Meet the critters: Cows

After we had the chickens awhile, we knew that our next step would be a dairy animal.  Since I'd had a bad experience with goats, I knew that I didn't want them....and besides, I'd always heard that their milk tasted funny.

Our neighbor had a wonderful jersey and they were nice enough to share her milk with us.  The cream was wonderful.  I was able to make ice cream and butter and the kids loved the milk.  So of course, we had to get our own cow.

We found a jersey due to calve within the month, and brought her home.....well, not all the way home, since we didn't have a barn to put her in or a pasture for her to roam.  The kids got to name her, I tried to help them with suggestions, but they each picked out a name and we combined them into:  Flower-Bob.  It was February, there was still snow on the ground and the ground was too hard to put in posts.  Our wonderful friends kept her at their house and did calf checks on her all night long just in case she had the baby early.  Eventually, my hubby built a barn, and we brought her home, and within a week, a bull calf was born.  We named him T-bone....and we knew what his future would be.

Flower-bob was a great mom, we tried the calf-sharing method, where we separated them during the day, milked her in the evening and then put the calf with his mom at night.  This did nothing to foster his trust in us and we also never got around to dehorning him....oh, and we botched his banding (to make him a steer).
So he grew into a very large, horned, and angry bull.  He was pretty smart.  Using his horns, he would pop off all the electric fence insulators, drop the electrified fence to the ground and walk over it to wreak havoc on the ranch.  His favorite game was to chase after a very pregnant me.  We had to take him to the vet for castration and then wait at least six months for all the testosterone to leave his body, otherwise the meat would have a strong (unpleasant) flavor.

We had him butchered in February.  It wasn't an easy thing to do, having raised him from birth, but man, does he taste good!

We had Flower-bob artificially inseminated that summer using sexed semen.  The next spring, she had a little jersey heifer we named Clarabelle.  After her birth, we kept them together long enough for her to drink Flower-bob's colostrum and then we separated them.  We bottle-fed Clarabelle and immediately dehorned her.  Instead of being distrustful, she now thinks she's a very large human....she loves attention and still has fond memories of her bottle, as she chews on anything made of rubber (mostly my barn boots).  She really loves my hubby, as he was the only one able to get her to drink from a bottle at first.

Now Clarabelle is old enough to be bred and we AI'd her with long horn semen, since she is still a little small, and long horn's have long, skinny calves.  We had Flower-bob AI'd with the last straw of sexed semen, so she will have Clarabelle's sister in June.

Since we don't have another steer, we adopted one in May from the local dairy.  They cull all the steers and sell them really cheaply.  They even dehorned, banded and bottle trained him!  The kids named him Meathead.

We brought him home and housed him in the goat barn where he made fast friends with the Nigerian buck born 2 weeks prior.

Flower-bob and Clarabelle weren't too happy with the interloper and they pick on him, so he gets free run of the ranch, which means he mostly follows me everywhere and stands outside the back door moo-ing for me to feed him.

Pickles!

This year was my first year making pickles.  I've never had enough cucumbers to make into pickles, but the greenhouse really performed well this year, I picked about 3 5-gallon buckets full.  I used the Seedsavers heritage pickling cucumbers.  Have I ever told you how much I love my greenhouse?

The first batch I made were sweet pickles.  I couldn't decide on a recipe, so I took a shortcut and bought some Mrs. Wages mixes. 

I used my mandoline to slice them uniformly, then packed my hot jars and processed in a boiling water bath. 

The eldest loves pickles and has been asking for weeks to try them.  I was a little nervous having never made them before (and cheating by using the mix which did NOT smell like sweet pickles when I made them!!)  I took a bite and LOVED it, the girl?  She was expecting dill pickles and was completely disappointed to find that they were sweet and 'yucky'.  The hubby and I really enjoyed them, though!

The next batch is going to be kosher dills.  I am going to do a mix of slices (for our homegrown hamburgers) spears, and slices to go with sandwiches.  

