Archive for category Homesteading

About three weeks ago, I went out to feed the sheep, and found Baby Jebus II crying continuously. Buck, our ram, had run him off of his mama, Mary, and was preventing him from getting anywhere near her. When Jebus tried to get to her, Buck would butt at him and curl his lip. Buck was also nipping at Mary’s flanks and chasing her around the barn yard, so we suspected that mating behavior might be at play. This seemed odd, though, because she was nursing a new lamb, and was almost certainly not fertile.

We addressed that situation by putting Mary in the horse stall in our barn with Jebus. Solving the problem was a little more complicated than it might seem because, being flock animals, sheep hate to be alone, so the obvious solution of cutting Buck out and leaving the ewes to themselves wouldn’t have worked. Buck wouldn’t have had anybody to keep him company. We hoped that this was a temporary thing that would pass. After all, Buck had been around the last batch of babies, and hadn’t caused any problems at all.

Since then, we bought hay for the sheep for the winter, and it is now taking up a huge section of the barn stall that Mary and Jebus are living in, leaving them with just a narrow corridor at the side of the stall. More fundamentally, the stall is just not suited for them to live in all winter. They really need access to a larger space and the out-doors. So, we decided to put Mary into the enclosure with Buck and see what happened if they were allowed to work it out on their own. Maybe he would get it out of his system.

Well, he chased her around, but he did not get it out of his system. Sheep can run pretty quick, but what I learned today is that they tire out pretty quickly too. They’re sprinters, not distance runners. After just a few minutes, they were both panting and running around with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. Take note of the growly noise he makes as he runs up on her. I bet you’ve never heard a sheep make that noise before! I hadn’t.

We decided the right thing to do was to put him in a separate enclosure. It couldn’t be the barn stall, because he will be miserable if he’s kept alone for very long,  I honestly believe he could destroy the doors given enough time, oh, and it’s also full of hay. So we built another enclosure from electric net fencing. The only thing that remained was to get him into it. As worked up as the sheep were, the old trick of putting corn in the corral and closing the door behind them didn’t work. They bolted as soon as I went for the door. So I tied a halter to the door, went in the corral, put some corn in front of me, and used the halter rope to pull the door closed behind Buck when he walked in.

Now, the only trick was to get the halter on him. As soon as he finished eating corn, he looked up and squared off with me. Normally, our sheep are pretty skittish. You’re much more likely to see their ass or their side as they keep their distance. When Buck’s feeling aggressive, he squares off and faces me dead on. This means that I’m likely to get butted if I’m not careful. In the enclosure, it’s relatively easy to keep my distance from him, but the corral is 4′x10′, so that won’t work. Once I get to the side of him, I can control him pretty well. There’s not really anywhere for him to run to in the corral, so he just runs from one side to the other while I pivot around and eventually get a hold of his head and stop him running. But he was on one end of the corral and I was on the other, and I would have to approach him from straight on to get to the side of him. I couldn’t reach out and touch him without touching his head, which incites rams to butt.

He butted at me once, but fortunately, sheep have terrible depth perception and he kind of short-stroked it. I hollowed out and pushed off of his head. He backed up and squared off again. I knew another one was coming. Part of me wanted to get out of the corral, but I told myself that he had to be moved, and to do that, the halter had to go onto his head, and I was the only one here who was going to be able to make that happen.

When he tried to butt me a second time, I scooted to one side and got my arms around his neck. Issa said it looked “badass.” It happened so fast that I don’t really remember doing it. Once I had his head, I put the halter on him, and leading him over to the new enclosure was relatively uneventful.

Currently, he’s in his separate enclosure and the ewes and lamb are in theirs. I’m hoping that him being able to see them will keep him from getting too lonely, because if not, we don’t have many other options. I guess we could separate Mary and Jebus into the second enclosure. At least they won’t be lonely with each other to keep them company. I just hope that the electric fence is enough to keep Buck from trying to get into the other enclosure at them. I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow morning with him wandering around the property or pacing their fence trying to get in.

Ah, the adventures of owning livestock.

