So much for quiet

I promised yesterday I'd be back today with farm pictures. I guess the cows must read this blog, because they sure staged a good scene for me this morning. (And you'll see how much practice I need with this new camera. Sorry these are not the best pictures.)

Right after the girls got on the school bus the phone rang. It was Madeline, using the bus driver's cell phone. "Mom, Mr. Bull is out in the pasture and he has a section of bale feeder stuck around his head."

Sure enough.



He had broke the bale feeder and got not only his head stuck through it, but one of his front legs as well. It was pretty comical to watch this 2000-pound animal dancing and leaping about, trying to get himself free.

Rafe was sitting on the kitchen counter watching him out the window, repeating sympathetically, "Poor little thing."

I felt a little bad about standing out there taking pictures of him in such distress. But there wasn't anything I could do to help. And you know the old saying. When life gives you lemons, take a picture. It'll last longer.

Even the feeder calves were concerned.



So I called Matt at work, and he called the vet, and right when they both showed up it started pouring rain. There are 3 vets in practice together - I wonder if they drew straws to see who had to come out and help us. Matt thought they'd shoot the bull with a tranquilizer dart, but Steve (the vet who apparently drew the shortest straw) thought he'd be better off getting him with a regular syringe.



Notice how Matt is keeping his distance. Every time Steve would come near the bull, the bull would swing his head (and the section of bale feeder) at him. Talk about dangerous. Steve did get a shot in him, and at that point I guess the bull finally got mad enough that he broke the section of bale feeder apart and freed himself.



Free at last!

Tree '06

As you can probably tell by the lack of farm pictures lately, things are pretty quiet around here. Everyone is pretty much settled in for the winter, and there's nobody having babies this time of year. The main task is taking beef to the locker every couple of weeks. But I promise to show up tomorrow with some kind of farm picture, just to get things back on topic.

I can never bring myself to start decorating for Christmas before Thanksgiving. Every year I tell myself, in the interest of time and efficiency, that I should just do a few things ahead of time. But I never actually do it. I enjoy Thanksgiving. For me, anyway, it's a time of reflection and of course gratitude. And it's one of the few holidays where people gather to enjoy great food and each other's company, without gifts or copious amounts of candy.

But the day after Thanksgiving? It's a go. I don't do the whole shopping thing...so not worth the early hours or fighting the crowds to me. No, our tradition is to go out and get a Christmas tree that day.

Last year I remember it was really cold and snowy. Not this year. It was in the 50's! A nice day to be walking around a tree farm, but hard to feel Christmasy about it. (In a few days we're supposed to be at lows in the single digits and highs in the teens.)

We decided to try a different tree farm this year, and headed down to Marble Rock to Lines' Tree Farm. It is a really nice farm run by really nice people, and the trees and wreaths are very reasonably priced. We'll definitely be returning next year!


View from the top of the hill

After all of these years, I remain the family member most enthusiastic about this tradition. I'm subjected every year to comments like, "Just pick a tree already!" They had the type of skinny, short-needled, Charlie Brown-ish trees I love. I know it's a fir, but can anybody tell me which variety of fir?



(And for those keeping score at home, no, we still - after 9 years of living here - have no woodwork.)

The girls helped me decorate it. The tree skirt is a tattered old red-and-white quilt Matt's foster mom made. And I just realized we haven't put our "star" on top! Our "star" is a sunflower basket my friend Ann gave me a long time ago. Going to have to go get that out of the basement and into its proper place!



This tree is making me so happy!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Get your sausage on

My daughters have corrupted me with their pop music ways. I need to give Justin Timberlake his sexy back, crank up some Hinder, and stop writing post titles like this one.

Um, where was I?

Oh yes, sausage! We are excited to announce that our all-natural whole hog sausage will be available here at the farm, and at Kountry Kupboard in Osage. The locker is getting it labeled for us today, so it should be in our hot little hands later this afternoon.

