Getting into Winter

Well our Fall crops were no good and I am a little disappointed. :( It is what it is. We just have to wait till Spring and we try all over again.

Miss Piggy seems to be in better spirits now since its been about 6 weeks and she is now back in with Hammy our boar. Last time I saw her go into heat was around the beginning of December...so very shortly she should be coming into heat again. We are just counting from the day we put Miss Piggy back in with Hammy as the "service" date.....just to be safe. Petunia our other gilt that we think is pregnant is hiding inside the barn and the only time I get a peek at her is when I get to feed her and even then she hides a little. So, I haven't seen much of her to definitely confirm she is pregnant! LOL

We also butchered a few of the roosters we hatched over the summer and they were pretty tiny....so we are talking about switching the whole flock to Plymouth Rock Chickens. We have a few and butchered them around the same time and they were meatier. Our oldest gals are done laying as well....so we need to make the flock smaller since we are just on straight feed now anyways. It looks like after the Holidays we will be putting those girls into the freezer.

There is talk about what we want to do next season as well as far as the garden goes....there is even talk about trying wheat! I am pretty excited! We are going to separate the pumpkins and corn. The corn strangled the pumpkins and we didn't get any this past season. :( We are also planting the corn all at once and a larger field more together on the other side of the property.

The tomatoes we canned are still holding up and doing great. We have gone through quite a bit....but we might actually make it till we get fresh tomatoes again! That would be wonderful! Its what we are working towards.

Many many meals have been made with just the fruit of our labor and its a wonderful feeling. I wish for everyone out there that you could try this. It is one of the most exhausting and rewarding feelings...other then parenthood! HA HA HA HA

Happy Holidays

The Smiths

Mid season growth of the garden

 

Found an old post that I never got to finish....buisness of homesteading with 5 young children around! LOL

Our Piglets

Well, Miss Piggy had her piglets.....we saw how big she was getting and how she was acting and we adjusted her due date to Halloween.....well Hurrican Sandy rolled through and must of stressed her out, she had them early. The roof cracked and had a leak and when we got a chance to go check on the pigs and chickens when everything settled....they were born, 11 of them....and already gone :( It got too cold :( I cried and I am still heartbroken. It was the worst day of this homesteading we have had yet. Looks like our other gilt, Petunia, is pregnant too.....we are going to make sure these piglets make it even in a snowstorm! LOL Looks like Middle of February we shall be having piglets. Keep our little farm in your prayers and also Miss Piggy, she is bit down....as you can imagine. I gave her a hug...but it didn't seem to help :(

Closing on another season

Here we are closing on the crops in our garden....getting ready to till for the winter and already got the pig barn and chicken coop boarded up. We have had some pretty cold nights already. So cold that we actually lost the 2 youngest chicks. :(
We had a pretty awesome year and I am hoping next year is even better. We got 188 quart size jars of spaghetti sauce, 66 stewed tomatoes, 45 diced and 30 tomato soup. We also got to make green tomato pickles. We made quite a bit of sauerkraut and ketchup and bbq sauce as well.

It looks like our boar has done his job and Miss Piggy is pregnant. We will find out for sure later on. Which means sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas we shall be getting baby piggies! :D

Our first hatchlings of our chickens have finally started laying....just in time too. Since it is getting colder and days shorter they are laying less. We go through quite a bit of eggs so we run out pretty fast. Which also means its time to butcher the males. They are starting to get too manly! LOL

Right now since the harvest has subsided I am taking the frozen chicken bones out from the last butchering session and making homemade chicken stock and freezing them in an ice cube tray and putting roughly a cup into freezer bags and using them to make soups and rice. Homemade stock is wonderful!

On another note we have decided to homeschool our children.....public school is just not a fit for our family, a nice thing about all my kiddos being home is they get to share in some extra chores. ;)

Ok well dinner is on the stove and my youngest Smith is now starting to fuss, so I am off!

In the middle of an INSANE harvest!

