Life has gotten a little busy around here and we’ve fallen off the blogging wagon for too long! Maybe a change in the season will help kick our butts into gear again?
It’s been a long, rough few week on the farm. We have struggled with our bulk tank failing for the past few weeks. We bought it refurbished from a dealer in July and after 8 weeks we had the control board conk out, causing the water that cools the milk to freeze solid around the tank and motors. The dealer finally sent us two new boards and a check to cover any other costs. We lost a lot of milk that had become solid blocks of ice…at least the pigs were happy during those weeks!
Hoping those troubles were behind us, we found on Wednesday evening this week that the milk was about 50 degrees in the tank – much warmer than the ideal 36-37 degrees that we need it to be. We narrowed it down to a compressor issue but ended up having to call a serviceman for an 11pm service call – that bill wasn’t pretty! But, he fixed it in about 15 minutes so *fingers crossed* we are past the bulk tank issues…
This came in the middle of my “week off” due to an eye injury. Of all the things we do on the farm that could potentially hurt us, I was accidentally punched in the eye by Cecilia during bedtime on Monday night, with her fingernails slicing my eyeball. After a visit to the ER on Tuesday morning, they diagnosed me with a corneal abrasion. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any pain meds for the eyes (other than the numbing drops I wanted to steal from the hospital) and the pain finally subsided around Friday. A week later, I’m almost able to open my eye all the way, although I still have a ring of haze and blurriness so my vision hasn’t completely returned.
I haven’t been able to drive so most of my work has been shifted onto Dan’s shoulders, which is an additional burden that I hate to put on him. I am able to milk, though, so we’ve started switching delivery routes for chores a lot of days. I like to think that I have a rather high pain tolerance and given my 3 natural births and kidney stones, I feel like that’s rather justified, but this eye kicked my butt. Dan complained that he barely slept because I was randomly crying out in pain throughout the night (I wasn’t very sympathetic).
On top of that, Dan was gone Thursday and Friday at a grazing conference – which was amazing! – but difficult with just me and kids at the farm. Thanks to my mom for taking so much time off work this week to take me into the ER, get Ceci to and from preschool, clean my house and cook meals! What would we do without moms?!
The grazing conference was incredible, though, and worth every penny and second of Dan’s time. It was held through the MSU Agricultural Extension Office at the Kellogg Bio Station in Hickory Corners. There they have extensive field research on grazing animals, specifically grassfed dairy, complete with a robotic milker. Very jealous!
I’ll leave the details for Dan to write his own post about that experience but his takeaway was that we are doing really well, given our limited resources, but there are so, so many simple things that we can do to improve our soil fertility, grass diversity and thus stocking capacity and health of our animals.
It almost made Dan want to go back to grad school until he realized that he’s doing all the research the students are – just on his own farm and making money, instead of paying money. 😉
The rest of September has flown by in a whirlwind of winter preparations, Cecilia beginning preschool, and me tackling a fall purge of our house. (Check out The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) I’ve been blowing up my Instagram account with photos of the progress. (@twosparrowsnest)
Beau is almost 7 months old, crawling everywhere and pulling himself up on every piece of furniture possible. He stands and walks with us, too, while holding our hands. 🙂 We’ve also been busy putting away the harvest – canning jam, tomatoes, and now applesauce. We have potatoes, onions and garlic for the winter, plus lots of frozen greens in the freezer. Now, we’re just waiting on hunting season for venison and our pork in the winter!
We finished out last batch of meat chickens on Thursday this week, which put us at a total of 450 birds for the year. Our goal is to raise and sell at least 800 next season! We’ve been so, so happy with the quality of these pastured non-GMO chickens and have already made quite a bit of delicious broth!
We are still taking orders for half and whole pastured pork. These guys are getting BIG and you can see them tilling up our front pasture on the farm. We’re using them to do our work this fall – after they till up the pasture, we’ll spread it with manure and seed a pasture grass mix into it. Pigs should be done around the end of the year – check out our Pork page for more info.
This week, we were able to take the afternoon to celebrate Dan’s birthday! I have to say that after a month like the last one, I’m incredibly grateful to have him as my partner in crime! Happy {Belated} Birthday Dan!!
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