Winter pigs

This is about all you'll see of the pigs when it's cold, unless it's feeding time. They burrow down in the straw, way in the back of the Port-a-hut. The Port-a-hut sits on the south side of the corncrib and is surrounded by large, stacked up cornstalk bales on the west side. Most animals seem to handle the cold pretty well as long as they have protection from the wind.

This morning it was 6 below, not sure what the wind chill was. When I heard the weatherman say, "The cold weather will arrive this weekend", I thought...what? You mean this isn't it? But Sunday's high - if you can call it that - is going to be zero. So it should be a good day to stay inside and watch the Bears win the Superbowl :)

Winter toys

Rafe's toys in the snowed-over garden, waiting for the spring thaw when the digging can begin again.

Bitter cold again today, with wind chills from 20 to 30 below. The kind of cold that can literally take your breath away.

Winter creek

From this on Friday...


to this on Sunday...

Duck defrost

Patti had warned me that Muscovy ducks might not be the brightest of the animal kingdom.

The temperatures plunged this weekend, with highs in the low single digits and windchills at 20 below. When I went out to feed and water the ducks and chickens this morning, I had my usual 10 ducks plus the one little brown hen with the speckly white chest that's been hanging out on the creek with New Drake. But no New Drake, and I figured he was a goner after last night's bitter cold.

I went back out at noon with more hot water and there in the shed with the rest of the ducks was New Drake, looking like a big ducksicle. Clumps of ice covered his entire body, making it hard for him to even move. There was an especially big clump covering the top of his tail feathers.

So I grabbed him and carried him back to the house, tucked under my arm, careful to keep his wings pinned against his body. The garage attached to the house has a heated floor and we keep it about 45 degrees in there. I figured it would be warm enough to defrost him.

As soon as I got him in there he started picking at the ice on his back and wings, preening and grooming himself. And pooping all over my garage floor. Oh well. Every once in a while he would stretch up and spread his wings, flinging bits of ice around.





It took about 6 hours, but he finally got defrosted and dried off. I took him back to the shed with the other ducks and shut them all in for the night. Hopefully New Drake will stay put until spring.

And I thought this was supposed to be the "quiet" time of the year!

Winter kids

A short but exhilarating ride



Matt is sure to make a pile of snow for the kids to sled down and tunnel through. The trickiest part of Olivia & Rafe's adventure was keeping the sled from sliding down before they were both in it.

When there's no snow, they sled down the piles of woodchips.

Winter dog

Ava stops eating snow long enough to pose for me.

Not feeling very verbose tonight, just tired. I have to be up extra early tomorrow, to go to the middle school and accompany band students as they practice for their solo contest in a few weeks. They each get 15 minutes with me, and I'll play straight through from 7:30 to 1:00. (Some of them double up, if they're playing the same solo.)

This started last year, Madeline's first year of band (she plays the flute). I told her to ask her band teacher if it would be all right for me to accompany her for the solo contest. My mom always accompanied me, until I got into high school anyway.

The response was, "Yes it's fine, but she wants to know if you'll accompany the whole fifth grade."

Winter ducks

11 ducks have finally smartened up and spend their time in the vacant broiler shed, though they were all on the creek today (but 5 came when I called them!) 2 still camp on the creek. I found my favorite drake frozen at the side of the creek. That leaves 6 missing, presumed dead and eaten.

Yesterday I was in the mood for a good old-fashioned Sunday dinner. I cut up a couple of chickens, set the breasts aside for later in the week, and made oven-fried chicken with the dark pieces. We also had baked potimarron squash, scalloped corn and broccoli, and a huge pot of mashed potatoes. It was a really good meal, with all of the main ingredients from the farm. Naturally I proceeded to eat myself sick.

One of the reasons I made a huge pot of mashed potatoes was so that I could make Golden Potato Soup tonight with the leftovers. This is a really fast and easy soup, perfect with a green salad and bread, great for a quick weeknight supper.

Golden Potato Soup
(slightly adapted from More With Less Cookbook)

Chop 1 onion. Saute in 1/4 cup oil.

Blend in 2 T. flour and 2 t. salt (I find it easiest to do this if I shut the heat off first.)

Add 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil and boil 2 minutes.

