A deja vu moment.......

Deja vu, that feeling like you've been someplace before, or seen something before, well I've got that nagging feeling now. It's been pouring rain for 2 days now and it's giving me that deja vu feeling. Feels like this past spring! Cold and wet, here we come again. My tomatoes will be wiped out tomorrow night as the weather forcast says 38 for the low. Geez, I'm really dreading that. The cold and damp always causes me trouble with my back. Makes me not want to get things done when I hurt all the time. The warm weather is always a welcome thing for me.

I spent most of the day working on a batch of Monterey Jack cheese. It may very well be my last batch with fresh milk for a while, I'm not too pleased with that neighbor and am considering not associating with them any more. Our friendship has been one of give and take, mostly me giving and them taking. This last little fumble of them taking a month to pay my son for showing cattle for them and then cheating him out of a substantial amount of money has me a bit miffed. Compound that with the farm equipment of mine, including my tractorthat they tore up this summer and all the tools they lost, the straw that's still being stored in my barn loft for them and it just doesn't even out for me. A couple of gallons of fresh cows milk a week just isn't enough for them treating me like they are entitled to take advantage of me. So, I may be working on cheese from store bought milk for a while. I hate the whole idea of it since store bought milk is worthless but I can not continue the way things are right now.

I managed to get 9 bushels of corn picked on Wednesday afternoon before the rain came in. I spent all evening shelling it. I don't have a shelling machine so I have to do it by hand. It's not hard, just time consuming and a little messy. I end up shooting a few kernels on the floor and the puppy had fun dragging the empty cobs around and chewing on them. It kept her busy so I didn't take them from her. Better than having her chew holes in my feed sacks! Now with all this rain, it will be a while before I can pick the rest of my corn out back. The rain will raise the moisture content of it. Oh well, everything can't be easy or I'd be bored!

Here's a picture from the cell phone, it's Squeak, the latest house kitten. Squeak is a boy kitten and he's a real dandy. He attacks your fingers when you pet him, he's all for fighting and biting. He growls and purrs all at the same time! What a nut! He doesn't want to get away from you and if you set him away from you, he just comes back. He climbed all over me last night while I was shelling corn, sat on my shoulder for a while, attacked my hair and licked my face. He's a fat little bugger too! Can you tell I like cats? LOL

Not much else going on here with all the rain. All the harvesting is done but the feed corn. I should have the oven fixed by late next week so not even any baking going on. Maybe I'll make a batch of soap...

Cheese Day and a surprise

Hey everyone! I've been busy making some cheese again. I made a batch of Colby cheese yesterday since it was raining here all day. It's drying a rind on the cutting board right now. I whipped up a batch of bread dough and set the oven to preheat this morning and went out to do the morning chores. When I came back in and went to put the bread in, I got a big surprise. Apparently, the element on my oven has burned out. That figures! It's not quite a year old but I guess I use the heck out of it and now I am on the hunt for an element. Depending on how much a replacement costs, I might be out of an oven for a couple weeks. That is very depressing to me since I did not get the brick oven built this summer. All those projects you just can't do without a few extra dollars just didn't get done. The brick oven is one of those projects. Just can't salvage fire brick and heat resistant mortar.....

This morning was cold! The Farmers Almanac says this winter is going to be cold and wet. That's going to be a bummer, I hate it when it's sloppy around the farm. It makes feeding the critters so much harder and kind of miserable. With the chicken house still not finished, the birds are staying roosted on the rafters in the pole barn which is okay but they poop and it's all over the barn floor. It will also he kind of hard to give them any kind of heat source when the temps turn really cold. It's so frustrating to me to see that project so close to being finished and me just not able to finish it. For the lack of 3 pieces of plywood! A lousy $45 is all that stands between a cold, drafty barn and a warm and dry chicken house. Maybe next pay......

Time is running out for getting plants started if you want to have a window garden over the winter. The seeds are sensitive to drafts and cool temps and as the weather gets colder, the seeds will mold before they germinate. So, get your peat pellets and your ziploc bags going now! Keep them in a sunny window and when your seedlings sprout, use your cut off pop bottles to get them going good. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and herbs all go great in sunny windows thru the winter. You can even grow radishes, carrots, lettuce and chives, they go well in those long rectangle flower planters and can be direct planted instead of peat pelllet started.

Oh Julie, thanks so much for sharing the chicken picture, would you send it again tho, the cell phone is so touchy with those tiny buttons and I mistakenly deleted the email while I was trying to open the picture!

