Growing outside the box

What I mean by that is to be growing things that are not usual for your garden. I've talked about growing coffee and tobacco a couple of times and have shared photos but this morning I found a photo tutorial made by a member of a survival forum I belong to. I hope Dilli doesn't mind me "plugging" the tutorial, I learned a good lesson on photo presentation from it. Please, check out Dilli's work, it is quite impressive and leave a comment....

Tobacco Photo tutorial by hillidilli(dilligaf)

Now for what's going on around the farm.....

Cody the coon dog killed a laying hen yesterday and the blue heeler pup wiped out almost all the Rouen ducklings. We saved 2 but I think one of those is going to die too. I spent a couple hours in the grinding room working on the feed mix. Grinding corn and mixing it with the rest of the grains I have. I like to have a weeks worth at a time to keep it fresh and save time on the daily chores. I was serenaded by the sounds of ducklings and chicks in the brooder tank in the corner. I'm worried about them being hatched out so late in the season, cold weather is coming very quickly. The unseasonable warm weather we enjoyed tricked the hens into thinking it was spring. It's harder than you think to convince a broody hen to not sit on a nest. Even taking the eggs away doesn't help much, they just lay more to sit on and gather eggs from other nests.

Did you notice, Queenbuffness made a comment on the chicken feeding page, she feeds her chickens meat scraps with great results. I think I will try it with my turkey scraps this holiday. Thank you Queenbuffness!

I still haven't gotten any of the projects that needed store bought supplies done yet. Seems the bank has a policy where they hold big checks for 2 weeks. Funny thing is, they claim it's because the check is an out of state check. They didn't have any problems cashing the small checks drawn from the same bank as the big one since June...... So add 2 extra days the bank is closed for the holiday to our wait, it will be December before i can have our own money to work with. I've already wrote several checks paying our overdue bills and I'm sure I will receive plenty of overdraft penalties for them. Thieving bastards. Glad they get to collect 2 weeks of interest from the Fed on my money.......

My Seed Savers Exchange seed catalog is all wrinkled up already ;) hubby and I have marked all over the poor thing working on what we want to try in the garden this year. The catalog is all heirloom seeds, some certified organic. Most of the seeds can be traced back to the 1800's.

I also order plants from Starks Brothers and Miller Nurseries. I'm also fond of a couple sellers on ebay. I get exoctic seeds there like coffee, tobacco and oddball fruit, vege and herb seeds either not readily available thru normal channels or too expensive commercially.

I put the nesting boxes in with the rabbit does last night, I should have 2 more batches of bunnies in the next couple of days and another at the end of the month. I need to get a good stock of bunnies up so I can meet what my new customer wants plus have a few for myself. You just can't beat the high protein/low fat of rabbit meat for your diet.

yesterday I tried once again to make some cheese with the poor quality milk. It's just not going to work, no matter what I do. Disappointing for me but more drive for finding my own cow. Cracked corn is just not a good animal feed all by itself. Not enough nutrient in it. While I know this to be true, it's hard to get some of these hard headed cheapass farmers around here to believe me. They think corn is some kind of wonder grain. They starve their animals all the time on cracked corn. Oh well, I know better anyway.......

ARG! This new computer with it's fabulous windows 7 will not support my Kodak program so I am still without pictures from my camera. I guess I will have to wait for the old HP to be fixed so I can share some farm pictures. I know it's a little boring without all the cool pictures from around here, hang in there, I'll have some soon!

Off to get some bread made..........