Additional Reading:

1. Home Schooling Crack Down in California We have written in the past about home schooling persecution here...
2. A Real Country County Fair 2007 We pulled some things together for some last minute entries...
3. Let Us All Bow Down to the Great God of Government As I predicted on the 10th, the government is now in...

I wish I was in a condition to be working on a Fall garden.  However, I’ve given up on the idea and turned my focus to getting my house organized and prepared for the birth.  I’ll think about gardening and flowers and all the wonderful outdoors work that I love later. 

Our boys, however, have spent a considerable amount of time in the summer heat working on the farm.  They’ve been running fence wire to contain animal in new grassy paddocks.  Hopefully soon, we will decrease our cow and pig population soon as we take a bunch of them to the butcher this Fall. 

The younger ones have enjoyed swimming in the little plastic swimming pool in the back yard.  We had an interesting incident the other day when the girls were swimming one afternoon.  I heard them screaming and yelling and found them very upset at our friendly milk cow, May.  She had found her way to the back yard and noticed the nice cool water the girls were playing in.  She proceeded to drink the swimming pool water and didn’t mind a bit that the girls were very upset about the situation.

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2. Somebody Turned Off Summer We really enjoy the changing seasons.  Last week our oldest...
3. A Summer Harvest Our 9 year old harvested his heirloom corn today. ...

We had 4 hens hatch out chicks this summer.  The boys noticed the hens go broody and were able to separate them and place them in their own small chicken tractor so predators didn’t bother them.  Within a few weeks each hen hatched out a batch of chicks.  I think we have about 24 new chicks running around here.  We have several more broody bantam chickens so we are awaiting to see if they are successful.  It’s always exciting to see the farm replicate itself and provide new animals instead of us buying them

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1. Exciting Farm News For 3 weeks, our oldest son has been vigilantly watching...
2. Our Improved Chick Incubator We didn’t have a great experience hatching out chicks last...
3. The Ugliest Vaughnshire Chicken One of our Bantam hens hatched out a baby chick...

The kids are very excited about the new baby.  My rambunctious 2 year old takes special time out of his busy day to come sit by me and pat my belly gently…occasionally offering the baby a kiss.  My 9 year old made an unsolicited, loving comment to me the other day on how I must be getting close to having the baby because I “look just like the sheep do right before they give birth.”   That was nice to know

We are hoping to get some new blog posts up soon about some of the happening things here on the farm. 

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1. 12 full weeks… It seems like the weeks are passing even faster now. ...
2. The Chicken Cow Cat Our 6 year old came in the house a few...
3. Middle Tennessee Agrarian life in the Fall! In case you have been wondering where we went…we’re still...

This year we have maxed out our pasture land and have been making efforts to clear some wooded areas to make new pasture land to expand our grazing areas with the increase in our animals.  It’s a very slow process.  We are looking forward to the fall and winter to give us the opportunity to work in the cleared wooded areas and hopefully get some fencing, gates up and watering infrastructure figured out. 

There is lots of firewood to be gathered, which we plan on starting soon.  If only more hours in the day….

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1. Raising Your Own Meat: Pastured Pork, Grass-fed Beef and Lamb For several years our family has been raising our...
2. Upcoming Fall Ramblings Ever feel like you fell off the wagon 3 miles...
3. Blogging changes coming 2007! I lament to my husband frequently that there are never...

We started with just having one pig at a time, until last year when we decided to try out 3 pigs.  Those pigs multiplied and this year we will be offering farm raised pork later this fall. 

Pigs are super cute when they are born, but escapee piglets quickly become quite the farm pest.  In my opinion, they rank up there with ornery goats.  Maybe I’m tainted in my opinion of pigs because of my own experience with them recently, but once one or more pigs invade your garden and eat your plants and garden produce and steal your chicken eggs, it’s hard to really like them.  At least with the pigs, I know I’ll get paid back in sausage and ham one day. 

