Especially since I just accidentally published half of the title by mis-placing my fat finger.
I thought I'd do a little clean-up on the internet, delete some old blogs, check the mail on some unused email accounts, etc and I got sucked into reading a few blogs again. I'm not ready to delete this one, though, and every once in a while I think I might fire it back up. I chuckled when I saw a draft I saved well over a year ago and never published.
Ive got nothing against blogging or bloggers, far from it. But I stay pretty busy with whatnot and sundry, and that business combined with poor typing skills, overly painstaking care in writing (This is a fault due to pride - I don't want to be exposed as an ignoramus), and wanting to demonstrate Settledness for a bit longer before I go pontificating on it have conspired to protect all of you who don't know any better than not to read this.
But we are all still here on the little farm, a little older due to lack of death, a little fewer due to Micah, a little smarter due to children learning a lot, which outweighs old folks forgetting a lot, a little wiser from failures, and a lot more grateful for the kindness of God, who has given us everything even before we work for it, and who gives us the gift of working for it, too.
Today, I'm going to rent an auger and dig 60 holes for the Apple trees that will arrive today or tomorrow. I'm going to plant 60 or so trees each year for three years and see what comes of it. This is a bigger scale of project than we are used to engaging in, but I can't see a downside to trying it. With livestock, we have to be careful not to overstock, but we've got plenty of room for trees.
I really have no idea what we had going on here the last time I posted, and I'm not going back over the old posts to find out. Right now we've got 15 sets of bovine hooves on the ground, but seven of them are calves from 1 to six months old. Two of those and Marcy the cow are visiting from Micah and Naddy's. Two are holsteins adopted to a nurse cow. That seems to be working much better than our earlier attempts to bottle feed dairy calves (100% failure rate).
We raised pigs for the third year this year and did much better this year on the processing of them. I had in mind to take them up to an Amish fellow who was going to show me how he handled the slaughter, scalding, etc., but work was too busy. I was stressing it, but the boys decided they could handle it without any help from me or an Amishman. So they built a good fire under an old steel tub raised on cinder blocks, attached rope and pulleys to a stout tree branch, attached the lawn tractor to one end and a dead pig to the other and commenced to getting the job done. Two pigs, two days, me at work off the farm. Yup, this farming is hard work. We're still figuring out smoking ham and bacon, but the first attempt at bacon wasn't half bad. I little gristly, probably from improper meat selection and slicing.
I'm looking for a flock guardian for the chickens. I can't bear to see their sad eyes behind chicken wire. Oh, and I hate to buy feed, too. The chicken/egg program is in a bit of disarray right now. We did well for a few years, but over time the hawks have come to rely on us. I'm hoping that what I've heard about a guard dog discouraging even hawks proves true. It's crazy too, but I'm trying to breed my chickens for increased survivability. With the hawks to provide natural selection, if it is at all possible, I should succeed in breeding chickens who walk around constantly looking up into the sky.
I've got some maintenance to do here if I actually post again anytime soon. I've got to restore links to some of the other blogs, after I figure out who's still out here and hasn't gone off the deep end. Not sure what the deep end is yet, but don't assume you've gone off it if I don't link you right away.
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