Add 4 cups milk, 2 cups mashed potatoes, and 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese. Stir and smash/blend the potatoes in. Heat just until cheese is melted - do not boil.

That's it, simple!

Winter cows

The snow has ended for today. Haven't heard what our total accumulation was, but it looks to be about 4 to 6 inches. Best of all, the wind hasn't picked up so it's really pleasant to be out and about. Tromping through snow to do chores is a good workout.

We knew it was coming, so yesterday I got the chickens and ducks bedded down and hauled feed out so I wouldn't have to do that in the snow. Matt was sick, so Madeline and I fed the calves their corn. They get two five-gallon pails of corn a day. Olivia fed the boar & gilts and filled the cattle watertanks. I hooked the trailer water tank up for Madeline, and she pulled it up to the house with the tractor to fill up and then out to the pigs (where she had to knock the ice out of their trough with a hammer first). Chores are much less of a chore when there's teamwork involved.

Olivia and I discovered a hen that had gotten herself stuck under a piece of fence panel that separates the cows from the calves. Looked like she had tried to squeeze underneath, but only got halfway through. I pushed on the bottom of the fence and Olivia pushed and pulled and wriggled the hen until she was out. Still, she wouldn't move. So I tried to pick her up and found that her feathers were frozen to the ground! Kind of like pulling off a bandaid - just had to pull her free real quick. I carried her out to the coop and she was eating and drinking and walking around just fine.

Salmon Faverolle

Canon Rebel XT, 50mm lens

This is "Salmon", our Salmon Faverolle roo.

(Original namers, aren't we?)

He's the lowest roo in the pecking order, and yet he's most likely the highest maintenance bird we have.

Sunday I was headed back to the house after doing chicken chores. Ava ran over to the stack of round bales and was sniffing up Salmon. I hollered at her to get away from him, and then realized that Salmon wasn't running away. So I went over to investigate and found that his foot was tangled in a shredded piece of bale tarp.

(Sorry, Ava. Good dog for alerting me.)

Back to the house for a pair of scissors. As I started snipping away the tarp fibers from his foot, I saw that he also had a piece of feed sack string wrapped around his foot. It had tied together two of his toes, and really constricted another toe. So I got that snipped and unwound, too.

Finally he was free. And promptly hid himself amongst the round bales, humiliated.


Even this time of year, when it seems there's not much going on around here, something's going on.

Mist rising at sunset

This was the sight that greeted me after work today when I headed out to feed the chickens and ducks. Immediately I set down my pail of hot water and trotted back to the house for the camera. That's what I love about photography, and about having this blog. It makes me slow down, notice, appreciate.

Tuesday's are busy days. I get off work at 5:00, do chicken chores, put something together for supper, and leave at 6:30 to take Madeline to dance class in a town a half hour away. Ordinarily I'd rush through my after-work tasks to get on the road on time.

But my eye stops me now. A voice whispers, "Look at that!" And I do. And I try my best to capture in a file of pixels what my eye sees.

Unfortunately this picture does no justice to real life.

Whatch you lookin' at?

All of the cattle staring at the crazy girl with the camera.

It's finally winter. Brrrr! My ducks refuse to come back to the house. They're hanging out on the neighbors' side of the creek along the bank. So I trekked out there with a bucket of feed for them this morning. Not an easy task, as it's entirely overgrown and there were many sharp sticks trying to poke me in the eye.

The ducks were very happy to see me. Well, probably not me. They were very happy to see the bucket of feed. They wouldn't follow me back to the house for it, though.

It was actually pretty nice at that spot, protected as it is from the wind. Made me feel a little better about them being out there. But still they keep me up at night, worrying about them in the snowstorm and the below-zero temperatures. I'm trying to talk Matt into doing an intervention and trying to catch them all without falling in the creek ourselves.

Dog pile!

Updated: fixed the PFI link

Ike thinks he's a lap dog.

I'm off to the PFI Conference. Looking forward to meeting up with acquaintances old and new, ideas and inspiration, and of course the all-Iowa food! Better pack my stretchy pants.

Another installment

of "One of these things is not like the other..."

I didn't even notice it the first few times I looked at this picture.

You can see the other installments here and here.