Ground pork, $2.25/lb. in 1 lb. packages
Ground Italian sausage, $2.50/lb. in 1 lb. packages
Breakfast sausage patties, $3.65/lb., 4 patties per package
Bratwurst links, $3.85/lb., 4 links per package
Smoked breakfast links, $4.85/lb., I think these will be 12-oz. packages

So get your sausage on...think sausage pizza, pancakes & sausage, those grape jelly cocktail smokies, spaghetti and lasagna...the possibilities are endless. And drool-inducing.

For you out-of-towners, Kountry Kupboard is located on the north side of Main Street between 7th and 8th Streets. Their hours are Monday-Saturday, 9-5. If you've never visited their store you're in for a treat! Lots of bulk baking goodies, many of them organic, high quality kitchen tools, and very soon...Sugar Creek Farm beef will be available there, too! And on the other side of their store they carry beautiful handmade furniture that is very reasonably priced for such workmanship.

Our hours here at the farm are pretty much whenever you can catch us at home. Feel free to drop in, or give us a call if you want to be sure someone is here. We're happy to make deliveries in Osage as well - with 3 kids we certainly make a lot of trips to town! We're also in Mason City almost every Saturday afternoon, and Charles City almost every Tuesday evening, so deliveries could be arranged there as well.

For questions, to pre-order, or arrange a pick-up or delivery please email:

themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net

Feeling spoiled

As if a new camera wasn't enough, I also got an early birthday present this weekend. A potting bench! Matt had our friend Jeff custom build this for me. It's made of basswood and it's absolutely beautiful. A couple of details that are hard to see in the picture...a cute scalloped edge along the back of the top shelf, and a cutout in the left side of the work surface. Take the "lid" out and a bucket fits into the hole!

It still needs to be finished. Jeff knows me too well :) He told Matt he'd better wait on the finish, because maybe I'd want to paint it. Paint is always a popular option with me, but this time I'm simply going to have it sealed and varnished.

Unfortunately for Matt it didn't turn out to be a big surprise. I'd only had the plans for this thing tacked to the refrigerator for a year or two. And then they mysteriously disappear a month or two before my birthday? I was so onto him. That's okay. He's racking up some serious points this week, don't you think? When I told him I was going to blog about my bench tonight he said, "Good, I'll get some good press on that blog for once."

This is the same friend that made my seed-starting rack, and when Matt asked him to do the bench he also asked him to make me another rack. I'm going to be a seed-starting fool this winter! But with a certain special project I've got cooking, I'll be needing that second rack.

The obligatory self-portrait

I got a new camera!

My sweet husband had the opportunity to sell one of his guitars. I didn't want him to do it. I'm sentimental that way. I envisioned one of the kids wailing on it someday. And it had pink fingernail polish drips down the back of it, from when the girls were little. But when he started referring to the guitar as "she", as in "she deserves to be with someone who will appreciate her and play her more than I have the last few years"...I acquiesced.

So he handed me the check and asked, "Will this cover that new camera you've been wanting?"

What do you know...it did! Thank you, honey. I have so much to learn.

One person in this world

still thinks I'm a rock star.

It makes me happy and sad all at the same time.

Man I miss it.

Opera singer

From the end of the driveway, Olivia's snowwoman looked like an opera singer to me. I think it's her outstretched arms and the way the warmer weather has caused her to lean forward.

Another fall job done

A couple of weeks after Matt put 3 or 4 loads of manure on the garden, my dad came over with his tractor and soil saver to turn it over for us.

Rafe thought it was great fun riding with Grandpa, telling Grandpa to "go fast." When Rafe was little he didn't like to get too close to the tractor because of the noise. He'd clamp his hands over his ears and run away. But as he gets older it seems he's better able to tolerate it.

Paige

My new niece, Little Miss Paige. 5 pounds and 13 ounces of perfection. She was ready to get on with it already and arrived a few weeks early.

Then and now

Rafe playing guitar with Daddy.


Rafe playing Daddy's guitar.

Oink

The cattle are definitely Matt's enterprise. The meat chickens and laying hens are definitely my enterprise. But the pigs are more of a gray area.

When we're talking about how much it's going to cost to feed them as the price of corn goes up (and up), Matt refers to them as my pigs.

