September Happenings

We are more than half way through September and quickly approaching the Autumn equinox.  This last month has been a whirlwind of back to school activity but some of us still find time to lounge on a haybale in the sunshine with a good book. (Quiet moments like these are what life is all about!)  It's almost time to slow everything down internally and externally. But not quite yet...

volunteers Kenji and Ayana planting potatoes

There are still so many seeds to be planted and starts to go in the ground.  Give thanks for generous volunteer helpers!  As we make room for fall vegetables the animals get some well loved treats, corn stalks being an absolute favorite.  

This week we met for our home-made food co-op which has been such a blessing.  What an inspiring group of women and the food is amazing.

  
This month's trade consisted of fermented dill pickles, beet kvass, pink sauerkraut, fresh raw mixed milk cheese, sprouted wasabi almonds, gluten free power cookies, dried peaches, apricots and strawberries, golden harvest season soup, chicken sage sausage patties, and chile sauce.  Whew, pretty great stuff.  

Some news on what's been going on in our kitchen...we recently borrowed a cream separator from a friend which has been fun to experiment with.  (In goes the warm raw milk, and out pours the cream on one side and skim milk on the other.)  

The extra fridge is full of milk and cream these days so after trying my hands at cheese making for several months now I am transitioning into the world of gelato.  Yes! gelato of all kinds, coffee, avocado, persimmon, whatever I can get my hands on.  

Balancing the busi-ness of life with a sparkle of creativity can be a challenge but we must always hold onto the beauty and stay grateful for it all.  There is no time of year I love more than autumn!

Raising Chicks On A Soured Milk Diet

Our new flock of twenty-five laying chicks (including an all white Leghorn rooster) arrived last week. This coming spring we are striving for higher egg production so we ordered mostly Black Star females with a few Red Stars, Leghorns and Buff Orphingtons added to the mix. We have been looking into raising the chicks on a soured milk diet which means feeding the chicks raw milk that has clabbered or soured, meaning fermented.  Clabbering raw milk is easy.  We just fill a quart jar or two with some of the fresh milk from the morning's milking (either goat or cow will do), screw on a lid and leave on the window sill for a couple of days until the curds separate from the whey.  

Raw milk is loaded with enzymes and probiotics.  When raw milk starts to sour, it simply means that beneficial bacteria called probiotics have started to use up all the lactose or milk sugar which casues the milk to no longer taste sweet.  Soured raw milk has a higher level of probiotics which have initiated the fermentation or clabbering of the milk.  (By the way, this only works with raw milk.  When store bought pasteurized milk goes bad it becomes a huge food borne illness risk to consume it and should be thrown out.)

All these probiotics can be used as a prophylactic against disease and illness, boosting the immune system and growing stronger, healthier birds.  We are looking forward to an abundance of eggs in the spring.   

p.s. It is still an amazing thing to think of how much the family cow adds to the homestead, everyone on the farm benefits from the by products!    

Adding Spent Grain To The Equation

We have been fortunate to arrange a weekly pick up spent barley from a local brewery that purchases their grain from a company with sustainable practices and uses non-gmo grain. After researching high and low, we have not found much information out there on the amount of spent grain that can be added to the diets of poultry and ruminants on the small farm scene.  So we have been experimenting with the spent barley as a supplemental livestock feed over the last few weeks and have made some interesting observations.  Our laying hens and ducks eat all the wet grain we give them but do not seem to be laying more eggs with the change in diet.  The goats and cows LOVE the grain!  They were not previously getting any grain and were fed mostly alfalfa and orchard grass. The addition of spent grain has significantly increased their daily milk production.  We have been giving it only with morning feedings, starting out with small amounts and increasing slowly to allow their systems to adjust to the new food.  

Since spent grain has already gone through a mashing and lautering process, it is much easier to digest than regular grain as the hulls have already been broken down leaving behind some carbohydrates and mostly proteins.  For us, this is basically a free protein rich feed we can give our animals that cuts our feed bills in half. One of our goals over the next few months will be to work out proper ratios of other ingredients to create our own nourishing layer mix with spent barley as the base.  Ideally these will be ingredients we can grow ourselves or source locally.  