It is distressingly hard to find a meat processor for small-batch, homestead-raised animals like ours. If you’re somebody huge, like Hormel, then you just own a plant, and all your meat goes through that plant. If you’re a butcher, then you buy livestock from a supplier, do your own meats, and sell them in your shop. If you’re like me, you need somebody to slaughter and butcher the animal that you raised and then give you the meat to take home. For various reasons, the folks who do the afore-mentioned two jobs aren’t usually much interested in the latter.

You would think it would be as simple as typing, “Tennessee meat processor,” into Google, but no! The few lists that you do find are full of people who either don’t do what I want or who have gone out of business. This is a truly upsetting condition for reasons which others (like Joel Salatin) have expressed far more eloquently than I. It means that, more and more, there is only one way for people to get meat, and that’s to buy it from intensively-farmed, gigantic companies. Small farmers are simply shut out of the marketplace because they are unable to get their livestock processed at all, and/or they are unable to negotiate the mine-field of regulations in order to legally bring their product to market. Incidentally, I do not consider myself a “small farmer,” but what I’m doing is not dissimilar from what they do, in some respects.

I’m not trying to run a business here! I just want to raise an animal, put it in the freezer, and then eat it myself. And, more and more, it looks like my options are to either process it myself or pound mud. Processing it myself is non-trivial. For small animals up to, say 50 or 100 lbs, home-processing is feasible. For large animals like a 300-lb pig or a 1,000-lb cow, you really need specialized equipment like hoists and power tools and such. Yes, I know that Native Americans were slaughtering bison for hundreds of years before a winch hoist was ever invented; that’s not what I’m talking about, though. It’s not that it absolutely couldn’t be done, just that it’s quite impractical.

That’s not the only equipment that’s required. Meat is usually best if it’s allowed to hang in a cooler for a while after slaughter, to allow the enzymes to break down connective tissue. This results in more tender meat. This is, I have been told, one reason why traditional pig slaughter time is the fall: the temperatures are cool enough to allow the meat to age without spoiling, but not so cold that the meat will freeze and be damaged. Don’t have a walk-in cooler? Sorry! You’re out of luck! And good luck asking some local butcher if you can put your meat in their cooler! What would the USDA think of your dirty, uninspected meat co-mingling with the “inspected” meat for sale to the public?

Want your tenderloin cut into pork chops or T-bone steaks? Hope you have a band saw! Cha-ching!

Setting aside all of the concerns about equipment, in order to DIY, you would need a plethora of skills that I quite simply lack, and that are increasingly hard to come by. You may not know this, but there is a dearth of skilled butchers in America right now. And those are just the folks who turn the processed meat into cuts! The folks who actually take the animals from living, breathing to hanging on a hook are even more rare! The reason for this is, in part, that huge meat-packing companies have turned meat processing into an assembly-line job. Nobody knows how to process a cow anymore. All they know how to do is one cut, and they do it thousands of times a day as the carcasses roll past on an assembly line. This allows the processing plants to hire un-skilled (often illegal-immigrant) labor. This is why, when I see a package of meat on sale for $1.99/lb or whatever, I often lament the low price. I’d rather pay more and have a plethora of skilled butchers, able to pass on their knowledge to folks like me. Oh, and let’s not forget all those un-skilled workers, getting repetitive-stress-injury from making the same cut a thousand times a day. I’d love to pay more for my meat in order to get rid of those jobs. But more fundamentally, I’d love to be able to pay someone else who has the skills to provide this service for me! And there are people out there who want to do it, but who are prevented by regulations that are designed by the big companies specifically to benefit themselves and to push small processors out of business.

We found our current processor more or less by luck. Our neighbor mentioned a local producer of cured hams and bacon, and we went there to ask if they would do our pigs. They said no, but that the processor they partnered with was just up the road. I have never found that processor’s information anywhere on the web. I mean, if you know their name, you can find their listing, but if you were just looking for a processor, you’d be out of luck. It’s sad, because what these people do is far closer to my ideal of

Yesterday, I said to Issa, “Mary’s udders look really big. I wonder if she’s pregnant.” Mary had been looking round, but our sheep were all a bit skinny when we bought them, and had all been rounding out nicely. The udder was the first sure sign of potential pregnancy. The timing would be a little weird, though. Mary only just lost her lamb about a month ago, during the heat wave. The lamb hadn’t been nursing much since we’d gotten her, but we had detected no signs of heat.