When someone's talking about how extraordinary they taste, they're our pigs.

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!

Whitey Ford is looking mighty tasty, don't you think?

We have 3 whole steers that have not been spoken for yet! They are due to be butchered the 27th of this month, but if we don't find takers for them we will (very sadly) have to take them to the sale barn.

Just seems like such a waste of tasty, lovingly raised, antibiotic-free beef. And no added hormones, either. (Ahem. Not allowed to say hormone-free, because of course being mammals they have naturally occuring hormones, blah blah blah.)

So if you're interested, please email

themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net

And I hate to say it, but Christmas is just around the corner. Last year we had a couple who purchased a quarter for each of their grown children as a Christmas gift. Which I thought was a really swell idea. Meat, the gift that keeps on giving!

Okay, end of sales pitch :)

Cleaning the Coop

Cleaning the chicken coop is about the last chore on my fall To Do List. Rafe came in to help when I was about done. I wore a handkerchief over my mouth to cut the dust, but I still ended up with a hacking cough the rest of the day.

This chore brings back memories of cleaning the old building on my parents' farm where I kept my 4-H pigs.

(And yes, maybe my dad did send me out there in the dark one night when he found out I hadn't checked on my pigs in a day or three and maybe I did go tearing back to the house screaming and making my parents think I'd been attached by a wild animal when my flashlight beamed across a nightcrawler, of which I was deathly afraid.)

Which always makes me think of Lisa, my best friend growing up. She was a "town kid", but somehow I managed to rope her into helping me scoop poop and wash my pigs for the fair. (Hi, Lisa!) I know she reads this from Waverly, which is far enough away that I can't rope her into much of anything anymore.

Anyhoo.

We scrape the chicken coop down to the floorboards, haul the old bedding off to compost, and start over with fresh wood shavings on the floor and clean straw in the nest boxes. Through the winter we'll keep adding layers of wood shavings. Lather, rinse, repeat next year.

Don't these nest boxes, with their fresh golden straw, just say, "Come, lay an egg in me."?


Today's grand egg total? Two. Last time I counted we had close to sixty hens.

Slackers.


There's Miss Silkie in the picture. People always ask me if we still have her.

The next task will be to catch as many of the hens as we can that are roosting outside of the coop, and shut them up inside the coop for a few days to help them remember where they're supposed to make their egg deposits.

Commando Farming 101

This is the new area Matt put together for the gilts a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes the things we do around here in order to raise animals get to be very survivalist. This picture shows several strategies that I've dubbed "commando farming":

1. (Very) used port-a-huts. I can't believe we're going to farrow in these things in March. It's going to be interesting. The upside though, we didn't take on debt to put up a farrowing barn or hoophouse instead.

2. Situate the port-a-huts on the south side of the corncrib for protection from the wicked winds of the north.

3. We had cornstalk bales made last week, and some of these have been stacked two high on the west side of the port-a-huts to block those cold westerly winds this winter.

4. Matt constructed these pens with old livestock panels found for us (free) by our junker friend. (Well, we repay him in hot meals and desserts :)

5. The tank off to the left was another freebie find. We don't have automatic waters, or heated waters, so in the winter water has to be carried by hand twice a day. This tank has been a lifesaver, freeing Matt from hauling water in 5-gallon pails.

Way in the back is Madeline (in the pink coat). She's been giving Matt a hand with pig chores every day, morning and evening, which has been a real help to him. She can take care of them by herself when necessary. She really doesn't care for the cows, or the chickens, but pigs (and flowers) seem to be her niche on the farm.

The other cute thing in this picture is 2 of the 3 little black piglets hanging out beside their mother's pen. They were weaned a couple of weeks ago, but up until this week we let them free range and they spent a lot of their time near Sarah. It seemed to help ease the separation process a bit.

Treats!

Halloween brings treats not only for the kids but for the animals, too. Our pumpkin patch friends sent us home with a wagonful of leftover pumpkins to be enjoyed by the cows, calves and pigs. The girls have fun smashing them open for everybody.