It's a boy!

While Orrin was out feeding and watering the animals this morning, he noticed that the Shetland sheep, Olive, wasn't interested in eating. Normally the animals are ravenous when he takes hay out to them, so this kind of behavior was unusual. She was due to have a baby any time, and he took her disinterest in food as a potential sign that she was going into labor. So he kicked the Jacob ram out of the pen – he was loose but would never go far from the Jacob female. We were gone for most of the day, and when we got home this evening, we went up to the sheep/cow shed to see if there was a new baby or two. There was a beautiful little curly black sheep, tucked in with Olive! Sometimes sheep can have multiples, but in this case there was just the one. We were kind of hoping for a female, so we would have another Shetland to help increase the herd, so now we'll have to decide what to do with the male. I would have taken a picture, but our camera recently met its demise at the hands of a certain boy.

Following up to my last post about bacon, we spent almost the entire next day trying to smoke the remaining 7 lbs in the barbeque. We had a heck of a time trying to get “billowing smoke”, as one of our book resources told us we should have. What finally ended up working was heating up a bunch of briquettes, then spreading out the hot ashes in a cast-iron pan and laying somewhat dried apple wood chips on top. Wet chips just kept putting out the briquettes, but wet ones that had been allowed to dry somewhat seemed to do a better job. We ended up with bacon that was quite smoky (definitely what we wanted), but still too salty, even after I had re-rinsed the meat that morning. The whole salt thing is very perplexing to me, as I didn't use even close to as much salt as the recipe called for, and yet it is way too salty.

Bacon Drama

We have been spending a lot of time with our pork these days. The other day I made sausage for the first time, which was so incredibly easy (if you don't bother with casings), that I can't believe I hadn't done it before. Basically, ground pork + herbs/spices + molding into patties = sausage. Who knew? OK, you probably did, but it was a nice surprise to me. I imagine I'll be doing that a lot more with ground pork in the future.

On the other spectrum of difficulty, we spent much of the day attempting to make bacon for the first time. A few days ago, we thawed one of the pork bellies from the freezer, which was 8 lbs of pork. We laid the pieces out flat on cookie sheets and casserole dishes (three were required) and rubbed a lot of salt and a little bit of pepper into the meat, then drizzled a little apple cider on top. We covered them and put them in the fridge to cure for 2 days (recommendations on curing seem to range from 24 hrs to 7 days). This morning, we tried using the grill to smoke the pork, as that seemed like the best option since we don't have a smokehouse. The book we were using as a reference said to soak wood chips for at least an hour, ignite them, then when they are smoldering place them on one side of the grill and the meat on the opposite side. What we pretty quickly found challenging was that you can't ignite wet wood chips! Orrin then did some on-line research and someone suggested lighting a few briquettes and then adding the chips to that. We tried that several times, but the wet chips kept putting out the briquettes and we had to reheat them. Finally, the chips must have dried out enough that they started to take the heat from the briquettes, and began smoking. We almost threw in the towel and were going to try it again tomorrow, but decided to put about 1 lb of the pork on the grill to try to smoke it, to at least practice on that. It's tricky to keep the grill on low enough to not cook the meat, yet still provide enough heat to keep the chips smoldering. We were trying for 210F in the grill, but mostly it was around 150 or 160F. Once we got to 150F in the meat (the recommended temperature), we stopped, which was late this afternoon. We cooked up our first batch of bacon and definitely got the smoky taste but also found that it was way too salty, so I must not have rinsed off enough of the salt from the meat, or else I put way too much on the first place (which I didn't actually think was possible, since I was following a recipe, and since the point of the salt is to draw out the water from the meat). I'll try rinsing the remaining meat some more before we start up again tomorrow. We chopped up the remains from today and threw it into the pot of lentils that was cooking on the stove for dinner, and it was delicious – and not too salty.

And hey, we made bacon!

And yet more animals...

You really shouldn't believe me when I say that we're not going to buy anymore animals...

We were feeling kind of bummed after the loss of one of our laying hens, so we tracked down a woman who wanted to sell some. On Wednesday, Oliver and I drove out near Wolfville and bought five of her birds. They are conventional, standard laying hens that you can buy pretty easily around here, so it'll be interesting to see how their eggs compare to the eggs from our heritage chickens. I have no idea if there will be a significant difference if they are fed the same food, but right now, the eggshells are pretty weak and sometimes have odd dents in them. The egg yolks from the new chickens are slightly larger and a little paler than from the heritage birds, and the whites are runnier. The new chickens were also on conventional feed. I hope the eggs will improve on organic feed and greens. 