Wow words cannot express how tired I am. My mom and I have been canning fools for the past 3-4 weeks! Tomatoes have been the one thing we have seen most and I have a really good feeling we are going to make it an entire year without having to buy spagetti sauce! This is amazing! We have also ventured into ketchup, stewed tomatoes, tomato soup, salsa and next week we are going to be doing a kids vegetable soup and minestrone soup to freeze for the winter. We have 167 quart size spaghetti sauce, about 100 quart size stewed tomatoes, about 20 pint size ketchup, 14 pint size salsa and 12 quart size tomato soup jars. Our harvest for them is no where near done.....we had to set up 2 HUGE tables under a canopy outside our front door to keep the tomatoes till we get to them and it feels like everytime we make a dent in the tomatoes my husband and Mr. Heyer go out there and pick some more and re fill up the tables! It is so great and tiring...but I will be enjoying my own homegrown tomatoes all year long now! We have also been using so many of them fresh and my husband likes to take a sandwich bag of cherry tomatoes to work with him each day as a snack! :D We still have green beans we are finishing up and some sauerkraut we need to jar in about a week.

The new incubator gave us 10 new baby chicks and we have another batch about a week away from hatching! So 14 newbies and we are still going!

The pigs still look like they are not mating. :( Not sure what is going on there.

Sorry there are no pics....again my computer is not letting me load them. Wish you could see this shelf Mr. Heyer made....its almost completley full!

Ok back to the harvesting! :D

Its almost June

Well here we are Memorial Day weekend, Happy early Memorial Day to all! :) We are not relaxing or any of that good stuff, instead we are doing maintenance on the yard and working to get the cows here. Cow house is done...now to keep them where we want them and keep them in! LOL It is so close I am so excited! We are also cleaning out our garage because as our kids get older they need more space. Trust me, we live in a pretty big house....but there NEVER seems to be enough space or storage. My kids are really getting into sports and they leave all their sports gear around our mud room and as we are trying to leave to go to practice they look at me and ask where their cleats are or their glove or so on. Mr. Smith also got me a new cabinet to put all the home preschool stuff in, so I have some organization and it is wonderful!

Ok back to the farm! I haven't been able to keep up with the crops we have been pulling. I lost count! We have had quite a few radish....at least 100. We have pulled some turnip, which we have decided not to grow again because no one liked it! HA HA HA HA....piggies are getting some extra produce :) We pulled about 20-30 turnips and there are still more. We have pulled all the radishes and have planted beans where the radishes were since we are doing succession planting to get the most out of our garden. We are planning to pull the rest of the turnips this weekend and plant more beans there as well. Beets are about 2-3 weeks away from harvest and we have gotten so many strawberries that my kids have eaten fresh strawberries by the handfuls every day for about 2 weeks now and I even got to make homemade strawberry ice cream! It was sooooo good! :D

The pigs are still growing and getting ready for breeding! We are just waiting on our male boar's leg to heal a little more. We had a scare about 2-3 weeks ago. Our boar ripped an entire board off of his house and before we could get in there to get it out before he stepped on a nail, he did. :( He was limping and it was pretty bad for a few days where we thought he wasn't going to make it. We cleaned it out the second after we got the board out and put antibiotic spray on it and kept checking him and we ended up having to give him an antibiotic shot for 3 days in a row and as of today he is walking pretty good, still has a slight limp when he puts his full weight on it, but otherwise looks to be in good shape :)

Our chickens and rooster are doing awesome! My incubator did not work, the temp fluctuated so much that it could not stay in the range the baby chicks needed. The good news is that one of the hens has decided to become a mother! LOL She laid some eggs and has been sitting on them for about 2 weeks now. The other hens kept laying eggs on top of her so we marked the eggs she was sitting on plus the few the hens decided to give her and now we check and make sure we take out only the eggs without marks on it so she does not have to keep sitting on more and more. Excited to see a mama hen do what God intended her to do! Make and raise chicks! :) Our meat chickens are up for butchering as well. They are meaner this time then last year, don't know why. I am glad that we have a hen doing her work and making meat chickens for us, so we don't have to order these mean chickens ever again!

