Last night’s storm tore a chunk of wall off our shop, much to our surprise:
And back to normal after Darren nailed the missing pieces back on:
Just looked out the window, and caught sight of Davin in the yard. It seems he has taken yesterday’s metal cage we used to transport the sheep, turned it on its side, put a plastic bin in there to hide behind, and one of the lawn chairs. He is now currently sitting in his little sheep-blind spying on the sheep!!! ROFLMAO!!!
We have 4 new additions to the farm and more coming in the next weeks! We’ve acquired 3 sheep (destined for my freezer and dinner table) and a goat as of yesterday. It was an adventure getting them home since we don’t have a stock trailer, but one trip to the junkyard did the trick. We found some metal mesh in the form of one of those cubes that holds the square water tanks we see alot around here. It was in 2 pieces so we chained it into the back of the truck and drove out to pickup the animals. Because of the shape of the mesh and where the attach points are in my truck, we had to lift the animals into the truck. We’re really feeling it today as 250 lbs of squirming sheep is not even remotely easy to wrestle into a truck even with 3 adults lifting. Here are some pics of the critters in the truck:
On the way home, the goat slipped out of his halter and decided to lie down for a more comfortable trip as did the smallest sheep though he was still in his halter. As we didn’t have store-bought halters, I had to make some out of some rope we had lying around. They worked well except I didn’t get the one on the goat tight enough or I should’ve put an extra loop around his horns, since he is obviously smart enough to escape from it. Thankfully none of the animals attempted to jump out of the truck on the way home.
It took awhile to get a non-slip ramp built when we arrived home, an then twice the time to untie all the cam straps that were holding the mesh on top of the cage in the truck, which was merely there to discourage them from jumping. We took out the metal caging and then untied each animal in turn from the cross tie I had setup in the truck. One at a time we walked each down the ramp (which was our atv ramps plus a 4×8 sheet of plywood and carpet on top of it) and then showed each sheep the water trough before removing the halter.
It was during the unloading of the 3rd sheep Darren got stung by 2 wasps. I guess he won’t be wearing the really bright yellow shirt out in the yard again!! Here’s some pics of heading to the trough, blurry since my blackberry doesn’t do a great job of motion shots:
Once we had the animals unloaded, we got hit with a nasty thunderstorm complete with lightning and 90 km/h winds. That wasn’t the sort of welcome we had in mind for the animals, but they did ok and took shelter in our trees. I checked on them again later once the storm had passed and we still had all 4 accounted for and doing fine. Checking this morning we still have all four of them happy. I think they drank from the water trough, or it’s slowly leaking I’m not sure so we’ll be replacing the plug in the bottom if it drains faster than it should.
It looks like next weekend we are getting the rabbits we’ve been waiting for too, as I found someone selling the exact breeds we want which are a New Zealand buck and Flemish Giant does. We’re building the cages this week to house them and should be getting underway with starting to breed fryers for our freezer within a week of their arrival! We are also waiting on some laying hens too and will also build a chicken tractor this week to house them. Looks like we’ll shortly have all our protein needs accounted for, at least for the winter!
We were driving around last week looking for something to do and I was reading the local newspaper and saw an ad for 2 month old Blue Heeler/Black Lab puppies free to good homes. Now having just a week earlier having said no to another Border Collie-Rottweiler mix from the same place we got Zipper, I really only wanted to see what the puppies looked like since we now had 3 dogs in the house.
We found our way to the farm and got a look at the puppies parents, both of whom are working cattle dogs and looked to be quite good at their jobs. I hadn’t seen the puppies yet and this got me thinking that they could be really good dogs. I happened to have stopped at home and grabbed a puppy leash and seat belt harness just in case of course. When we got into the yard, all the puppies were outside but they all but 1 jumped underneath the sheds and hid. I grabbed the one who was curious enough and had stayed out, and had Darren fish out the next nearest one from under the shed. OMG they were so cute! and I really should know better than to pick up a puppy. She looked like one of the best of the litter and didn’t freak out too much being handled and looked at. We compared her to the other one we’d grabbed and decided she was the better of the two. So I snapped on the seat belt harness and leash and put her in the truck. Done Deal!