February Pictures

Our new Dexter cow, whom we named Buttercup, since hopefully she'll be providing us some delicious butter starting later this summer. Plus, we're still fans of the Princess Bride.

A recent harvest of carrots out of the greenhouse. I'm so glad Orrin thought to plant carrots in there in the fall, as they are incredibly tasty and so much better than the bland variety at the grocery store (even though we buy organic).

A gorgeous winter day in which we headed down the driveway to post this sign up at the entrance to the driveway. 

The same day - Orrin is pulling Oliver, and Zoe is joining us on our walk.

A Perplexing Death

A strange thing happened yesterday – one of our laying hens died, leaving us with nine remaining. It's very perplexing, as we don't know how or why it happened. The day before, Orrin had let the chickens outside, as the weather was pretty decent, and he said he noticed a few drops of blood on one of the Columbian Rock hens, but she seemed fine. Then yesterday, he found one of the Rhode Island Reds dead in the chicken house. He couldn't see anything wrong with her, he just wondered if maybe she was injured somehow the day before while they were outside, and then died from the injury. I think we'll never know.

In other chicken news, one of the Buff Orpington hens has gone broody, which means she wants to sit on the nest all day, keeping eggs warm to hatch. Well, we hadn't been leaving any eggs under her because it's still chilly outside, but decided to just roll with it and see what happens. At the moment we'd like to keep our breeds pure, so since we have a Rhode Island Red rooster, Orrin is starting to put Rhode Island Red eggs under her to take care of, maybe accumulating 6 or 8 over the next week. Then we'll see what happens. In theory she'll take care of the eggs and then take care of the chicks once they hatch. I wonder if they'll be ok in the cold, but since she's interested, we thought we'd try it. If it works, there will be some chicks in a few weeks (chickens have a 21 day incubation period, on average), and if some of them are female (usually about half are), then we'll have more laying hens about 6 months after they are born. If it doesn't work, we're just out a half dozen eggs or so.

The Animal of the Week, x2

A couple more animals have recently joined us. One, a berkshire boar, arrived a week ago. The other, a Dexter heifer, arrived yesterday. The boar is the same breed as Isabel, our (previously) remaining pig, and we decided to buy him to breed her, so that she could hopefully have 4 or 6 piglets in the spring. Shortly after meeting each other, she bit him on the ear to let him know who was boss, and they've gotten along just fine since then!

The new heifer is going to be the start of our milk cow herd. The galloway's that we have are intended for meat, or at least the males are, and we decided to start getting ready for the dairy side of things. Dexter's are pretty small cows, in general, and known to be generally easy-going. Our new cow is young, and newly bred; her first baby is due in August. That'll give us time, we hope, to get ready for milking. Dexter's can produce 2 to 3 gallons of milk per day, compared to the 10 gallons or so that you can get out of a Holstein – or so I'm told.

Originally we thought we wouldn't add dairy to our list of farming activities for a couple of years, but we realized that if Isabel has a bunch of piglets, then one goat's worth of milk will not be enough for all of them. This way, the new cows milk can mostly go to the pigs and the calf, but we can start playing around with making butter, trying the milk ourselves, and eventually making cheese. We are both lactose intolerant to some degree, so we are hoping that raw milk, which still has the enzymes intact, will be more digestible for us.

Oh, and the last (planned) animal breed to arrive will be in May, when we get our first hive of bees.

Orrin tells me that we now have all the animals he wanted to get to set up the farm. I asked him if I could remind him of that the next time he's looking at livestock for sale on kijiji...

Between now and August there will be several arrivals of new babies – both ewes are pregnant (the Jacob and the Shetland), Gigi the galloway and the new cow are both pregnant, the goat is pregnant, and hopefully the pig will get bred too. In the spring, we will also be separating out one of our types of chickens, the Rhode Island Reds, with the rooster of that same type, and plan to let some eggs develop into chicks, if one of the hens goes broody. If that doesn't happen, we may have to figure out how to use an incubator. I clearly haven't picked up enough farmer-speak, because if I had I would have said, “the cows and sheep are bred (not pregnant!).” Oh well, I'm pretty sure I'm becoming more farmer-like every day.