Crunch 'n Munch

The weather guys made such a big stink about the last (potential) ice storm and not much really came from it.  But just yesterday afternoon we got freezing rain and ice pellets and it continued lightly through the night.  The porch was a sheet of ice at 3 am.  And how did I know this?  Because I was up cleaning coals out from the wood stove and on my trip back from dumping coals (thankfully not before) I slipped on the steps.  My left elbow has a noticeable knot in it and my ribs, belly and boob are killing me.  When I got up from the fall, it hurt so badly that tears started welling up in my eyes.  Nothing's cracked or broken (well, except for my pride), but is it just me, or does falling in one's later years just like totally suck?  Luckily I didn't break a hip or Paul probably would have put me down.

Anywho, enough of my sob story and on to (slightly) more interesting things.

It's an icy wonderland outside.  Anything weighing more than a cat crunches through the frozen landscape with each step so it's fairly noisy in the barnyard today, even without Pickles yelling (yes, she's back to yelling for absolutely no apparent reason).  I forked out some fresh hay to everyone, and after the initial "That's MY hay! And so is THAT.  That hay over THERE is also mine!  Don't even THINK of eating this hay!!" ruckusing has subsided and the sound of  ice breaking beneath cloven hooves eventually abated, I was able to enjoy the quiet of the crystal-encrusted wonderland.  Well, almost quiet.

The sound of little goat mouths munching on hay broke the silence.  The steady munch-munch-munching of nine caprine chompers working on their fibrous forage filled my ears.  And honestly, I love that sound.  I find it calming, almost mesmerizing.  I stood out there for a good ten minutes, just listening to them grind away.  And have you noticed that it's a slightly different sound when they chew their cud?  I suppose I spend too much time around goats if I can tell the difference between the sound of fresh hay vs. partially digested hay being chewed.

I guess there's worse things I could be doing.

The Gift that keeps on giving

We had Christmas Dinner at Mom's house this year; salad, green beans, salad, two kinds of homemade Kluskies (thanks Wally!!) and a big ol' ham.  A few days later (probably after Mom couldn't bear to eat any more ham), she came to the house with a ham bone in hand.  Whoo hoo!!  There was still a good amount of ham on the bottom, so I cut chunks off and put them in a zippy bag in the freezer.  The bone was almost immediately put into a pot along with fixings for split pea soup.  Oh, how I love split pea soup.  Oh, how quickly it disappears.

Since the woodstove had been cranked 24/7 for the past however many days, I've been trying to keep it working to heat both our house and our food.

After Rhiannon and I did our math school work for the day.......

Greater Than, Less Than, Simple Fractions, Addition & Subtraction

.........we utilized those same delicious educational components by soaking them in water overnight then dumped them with the ham chunks, bay leaves, onions & other obligatory soup seasonings and let it sit on the wood stove most of the day:

We had such a big chicken supper last night that the soup kind'a sat on the sidelines.  But that's ok.  I think it tastes better once it sits for a while.  Today I'm going to try cooking cornbread on top of the stove and we'll have that and soup for supper.

It's Soup Weather.....are YOU making any?  If so, I'd love for you to share the recipe so I can add it to  the "Soup" section in my recipe box.  I made a homemade Cream of Mushroom that I got from Mama Pea last year and it was heaven.  Maybe I'll splurge on a package of mushrooms and oyster crackers next time I'm at the grocery store and make that again.

Yes, it's cold outside. It's WINTER.

I know, this is an unusually frigid snap for most of the country, but what I don't get is the news media blitz about it.  Do we really need to remind people that they should wear hats and gloves when they go outdoor in sub-freezing weather?  How many stations have done the "Vaporizing water" trick?  I'm still waiting for some news outlet to send some intern out in the streets with a flap of chicken skin and time how long before it's frozen.  For some reason, that sticks out in my mind from a weather broadcast years & years ago.

Anyways, things back here at the homestead are, well, cold.  Colder than usual.

The weather being the Freezing Vortex that it is (or whatever the heck the media is calling, you know, winter), the wood stove has been cranked for I don't know how many days straight.  During the coldest part of the day, it was 42 degrees in the master bath, 51 in the bedroom and 61 on the couch closest to the stove.  I know, I know, there are people who have it worse and I shouldn't complain.  And it's not the end of the world if I can't walk around in shorts and a t-shirt indoors.  I'm actually kind'a liking the long underwear / sweatpants / sweatshirt / socks / slippers layered look.

