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..........

Big Duck Roundup

Welcome to the big duck roundup! The water tank there is how my son has been floating around with the ducks. Apparently, the flock of 6 has joined up with the 8 youngsters and they've been having a pretty good time in my root cellar hole. I considered filling the hole in to soak up the water but I still don't have enough blocks so until I have the blocks to build the root cellar, the ducks and the boy get to swim in the mud hole.

Just 500 more bales of hay to go! Of course, it hasn't even been cut yet. This is what I cut and baled this past week, finishing up late yesterday. I even cut my circle driveway, got 11 bales off of it, LOL. The driveway is what I cut to check the haybine after I did all that work on it. Had to make sure it was working correctly before I got into a big field away from home.

Hay baling takes up the whole day so not much else been going on around the farm. Just normal, every day chores. It's looking like we're up for a bit of rain this coming week. Seems like a good time to be in the barn, working on the corn crib....

More Harvesting going on

Time to get back at it. Even tho the weather front has passed, I'm still suffering from some hip troubles. This has been by far, the worst year since the surgery. I just gotta keep at it tho, nobody is going to do it for me.

I've about given up trying to keep ahead of the weeds and grass growing in my garlic/onion patch. I weeded about 1/3 of it last night, got ate up from skeeters, again, and harvested 22 lbs of garlic, 12 lbs of red onion and 38 lbs of yellow onions. Plenty more is ready but I need a break to make more blood! Those skeeters about sucked me dry last night.

A pal told me to try Listerine to repel skeeters. I'm going to give it a try tonight. According to the directions I got, take a baby wipe, pour a little Listerine on it and wipe your arms, legs, any exposed skin with it. It dries quickly and isn't sticky. Sounds like a plan to me.... I don't have baby wipes, hope it isn't part of the trick....

The first planting of corn is about ready. If you recall, the crop didn't go so well and is seriously stunted. The ears are pitiful. I may just let them fully mature and dry on the stalks and use them for seed corn next year rather than try to harvest those tiny ears for eating or food storage. The second crop looks great tho, it's due the end of the month.

A small tragedy today, the Californian doe (rabbit) kindled and killed every one of the kits. Never even pulled fur and had them out of the box. Strike 2 for her...

The chickens are all doing well and the ducklings are growing like crazy! I have one more nest being set on, hopefully I can get another 6 or 7 ducklings. I've cleaned out all the old nests so the chickens and ducks will go back to laying eggs for me.

I've been working on my food storage and my disaster preps too. Reorganizing and making lists of things the kids and hubby have liberated out of it. They've wiped out every single piece of candy in it and all the chocolate! If that doesn't qualify as SHTF, I don't know what does, LOL. How dare them eat all my chocolate stash!

I noticed I'm down to the last dozen quart jars of tomatoes, good thing this years crop is coming on! We eat lots of tomatoes throughout the year and since tomatoes are so easy to grow, there's no reason to even be out of them. I'll be setting up to can tomatoes this week.

More farming updates soon........

A nice Friday on the farm

Well, most of the day anyway. Had to do a little running around first thing and it took 6 hours! Good thing I got an early start. The normal stuff, getting fuel, looking for rabbit stuff, truck sticker, searching for guards for the haybine, the monthly stop in to the gun shop and the flour, sugar and salt purchase. Whew! Lots of stops! But, got it done and back to the farm. I got all the loose straw picked up.... oh, I didn't tell ya's about the straw! A neighbor I used to coal mine with combined his wheat(mine too) and pulled the adjuster out so the chaff would windrow for us to bale. 500 bales for the calves, goats and horses. We borrowed a hay elevator thingy from another farming friend and put it all up in the barn loft. What a cool piece of equipment, no throwing bales up into that little hole above my head! Of course, now we have to fix the hole in the barn roof from the inland hurricane. Turns out the barn is in worse shape than we thought but we got the hole fixed so we'll have dry straw and hay up there. Back to the straw... the New Holland combine is a rotary combine and it beats the wheat stalks half to death and makes it very chaffy(is that a word?) So, the bales shed straw and made one heck of a mess all ove the ground. Guess what I did with it???

Now to what I did today after all my running around... I've been weeding a little at a time out in the front patch and my cantalopes are working on flowering. Some plants are still very small but that's okay, they'll catch up. Anyhooo, I raked out some bunny poo, some chicken poo and mixed it with the straw chaff and spread it out on the cantalope patch. I wanted to go all the way down into the beans and sunflowers but the skeeters were munching me! Dang things are like mini vultures! Tomorrow before the rain comes in, I'll take a picture of it and finish it up. Too dark now for a picture.

Cucumbers are producing! I finally have cucumbers! I also have green peppers, tomatoes are just now looking like they're starting to change.

The fat sheep is outside today. He needs some sunshine so I got the pen up and kicked him out into it. So far, so good, he's still in it! That's more than I can say for the goats. I gave up trying to keep them in a pen. They are a pair of Houdinis. So, I've been altenating tying one or the other, staking them out in the shade and so far that's working good. The one that's free runs around a little bit but they both stay close enough to each other to not get into any trouble.

The ducklings and banty chicks went outside to the chicken coop. Waaaa! My house brooder is empty. I miss the little chirps already. Empty nest syndrome! hahahahaha

The coffee plants are doing well, a picture of them for tomorrow as well.....


Oh, I'm attending a Tea Party tomorrow to support my fellow patriots and to voice my displeasure with what Congress and President Obama are doing to this country. I am angry over the health care plan they have and the cap and trade bill currently in the Senate, all the new taxes on everything the can tax......

Farm Quickie

The rain has quit and it's like a sauna here today. The sun is shining and it's 90 degrees. Just walking around outside makes you drip. Had to make this quickie post to share what I found in the old barn a few minutes ago.... 7 new ducklings!!!! I've been getting chicks here and there all along but no ducklings and I was beginning to think there weren't going to be any.

Update on the cat scratch... it's ugly but the swelling has gone down a tiny bit....

Well, gotta get back out in the sweatbox, more work to be done!!!

This weekends Pictures

A little bit of happenings this weekend, some work getting done with the warm and dry weather.
The last few days since I've been out and working slowly but surely on the farm, I've turned the goats and the sheep loose to run around. They've all behaved rather well, checked out the whole farm and even without fully functional perimeter fencing they've stayed close. I've got a duck that has decided she needs duck and chicklings, she's taken over a chicken nest, laid herself a few eggs and gone broody on them. Maybe she'll get s few hatched. I've got a bit done on the chicken house, being down on the ground is causing me some discomfort so it's going slower than I want it to. I also can't seem to find that whole bucket of 10p nails, guess I'll need to go pick up more. I hate going to town tho. The bunnies ae growing like mad, I've got some
New Zealand whites out of the box and those cute little smoke grey ones about 3 days from coming out. Hard to see them in the box, they blend in with Mommas hair so well.

I feel exhausted today for some reason. A trip around the barn lot and a little work on the barney mobile and I need a rest. I've got cheese going on the stove too.

Speaking of cheese, I visited some Amish neighbors that make cheese and learned tons watching them prepare a wheel of Gouda this morning. I look forward to the wheel I'm working on now.

Gardens are coming along and as stuff gets established and isn't getting pummeled by 25mph winds, I'll share some pics.......

Swimming Day

While we've watched it rain bucket loads over the past week, our ducks have swam all over the entire farm in places that should never have water. Now the farm is complete with ducklings in the bath tub! My kids thought the ducklings might need a little swim time, filled the tub a little bit and turned them loose. It's still too cold around here to put them outdoors with the rest of the ducks but their time will come soon enough. So, we'll just keep humming the rubber ducky song.......