Our hope is that this puppy turns out to be a much better cattle dog than our shepherd husky cross Hera who doesn’t get why our collies run around all the time herding things. The new puppy has been named Nyx, and once she got over being taken away from her litter mates, she started exhibiting great curiosity and boldness and began to follow us around trying to herd us. Perfect! I think she’ll turn out really well. Here’s some pix of her:
Here is the list of plants we are growing this year. Anything not labelled specifically is generally being grown as an annual. There is more to come with this list as we are currently planning what permanent items are going onto the land. For fruit trees and such, we hope to purchase 2-3 year old stock that is already hardened off, but in some cases we’ll have to get seed or seedlings depending. We are seriously looking at some of the hardy miniature kiwi varieties that can survive down to around -35C.
TechCowboys Farm 2009 Growing Season List
Asparagus Perennial Vegetable
Bean Asian Yard Long Orient Wonder
Bean Pea Bean
Beans Scarlet Runner Emperor
Bean Soybean Black Jet
Bean Tongue of Fire
Cauliflower Early Snowball
Celery Green Utah
Cucumber Armenian
Cucumber Lemon
Cucumber Marketmore
Cucumber Morden Early
Cucumber National Pickling
Cucumber Pioneer Pickling
Cucumber White Wonder
Fruit Chichiquelite Huckleberry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Citron Red Seeded
Fruit Garden Huckleberry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Giant Cape Gooseberry
Fruit Grape Valiant Perennial Fruit
Fruit Groundcherries
Fruit Hardy Kiwi Perennial Fruit
Fruit Litchi Tomato or Morelle De Balbis
Fruit Naranjilla
Fruit Orange Master Pomegranate Perennial Fruit
Fruit Pepino Melon
Fruit Purple Kiwi Perennial Fruit
Fruit Saskatoon Berry Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Patio Temptation Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Red Wonder Wild Perennial Fruit
Fruit Strawberry Yellow Wonder Wild Perennial Fruit
Fruit White Currant Perennial Fruit
Fruit Wonderberry Perennial Fruit
Grain Amaranth Hopi Red Dye
Grain Asian Amaranth Edible White Leaf
Green Asian Tsai-Hsin
Green Cabbage Chinese Tenderheart
Green Cabbage Early Copenhagen Market
Green Chard Five Colour Silverbeet
Green Chinese Cabbage Pok Choy
Green Endive Full Heart Batavian
Green Kale Chinese Green Lance
Green Lettuce Counter
Green Lettuce Romaine
Green Lettuce Salad Mix
Green Lettuce Tennis Ball
Green Pak Choi Tah Tsai
Green Strawberry Spinach
Green Swiss Chard Bright Lights
Herb Basil Cinnamon Annual Herb
Herb Borage Annual Herb
Herb Lovage Perrenial herb
Herb Oregano Perrenial herb
Herb Spearmint Perrenial herb
Herb Stevia Perennial herb
Herb Summer Savory Annual Herb
Herb Sweet Marjoram Perennial herb
Herb Tarragon Perennial herb
Melon Cantaloupe
Melon Cream of Saskatchewan
Melon Oka
Melon Sugar Baby
Pea Golden Sweet Edible Podded
Pea Homesteader
Pea Spanish Skyscraper
Pepper Blushing Beauty F1
Pepper Cayenne
Pepper Jimmy Nardello Sweet Italian
Pepper King of the North
Pepper Lemon Drop
Pepper Little Blue
Pepper Super Hot Chili F1
Pepper Tequila Sunrise
Pumpkin Small Sugar
Pumpkin Kakai
Pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes
Radish Asian Watermelon
Radish Black Spanish
Radish China White
Radish Plum Purple
Root veg Asian Burdock Takinogawa Biennial Vegetable
Root veg Beet Detroit Dark Red
Root veg Carrot Amarillo
Root veg Carrot Atomic Red
Root veg Carrot Dragon
Root veg Carrot Oxheart
Root veg Kohl Rabi Early White Vienna
Root veg Parsnip Hollow Crown
Squash Anna Swartz Hubbard
Squash Buttercup
Squash Butternut
Squash Gourd Bird’s Nest
Squash Galeux d’Eysines
Squash Loofa
Squash Red Kuri
Squash Zucchini Golden
Squash Zucchini Tatume Climbing
Sunflower large seeded tall
Tomato Ball Beefsteak Indeterminate red
Tomato Black Cherry Indeterminate black
Tomato Black Zebra Determinate black
Tomato Brandywine Red Indeterminate red
Tomato Bush Beefsteak Determinate red
Tomato Bush Early Girl Determinate red
