Quick wheat update: the Lord has graciously allowed the wheat to continue to grow!
Here it is early May:
It literally rained almost all of May, so we’re just now getting to a point where things have dried out. Which means it’s that time….harvest! Hopefully we’ll start to get out there very soon to see what we can collect.
Here is where it is as of today:
We are thankful as always to God for His provisions, and for the abundance of rain! We pray He help us in this process to be able to do a good job in saving the gift of this wheat!
This time of year has come to mean many things to us: Dave finally taking off his coveralls from wearing and sleeping in them allll winter long (we call it his “onesey”); new life in terms of crops, gardens and…….. BABY GOATS!! We have been raising goats for almost ten years now, and the Lord has been most gracious to us through our learning curve so far. We are always in awe of His mercies towards us. With that, I will take you on a mini pictorial tour of this years young-ens:
May I introduce to you Abe. He looks the most like his daddy, Rocky, out of this year’s kid crop. His sister, Abby, is sitting next to him:
And here is their mama, Adeline, with Abby at her feet:
Next is our orphan Annie from a few years ago, the mama of new l’il Abner here. He takes the prize for looking the most like *his* daddy, Shatner:
This is Nellie, the sister of Adeline in the pic above:
Nellie was blessed to have triplets this year: Artie, Gueney, and Lance: (Gueney with the long ears is the runt but, BOY, does she make up for it in moxie!):
Here is Marie, the daughter of Betsy that died a couple of years ago. She is pure Nubian, and she, also, was blessed with triplets this year. Soon after they were born, I started to notice a swelling under her jaw and into the neck area. After doing some research, it appeared she maybe had some form of bottlejaw, which apparently can be caused by worms or protein deficiency. And perhaps the strain of giving birth to triplets made her weaker and zapped her resources. One site said to slow down before running out and getting a chemical de-wormer, and one site recommended apple cider vinegar as a potential remedy. Well, I started giving her about 20 CCs of raw apple cider vinegar diluted with water for the first couple of days, gave her protein cubes with food-grade diatomaceous earth on it for any worms, and made sure she had extra grazing time, and thankfully to God, it went away! I really believe it helped too, because I started to back off the regimen, and the swelling came back, and when I started it up again daily in a smaller amount (5 CCs apple cider vinegar/5CCs lacto-fermented juice/water combination daily), it went away again! The lacto-fermented vegetable liquid is for good bacteria to help her rumen function well. We will probably continue with it while trying to slowly ween her off of it, and we are thankful to God for allowing us to find something to help:
And here they are! Farrah, Kate and Jack. Their daddy is pure Nubian, as well:
Next stop: Pammy! She has been about the sweetest goat one could hope for. Little Sammy (long ears) and Tammy are hanging on her apron strings here:
And here is Gracie, one of Pammy’s oldest kids. She was also blessed with triplets this year, but God saw fit to take them away within a couple days of birth. (This is explained on the video). She and I have bonded pretty closely since then because I started milking her right away. She takes after her mama with her very sweet temperament:
Here is our little video so you can see them live doing goat kid “stuff”:
Marie’s triplets were born in April when it was still kind of chilly on some mornings. I had seen my neighbor do this when her kids were born in the winter time. I took the sleeve of an old sweatshirt, cut two armholes in it and stuck her head through the end of the sleeve. Voila! It was that easy to make a quick kid coat. Here is our model, Kate:
I improvised a coat for Kate’s brother, Jack. His “plumbing” requires different covering techniques. I used a hood from a sweatshirt and secured it with a make-shift belt. It worked well!
Even though we have learned that this time of year can bring the heartache of loss as well as the elation of lots of new life, we are so very thankful for God’s provision and mercy and pray for Him to continue to make us good and wise stewards of His gifts.
Here come the second batch of chicks! Again, God graciously granted another set to hatch! This mama we set up in our first barn stall. At this point, I’m not sure how many she hatched out. In the video I say maybe ten, but I sort of remember only eight when I finally started counting, but now she’s down to six. I know I found two out one time and put them back, and I know I found one that had died in the cage area, but I’m not sure what happened to others if there were any. If so, I’m thinking maybe they got out and then maybe something got to them.
But, we are thankful for these six, and here they are:
And their video:
Again, we are grateful to the Lord for granting this next batch of chicks!