Last Call

The last of the '06 beef will be butchered in a couple of weeks. We have one quarter left, just shoot me an email if you want it:

themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net


We do also have one whole steer that will go to the salebarn if we don't sell his 4 quarters. So if you have 1 or 2 or 3 friends or neighbors that you'd like to split with, we'll see if we can get the locker to fit us in. Or, we'd be happy to haul it to a locker near you as long as you're taking the whole steer (within a reasonable driving distance).

Taking a whole steer might also work well for a retail establishment - restaurant or grocery store. Contact me at the email above for wholesale pricing if you're interested.

Road ducks

Some days for my lunch break I grab the camera and head outside. I need the fresh air and a little distance from my computer monitor. These days it's dark by the time I get out to do chicken chores, so it's nice to see everyone before they go to roost.

I could only see our Mr. Duck and New Drake on the creek, so I went looking for the other 17 ducks. I looked in the chicken coop, in the southern part of the pasture, around the hog huts, all the usual places but no ducks. I gave up and headed down the driveway to retrieve the mail from the mailbox.



And what to my wondering eyes should appear but ducks on the side of the road. About 8 of them were hanging out alongside the road, right where the creek crosses under it (and where there used to be a bridge).

The rest of the missing ducks were down alongside the creek.


Sometimes I wonder what passersby must think of the goings-on out here.

Tractor girl

Madeline's favorite part of chores is driving the tractor. As she's taken on responsibility for feeding the breeding gilts and boar, I've noticed a marked increase in confidence in her. A good thing to have entering the middle school years.

What we did on New Year's Day

(or, Why some people think we're crazy)

Last time we had beef butchered I asked the locker to save us 20 pounds of fat. They don't render lard anymore, because their machine broke and there just isn't much call for it. They gave me a look, but over time they've become pretty accomodating to my many crazy requests.

But I think they gave us a little more than 20 pounds:


We only got through one of these chunks. The whole point of this little exercise is to learn to make soap. So yesterday we set about with Step 1, rendering the beef fat into tallow. I cut off chunks and Matt fed them through the meat grinder. The kids are rather excited about the prospect of making our own soap, and they all wanted to help with the grinding.





I started with an inch or two of water in my largest stock pot, and as Matt got a dinner plate filled with ground fat I'd add it to the pot. We brought the fat to a boil and then turned it down to a simmer, periodically skimming off the cracklings and unrenderables.

We had several bowls ready, each with a little water in the bottom. Matt ladled the fat into the bowls and we let them set for a day.



Tonight I cut it into pieces, seran wrapped the pieces, and put them in the freezer. I hope we did this right. The directions we used said that once the tallow was set there would a gelatinous layer on the bottom that would need to be rinsed off under cold running water. We didn't have anything like that. Anyone out there know? Perhaps because when we ladled it into the bowls most of the "junk" was left in the bottom of the stockpot. The fat that went into the bowls was very clean.

We ended up with 17 pounds of cakes. They're really pretty, an absolutely pristine white. I'm tempted to take some and make a pie crust, like my mother-in-law used to.


Next step is to find a good beginner soap recipe, and acquire a soap pot and the other necessary tools and ingredients. Advice?

Happy 2007

10-Grain Bread loaves I baked as a Christmas gift

So, vacation's over. I enjoyed a much-needed break from my computers. But tomorrow it's back to the day job.

Being an everyday listmaker, you can imagine that the New Year's Resolution List is something I jump into with gusto. A couple of years ago I stole an idea from Superhero Journal - a multi-list concept, you can go read about it over there.

One of my "10 Things I Intend to Create in My Life in 2007" was this:

To continue to cultivate peace and contentment in my life

But the word "contentment" is troublesome to me. It's definition is "happiness with one's situation in life." It implies a sort of endplace, where you need nothing more than what you have.

It's true that I need nothing more than what I have right now. I'm happy in my life, happy in the people and activities that make up my days. And yet I'm a person that is constantly trying to grow, learn, change, push my limits. I have dreams that I want to work toward. But when I voice those desires, my dear husband invariably accuses me of being discontent.

So what do you think, dear reader? What is your definition of contentment?

(And coincidentally, I read this post after I wrote this one. She points right at what I'm trying to get at, but with so much more poetry. Simply beautiful.)