Tomato Earl of Edgecombe Indeterminate orange
Tomato Early Girl Hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Gartenperle Determinate red
Tomato Goldie boy Determinate orange
Tomato Great White Indeterminate white
Tomato Green Zebra Indeterminate green
Tomato Japanese Trifele Black Indeterminate black
Tomato Kellog’s Breakfast Indeterminate yellow
Tomato Manitoba Determinate red
Tomato Purple Prince Indeterminate black
Tomato Rainbow Blend Indeterminate red
Tomato Red Belly Indeterminate yellow red
Tomato Roma VF Determinate red
Tomato Ropreco Paste Determinate red
Tomato Starfire Improved Determinate red
Tomato Sub Arctic Plenty Determinate red
Tomato Sweet 100 hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Sweet Cherry Hybrid Indeterminate red
Tomato Tiny Tim Determinate red
Tomato Tumbler F1 Hybrid Determinate red
Tomato White Currant Determinate white
Tomato White Queen Indeterminate white
Tomato Yellow Pearshaped Indeterminate yellow
The era of bunnies has now dawned at our farm and the first bunny has arrived. This new bunny is Davin’s 4H project this year. I found a bunny that was free to good home, and so Bender (named by Davin after watching 2 seasons of Futurama) has moved in as of yesterday. For now, he will be an indoor bunny since it’s been really cold here temps from -20C through to lower than -30C. We are building up the leanto at the back of the house and finishing its insulating and adding a partition wll and door to complete the first part of the rabbitry. We will temporarily house it in the lean-to until we build a really nice rabbit house later on. Bender is a Netherland breed of rabbit, male and un-neutered and about a year old. He was part of a rescued litter taken in after the parents were eaten by coyotes. Here are several pictures of Bender in his new hutch:
Also soon to arrive are some meat rabbits. We have finally found a couple sources for meat rabbits in Alberta and are going to ge a buck and 2 does to start with. With some good planning and a little luck, we should have a good supply of rabbit meat for our freezer later in the year. From the research I’ve already done, it seems that it will be about 17 weeks from a doe being bred, we could have market-sized fryers ready for the freezer. That should put our first time for butchering/processing sometime in May. That’s not too bad of a time frame at all. Depending on the breed we get, we could expect an average of about 3 pounds of meat per rabbit and I’d say an average of 7 rabbit per litter, so 21 lbs of meat average per litter. With 2 does breeding, if we attained the full 5 litters per year @ 80 total kits, that would be 240 lbs of rabbit meat in a year.
On the vegetation front, I have begun compiling my list of things to grow for this season and realised today that I need to get planting into the seed trays this week for flowers and veg that need 10-12 weeks before last frost. I plan to build poly tunnels and use coldframes this season to extend our season as much as possible and hope to set my planting out date for the first week of April. For Alberta, that’s early, so the polytunnel(s) are going to need to be heated. I think I’ll be getting my planting gear organised tonight!
This post is the first in an ongoing stream I’ll be doing on sustainable living combined with making household life more convenient & inexpensive. A big part of our moving to the farm is to evolve our family’s way of life into a form that works with our busyness and keeps costs down as well as trying to live in ways that are sustainable long term, no matter what sustainable turns out to be in each instance.
The first thing I will have a look at is BBQ Sauce. My favorite sauce is Bull’s Eye, but the bottles are small and they cost around $5 a bottle. Great profit margin for the manufacturer, not so much for my pocketbook. I could easily go through a bottle in a week or two. So I found a copycat recipe that tastes close enough to the original rather than go without enough sauce.
