The more cow pies the merrier

Cow pies are so delicious and nutritious that's why we got more cows so we can get more of them.  In case you didn't sense the sarcasm here I'm just being sarcastic.  We are, however, getting more cow pies in the pasture because we just got another cow yesterday!  Yup, another pregnant cow.  Everyday we have been going out to the pasture to check on the cows to see if they have their babies yet...but no they haven't had their babies yet.  But don't worry, as soon as they have their babies I will post pictures on here.

So now we have a total of 4 heads of cows.  We don't know 

what to name the pregnant cows yet.  Udder 1 and Udder 2?  

One of my kids wants to name one of them Cloudy...😳 

I'm not quite sure about that name...but then why the heck not 

since they named their cats Scratchy, Stardust, Angel, and Midnight.

The new pregnant cow is the smaller black cow you see in 

the picture( the one looking at the camera and smiling for the picture).  

Dexter is the black one with a big fat head

On top of getting a new cow yesterday our friends gave us two Pygmy goats.  So now we have a total of 4 goats just roaming around in our front yard.  These goats we just got from our friends are really friendly and not skittish like our other ones.  They would even let you get close to them and pet them!  Needless to say my  kids are in love!  The Pygmy goats are simply just there to "mow" the yard and keeping the grass down or maybe for breeding.  They are even smaller than our mini Nubian goats.  

Meet Molly and Joey!  Is it me or goats just have some weird, crazing looking eyes?!

2+1=4

I meant to post this last week but I procrastinated...better late than never, right?

You might be scratching your head wondering why 2+1=4.  I'm here to explain why this mathematics equation is actually correct.

If you have been following this blog you already know we currently have one Dexter bull and a Dexter steer.  Last week we just got another Dexter and this time it's a cow. (Remember we had a whole lesson on different names we give cattle already).  This cow is actually a pregnant cow.  So even though we currently have 3 dexters on our farm we technical have 4.  And we will be getting 2 more pregnant cows in the next few weeks.

We are contemplating milking the cow after she has her calf.  We shall see.  We are excited to see the calf when it's finally here!

Dexter, the lady's man!  Already making friends with the new cow.
In this picture the cow has only been here for less than 3 hours.

A productive Saturday morning

We spent about an hour this morning picking dewberries.  We found some new spots on our property with lots of nice plump, juicy and ripe dewberries.

It was a very big bowlful of dewberries 

And a friend suggested making dewberry pancakes with buttermilk syrup with the dewberries we picked.  So that's exactly what we made for breakfast this morning.  I feel so accomplished already this morning!

I'm in heaven!

I just looked up a buttermilk syrup recipe online and found this one on allrecipes.com.  Allrecipes.com usually has pretty good recipe.  It's pretty good buttermilk syrup everyone loved it!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/59591/buttermilk-syrup/

Another one of those

We just got ourselves a steer last Friday .  Another Dexter.  As mentioned in my earlier post dexters are a smaller breed of cattle and are good for people with smaller acreage.  And for those who don't know what a steer is, steer is a less manly aka castrated bull.  Before I started getting into this whole farm thing I thought all cattle are just called cows.  Who would have thought they actually have a lot of different names for them?!  So for example steer as mentioned above is the castrsted bull, then bull of course means a male cattle, cow is a female cow. But why can't people just say castrsted cow and not come up with a different name, like steer for them?! Is it just to confuse people?!   Oh and then there's heifer and that means cows that have not had babies, and cows are just female cows who have had babies.

Well anyway, so the steer (you should know by now a steer is a castrsted bull!) we just picked up yesterday is just 6 months old.  So he's still kind of cute.  I decided to name him Ribeye and there was no objection from hubby and kids. 

And we shall call you Ribeye

He's only 6 months old so if we grass feed him only then he should be ready for butchering in another 18 months or so.  If they are grass fed only, which we intend to do, then you will get the best yield and still get good meat if butchered at 24 months.