We butchered our first ducks last weekend and it was our first time having duck, I have to say I am looking forward to having duck again! Hopefully Mr.Smith will get some this fall during duck hunting season. :D

We have had 2 meals where everything could be grown and just about was on our homestead. We had roasted chicken with peas and turnips (the chicken & turnips, were homegrown) and for breakfast we had mini spinach, onion, & bacon quiches (the spinach & eggs were homegrown) and it made me happy that we are getting closer and closer every year to being able to feed my family from our homestead and no longer go to the grocery store for food. I am trying to get my kids to eat more seasonally as well to get used to us not having grapes and peaches available 24/7. Its a slow transition, but for the better, for our bodies, the environment and my wallet! :D
This winter I think we maybe looking into renting more farm land,we are outgrowing our little homestead here and I would like to start maybe making some money off of the farm. We shall see.

Well off to start dinner! Will try to post new pictures soon.

Ok the long awaited pictures!

Sorry it took so long to get pictures up, my computer has been acting up when it comes to loading pictures and we have just been too far darn busy to try to fix it....until today! We have been working our butts off in our garden again this year and have expanded immensely! We started out with cold weather crops and have slowly been adding in some warm weather ones since it has been unseasonably warm here. We have had a few nights that we had to cover our seedlings that popped up already, but it has been worth it to see all that green growing!

Here is our FIRST HARVEST! Can't believe I am saying that already, they took a whopping 25 days and so far we are up to 8 radishes!

Here is our crazy seed room in my basement, its old Christmas lights, I strung up to give them all light. They were actually the icicle lights we got for free. We had onion seeds growing here. These all died when we transplanted them, I guess the transplant shock was just too much for them. So we went with plan B and got bulbs and they are doing fantastic!

Here is the onion seeds just planted and ready to go to the seed room, I planted 135 onions.

Here is just one view of our expanded garden.

Another view of just haw darn large it has become. I remember my first garden in this yard 4 seasons ago and it was the size of my boar pigs pen. It failed miserably.

A view from right next to the pig's pen.

Here are my beefsteak tomato seeds. They did awesome indoors and we had 72 tomato transplants that did great in the garden soil till 2 days later we had a scorcher of a day into the 90s that day and killed them all off. Even after watering them in the morning, they still shriveled up and died on me :( So we are starting over.

Here is Hamlet (Hammy as I call him) this is the boar pig and he is over the butchering size now, which is about 250lbs and he is only 7-8 months old.

A side view of Hammy, he LOVES my husband so much, he waits for him and lets him pet him...its so cute :)

Here is Miss Piggy, she is our Berskshire girl. She is about 6-7 months old and is close to 200lbs. She will be bred in September.

Here is Petunia, our Yorkshire girl she is about a month older then Miss Piggy and she will be bred in August.

Here are the girls together in their pen.

Here is a new addition to our family. Richard the Rooster. He is gorgeous and so friendly.

Here are the Hens with the Rooster eating some oranges. We have tried to get them to hatch their own eggs with no luck, so I have an incubator and we have started our first round of eggs and we are on day 3. It takes around 21 days for them to hatch....we shall see!

Here is another project we are working on. Here we had a bonfire of brier bushes and dead trees to start clearing out the pasture for the cows. Our old spot I had wanted to put them did not work out, so we will have to wait a little longer to get the cows.

Here is where we plan to have the barn.

Another view of the barn area, right next to the pig pens. Another project we will be doing over the summer is running electric up to the coop/pen so we can have lights and heat up their water over the winter. We got lucky this past winter with their water not really freezing, but this winter coming up who knows, it could go the opposite and it could 1 degree for all of January! Good Luck un freezing that water! LOL

We have also added an irrigation system with hoses and just poked holes in them to help with the watering since we have had such a dry April. This weather is so weird lately! We are starting out better then last year and that always leaves me in a happy mood!