Joel Salatin says something interesting about feeding spent grain to dairy cattle.  When the Industrial Revolution was changing the infrastructure of cities, dairies sprang up around breweries in order to feed the distiller's grain to the cattle.  However, it made the pH of the cattle's rumen much more acidic and changed the milk.  I imagine this was with cattle fed on only spent grain or a large amount.  We will see how it goes with adding it in as a supplement in moderation along with continuing the same amount of hay and fresh vegis.  

Feeding our animals what we produce (or recycling other's waste products that we can obtain close by for free) is all part of our bigger plan.  Cutting back on purchasing commercial layer pellets and adding spent grain to the equation brings us a few steps closer to our goal of obtaining a closed loop system on our small farm.  

Family Cow Chronicles Volume IV: Diary of a Milk Maid

I'm not sure if one actually aspires in life to become a milk maid.  I certainly did not plan to land in these shoes.  But here I am, day in, day out, surrounded by udders, iodine wash, and a lot of stainless steel. I think when I look back on this time of my life -when I am older- it will be all the milk I will remember.  That and the sensation of my head pressed against soft fur, the smell of cow and of course the hard labor of farming.  I still feel like an impostor when I say that word "farming". That is what we are doing though, right?  No matter how small the scale.  I don't think it can be called anything else. 

But back to the milking...a few weeks ago Ginger decided I was no longer the Alpha cow.  I'm not sure what happened because our initial bond was so strong, she was my girl.  For whatever reason she has become infatuated with my other half, perhaps it is his maleness and she is longing for a bull.  Whatever the reason, she had been testing me at each milking, driving me crazy with her kicking and her stubbornness.  I managed to milk her but she made me work for it. Clearly this was not working, something had to change so I decided it was time for me to break her.  I do love her and I want to be her friend.  I believe in kindness and treating my animals with the utmost care.  But there can only be one boss in the milking parlor and that would have to be me.  I stayed up late two nights in a row reading all the family cow pro boards, going over each post where the people were having the same problems.  Time and again the advice was to break her in with either a wooden spoon to the leg each time she kicks or with a loud, low "NO!".  Well, it is pretty out of character for a gentle, soft spoken gal like me to use force, but I decided to try both...When I woke last Tuesday morning, I was determined to let her know I was in charge.  

All this must sound so foreign to those who don't have large livestock. It probably even sounds cruel.  But if you have ever had a 1600 lb. animal kick at you with full force you quickly understand that you have to nip it in the bud.  The bottom line is it's dangerous! Breaking in a milker is not for sissies.  And just for perspective, I did try the kick stop, and tying her leg, and bringing the calf up with each milking. My drastic measures came after several injuries from her and I really just felt like enough is enough.  If we are going to do this twice a day she needs to mind me and if it takes a fight- then so be it.

So that morning's milking was unpleasant for both of us.  But you know what, half way through she got the picture that kicking is unacceptable and shockingly, every milking since has gone smoothly.  Ginger is smart and a quick learner. I also made sure to stock my pockets full of oranges for her.  I am finding that consistency, firmness, and yummy treats are the key to successful animal husbandry, not forgetting patience and a generous dose of loving too.

A Fruitful Week

Giving thanks for abundance is sweeter than the abundance itself...

-Rumi

In general it has felt like a late, lean year in our garden.  With the lack of rain and our attention focused mostly on the animals, the garden has kept us fed, but felt less abundant than previous years.  And just as I was thinking about how there seems like not as much growing around here (besides the ever prolific squash!), I take a spontaneous walk through the orchard and discover an abundance of fruit in need of harvesting.  In turn, this prompts several days of gathering and preserving.  There are so many plums and apples.  If we wait until the fruit ripens on the trees the turkeys and deer will eat it all.  So in an effort to keep some of these sweets for ourselves I harvested buckets full.  They can all take their time ripening in the sun in our driveway. Some of the trees produced less this year-like the prune plums and the gravensteins- but the grapes are off the hook!  I kept making trip after trip with my basket loaded, all in amazement that the laden vines were hidden under the leafy cover just waiting to be discovered.  Like a kid in a candy store, I can't imagine a better way to spend my day. And into the kitchen I go to make grape jelly, fruit leathers, apples sauce, and dried plums.  (My goal this year is to can enough jam that we will not buy even one jar from Trader Joe's!)  The oysters and shitakes from our mushroom bed are going into the dehydrator too for soups later in the season.  We're still crankin' out the sweet and spicy zucchini pickles, our preferred method to use up overgrown summer squash.  The Oregon Sweet Meat squash are piling up on the cob bench as they make their way in from the garden. These have become my favorite winter squash for their rich delicate flavor and their ability to keep for almost a year without refrigeration.  They have a striking grey blue skin with a generous bright orange inner flesh. In these days that our hearts are filled with gratitude and reflection, the harvest has begun, and we preserve the bounty one small batch at a time.  