 I hope they pass the 7 year old's taste test!

Final garden harvest

It's forecasted to get down into the 30's at night this week, so I needed to harvest all the remaining produce out in the garden.  It always makes me sad to see the end of all my hard work (and yet, I'm looking forward to the rest!). 

My 12 little tomato plants really outdid themselves this year.  This is the first year we've produced more than a couple tomatoes, I think I brought in about 200 pounds of fruit. 

I have 4 large boxes filled with totally green tomatoes in layers, 2 filled with slightly orange ones (hopefully they'll all survive after the baby gets done touching them all).  I'm looking up recipes for pickled green cherry tomatoes. 

We've been busy canning them and making spaghetti sauce.  Since our wind generator died again 2 weeks after we got it fixed, I haven't been able to dehydrate the peels as I did before, so I'm saving them in freezer bags for when I can run the dehydrator again. 

I picked a bunch of zucchini, which I plan to shred, then freeze to make into bread in the coming months.  My other plan was to dehydrate those as well, and 'spike' our meals with the yummy goodness, but that is also on hold.

We still need to go pick our pumpkins.  I planted a 'giant pumpkin' plant, and got exactly 1 large pumpkin from it and a lumina pumpkin plant, which grew 4 small pumpkins.  Perfect for our family of 5!  Next year, I hope that we can grow more, since we all love roasted seeds.  My hubby loves pumpkin pie, so maybe I'll plant some sugar pumpkins, too.

My corn never did well, the heritage popcorn did the best, and I'm able to harvest a couple ears to save and plant next year. 

My watermelon plant finally produced 2 melons.  I left them outside to ripen as long as possible and they are very sweet. 


The greenhouse still is growing beets, leeks, cabbage, pickling cucumbers and carrots, the frost shouldn't affect them, so I have some time left before I need to process those!

I'm participating in the Homestead Barn Hop.  Feel free to peruse other blogs, I know this is my favorite part of the week.

Home maintenance: Skylight Replacement

One of the joys of being a homeowner is doing maintenance.  When we first bought the house we knew that the original owners had removed a skylight in the bathroom over the garden tub.  Unfortunately, after the first winter, the skylight in the kitchen started to leak.  We patched it, knowing that in the future we'd have to either replace the skylight or remove it altogether.  I really like the additional light in the kitchen and it saves on energy, which is important to our off-grid lives.  We would forget about the leak in the dry months, only to be wetly reminded once fall came around again and the bucket came out to catch the drips.  For a time, we would cover the roof with a tarp (and some tires and concrete blocks to hold it down)....oh yeah....we looked pretty tacky!

Finally this summer, my hubby decided to remove it and I convinced him to install a solar tube in it's place.  

 

My feeble attempt to contain the mess.

 

When he removed the skylight, he discovered that the roof was badly damaged and a large area would have to be replaced.  Also, that night it decided to rain for the first time in weeks, so out came the tarp again!  I felt like I had OCD trying to keep up with the falling drywall and dust, along with keeping the baby out of the kitchen. 

After replacing the roof, he installed the solar tube, but he declined to tackle the drywall.  For some reason in our area it's incredibly difficult to find a contractor to do work, even the simplest project is a hassle trying to find someone. 

After a few weeks of contacting drywall installers, we finally were able to have one out for an estimate.  The crew came back the next day and finished it up beautifully in less than 4 hours. 

After a quick coat of paint, it looks perfect and like there never was anything different in that space!

Tomatoes: Dehydrating

I saved the skins and seeds from making sauce to dehydrate to make powder.  Why powder?  Well, to add to soups or stews to give it a little tomato flavor, of course!  You can also add it to spruce up your recipes without adding extra liquid.

I placed the skins and seeds on a roll-up tray in a thin layer.

After about 4 hours on high, I used a fork to lift and flip the mass of skins.

I let it dry another 4 hours.  It probably didn't need that long, but I wanted to err on the side of caution.