Hubby went back to work last night, boy was it quiet in the house last night! I forgot how quiet it can get around the farm. Surprisingly, he came home in pretty good shape this morning and is in a pretty good mood. I'm glad he had a good night.

You know, I really love it when you guys share with me via email. I'm always available via email at mmpaints@yahoo.com.

First Monday of October

Wow, time has flown by this year. I remember when I couldn't wait to get the garden going and now here it is, done for the year. Guess I was just so busy this year I missed the chance to enjoy it more. That's a shame because this life is such a wonderful thing.

Oh, I still have tomatoes going! Nobody believes me since everyone else around me has had to pull theirs. Not me tho, the plants I put in that mineral tub are still going strong! I've got some side shoots looking a bit rough from the cold overnight temps but we've not hit frost temps yet and the plants are still flowering! This was the tub full of home made compost, the horse manure, rabbit manure and the creek sand mix. I put 12 plants in that tub, 3 for each tomato cage and the plants grew double what the cages could hold, spilled out and over, hung down to the ground and produced tons of Roma tomatoes. Folks always seem to forget about what heavy feeders tomatoes are and end up with only half a growing season on them from lack of nutrition. I always tout the rabbit poo as awesome stuff and it's because you simply can not buy a fertilizer that's more efficient than bunny poo. The levels of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and potash are always perfectly balanced, you can use it fresh without burning your plants and you can never overdoes with it, the plant only breaks down as much poo as it needs to feed itself. How can you go wrong? You can't, you just can't. Plus, you can eat the rabbits!

It's not hard to grow any vegetable in a bucket. It's just like planting it in the ground with minor adjustments for watering and feeding. You must water your container plants more often than you would plants in the ground. The sunlight heats the soil and evaporates the moisture quicker than it can in a ground garden. The more you water something, the more you wash the nutrients out. If you'll think about that fact, the poor gardens in areas where there was so much spring rains will make sense. We had soooo much rain this past spring in the southern Illinois area that the regular gardens did horrible and if the plants were not supplemented with some sort of fertilizer, the crops simply did not even come up! Even with all the land I have here that could be planted with food crops for my family, I still put plants in containers. Every growing season I spend a day mixing up my special concoction of container planting soil mix. Each year and I am pleasantly surprised at how well the container grown plants perform for me. So, when you're out and about, always keep your eyes open for contaiers you can plant in. Remember tho, some plants need at least a 5 gallon bucket worth of root space!

Oh my aching back! I spent 2 days with my favorite neighbor helping to vaccinate 90 Charlois(I think that's how you spell it) beef cows. They are a creamy white cow with plenty of attitude! I got to be the sticker, I loaded all the needles and poked every cow with at least 3 needles, a few got up to 6 needles! Got chased by a young bull(he was most certainly angry) and slobbered with plenty of cow poop. Several of the young heifers scared the fire out of me, they're much bigger and are so much different than the pets I raise to butcher. There's something to be said for naming your feeder calf and playing with it every day! At least I knew how to catch the tiny calves, they weren't too much trouble but they sure did make my back hurt. Just not as young as I used to be......

I've got my winter kitchen window garden started. The tobacco I grew in the ice cream bucket is flowering, I used a q-tip to pollinate the flowers by hand yesterday. I've never done that before so I'm not sure if it will work as well as tomatoes and cantalopes do, just have to wait and see if I can get seed pods from it. The coffee plants are still going strong, I might split them up into their own containers in the next week or so. I need to have about an hour of free time to do it tho and I haven't even had time to make a good supper lately. Good thing I put bread and a few meals in the freezer or I'd be one hungry farmer!

Soon the ground will be frosting in the morning and I'll have time to do all those little projects I want to get done. Like what's in Hobby Farms Home magazine this month. It's a nice little article about using your eggs to make ornaments. I've had a kit and book to make those Czech design eggs(pyansksa or something like that) I'd look at the book but since I'm at the library....

I'll bet I have 6 dozen duck eggs in the fridge right now. Since I've been so busy running around at other peoples farms, I've just not had the opportunity to use all my eggs in those delicious recipes I have stashed in that notebook. I need to be cooking sometime soon! The duck eggs are nice and large and would make great shells for the ornament decorating.