So as you can see many many things have been done since I posted last and its not going to slow down one bit, so you will have to forgive me if my posts are far and few. I will also update my harvest counter, since we are now harvesting!! :D

First till of the garden

We have just gotten done ...or I should say Mr.Smith has, tilling the garden and the new sections. It is bigger then last year and I am excited! Makes me think Spring is really on its way! This season will hold a lot of new firsts for us again....as will many seasons coming up till we get this down. :)

Got more seeds into the seed room! 36 Roma tomatoes, 36 Beefsteak tomatoes, 36 cherry tomatoes, 135 more onions, and 27 broccoli! The first wave of onions we were doing really well on and had 85 that had sprouted from 135 seeds...then the stomach flu swept through our house and I was able to get the lights on every day for them....but that was it and I was not able to water them for 3-4 days and a bunch died....so from the first wave we are now at 51 onion seedlings and it seems the others were not able to be revived.....going to leave them a few more days just in case....but I have a pretty good feeling they are done
:( So hopefully these seeds will go better. We also started to clean out the few 5 gallon buckets we have since we are going to try the upside down tomato plants again this year.What we failed to do last year was let the roots set themselves up so they wouldn't be ripped out with a bad wind storm....this year since I am starting the tomatoes earlier I am going to flip the 5 gallon bucket upside down with the plant towards the sky for a week to let the roots set up, then put them outside hanging with the plant towards the ground from my clothes line again. If it all goes well I am going to try to add Basil in the top of the soil as well.

Next weekend I am hoping to get to do the layout of the cow fence and the cow barn! Maybe go visit the cows we are going to be getting calves from?? That would be amazing! :D

On another note its Sunday and I look through the ads to see what we need to feed my large family because we are always out of something and need another thing and so on and it made me sad to see how prices went up yet again at the grocery store. :( Over the first month that we were getting used to having another member of our family added into the mix we ate a lot more processed food then I would of liked and it reminded me of how good fresh and wonderful homegrown fruits and veggies are. The homemade meals from them are fantastic and I have missed them. So the food at the store is becoming more and more expensive and less and less tasty. :( Hence one of the big reasons we started this homestead. We knew having a large family is difficult in this day and age and I want my kids to be healthy and to know where food comes from....well and provide for them as well. :)

God bless and praying this season goes well for the gardeners!! :D

Getting started in a new area

We have talked for a year now about breeding our animals. Well we have been looking for a New Hampshire Rooster to mate with our New Hampshire Hens....we have looked everywhere and just decided to buy one as a chick from the local farm store and  was getting the early order in and as I was talking about the rooster situation and the one lady that works there was looking to get rid of one! Praise God! He has answered a prayer of mine! He definitely works in mysterious and wonderful ways. :) What comes along with breeding is more of the unknown and it can get daunting at times ....since there are so many things I don't know about farming and animals and I learn a new thing every day! Chickens seem to the easiest to breed first. We plan to separate 2 hens and the rooster into the old broiler pen and just let them take care of business on their own and let nature take its course. After the hen has the eggs with babies we will need to make sure she is incubating them the way she is supposed to and then after they hatch, brood them. We do have all the equipment in case the hens decide they don't want to be mamas.

On another note the onion seeds I planted have sprouted. Its been a little over a week and we already have 32 seeds sprouted! I will be starting more onions, some tomatoes, and broccoli next week! Need to get more of the seed room completed to handle those extra seeds!