The outside critters have all survived the worst of the cold snap; 1 degree at night with a windchill of "OMG that's cold".  But we're expecting a high of 30 today and only 18 at night so we're over the worst of it.  Although we didn't have any animal casualties, we did have two egg casualties:

I've never had eggs crack from freezing so quickly before.   I've occasionally left eggs out overnight in the winter and they had cracked, but these were gathered during the day.  I just let them defrost on the kitchen counter, fried them up really well, then make myself an egg & cheese sandwich for supper.

Dreaming of Spring

Or at least of temperatures above freezing.

If I could knit, I would sooooo make this for you, MamaPea.

I won't bore you with yet another blog story about how freaking cold it is.  You are probably already painfully aware of that fact.  I did, however, want to let my Mom know that we opened up the barn for Ms. Melman and Nugget (and they still refuse to go in there), that I put a ton of bedding in the goat barn and opened it up for them (where it is normally reserved for kiddings), and ALL of the chickens are in the big coop side, together, snuggling as much as chickens can snuggle.  And, much to Paul's dismay (I love you honey, please don't divorce me), Outside Kitty has been allowed inside the house temporarily.

Being stuck in the house, I've been on the computer a lot and started searching for anything spring-like or gardening-related for some eye candy and to take my mind off the fact that my feet are freezing even in socks and fuzzy pink slippers.  I clicked through enchanted gardens, rock gardens, desert gardens, gardens with sculptures, gardens with cats (imagine that) and garden plans.  They look so perfect, so organized, so wonderfully neat and tidy:

Then there's MY garden plan:

I've got my Baker Creek catalog dog-eared and post-it noted, inked up and generally abused.  Trying to figure out what "New and Improved" something or other I'm going to plant.  Even though I have a bunch of seeds from years gone by, seeds saved this past year, and seeds given to me by friends.

I'm also seriously debating just purchasing the old standbys (Roma/Rutgers/Beefsteak tomatoes, California Wonder Peppers, some sort of cabbage) at the nursery down the road, or, if I'm lucky at the Baker Creek site up in Missouri if it's early enough in the season.  I don't have a lot of dedicated area for growing seedlings and although I'd be saving money to grow my own, I just don't have the patience for anything except hard to find vegetables.  Melons, squash, pumpkins, beans, peas and cucumbers I've had decent success just direct sowing them so I'll continue that route with them.

I've been composting just about everything our livestock can squeeze out their backsides and I'm putting piles of wasted hay in the new garden plot that Paul dozed for me last spring.  In the summer I dug holes in that garden with the tractor auger, filled the holes with compost and put in a few dozen summer and winter squash seeds and didn't get jack from it.  The plants grew to a certain stage, flowered and started to fruit, but the fruit were teeny-tiny.  Not sure if the "soil" is just so crappy (i.e. not so much dirt as it is rocks) or if it was just a bad squash year as I heard other gardeners complain about.  But we managed to get decent garden beds in the Berry Garden after three or four years of constant composting additions so I figure this new garden will just take a while.  But of course, in the interim, I will continue attempting to plant something, anything in there.  And I suppose if the plants don't thrive, if they die, or the seeds just rot in the earth, at least it's adding to the overall soil-building plan.  And one day - hopefully before I'm dead - we'll have another thriving garden plot.

The Great Chicken Relocation Project

I've got something of a routine down when it comes to raising a batch of laying hens.  When the day-or-so old chicks arrive here, they go into the small kidding pen with a heat lamp for about a month.  When they run out of room or when the heating lamp is no longer needed (whichever comes first), they get relocated across the hall to the large kidding pen and will stay there for a month or so.  Or in this case, until I need the kidding pen for, well, kidding.

It's been three (or four?) days since I opened the slat in the large pen door in order to allow the new Rhode Island Red (RIR) pullets to stretch their legs and explore the great wide open.  At first, they were obviously skeptical of my removal of the board keeping them from the rest of the chickens and goats.  Lots of curious chickens craning their necks to peek at what lies outside of the barn, but none convinced enough that it was safe to leave their home area of the past four months.

That is until I stopped putting feed in the pen and scattered some cracked corn outside of the pen:

It didn't take long for their gizzards to trump their uneasiness and one after one, they hopped out of the pen to peck at the corn.  It didn't take much long after that for the goats to find their way to the corn either; stinking gluttons.

I think all of them have been out and about the barnyard at one point or another.  There's a lot of chicken squawking as the older hens are having a field day teaching the younger ones who's boss, but nothing horrible.  I've even seen a few of them manage to find their way to the main chicken feeder located outside of the goat / chicken yard.  Some seem much more willing to explore than the others, but I'm hoping that they stick close to home because our resident red tail hawk has been hanging around again and I'm sure they'd be an easy snack.