We had a momma pig have 5 piglets a little while ago and if we were good farmers, we would have castrated the boars when they were just days old.  However, we neglected to take care of that early on but decided that the two boars we have needed to be castrated before they grew any bigger. 

With my husband in town working, our two older boys, who are 12 and 14 years old, had several “taking care of business” farm chores to do this week.  One of those items on the list was castrating the rams and boars.  After our morning meeting, I sent them out to take care of the animals, along with their two younger brothers for backup support. 

Sorry, no pictures of the actual process…I wasn’t about to go document the process.   They had helped their dad on the cows, sheep and another pig, so I hoped they could figure it out by themselves.  My husband assured me they could do it.  An hour later, they came back in the house looking like they had just butchered the pig by the look of their clothing, however, they assured me the pig was fine and their backup support almost fainted so they didn’t need their “help” with the after lunch lineup of sheep. 

Later on that day, I was in the kitchen preparing supper and opened up the refrigerator drawer to find a nice reminder that I’m a mom of farm boys:

I’m serious when I say that as a mom of 5 boys, I still don’t get it.  Whether it’s spitting on the clothes iron to see if it’s hot enough, consistently trying the laws of gravity or putting pig testicles inside my refrigerator, boys continue to challenge and confuse me. 

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1. 2009 Pigs We have pigs again.  Actually, one of the pigs...
2. Friends in the Pasture This year, we chose a female pig.  For those who...
3. The 5 year old farm boy If you could have know how farm illiterate/challenged we were...

A Tale of Two Calves.  One calf was fed raw milk and the other calf was fed conventional pasteurized milk.  Check it out here!

The differences in these two calves is really amazing. 

We’ve seen a similar pattern here on our farm with calves raised on raw milk either from a nurse cow or us milking and giving the cow raw milk in a bottle as opposed to the calves raised on formula.  The raw milk raised calves thrived…the formula fed calves we struggled to keep alive. 

Additional Reading:

1. More Cow Talk Our boys are raising a cow for their grandparents.  They...
2. Purchasing a Milk Goat Milk goats are a great family farm animal.  They are...
3. Introducing Havala Baby calves are so enjoyable to have around on the...

Contrary to what many people believe, all milk is not created equal!   After using conventional milk, pasteurized organic milk, pasteurized non-homogenized milk and raw milk and visiting a wide variety of dairy operations from conventional to grass-based as well as running our own small dairy operation, I can definitely say there is a huge difference.  Now that we have our own raw milk resource, I’m fully a raw milk convert.   Now realizing that raw milk is difficult to find, I’m very sympathetic to those who would rather have real milk choices but are stuck with conventional milk for the time being.  It’s a difficult switch to make for a lot of people just because of the ridiculous restrictions put on family farmers producing raw milk which make raw milk a rare find in many parts of the country.  There aren’t many raw milk dairy farmers around!

One question I get asked alot from people who know that I’m a farm wife, is if I drink my own raw milk when I am pregnant!?!  At first the question seems a little obvious, but then maybe not with all the raw milk scare tactics from the media and mega-factory farming corporations. 

Yes, I do drink my own raw milk when I am pregnant.  Shocking, I know to some…but once you read and educate yourself on the facts about real milk, it’s not so shocking drinking raw milk while pregnant.  In fact, while I am pregnant and breastfeeding, I take extra special care to make sure that I get more milk, eat more raw butter and use more raw cream.  I can feel the difference that the real food makes when I consume it.  As a pregnant mother, I have no reservations about consuming raw milk and giving it to my children to drink.  Yes, even my little ones regularly have fresh milk.  My older boys love to guzzle down cup fulls of raw cream and make raw milk whipped cream for toppings on a variety of foods. 

The milk we currently drink is from our 3 year old Guernsey cow named May.  We milk her once a day.  The rest of the day she is eating grass, licking up free-choice minerals, drinking the spring water and resting in the shade of the trees living the life of a cow on a small family farm.  She occasionally escapes and gets into the garden where she likes to eat all sorts of garden plants. 

