Farming is a profession of hope

Farming is the profession of hope...

Right now I have hope for goats.

My beloved goat is sick with pneumonia. Her name is Imp and I haven't had her for very long so this is certainly a heartbreaking turn of events.  It seemed to happen almost overnight, Saturday I milked her and we had a grand ol' time singing milking songs and spending some quality time together.  Sunday morning I gathered my milking supplies and stepped out of the house calling my usual greeting "Good morning Imp!".  As I neared the milking stall I noticed that she did not look her usual chipper self,  she was out of breath and seemed to be hiding under her milking stand.  I went in to see her and she just layed down in front of me.  I was terrified, I dropped my milking supplies and headed back to the house to call for Ken to come help in a panic.  This is my first goat related health issue and I sure wasn't ready for it yet! (Are you ever ready?!)

We whipped up a mixture of warm water, molasses and vitamin A,E,D fluids, grabbed an oral syringe and headed back out for my first solo mission in drenching (Imp, as it turns out, is a model patient).  I called the closest vet in Steinbach and asked if they could come out and see her as well as take care of all the worming and vaccinations for the other three. On Tuesday morning Dr. Olsen painted a rather grim picture of the likely outcome of a respiratory illness this advanced.  Even though the illness seemed to come out of nowhere she must have been hiding it for awhile before it became too much to bare. She prescribed daily injections of penicillin and left with a word of warning that she may be too far gone.  

Tears in eyes and needles in hand I decided I was going to do everything I could.  Imp and I would not go down without a fight.  Digging into my herbal books and scouring the internet I came up with a formula for respiratory ailments, I've dubbed it 'Imp Saver'.

So as a compliment to the penicillin shots I have been giving the following herbal infusion twice daily. 6 x 35cc in the morning and again at night.

In a 1L Mason jar overnight I infused equal parts of Peppermint leaves (Mentha Piperita), Hyssop leaves and flowers (Hyssopus Officinalis), Echinacea powder (Echinacea Angustifolia), Pau d'arco (Tabebuia avellanedae), Slippery Elm Powder (Ulmus Fulva).
We are on day 5 of this regiment and she seems to be responding quite well, she is showing a lot more interest in food and water, as my dad says "oats are an important part of goats!"  She is a little more feisty and her breathing seems to have calmed down a bit although she still seems to be breathing slightly heavier than usual.  Today is the last shot of penicillin and I will continue on with the infusions for awhile and start including into it some fennel seeds to try to help boost her milk back up again.

Earlier this week I was feeling very down and I didn't have much hope, but now I have hope for goats!

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If the farmer's lying under the table, the food wasn't really fresh!

A fresh egg is a beautiful thing.
The yolks are plump and will rise up out of the whites like a glorious colourful sunrise triumphantly rising up over a gelatinous translucent sea.

There is no comparison in store bought eggs. 

Store bought eggs are like the beginning, black and white part of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy falls off the fence into the pig pen, fresh eggs on the other hand, are like technicolour magic.

I was so shocked the first time I broke open a fresh egg from our hens, all my life I grew up with store bought eggs with  flat, dull, greyish yolks.  Bright yellow/orange scrambled eggs took a little getting used to.

I like to think of the the yolks of the eggs as a big indication of the life lived by the hens.  Plump, sunny yolks come from happy and healthy hens who live a life full of fresh air, sunshine, rolling in dirt, chasing frogs, skipping down the yellow brick road and eating bugs...so what does that mean for hens who lay flat, greyish yolks? I imagine it's something along the lines of slaving away at a un-fulfilling job in a cubicle farm only to be replaced by a younger employee to increase production, only instead of just replacing you, they chop your head off.

Another thing that your egg yolks will tell you (she's listening to eggs, man)  is how old they are.  Think about what an egg goes through before it ends up in your food? A store bought egg must be processed and packed, shipped to distribution centres, distributed to stores, sit on the shelf waiting to be purchased and then sit on the shelf at your house waiting to be eaten. Some eggs can be upwards of a couple months old before you ever use them.  Mother Earth news did an article about the storage of eggs and found that some eggs kept for up to 7 months.  They have an incredibly long shelf life, contained in their perfect little calcium "containers". That does not mean that you can toss your eggs into the fridge or pantry and forget about them for over a half a year and expect that they will be perfectly fresh when you decide to make an omelette. (For omelette making instructions please refer to This video, make sure you have plenty of wine and someone to help if your "cheese is trapped")

But Leiah?! you say...how do I know if my eggs are fresh?!

Well let me share with you the magical secret of the following simple float test to determine the freshness of your eggs:

SCIENCE!

All eggs have a small air sac in them, the older the egg is the larger the air sac becomes.  A fresh egg will sink when submerged in water and an old egg will float.

How to do it:
Fill your sink with cool water and carefully lower your eggs in.
A fresh egg will immediately sink to the bottom and lay on its side.
An egg that sinks to the bottom but tips up onto its end is still good enough to eat.*
An egg that does not touch the bottom but instead floats either under the surface or pops up to the top of the water should be discarded and not eaten.

*fun fact: older hard boiled eggs peel easier than fresh hard boiled eggs, so save your older eggs for making egg salad sandwiches!