Welcome to your new home, Ribeye

Another fact about Dexter is that if you are going to get dexters for the purpose of breeding then you probably want to get a registered one.  Registered Dexter is a lot more expensive than the non-registered ones.  Reason being the registered dexters have gone through DNA testing and are cleared of having certain genetic disorders that dexters are known to have.  With this particular breed of cattle they are known to have chondrodysplasia (chondro) and pulmonary Hypoplasia with Anasarca (PHA).  Chondro is a "Genetic mutation that causes defective bone growth...and it results in the animals appearing heavy bodied of short legs."  So basically it's some kind of dwarfism.  

The other one PHA is a little bit more serious.  PHA "indicates incomplete formation of the lungs. Anasarca indicates an accumulation of fluids in tissues and body cavities. PHA-affected calf may be tremendously swollen which would make delivery exceedingly difficult and potentially life threatening for the cow."  So basically the fetus and the mama cow could both die. 

So this is the little bit of knowledge that I have of dexters for those who might be interested in getting dexters.

Exploring his new home

Dinner served

We had pork chops for dinner tonight.  Most of the time pork chops are nothing really that special.  But tonight the pork chops we had for dinner are from the very pigs that we raised and recently butchered.

Dinner almost ready!

It was delicious!  They are pretty decent sized...a little tougher than the store-bought pork chops I'm accustom to but a lot less bright pink because there's no preservatives in my pork chops tonight!  And no added hormones or what not.  The meat itself taste really good and hubby noticed our pork chops soaked in flavors better than the store-bought ones as well.  We were very pleased with our dinner tonight!

This is one delicious meal!  I wish the mashed potatoes
I made tonight were home grown but they weren't.  Someday...

Raising your own pigs for meat might not be "cheap" but it's worth it.  If you go to the store and buy the "all-natural" or no hormone pork meat you will probably be paying double of what we paid for our pork meat.  For us this time it came up to be about $5/lb.  That takes into account of the expenses for acquiring the pigs, expenses on feed, and the cost of butchering the pigs.  If you were to butcher your own pigs you can probably cut your cost down by about half.  But we prefer not to do the butchering ourselves unless we have to.  

But in the future our cost would probably go down some because we would be breeding our pigs.  We would keep one or two piglets then sell the rest so that way we can offset some of our expenses.  At least for now that's the plan.

So to top off dinner we went outside to pick dewberries and had dewberries for dessert.  Oh I so wish we had vanilla ice cream to go with them though!  For those who don't know what dewberries are they are kind of like blackberries but they grow very wild around this area during this time of year.  They are a little more tart and sour than blackberries but nonetheless, very tasty.  My kids love 'em!  Right now we have them all over our property.

These are dewberries 

200 lbs of goodness

Yesterday was the day I've been waiting for for the past 4 weeks!  If anyone has been following this blog, we took our 2 pigs in to get butchered about four weeks ago.  Our pork was finally done and we went to pick up our meat!  Over 200 lbs of pork!

This is what 200 + lbs of pork looks like (plus one more big bag not shown in this picture)

There are bacon, and ham, pork chops, sausages, shoulder steaks etc.  It's kind of awesome to be able to see the harvest of your hard work.  All the hard work of feeding them twice a day, running after and catching them after they escaped, all of that hard work finally paid off!  And the best part is that we know what we were feeding our pigs and there was no hormone or junk in our meat!

This is our pork meat inventory

This is what I'm having for breakfast this morning:

Yum

Sunday = no rest day

Sunday/Sabbath day is usually a day of rest.  For going to church and leaving the care of the world behind.  But if you just got a bull the other day Sunday means no rest!

We just picked up a Dexter bull on Saturday morning.  Dexter is a smaller breed of cow.  It's perfect for people with a smaller farm/land.  You'll need about 1-2 acres per a regular-sized/large cow/bull.  But for dexters you'll only need about 1/2-1 acre per cow.  Hence, the reason why we got a Dexter instead.