The next morning, I put it into a quart canning jar and used the bottom of my blender to create it's own canister to grind it up into.

I had to keep shaking the jar to get it to grind, but it only took a couple of minutes to become a fine powder.

The kids were astonished as to how small the skins from over 100 tomatoes ground up into!

Tomatoes: Gettin' saucy!

I picked a peck of pickled p....wait, I picked a ton of tomatoes, well, not a ton, but about 20 pounds.   Not bad for the first picking.  I have about 4 times as many green ones still out on the vine.  With this batch, I wanted to try something easy:  sauce.

First I washed them all.

Then cut into quarters.

Don't worry, I separated them into 2 pans, even though I knew they would cook down a lot.

 After cooking on low for about an hour, I ran them through my food mill to remove the skins and seeds.  I saved the skins and seeds for my next project.  The sauce was really thin and filled one pot.

I let it cook all day long.  The smell was tantalizing, it made me hungry for soup or stew, perfect on this first chilly day this fall.  I cooked it down to about half.

I used the Ball Canning guide, adding 1 Tablespoon bottled lemon juice per pint, then placing them in a boiling water bath canner for 40 minutes (I had to add extra time due to our elevation).

I only got 6 pints out of this batch, I could have cooked it down farther, but I was tired of stirring it periodically all day to prevent it from burning, and frankly, I didn't want to stay up late watching the canner.  I love the color!

How to (not) preg check cows.

I had both of our jerseys artificially inseminated last month and now it's time to pregnancy check them.  I have options.  The first is to trailer them 50 miles to the vet so he can stick his hand down into their uterus and feel the calf.  The second is to do a blood draw from their tail and send it to a laboratory in Idaho.  The third was just a rumor, but sounded somewhat plausible, take a urine sample (preferably the first urine in the morning) and use a human pregnancy test.  The fourth?  Wait 9 months for a calf to pop out....or not.

Yesterday, I attempted the blood draw.  I watched the videos on how to do it and the cows on it seemed to not feel a thing and didn't make a move.  Hmmmm, well, Flower-bob did NOT get that memo and although she was locked in her stanchion happily munching grain, she bobbed and weaved her backside around so much that every time I got the needle in, she would jerk away and the needle would fall out.  It didn't help that I was paranoid that she would kick me, break my leg and I'd have to drag myself up to the house for help.  I tried again last night, using a numbing spray, to no avail.  I didn't even both with trying Clarabelle, she's really squirmy!

That left getting up a 0-dark-thirty this morning and try to catch some urine in a cup.  I've come to the conclusion that the cows watch the house in the morning to see when the light goes on, because Flower-bob was up and waiting for me in the dark (meaning I probably missed her first pee).  I hung out with them for about 40 minutes before Clarabelle was nice enough to make her contribution....but Flower-bob kept looking at me suspiciously.  After another 30+ minutes, she finally lifted up her tail....so I moved quickly into place, but she put her tail back down and ran FULL BORE across the pasture.

 WAIT!!  COME BACK!!!

Imagine if you will, the cow running full tilt with me chasing after her with a cup in my outstretched hand, and Clarabelle bringing up the rear as if this were all some new game we'd just invented.  Finally Flower-bob couldn't contain herself any longer, lifted up her tail.......and pooped.  Grrrr.....then another 10 minutes and she finally urinated.  Success!!!  Well, it was all for nothing, because both tests came up:

I'm pretty sure that Flower-bob is pregnant and Clarabelle is not....she's still showing signs of heat.  Last time with Flower-bob, we used the 4th option, and even at 8 months we were still debating whether or not she was preggo.  I'd rather know NOW so I can re-attempt the AI, I'm really missing all my lovely raw milk and the cream.

Oh, and I am NOT sticking my hand in there!!

I'm going to try the urine pregnancy test on the goats next year after I breed them....can you imagine me buying 4 pregnancy tests at the store with 3 kiddos in tow?  That should be fun....or maybe I'll just send my hubby.  ;-)