I finally managed to hook up a light in the main coop and have been turning it on before dusk.  But since the kidding pen is still open, the younger chickens continue to roost in there at night.  I figure I'll give them another few days of access to the pen then hope they'll be smart enough to seek out the light in the main coop and roost in there.  Smart?  Chickens?  No such thing.  So in reality what is going to happen is that come dusk they will all congregate in front of the closed kidding pen door and I will have to hand-deliver twenty chickens to the main coop every evening for several weeks until they finally get it.

She's stuck. Oh, rats!

Paul had yesterday off from work so we all spent most of the day outside enjoying the 50 degree weather.  Lots of poop was scooped and tossed into the compost heap, fresh bedding was put into the goat huts, storage areas were cleaned out and the RIR pullets (and two RIR roosters) were again scooted out of the kidding pen.  Oh.  And Penny got stuck underneath the barn.

The night before, I noticed Penny's head sticking out from under the barn when I tucked everyone in for the night, but just figured she was hanging out there or trying to avoid getting picked on.  Then in the morning she was in the same spot.  I tried coaxing her out (i.e. poked her butt with a shovel) but try as she might, she couldn't wiggle out from under there.  So I ended up having to move the steps in order to give her more room.  Paul took her by the collar and I poked her butt; she shimmied and Paul pulled and she made it out.  A little bit stiff in the legs and a little bit poopy in the behind, but no worse for the wear.  What IS it with these stupid goats?  First Pickles and now Penny.  Is it a Boer thing or is it I just happen to get the dumbest goats in the Ozarks?

I then started tackling other goat-keeping chores.  The little enclosure that the protein tub, minerals, salt and baking soda is in was cleaned and I noticed that they were out of baking soda.  I opened the seldom used storage area located in the back half of the barn to get the soda and when I opened the doors I saw a bunch of orange peels, egg shells and a lot of hay.  At first I though that the mice had taken over again, but there was sooooo much stuff packed in there I figured something larger had holed up in there.  And when I moved one of the folded up dog crates, there he was, staring at me; a big ol' pack rat.  I immediately put the crate back and looked around for something to kill it with.  The scoop shovel was too big.  A rock wasn't going to work.  Didn't have a sidearm on my hip.  Then I spied one of the metal rods that are used to hook the dog crate together.  Heck, why not.  And I actually managed to shish-kabob his rodent butt.  After tossing the carcass out of the barn, I went ahead and pulled everything out of the area and found a ton of stuff jammed in behind the buckets and crates.  Enough grain to fill a 5-gallon bucket.  A big ol' feather lined nest - thankfully with no rodent offspring.  Shredded blue tarp.  Wad of feed sack string.  Additional piles of other indistinguishable organic materials.  And a chewed up photograph of what looked like the JFK autopsy.

New Year's Day Fun.......
Poking a dead rat with a stick!

While we were cleaning out the barn, Outside Kitty was also doing a little cleaning of his own.  Rhiannon had opened the door to the feed room and Outside Kitty ran in.  Rhiannon eventually came back out, but he stayed in there.  After a while I heard a lot of scratching around and peeked in there to see him playing with an almost-dead mouse.  What a good kitty!  Paul said that he should have been after the pack rat, but I don't blame him for going after less threatening quarry.  That pack rat was almost as big as my boot!

Obligatory New Year's Resolutions

I won't say that I hate New Year's Resolution.  Nor will I say that I enjoy them.  It's just that my entire life seems to be filled with lists and NYR's seem to be nothing more than an additional list that I have to keep from losing.

But in order to keep with socially mandated traditions, here is my list of Resolutions for 2014:

Eat Less *
Exercise More *
Spend Less
Plant More
Worry Less
Enjoy More

*Been on my list for, say, the last ten years.

This should not be confused with the "Homestead To-Do List" nor the "Things I Really Need to Do, But Probably Wont" lists, which are much, much longer and much more detailed.  And since the 2014 NYR is rather vague, I'm hoping that I can actually adhere to it.

Even though I'm not going to spend any additional time contemplating how to be a better person, how to get rid of my muffin top or how to squeeze a penny harder, I am looking forward to planning for the Spring garden.  Which seems like a pretty good way to tackle every one of my 2014 NYR's now that I think about it.  I'd be eating less (calories) if we ate out of our garden more.  I'd be exercising more by working in the garden.  We'd spend less at the grocery store on fruits & veggies if I planted more.  I'd worry less about what questionable chemicals that are on store-bought food if they come from our own homestead.  And I'm sure to enjoy being with Rhiannon as she helps me out in the garden.

So there you go.  My New Year's Resolutions can all be accomplished by planting a garden.

How Zen is that?