I discovered that with a large enough pot, it’s -really- easy to make the sauce. The steps are really basic: 1. Measure ingredients into pot. 2. Stir till thoroughly mixed. 3. Heat till simmering, and cook till desired thickness is reached, stirring occasionally. (I’ll post the actual recipe once I retrieve it from home.) The ingredients on the list are all readily available, and you can use homemade tomato paste for it. I’ll cost out the recipe soon too and post the comparison results here! I added some hot peppers that we grew this year to the mix and it made for a really nice complex sauce mixed in with the smoke taste. The length of time to prepare was only a couple hours. I didn’t bother processing the cans in the pressure canner as the first batch was to test it out and I was pretty sure we’d go through it really fast. I was right, and will have to make another batch very soon!
The next batch I likely will process in the canner, and make many more jars than the first time around. I found that pint jars and quart jars are nice manageable sizes for this sauce.
The next thing I made was a copycat of Hershey’s chocolate sauce. Again very easy to whip up in a pot on the stove. Add ingredients, boil, and put in jars. Recipe to come shortly and cost comparison. This sauce has found a permanent place for a jar in the fridge.
3rd thing I’ve made and have made a number of times over the past 10 years is pan grease for baking. It’s a half and half mix of crisco shortening and flour, mixed well and put in a tupperware container with sealing lid. I use this mix to grease my baking pans all the time. It works very well and doesn’t lend any additional flavours to the foods made, yet helping them release easily from the pans.
So these 3 different things have saved our household a good chunk of change since we don’t buy them pre-made from the store, spend the gas to drive to the store, and spend the time heading to the store either. When the batches are big enough and infrequent enough the batch production cost and overhead is very little in comparison.
We now make all of our bread and haven’t bought any since we moved into our new farm! It’s far better to eat our own than what’s in the store. We also are using our -big- crockpot most nights of the week so time is saved when we get home and supper is ready.
Well, it’s been a few months since I posted and as life always gives you the unexpected, we’ve had a wild ride this summer into fall. Typically my family will “reboot itself” every September in some fashion and this year has been no exception, but with the addition of being extremely intense!
We gambled our harvest in order to gain a 7 acre farm of our own and the gamble paid off! This means of course that we ended up moving at the beginning of July and then again at the end of September. We’ve purchased a 7 acre farm in Warburg AB that will be perfect for growing our veggies. No more traveling between different cities to grow things! With the house-hunt this summer combined with the driving distances between Alberta Beach (Mission Creek Estates) where we were renting to Mundare & Camrose, our final harvest amounts were nowhere what I had initially hoped for since we just weren’t able to be everywhere nearly enough to tend things. It became a case of resources spread far too thin and not enough hours in the day when working full time in Edmonton. We did get plenty of tomatoes, potatoes and carrots, though the cucumbers failed this year along with the pumpkins and much everything else except peas.
My parents stayed with us for the month of September so our son would be able to start school right in Warburg at the beginning of the school year. It was a grueling haul as everyone left the house and drove in different directions at least 80km each way. My parents spent about $50/day on gas and my gas usage that month came out to about $1200!! I’m very glad we don’t have to do that again!
As part of the reboot, I rather unexpectedly found myself back on the job market. After a brief 5 days of looking around I signed on with Able Automation in Leduc AB. This works well as the daily commute 1-way is about 35 minutes on dry roads without snow. We’ll see how long it takes me when roads are snowy, I really hope the county maintains our highway well since it is fairly busy all the time. I am really glad I bought a 4×4 truck now that we are out in the country full time, since it will certainly be a help in many ways around the farm as well as driving each day to work – especially since I do a lot of service calls into Edmonton and area now.
Looking ahead to next season, we have much work to do to plan how we are going to utilise our land & buildings and what to implement first vs. $$$ available for each project. I think it could easily take 5-8 years for us to fully develop the place. We have an approximately 7,000 square foot, 3 floor shop (read old aircraft hangar/quansit) to work in which is fabulous! There is enough space not only to park our vehicles in one bay, but enough space to start all my plants indoors under lights year round, a room to do wood/metal working, a place where my husband can fix/build computers, a big room for multimedia workshops (as well as playing guitar hero on a big screen), and tons of other space.
This week I need to get out in the field and measure up next year’s veggie plot layout. At the very least I’d like to do either raised beds, or build polytunnels or both. We’ll see how much it costs and how much time I have to build things. The first hurdle to get by with the field is all the grass that is about 3 feet tall and mostly laying down on its side. That needs to get cut and moved off the area so I can get at the ground. But all in good time.