So yesterday after church we came home and we're looking around the front pasture to make sure the bull is settling in okay in his new home and that he was still around.  Of course he escaped!  It just seems like we always have a problem keeping the animals inside of where they are supposed to be. But to my defense this time it wasn't quite our fault, the bull actually busted the old gate that was improperly installed by the previous owners and he lifted the gate up and got out from underneath the gate.  See picture below

He busted the bottom bar of the gate then lifted the whole gate
up and escaped from underneath the gate.

So we spent about two hours looking for him, attempted to drag him back to where he was supposed to be, finally dragged him back to the front pasture with the help of a lasso and four-wheeler, then temporary fixed the gate so he wouldn't get out again for the time being.  So much for resting on the sabbath.

We found him in the very very very back corner of the property and where it's very very very swampy (we just got a lot of rain here this past week so the back of the property turned into a swamp).  Out of all the places he could have gone to or gone hiding he had to pick the swampiest and the furthest corner of the property!  This bull better not escape again!

Here he is, we named him Dexter.  How original, right?!

A closer look at Dexter

Animal shelter

The animal shelter I'm referring to is not "the pound".  I'm referring to like a cover for animals.  We had been wanting to build some shelter/shades for the pigs but just haven't had time to do it.  So finally today we did it.  We got it done before the severe thunderstorm is supposed to come.  I'm glad I have a handy husband.

Digging holes for the posts.  Thank goodness for the post hole digger we purchased from Harbor Freight it made the job so much easier!

Making progress

Almost done.  The pigs are inspecting it.  I think they like it.

Finished!

Our next project?

We just received this catalog in the mail yesterday.

I didn't get a chance to look at it yesterday but I had some time this morning to look through it.  Let me tell ya, I have never ever in my life been so sucked into a catalog, let alone a seeds and plants catalog.  But I spent quite a bit of time this morning looking through the WHOLE thing!  It was so fun looking through it, circling all the plants and seeds I want to buy later when we have our garden and dreaming about the day when we have a garden full of our favorite fruits and vegetables, and the day when we could harvest all of our hard work and the sweet juicy apples, and tomatoes and whatever else from our very own garden!  Of course we will start out small and just experiment a little first before we go all out.  But one can always dream, right?!  I'm hoping we can start a garden this year but we shall see, it's not like we don't already have enough projects already.

Talking about projects this morning we went out to tear down the very old chicken coop that is on the property.  We also cleaned up that chicken coop area so we can build a new one and hopefully we could get some chickens soon....I can't wait to get our own chickens and get fresh chicken eggs every morning!

An exciting morning

This morning started out as just one of the normal days.  We got the kids up for school, fixed them breakfast, packed them lunch then off to school they go.  And as usual we walked them to the front gate to wait for the bus.  But this morning there was something waiting at the front gate with us too!  It was a wrecked car in the woods right by the front gate.  My first reaction was "what the heck? What happened here?  Did someone get hurt?"  The driver's side door was opened so hubby peeked inside (he's always just so curious) and nobody was in the car and the key was left in the ignition.  We figured it must have been a teenager who was speeding down the dirt road last night, lost control then crashed.  (Yes, I don't understand why but we see these dumb teenagers and very young people speeding down the dirt road ALL THE TIME!  Kind of annoying.)  And after they crashed they probably panicked and just left the keys in the ignition and just walked home or something (teenagers just do weird things sometimes, you know?)

We called the sheriff's department so they could come out and do whatever that they do for situations like this.  The story gets more interesting.... Came to find out this car was reported stolen.  AND they said there was a very strong smell of marijuana inside the car.  So someone stole this car and while going on a joy ride smoked some weed, then crashed the car and left the scene.  But something else fishy is going on...if the car was reported stolen why would this person have the keys to the car???  But whatever I'm not a cop so I'll just let the cops deal with it and figure that one out.  After the cop was done doing his thing we just stood there and watched the wreckers pull the car out of the woods and loaded it up onto his truck.  It was very interesting to watch, quite a show, except it was a free show.

We found this stolen car in the woods this morning

Door left open and keys still in ignition

Busted fence

Where did the fence go?!

Check out this big ole' rut this car made last night