Easy Mushroom Bed

A couple of weeks ago our neighbor brought us several bags of sawdust mushroom logs from her visit to a mushroom farm down south.  Apparently the mushroom farm discards all their logs after they have had their first flush of shrooms and there are piles and piles of these logs for the taking.  The logs still have much more fruiting potential but since the productivity declines after the first flush the farm throws the logs out.  We have no experience growing mushrooms from this type of log and I was skeptical that it would be as easy as our neighbor described.  Her directions were to soak the logs in water for 24 hours.   

Then lay down a bed of wood mulch and space the logs about 5-6 inches apart over the mulch to allow room for the shrooms to grow without touching each other.   

Next step was to cover lightly with straw or some other medium that will help keep in the moisture.  That's it!  No worrying about sterile environments or plastic tent covering. We chose to place our mushroom bed in a retaining wall between our house and our chicken area.  The retaining wall gets partial sun, is protected from wind and gets the overflow of watering from a lettuce bed above so it stays pretty moist.  A perfect place for mushrooms and we don't have to think about tending them at all.  We just have to remember to harvest them once and a while.  

I was so excited today when I went to check, almost all the logs are fruiting.  After only two weeks, we have shitake and oyster mushrooms growing just a few steps from our front door.  

brown shitake mushroom

shelf-like oyster mushrooms

Our first shitake harvest will be fried up with some eggs tomorrow morning!

A Full Belly Experience

Wrapping up their unit on farms and farm workers rights, my son's class took an end of the school year camping trip to Full Belly farm. This was my first visit and, oh, was there ever so much to see.  Full Belly is a 300 acre working organic farm in Guinda, CA, started 30 years ago by a Mom and Pop.  They are known to most east bay area foodies for their popular CSA boxes and their flourishing farmer's market stands.

Over the two days we were at Full Belly I captured some pics of what peaked my interest most...like the pastured poultry set-up that runs through the orchards. 

I appreciated the effort they are making to transition out of imported feed and grow all their own grain and hay for their livestock.  

An educator explains the different sprouted grains fed to the flock, particularly milo.

Bottle feeding the bummer lambs was the favorite activity

The combine harvester was, might I say, p-r-e-t-t-y cool!  There must be some country girl in me because I get really excited about farm equipment.  This massive beast both harvests the grain heads and threshes them, then makes a second pass through the field cutting the stalks and baling them into hay.  The farmer was kind enough to allow one of the girls in our group to drive.  

Acres of golden barley, wheat, and milo

The most exciting event over the course of the stay was having the children package 300 CSA boxes.  They made an assembly line and went to town putting together boxes and packing lettuce, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and more.  These boxes were particularly special since the next morning they would be delivered to our school drop spot!

Finished boxes ready to be loaded for delivery

New silos for grain storage

Fodder tray system sprouting grain for livestock

The Full Belly educators emphasized the importance of treating farm workers fairly.  For them this means employing their workers year round, providing full benefits, and having a policy where all workers can take home as much produce as they like for free each day.  Below the drying room stores the gorgeous remnants of the flower harvest. This room was created for the women who harvest flowers to extend their jobs year round into the winter.  The flower ladies craft bouquets and wreaths from the perfectly dried harvest.  

It was spectacular to get an inside view of Full Belly!  I feel challenged and inspired to scale down some of the new ideas I took away and implement them here on our few acres.  It was also so valuable for my son to see that we are not the only ones who do so many of the things we do.  Making butter from your own cow's cream is actually not such a strange thing after all!