught farmers confidently raising chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs. Our focus is on practices that are environmentally harmonious and respectful to our livestock. We appreciate the beauty around us, clean eating, fermenting, and responsibly utilizing the bounty of the land. If you like thinking for yourself, continuous learning, and connecting with the homesteader lifestyle, check us out.
Do you know what carrageenan is? If you don’t, you should…it’s probably in a lot of things you eat, and may even be in your pets’ food.
Carrageenan is a substance made from red seaweed, used as a thickening and stabilizing agent. It’s added to many foods, such as soy milk, wet pet food, yogurt, deli meat, frozen meals. Studies show it causes gastrointestinal (GI) inflammation, and has been linked to GI problems like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).
It’s a gray day, with lots of mud created by the snow melt. Seems appropriate for a bit of reflection.
So many of us lead ridiculously busy lives, barely having any time to just sit and think. What happened to those long summer breaks from school where it seemed like summer would go on forever? You could just stare up at the blue summer sky and daydream about the future. We need those moments.
Sometimes people get stuck in a rut. Many of us go through the motions, doing what we think is the “right” thing to do: go to college, get a corporate job, work the 9-5 (really, more like 8 to 6 or more for many), buy a house and cars, contribute to your 401(k). You do it not because it’s what makes you want to get out of bed in the morning, but because it’s what society says you should be doing. You work long hours, spend little time with those you care about, let yourself get out of shape, eat unhealthy meals at your desk or on the road, and collect your paychecks. You probably don’t or won’t take much in the way of vacation because work is ever-present – you have to check your email on vacation or deal with a thousand messages in your inbox when you get back. Maybe the office even calls you when you’re on vacation. So much for boundaries.
Warning: this post discusses rabbit procreation. Reader discretion is advised.
So, both the New Zealand does (Ava and Loretta) were not pregnant after the first attempt to breed them about a month ago. There were several possible reasons it wasn’t successful, but the most likely one is that the bucks didn’t exactly know what they were doing. In fairness, the does may have had a part in that, too.
We’ve been trying to figure out which of the Muscovy ducks is laying, and we know Coraline is for certain. The other morning, we found 3 eggs in the duck coop. Based on history, we concluded that one was laid by Coraline, but who laid the other two was a mystery.
Without seeing who’d laid the eggs, we speculated that Phoebe (Ty’s girl) would likely be one of the layers, as would Pru. Piper is the fourth duck, and she has the brown head with little caruncling. She just seems a bit less mature than her sisters.
We’re into fermenting. Right now, we do kombucha, water kefir, and milk kefir (and lacto-fermented sauerkraut). There’s also a really chunky Jun scoby languishing up in the cupboard, but that’s a story for another day.
Basically, you take milk kefir grains (which look like large cottage cheese curds), put them in milk, stir them, and over time, they turn the milk into a delightful beverage that’s like slightly runny yogurt. It’s also full of probiotics. Some people like to add fruit or blend it into a smoothie. If you use heavy cream as your base, you get a thick kefir that’s like a cross between whipped cream and sour cream. It works well on tacos or atop an egg custard. Strained through cheesecloth, milk kefir makes a very nice farmer’s cheese. Continue reading “Making Milk Kefir”
The “waterbugs” are a week old today. They’re starting to get some real feathers on their wings and tiny tailfeathers. They do lots of scratching in their brooder, which has a layer of large pine shavings on the floor (large shavings are used to minimize the risk of chicks ingesting it). The scratching means that their waterer, which sat on the floor, was continuously filling up with shavings. It was time for them to graduate to the nipple waterer.
Waterers in the brooder are, in our experience, prone to overflowing and causing unholy messes. The idea is that the water flow ceases when the water tray fills to a certain point, but we have experienced many that just kept flowing, with disastrous results. One overflowed so much into the brooder that it caused mold to grow under the plywood floor – BAD. We had to tear out the entire floor and replace it. It was about an $80 job just for materials, but that doesn’t account for labor. Many expletives flew that day!