missing blogland

January 21, 2012

Wow!!! i can't believe it's been over a month since i was able to sit at this computer and post.   The holidays were wonderful and busy, and since then I have not made the time to post some of the happening on our small farm. One thing that has kept me busy is babysitting my precious granddaughter three days a week.

She makes me smile every time i look at that precious face.  She is going to turn a year old in February and is starting to walk a little. Right now her only interest is putting anything and everything she gets her hands on, in her mouth.  I took this picture Thursday of this week, NO !!I'm not a bad grandmother who takes her grandbaby out in the middle of January in short sleeve and barefoot...Temps got to 78 and high humidity, and yes, we have clover on the ground already.  We only had a few nights where temps dipped into the 20's so far this winter and no consistent cold weather this year. 

This post will be short with just a few snapshots of happening around the farm.  I missed sitting here reading all the wonderful blogs and catching up with all the happening. 

The cows are doing fine, the Belted Galloway and her baby Maggie are so pretty to see out in the field, love their black and white thick curly coat.

Maggie will be bigger than her mom before too long.  We were able to register Maggie with the Belted Galloway Association.  We didn't have papers on her mother,Oreo, but we bred her to a registered bull.  We are hoping to be able to breed Maggie to another registered bull and start working toward a full bloodline. 

This is Rosie, the katahdin sheep, which was bred to our St. Croix named Ramsey.  We are hoping to see twin lambs on the ground sometime in February.  She is looking pretty fat and ready to me, we can't wait... I will keep you posted on the birth of our first lambs.  We are still on a waiting list  for a registered St.Croix ewe come spring, so that we can start a registered heard of that breed soon.

There's Ramsey looking more manly than ever with his full mane down his neck.  He loves the Galloway cow Maggie, we always catch him rubbing up on her to get a scratch.

This is whats growing in the fall garden..........mustard greens and turnips.

We still have shallots, cilantro and onions growing.  I just picked the last of buttercrunch lettuce and  kale last week. 

  Now I'm looking at seed catalogs and dreaming of a spring garden.  This was our first try at growing a year round garden, and I'm happy to say we did well.  I didn't do the math, but i know we saved a lot on our grocery bill, not to mention the health benefits of growing food ourselves.

The Day after New Year's we were blessed with a deer that my daughters boyfriend was kind enough to offer us for our freezer.

The great hunter that he is, he had already supplied his family's freezer so he offered this one to us.

We thought by this time, on our journey to raise our own food, that we would have some beef in the freezer by now.  Our little bottle calves did not fair well, and we lost all but one.  Buster is the only survivor, and with all the antibiotics we had to give them, we decided not to slaughter them for our own consumption.  So Buster is growing out in the field until he gains enough weight to get back our investment with those four dairy calves.

In the meantime...we are thankful for this deer meat for our freezer.......

We didn't get much notice before we were presented with this amount of meat to process, and not to mention my husband had to leave out early for his seven days offshore.  So we had to work fast and use what we had in order to process this meat. 

Yep!!!!!!!!! we did it the old fashion way, with my mothers hand crank meat grinder.  We deboned and chopped the deer meat and mixed it with pork and got it all ground up by taking turns cranking the handle.  We all felt our sore muscles the next few days, lol.  Even my youngest daughter (not pictured) got in on the action, she helped debone and chop some of the meat, I think she just wanted to show her boyfriend (who shot the deer) that she's no sissy.  I should have gotten pictures of her in action to show her boyfriend, who wasn't there during the processing, that she handled up on his deer.

                                         

We processed roughly sixty pounds of meat.  I took some of the ground meat and seasoned it up like breakfast sausage, using sage, crushed red pepper, salt and black pepper.  So far i have made a chili with it and we ate some of the breakfast sausage, which turned out pretty well.  The kids just loved the chili and that sorta surprised me, they said that was my best chili ever....If they happy..... I'm happy. 

 Those are some of the happening on Cypress Hill.... I will try not to stay away so long next time.

Im linking up to Farmgirl Friday over at Deborah Jean's Dandelion House, and country homemaker hop with Heidi, please join me.

     

                                                             

      Live Simple....................Sheryl