My computer is not allowing me to upload pictures right now....so bear with me and I will try to get the progress photos up ASAP! :)

Thinking of season 2012

We are about to enter the growing season of 2012. We have not gotten to where I wanted to be at this time....but you can only do so much. We had Smith kid #5 about 3 weeks ago and he is fitting right in. :) I am about to plant the onion seeds we got from our onions the past season in 2011. Love saving the seeds from last season to use this season, makes my job easier because I already have the seeds and I don't have to order them and they are FREE!! LOL So I am hoping to this weekend start my first wave of the onion seeds. We are doing succession planting again this year and we have a schedule I would really like to stick to....but as we get deeper and deeper into this homesteading lifestyle I am realizing that even the best laid out plans don't go as well as you planned....or don't go according to plan at all! Another thing I have realized is that there is something to do everyday other then the normal chores here on our small farm. There is always something that needs to be fixed or modified or adjusted or needs to be larger or smaller or anything. We have been thrown through a HUGE learning curve. I still love it....but I am coming to realize just how hard farmers work and we are itty bitty compared to large scale farms. It has created a new appreciation for the farmers of America.

The pigs are getting huge and boy they are so smart! We separated the male from the females, but 2 months ago they figured out how to escape and did so like 7 or 8 times. The male figured out how to ground out the electrical wire. We fixed his and then he busted through the wall and got into the females pen and then knocked over their water barrel onto the electrical wire. We moved the barrel...he moved it back over and did it again. So we then fixed the wall and bolted the barrel and moved the wire just to make sure and got a higher voltage charge flowing to make sure they just don't want to touch it. So far so good. It was definitely interesting trying to get 3 pigs back into the pen....we had to bait them with people food. Had no idea that pigs were so picky. We also knew they would eat A LOT, but boy I definitely underestimated how much they actually eat. So I contacted a local grocery store and they give us the expired bread and produce they cannot sell to humans but is still edible and not moldy and a few bakery items to feed these pigs and then we give them some grain to make sure they are getting all their vitamins and minerals. We have chosen to not let the pigs till the garden just because we do not have the money for a temporary fence right now and I am not sure I want to chase the pigs again if by chance they do get out. We are about 8 months away from breeding time with the pigs and around Christmas we should have our first piglets. That will be interesting as well! LOL We are also about 6-7 months away from butchering our first pig. We need to get the smoke house up and running for that as well, I definitely want bacon :)

We have saved our money and are about to get our cows. We still need to get a fence up and get their house ready....but one thing at a time and I REALLY do not want to chase cows so we are going a little overboard and using electrical wire and barbed wire...so in case the electrical fence does happen to short out, we still have a back up and hopefully not have to chase any cows....especially since we are getting a bull as well. I would like my cows to be more pasture fed them hay fed, so I am going to buy seed and let the timothy and orchard grass grow and maybe get some clover seed mixed in there. It will help offset some costs and its better for the cows.

Our chickens are laying a storm of eggs and are wonderful. They also are getting some produce from the grocery store and are pretty happy chickens! :) We are looking for a full grown male to start mating with 2-3 of them so we can get meat chickens that way. I refuse to do the Cornish X chickens again. It was a horrible experience and I want a slower growing meat chicken and our New Hampshire are awesome dual purpose birds....so we are trying to find a rooster of the same breed and let them have at it. We already have the chicken coop separated because of the meat birds, so I plan to take the 2-3 hens and the rooster and put them all on the meat bird side and let the moms do all the incubating and brooding....New Hampshire are pretty good mommies too! Easier for us!

We planted 4 more trees this Autumn, another 2 apple, a peach and a pear. We also got raspberry bushes and a grape vine!

My husband also got to practice more of his butchering skills this winter he and my soon to be step dad got 2 deer and skinned and butchered them. I got to be the processing house and grind up the other parts and make sausage and so on. It let us know what we need to do to the slaughter/summer house to get it ready for a 1,200lb cow we will be butchering in the next year or 2. We still have a while to go to finish fixing up our little homestead and get it to where its all usable and efficient and our to do list is ever growing along with our family! HA HA HA :) It has been a bumpy year so far, but it has been worth it to see my kids start to learn a good work ethic and learn where food comes from and what it takes to get it and when you grow it yourselves how much better it tastes. So excited to see how things go this next season....we are going to be expanding more and trying more new things and try to master some of the other things we have experimented with last year and saw was successful!

Well hope you are all having a great winter and hope to be posting more as well go through our trials this coming up season!