I also wanted to get into a whole rant about something in this months Mother Earth News, 11 great places you (maybe) never heard of. They listed Carbondale, Illinois as one of those great places. Hello?!? The author must have visited another Carbondale, Illinois and for sure not the one I hate to drive to....... Or perhaps didn't even visit at all and just phone interviewed the head of the local food co-op and someone from the tourism office. They sure didn't mention the crime or the traffice or the garbage all over the streets and the tourist spots in the Shawnee Forest that have been ruined by ignornace, trash on the ground and spray paint.... shame shame Mother Earth News, I'm pretty disappointed with you all for this one.......

Well, once again my time on the library computer has come to an end and I must stop. I really need to get back to the farm and at least act like I want to do chores today! LOL

The Self Sustaining lifestyle

I get questions all the time-how do you do it? and is it really possible to be self sustained in this era? I just always smile and shake my head. Sometimes trying to explain to people is an exercise in futility. Not everyone is tho, some folks get it right away and those people end up being aqaintances for a while.

What is it that I do that makes my lifestyle so different from everyone elses? Well, I guess it's because I spend almost all my time in the pursuit of feeding myself and bettering the world around me. Not with expensive consumer goods but with down to earth, useful items that will help me feed myself and my family in a more efficient manner. We don't spend our free time walking around the mall or shopping, we don't even go to the grocery store unless we need some sugar or salt and pepper.

Living self sustained isn't for everyone, that's for sure. If you must go to a job for 8 hours a day and spend an hour or so driving back and forth to that job, your day is consumed already and there's really not much time left to plant 5 acres of crops and tend livestock. Even baling hay would be out of the question. I did the rat race working for others thing and I'm not saying working for yourself is any better because it's feast or famine here all the time, but I spend most all my time outdoors and out of those horrid flourescent lights and filtered air, I never have to dress up in uncomfortable clothing or shoes and the livestock does not even care if I brushed my hair before coming out to work! LOL goats don't care if your coat matches your shoes as long as you have a bucket of grain in your hand!

Living self sustained takes some serious mental and physical sacrifices. I gave up television(how refreshing that is!) I gave up fast food(and lost 10lbs) and I don't drive anywhere that isn't necessary to the workings of the farm so I'm consuming less fossil fuels. I've also forgone the commercially produced foods, I can my own tomatoes, vegetables, grow my own potatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and butcher my own meats. I learned all this a little at a time, on my own thru books and the internet. Trial and error were also good teachers. Not every crop I plant even now goes the way I plan for it to go. I have finally gotten the bread baking and the cheese making down pretty well. Every batch is slightly different but it's all consistently good now. I always hear the arguement "everybody needs somebody every now and then", well, that is true, that's why I married a like minded man. Between the 2 of us, we can easily handle anything and everything that comes along. We actually prefer to do it ourselves. Now, when we get old enough, we might need help, but until then, we're doing it all by ourselves and it's working.

The only challenges left for me is to be completely solar and to process my own diesel fuel. Maybe next year.....

Okay, remember the ice cream I was going to make? Well, I got side tracked and have not had the chance to make it yet. A neighbor came to me with a little work. He needed some help getting some sick calves up to the barn and some round bales moved out of a fresh pasture. He wants to turn his cows out in it and doesn't want them to tear the winter hay supply up before winter. Can't blame him there. All I had planned was to bake a little bread, make some pork sausage, do a batch or 2 of cheese and make that ice cream. Didn't got any of that done! I spent 13 hours working for the neighbor instead. A good day, I got it all done for him but today I'm sore and tired! Those calves were pretty darn big! Tomorrow hubby and I will fix a tractor for the same man and move some hay from another field he has to closer to his barn. We got the water bill paid with the money he paid us plus he gave us an old hay wagon that needs a new deck on it. It will be a good winter project for us and we can hook it right to the back of the square baler so we don't have to pick bales up off the ground. I'm not as young as I used to be and the walking thru the field picking up the bales off the ground wears me out. The hay trailer is a very good thing.

I've got about a third of the materials I need gathered up to build the corn crib. I've got the bottom of the crib built, just scrap 2x6's cut 4' long with boards on each end to finish the box and 2 short pieces of plywood, butted together to make the floor. The plywood was scrap so it's not perfect but good enough to hold corn. The crib isn't super big, it's just 4' long and roughly 2 1/2' wide but it should hold all the corn I grew with some room left over. I still need some slats to finish it, the pallet wood only went a foot up the sides.

Ah, I can't wait to get the home computer fixed, Polar Bear is growing like crazy! She's a smart little dog. I hope she turns out to be a good farm dog.

Well, Iv'e reached the end of my time at the public library on their computer, see you all again real soon!