Apparently, God’s Spring-season “Broody Time!” memo went out, because He has begun to graciously grant the chicks to start a hatching!
This is round number one, which we usually start in the mini-chicken tractor. It’s an Australorp mama that hatched out six chicks, all of which are still going strong!
Here they are at just a few days old! It’s amazing to me how they can be all squashed up in a little egg like that, and peck their way out — more of God’s miracle ways!
Here’s a video of them:
We are always very grateful to the Lord for Him perpetuating His animal provisions!
Around the time of our last calf, Mateo, was born, we found another calf in tow, this time with our cow Holga. The calf is our first heifer of the year, and because of her creamy color, we’re calling her Natilla, which is “custard” in Spanish. Where she got that color I have no idea. 🙂
And here she is:
And her video:
We are very thankful to the Lord for the continued safe and healthy delivery and calves, and for His continued provisions for them!
Once again, the Lord granted us another calf this year, another little bull calf from our cow Amistosa! We’ve given him the name Mateo, which means “gift of God.”
Here are a couple pictures of him — he has the grey coloring from his daddy:
And here’s a video of him, and him with the other two calves we’ve done blog posts about before:
We are always grateful for these gracious gifts of God. We pray they’re used for His glory, and the benefit of His Church!
It has a water trough on the back to heat water, and David will talk about that in the second part of the blog post, but it also has an oven, and we thought Susan could take you along for the ride of her first foray into baking with it! …..
“Go Ahead, Bake My Day”
I had grown fairly comfortable with cooking and heating things on our newly functioning wood burning stove top, but the oven seemed like this intimidating metal monster with its steely stare saying “Do you feel ‘lucky’ punk? Go ahead, bake my day.” Well, I figured I didn’t have much to lose in that our propane oven had been broken for a time, so I overcame my hesitancy with this opportunity to bake again. And if it was edible – bonus!! I couldn’t go “too” far wrong with simple cookies, right?
So, while I still had the courage, I hurriedly prepared my snickerdoodle cookie dough, took a deep breath, walked ten paces towards the oven, nervously opened the door, quickly slid our inaugural cookies onto the baking shelf and closed the door yelling “Bake THAT!”
Well, we soon found that 375 degrees F are not the same in different ovens, according to how quickly these were baking:
I’m still not sure which oven has the correct temperature, but I was thrilled something had actually gone from soft and doughy to hard and crunchy! Practice makes perfect, so I attempted to disarm the metal monster by singing “Getting to Know You” to it…..
My attempt at making a new friend must have had some impact. Here is my second batch after adjusting the temperature and baking time. Much better!
I don’t have to tell you which batch is which. 😉 They were all very tasty, though! (Clarification: I didn’t personally eat them all, but I did take the liberty of sampling the heck out of them):
I figured I’d keep going and strike while the oven was hot, so I made up some dinner rolls and shoved them into the metal monster’s mouth, as well:
You’d think I would have learned from the cookies, but I still needed to fine-tune these batches. I’ll let you guess which was batch number one. 🙂 But it was all edible, thanks to God! Another monster slayed; another friend made! Hopefully, my baking in this new stove will get better over time. Thankfully, I have a wonderfully understanding, patient and supportive husband:
We are so thankful to have this method of baking that doesn’t rely on anything we need to buy. I realize women have been baking this way for hundreds of years, but now I’m one of them!! With God’s help, if He wills it, I hope to continue to improve in my baking and utilize this stove for many years to come.
Susan
Wood, Ashes and the Hot Water Trough
We’re still a little unorganized with our wood piles, but here is some of it stacked inside where the kitchen counter will, Lord willing, go one day. I do plan to build an indoor wood pile stacker:
And here is the staging area outside next the house entrance:
This is where we’re collecting our ashes. This fairly large, handy galvanized pail works great!
In our first wood-burning attempts, we didn’t really know how to get the ashes to burn all the way down, so some charcoal was left over. I’m thinking after wiping off any ash these could be crushed up and used as activated charcoal:
And here is a video of the hot water coming out of the water trough. It works great! Not that the water is really potable, but I figure the animals’ health won’t really be compromised by using the hot water once in a while when their water is thickly frozen on top and it dilutes with the water already there:
We are thankful once again to the Lord for granting the provisions of the wood burning cook stove and some successful oven and hot water trough usage!
Heb. 11:8-10 - "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
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