I resolved to keep an eye out.

This morning, Issa and I walked out to let the chickens out and check on the sheep. Big Mama and Buck were out in the yard. Mary was in the shed, where we couldn’t see her.

“Maybe she’s in there with her new baby,” I scoffed.

“Actually, she is,” Issa said.

The Wallow has a new baby!

The month-long dry spell finally broke last night. We have had about 8″ of rain so far in the last 24 hours, and no sign of stopping. The lack of rain is really showing in the fields. Normally, about 3-5 weeks after the sheep have been in an area, it is ready to take them again. The grass always grows back quickly, but the under-layer of clover takes longer to recover. The bare spots where they lay down or paw at the dirt take even longer. It’s important to let the area recover as thoroughly as possible, or cumulative damage will slowly degrade the quality of the forage.

With the dry spell we’ve been having, though, the grass has basically been at standstill. The sheep made their way through what I would consider to be marginally-recovered areas, and then we get to the point where the only thing that was left was not-even-marginally-recovered areas. There’s still plenty to eat on those areas, and I could do another pass, but it would be one step forward and three steps back. It would take even longer for the area to recover fully.

Although winter is still far off, I decided the best thing to do would be to take the sheep off the pasture and put them on hay and grain. To have grazing animals on hay and grain as early as September is remarkable, especially in a climate with as short a winter as Tennessee’s. We come out of winter around March or April, so we’re looking at around 7 months of the year off pasture. With excellent management, I have heard of getting grazing animals down to more like 3-4 months of the year. Even if there’s snow on the ground, if there’s good grass underneath it, you can graze! The trick is to let the pasture build up a good “bank” of forage going into the winter so that when it goes dormant in the cold, you’ve still got a bunch of edible plant material to feed. This buys you a few weeks or months of additional grazing after the cold starts to set in. That’s the goal, but here at The Wallow, we’re plumb tapped out. It’s okay, though. Although my goal is to graze as much as possible, I can afford to feed hay and grain if I need to. If my sheep have to eat hay for 7 months of the year, I’ll chalk that up to beginner’s lack of skill and hope to do better next year.

With this rain, though, I’m hoping that the grass will pick back up and I’ll get a few more weeks of grazing in late September through October or so. We probably won’t see actual snow until November or December, so if I can bank a bunch of plant material from this deluge, it may not be the end of grazing yet.

I didn’t want to put the sheep in the barn stall, because that’s where we’ve stored all our hay, and they would get into it. I realized that, with the pigs going off to the processor this Tuesday, the pigs’ shed would be unoccupied, and that would be a great place to put the sheep up for the winter. I got up one morning last week and groaned about having to go move the sheep again. I move the sheep basically every morning, which involves setting up and taking down temporary fencing. It takes about 30-45 minutes, and I usually don’t mind, but I was just not feeling it. I was also stressed about where I was going to put them, given that there are basically no areas that are really ready to take them. Issa said, “There’s only a few days left until the pigs go away. Why don’t you just let the sheep out? Then you don’t have to move them and don’t have to worry about where they’re going to get their food.” I liked the idea of not moving them so much that I took her up on it.

One problem with that is that when the sheep are loose and it rains like this, they like to go into the barn to get out of it. They camp in there and leave piles of manure everywhere. I took some cattle panels and bungee cords and blocked them off.

At the time, it felt like a clever solution to the problem, but that’s actually exactly what cattle panels were invented for. This would actually mark the first time I used a cattle panel for its intended purpose, instead of as a trellis for plants or as a frame for the roof of my chicken house.

Let’s just start with the garden. Everything but the potatoes has either run its course or I’ve given up on it. I got gob-loads of strawberries, enough tomatoes to make a few gallons of sauce, a zucchini here and there, and some of Leah’s squash. Other than that, nearly everything I planted got overwhelmed by weeds or eaten by an animal or insect. This week, I started pulling out the irrigation hose and taking down the trellises and tomato cages. I weed-whacked the whole garden and am going to start tilling it in preparation for planting the winter cover crop in a few months.