I am finding all my studies into Six Sigma methodology is really helping with the enormity of the farm project and the multitudes of details. Right now we are picking off all the activities that give us the most progress for the least/easier effort. Winterising the house is well underway, with applying polyfilm to the windows, caulking cracks and seams where needed, wrapping pipes with insulation etc. I am making a new door for the master bedroom to replace the folding door that the dogs keep pushing open and running through too. I’m putting all the plans into a MS Project 2007 file to manage it all, though I’ve started it as a spreadsheet in Excel just to get things fleshed out so I can see it first.
We’ve been learning which things are the most important to tackle and what sort of things we should have on hand. Last month while it was still warm, there was a really bad windstorm, and although stuff stayed intact around the farm, the wellhead froze! We woke up on a sunday morning to no water pressure, and we thought fantastic the pump broke or something. Going out to the well house turned up that we hadn’t yet plugged in the heater in there (it was still warm enough everyday). We messed around with it and couldn’t get it going, but it was freezing in the pumphouse so we got the heater setup and let it run for a few hours just to see if that would help since we thought the pump had died. Lo and behold, once the well head warmed up the water began to flow again. (We had pointed the heater right at the wellhead since we’d noticed some ice near where condensation normally would drip.) From this experience we realised that we should have on hand a duplicate pump/set of equipment for various things around the farm like the septic pump, the well pump, a new hot water tank, potentially a new furnace. Certainly a generator would be a good thing to have too. I’m glad we have the space to store all this extra equipment, which we still need to buy!
Once I get our list of things really fleshed out, I’ll post a copy so people can get an idea of the hugeness of the project we’ve taken on. It’s going to be fun (I hope), and a ton of work. But the result will end up being an energy-self-sustaining farm, well productive in food and other goods. Our first podcast will hopefully be recorded and published just before Christmas!
New additions to the family since we’ve started all this moving are 2 new dogs Hera, a 1.5 year old white shepherd husky cross, and Zipper a now 5 month old Border Collie-something-er-other cross. Lexie our first dog really likes having buddies, although Zipper is teething so Lexie tries to avoid her for now, not wanting to get chewed on. They have learned their jobs as farm dogs, which is to guard the farm of course and they love to run around the 7 acres as much as they can. We’ll be getting a rabbit shortly for Davin’s 4H project once we find out where to buy mesh for the cage/hutch, so we’ll have to teach the dogs to leave the rabbit cage alone. They certainly don’t leave our garbage bags alone, causing us to have to lockup the bags before dump day each week! Here’s some pics of the dogs and other stuff going on right now.
I’m happy to report Hera is doing fine! Now I can turn my attention to figuring out what to sell at the local farmer’s markets and getting our first podcast recorded and produced!
Well, the new dog managed to eat a sharp chicken bone that Davin accidentally spilled onto the floor during dinner last night. We couldn’t get it out of her before it went down her gullet!! I had my forearm pretty much halfway down her throat and I just couldn’t catch it – it slipped away on me. We called the animal hospital right away and they said to feed her ALOT of food, so we did: bacon-fat-soaked kibble, yogurt, and cookies. She got about 6 cups of food, and now we wait. The vet said the food should help encase the bone and may prevent it from getting stuck so it can pass right through. I hope this is the case.
It was a chicken leg that she had bitten in half so it had a sharp point on it. The point went in last so it may have a good chance of sliding through. They said it could take 2 days for the bone to pass if it is going to, and if she shows any signs of distress to bring her in for an xray. The problem is that if the bone gets caught and rips things up inside, there’s not much the vet will be able to do for her except put her down. We are praying we come home to one poo-filled crate and a dirty-but-safely-relieved doggie, not a dead one.
So what was a good weekend on the farm went completely the wrong direction on us last night. We did get half the compost bin built and the first bin (of 3)is now in use. I can say though, that I’m glad it wasn’t Lexie who ate the bone. She’s been around 3 years and we are really attached to her, whereas the new dog is still new yet we’ve started getting attached to her too. Wish us luck in the recovery! I hope it doesn’t see us bereft of 1 dog.