After milking, my boys bring the milk inside and strain the milk through a filter into glass half gallon jars.  We use half gallon glass jars because we’ve found that they are easier to pour from and easier to cool down.  We mark the glass jars with the day of the week the milk is from and quickly get it cooled off in the refrigerator.  She produces superior golden milk with lots of cream.

We go through great lengths to ensure our animals are healthy and we are very careful to follow good milking practices, but it doesn’t come without a cost.  Our milk isn’t cheap…but it also isn’t the same milk as the $2 milk in the store.  Two completely different products!

 I feel very blessed to be able to have such a resource and thank God that He has blessed our little farm with land flowing with milk…and hopefully one day we’ll get around to the honey part! 

We would love to help others get back to the agrarian life where real milk is considered a great blessing and whole foods off the land are prized provision from God, not to be taken lightly.  We have a long road to travel to turn our food system around, but we believe that the mega factory based industrial food system is doomed for failure.

Get to know your farmer!  All milk is not the same and you should do your research to ensure you are receiving good healthy milk! 

If your skeptical about raw milk, here are a few resources where you can find many articles about the subject:

• Farm to Consumer Legal Defense:  Lots of informative articles on raw milk, local food, factory farms and different food safety issues. 
• Real Milk:  raw milk safety, health and economic issues. 

Additional Reading:

1. Drinking Raw Milk During Pregnancy “I am about 6 weeks pregnant with our second child...
2. Processing Steps for Raw Milk After we milk Bonnie Blue, I carry the milk back...
3. Raw Milk Vs. Conventional Milk Experiment I ran across this blog post that I thought would...

Earlier this summer, there was much excitement when we picked the cabbage we planted earlier this spring.  Beautiful, non-perfect, organic cabbage heads.  I cut up one head of cabbage and sauteed it with garlic, onion and some of the pak choi chinese cabbage left in the garden.  It was better than delicious.  We all enjoyed it not only because it tasted great, but it was all our hard work paying off in the form of good food from our own garden.  I also used the cabbage to make homemade cole slaw.  Delicious! 

Now our only garden rewards are the tomatoes.  Though not as abundant as last year, they are very prized and welcomed. 

It seems silly that something so simple could bring so much satisfaction….but it does. 

As a family, we are far from recapturing the lost art of gardening.  We’ve had many set backs this year and low garden production.  I’ve ended up buying more produce this year.  However, I know it is just a season and am thankful that we are learning from this hard gardening year that will hopefully make us more productive in future years!

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The cows are quickly growing and gaining, the sheep are expanding and growing too.  Several of our hens hatched out baby chicks and our baby pigs are also growing and causing all kinds of problems!   

We are also expanding our pasture area by clear cutting some of our wooded areas.  We currently only have a small amount of pasture land and are needing more pasture to rotate the cows and sheep.  We are also wanting to plant a sizable orchard once we get a section of the land prepared, so we are utilizing the land we have by changing it up a bit.   I am sure we will share more on this at a later date. 

Our garden has been slow this year.  We have had several invasions by the cows and piglets.  I’ve also had plants mysteriously die and my cucumbers have been very bitter this year?  I read that it could be caused from too much heat and irregular watering?  So far, the okra and tomatoes are doing great.  The peppers are just now starting to take off.  I’ve learned that I don’t make a good gardener at 8 months pregnant!

I’ve been working on putting up food in my pantry and freezer.  I bought a ton of food from the local produce auction and have been working on getting all of it frozen and canned up!  I also have lots of peaches that I am canning.

Here’s the links for following my food preserving efforts this week here on the farm:

1. Buying Local Bulk Produce
2. Freezing Corn on Day 1
3. Shredding Zucchini and Freezing more Corn on Day 2
4. Canning Peaches on Day 2

Additional Reading:

1. The 5 year old farm boy If you could have know how farm illiterate/challenged we were...
2. Beef, Lamb and Pork Coming in the Fall The boys finished up castrating the rams and pigs today. ...
3. Farm Journal Entry – Spring This week we have posted a lot of farm related...