I have been planting in 4′ beds, separated by 2′ aisles that were not tilled. This was based on a desire to emulate raised-bed style, intensive gardening. One problem with this approach has been that the grass and other plants that grow in the aisles aggressively encroach on the beds, requiring a lot of labor to maintain. Next year, I plan to till the entire garden area so that there is only one perimeter to “defend,” instead of each bed having its own perimeter. I also plan to try row-based planting instead of intensive, block-based planting. I find intensive planting very hard to weed around, because you have to get in between the plants and avoid pulling them up. In theory, the density of the plants keeps weeds down, but I haven’t found that to be the case. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. I don’t know, but next year, I’m going to try rows and see how that goes.

Last year, I abandoned mulching. This year, I abandoned intensive planting. My hippie-cred is melting away. I’m still never using chemical fertilizers, though.

I saved out some zucchini and cucumber seeds this year, my first attempt at seed saving. What you see above is my improvised drying rig. It’s a pizza skin on top of a box fan that has been set on some mason jars. I’ve heard you can use a similar setup for dehydrating, although I’ve never tried it.

We’re still moving the sheep every day, or at least, every two days. It’s had an interesting effect. Although the sheep are moving through the property much faster, because they spend less time on a paddock, the grass recovers much faster, and the net effect is more, higher-quality forage available to them.

Om nom nom…  Big Mama’s wool was not shedding off of her back, so we held her down and cut it off. We were hoping that all three of the sheep would shed, but it looks like her mixture includes enough wool-sheep that she’s going to require shearing.

Daily, the sheep get a ration of corn with some essential minerals. The corn is just as a treat. They’re filling out nicely, though, and all seem to have gained weight since we got them. Although I put a lot of time into halter-training them, they’re now trained enough that they just follow a bucket of corn wherever I need them to go. Since we’ve got the perimeter fence, I don’t have to worry about them escaping, not that they go very far from the bucket. Once, I needed them to stay where they were, so I set the bucket down on the other side of their fence and they just sat there and waited for me to come back.

I’ve got that whole firewood thing handled. We have about 6 cord, not counting the enormous trunks that a local tree service gifted to me. They’re big enough that I may have to pay somebody to come out and cut them into rounds, because my chainsaw can’t get them, even if I come in from both sides. I calculate that there’s about 2-3 cord of wood in those trunks, so even if it costs me a few dollars to get them cut up, I’ll come out way ahead.

The pigs go off to the processor September 6th. They’re around 250 lbs now, and will be topping 300 by the time they go. We had been planning to take them in the truck, and had been feeding them in the back of the truck periodically, to get them used to going in there. There’s a steep dip at the back of the pigs’ enclosure that the truck can back up to and, with the tailgate dropped, the pigs can walk in.

That all changed when we bought a trailer a month or so ago. I had the idea that I could use tie-down straps to put the corral we got for the sheep onto the trailer and turn it into an improvised stock trailer. It worked out pretty well. It can be positioned wherever we need it; it can be left in place, unlike the truck; and it has a nice ramp for the pigs to walk up. They took to it in just a few days.

Behold the power of compost! That’s a volunteer tomato, going bonkers in the compost pile.

Finally, I’ve been working with the bees. Ever since the sheep knocked over their hive, I’ve been more motivated to interact with them. I put the hive back together, and I guess I just figured, well, now that I’m messing with them, I may as well keep at it. When I inspected them, their numbers seemed low and they didn’t seem to have a lot of capped honey, so I put a hive-top feeder on top of the hive. It’s basically a container that goes into a super and holds a sugar-water solution that the bees can get at from inside the hive. I had to take some steps to keep a colony of big black ants from invading the feeder (hint: the trick of putting the hive on top of cinnamon sticks did not work), and then a few days later, I noticed a flurry of activity at the opening of the hive. Bees were coming and going in a much different pattern than usual, and some of them were wrestling around and falling on the ground (you can see this happening in the photo above, although it was a little hard to capture the event on camera). In one case, Issa saw two bees grab a third bee and toss it off the hive like bouncers in a bar. We had a robbing situation going on! Robbing is where one  hive of bees comes to steal another  hive’s honey. It is especially likely to be set off by the sugar-water solution in a feeder. I put a 2×2 board on the entrance to act as an entrance reducer, which makes it easier for the bees to defend the hive. As of today, the attack was ongoing, but the “home” bees seemed to be having a much easier time of it with the smaller entrance.