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Meet me in the garden

"I found a little plot of land

In the garden of Eden

It was dirt, and dirt is all the same

I tilled it with my two hands

And I called it my very own

There was no one to dispute my claim"

-Joanna Newsom ( '81)

Later than I would have liked and forgetting a few key items (potatoes!?! how can you forget potatoes!?!),  the garden is IN.  Though at this point it appears that we are only growing wooden stakes with bits of brightly coloured binder-twine sprouting off them and an old utility sink.  You see, I devised a plan this year, every year I plant beets because I love beets, and every year something eats my beets, from underneath first and then the tops.  It is as if I never even planted them.  So while cleaning up the yard last weekend I came across one of those big double utility sinks, the legs were all broken off but one, so I finished the job and sunk the disabled sink into the garden and filled it with soil where I then sowed my beet seeds.  Take that you beet loving varmint, I shall dine on beets this fall and congratulate myself on outwitting you (I hope). 

On the garden roster this year is:
Sweet corn
White spanish onions
Celery
Carrots
Kale
Cabbage
Mesclun mix and green leaf lettuce
Zucchini
Squashes of mysterious origin
Green beans
Edamame
Cucumbers
Asperagus
Garlic
Herbs - chocolate peppermint, oregano, sage, basil, thai basil, rosemary, summer savory

Golden and detroit red beets (hah)
Thai peppers and bell peppers in the green house
and a small donated amount of tomatoes as all of our seedlings failed miserably. (all three varieties!)

I am really excited about the Kale, its the first year that T&T seeds has carried it and I do love me some kale, sauteed with some balsamic and olive oil and garlic.  I wonder if its too late to pick up some seed potatoes?

*note to self: dragonflies showed up the weekend before may long weekend this year, I am not sure when exactly they showed up last year but it seemed way later in the season.

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Spring has Sprung!

In the last few days we've been noticing something strange happening...green hues, bumps on the dogs and blue streaks everywhere! this can only mean one thing. it's spring! if you look at the forest all the tops of the trees have a light green hue to them which will turn into full on leaves pretty quickly, no offence Oak trees you are damn ugly when you are naked and I can see why they use you in all halloween/scary movies, but one thing that is great about you is that you drop accorns which in turn bring the blue streaks of the bluejays! in the spring we get waves of life passing through, just as the wave of dark eyed juncos had their fill from the feeders and moved on the next wave came, bluejays everywhere...screaming! and with it another spring time call..."Ken I found another tick can you come and pull it off the dog!" Yup Spring is here. Hurry up summer, I forgot how much I missed you!

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October and March resemble each other in every way

It's the kind of weather that calls for a warm fire, a good book and maybe a nice pot of home made soup simmering on the stove. It's not a day I feel like going outside and working on projects in the yard, so instead, I will write a list of the things we need to accomplish this season so that I can look back on this list and feel accomplished or it can serve as a nagging reminder of the things we never got around to.

Fix Gates:
A lot of the gates around the property are in serious disrepair, the wood used to build them was probably old and reclaimed from some other project when they were originally built.  Years of rain and snow has made many of the gates start to collapse on themselves, the bottoms are rotting and the corners are disintegrating.  It's a bit of a tricky fix on some because the man who built Lower Fort Bauer was extremely fond of nails, big ones, and lots of them.  Each gate is held together with no less than 47 large, rusted and bent nails.

Create club chook:
The Chicken coop is in need of some updating, the gaping cracks, lack of insulation and dripping roof is sooooo 1694. Having bought everything that came with the farm we also have things like piles of brand new shingles and pieces of metal roof hiding around every corner so this summer we are going to dig around and see how we can create a more comfortable home for the chickens in preparation for next winter, and I wouldn't want the current chickens to be embarassed to have their new houseguests move in. oh yes, the new house guests...we have 9 peeping chicks in our house which are getting bigger and bigger every day. The current chickens are just for laying eggs, so this time around we've decided to get Brahma chicks which are a dual purpose breed...I will let you figure out what the other purpose is, and i'm sure there will be MANY seperate posts on that learning experience.

Paint/stain the Fort:
We need to figure out something for the exterior of the addition of the Fort, most of it is holding up very well, but the wood on the west side which is exposed to the setting sun has started to weather and is looking a little long in the tooth.  It adds a special character to the place but at the same time we want this Fort to be standing for the rest of time and it needs some kind of a seal to keep moisture from rotting the wood.
This season we either need to pain it or stain it, as of yet we are undecided what the best course of action is, it's not like we can walk into home depot and ask them how to care for a house built like a turn of the century fur trapper settlement.  Actually, *light bulb goes off above my head* we may be better off calling some of the turn of the century trapper outposts that still exist around here and asking how they care for their stackwalls.
hmmmmm....

Trips to the Dump:
These will be an all summer affair.

Build a solar heater out of beer cans:
We are currently working on emptying the beer cans, more to come on this project...

Small Aesthetic Jobs:
-finishing up the solar shower & wood fired bath tub
-fixing the dock
-beautifying the front gate with addition of wooden stakes (fortress chic?)
-mending the greenhouse roof

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