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Category: her thoughts (page 5 of 21)

Electric Fencing for Poultry

August 10, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

Our electric poultry fencing has been an eye-opening experiment so far…

What we’ve learned:

1. Setting up the fencing takes a few hours each time but depending on how large of a space we make, the birds can occupy the space for weeks at a time.

2. The ducks respect the fence, and since getting shocked a few times, have stayed as far away from the fence as possible. Every few days a duck will get spooked, and since we have not clipped their wings, it might fly over by accident. It sometimes takes the poor duck a few hours to get up the nerve to jump back through the fence. They definitely respect the boundaries!

3. The geese are the most respectful of all, never going over and never coming close to the fence.

4. The turkeys are a different story, however! They respect the fence on a hit-and-miss basis, sometimes staying inside the fence and other times taking the shock and climbing through. The most annoying part is that when they have no trouble escaping, they have loads of trouble figuring out how to get back in. We are looking into getting electrified netting to use for the turkeys in the future, but we’ll see!

The big electric-fencing-for-poultry lesson is:

Simple electrified strands work for ducks and geese, but not for turkeys!

.:.

Clipping Turkey Wings

July 31, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

Before you get worried, please know that when you clip a bird’s wings it doesn’t hurt them. You do not cut the skin, simply the feathers. It’s like cutting your hair.

We’ve shown you a video about clipping a goose’s wings, so check that out to see how it’s done. A goose’s wing feathers are super thick and you need tin snips to get through the thickness. Turkey feathers are not as thick (right now when they’re young, anyway) and I was able to clip all 66 turkey wings by myself. My strategy was simple and only took about an hour:

Open up their house in the morning and put some food right by the entrance.
Sit on a stool right by the entrance and wait.
Snatch up a turkey when it trustingly walks over to snack.
Pin its legs between your legs (watch those sharp nails!).
Hug one side of its body up against your stomach (this keeps that wing from slipping loose and flapping around).
Lay your non-dominant forearm over their upper back, below their next and gently stretch our their free wing with this hand.
Use your other hand to cut the flight feathers off.
Let them go and watch them lopsidedly try to fly away.

The aftermath of wing clipping. And yes, I saved those feathers!

We usually only clip one wing of our birds, since it keeps them from flying just as well as clipping both. This way, they feel lopsided when they fly and eventually give up on trying to fly with any accuracy.

The reason we decided to clip their wings is because they kept flying over the electric fence into the garden and not knowing how to get out to join the rest of the flock. They also kept perching on the edge of the carport, which was making me feel homicidal!

And of course, after each was clipped, they were still trusting enough to follow me around all day and try to stand by me!

Where are the turkeys? Standing by me, of course!

.:.

Meet the Gosling Quartet…

July 29, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

Our 4 goslings.

If you’ve been following us on Facebook, you know that we recently received our Embden goslings in the mail. You also know that even though we ordered 10, we were only shipped 4. Sad news for us!

We ordered a “straight run” from Murray McMurray Hatchery which means that they were not sexed to determine how many males and females were in the bunch. Ordering them this way is cheaper, and since we only wanted to keep 2 males and 2 females to add to our breeding flock (and eat the rest), we figured that ordering 10 would ensure that we got what we wanted. Unfortunately, now that we only have 4 (apparently the hatchery has experienced lower hatch rates than expected and they will not send us the other 6), we are going to have to just wait around and hope that we have at least 2 males in the bunch. The 4 geese that we have now (only one of which is an Embden) are all females, a fact that we weren’t certain of until recently!

This is our second time this year that our shipments of birds were delayed or altered (beginning with our turkeys). Although the whole thing is disappointing, we’re just going to have to make due with what we’ve got!

So now we have another goose quartet, this time one that is filled with lots of fuzzy cuteness. Goslings are by far our favorite babies (I honestly enjoy them more than the piglets, to be honest)! They have such personality even at a few days old, and the fact that they imprint on the animal nearest them when they are born, makes me excited to hatch our own future geese and have them be best friends and adventure partners to our children! Geese are super loud and can flog any animal with such intensity that I am inclined to think them just as protective as dogs.

Our goslings are already “fussing” at us when we come over to visit them, just as adult geese do–bending down and stretching their necks out at you while honking.

The “fussing” posture!

We’ve let them out in the yard (supervised, of course) to roam around and they enjoy eating grass and seed pods. What self-sufficient little marvels!

They will probably outgrow their current home in a few weeks, and then they will probably get to go live with the other geese and ducks. We’ll see!

.:.

Dehydrating Mushrooms and Apples

July 27, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

We just dehydrated our first batch of mushrooms and apples.

The shiitake mushroom logs won’t fruit in the colder weather, so now is the time to save them for winter soups and stir frys.

The apples were beginning to spoil rather quickly, so we thought that dehydrating them for fruit-leather-like snacks would be fun.

Some of the apple are going bad…

The apples and the mushrooms were sliced about 1/4 inch thick or smaller and laid out on the dehydrator trays. The apples were soaked in a Vitamin C water solution to lock in the nutrients that are often lost during dehydrating and to keep them from turning brown too quickly. They were dehydrated for about 14 hours at 135 degrees.

Soaking apple slices.

The combined smell of the dehydrating apples and mushrooms was a bit funky, but the finished product looks great. I can’t wait to try the mushrooms this winter!

Ready to go in the dehydrator!

.:.

Pickles, Pickles, Everywhere!

July 24, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

With the cucumbers doing so well this year, we’ve had to make a lot of pickles to preserve them! The paste tomatoes have also started coming in, as have the tomatillos. This means that fermented salsa is the way to go for us!

So far we’ve pickled a couple gallons of cucumbers and a few quarts of salsa.

White Wonder cucumber pickles on the left and tomato salsa on the right.

Our salsa has manifested into two distinct kinds:

Tomatillo salsa
Tomato salsa

Each of these salsas has a variety of garlic, basil, and jalapeño, and each of them has a touch of the other’s main ingredient (either tomatillo or tomato, depending).

One we’ve pureed the ingredients, we add 1 tablespoon of salt and 4 tablespoons of whey. This recipe is a variation on Sally Fallon’s recipe from her fantastic book, Nourishing Traditions.

This recipe has worked really well for us! We let them sit out in a room temperature space for a few days, “burping” them a few times a day. Daily taste tests reveal when they are ready, and afterwards they get refrigerated until we decide to eat them!

This is the original recipe that we use for pickles (this makes 1 quart):

Dill
Minced garlic
1 cup of purified water
4 tablespoons of whey
1 tablespoon of salt

Happy pickling!

.:.

Turkey Freedom!

July 22, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

The turkeys have had free range over the property for the last few weeks, since they are now big enough that we’re not worried about hawks attacking them!

Where ever you go, they follow you. Kind of like an annoying little sibling!!!

They follow you here…

… And they follow you there…

They follow you everywhere!

Don’t forget that we still have some of our free range, GMO free, heritage turkeys for sale for your Thanksgiving celebration! Check out this page for more information!

.:.

Farm Food Friday: Venison Meatballs

July 17, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

We’ve gotten a little tired of the same old venison dishes, so we decided to make some venison meatballs!

We pulled out the old meat grinder, and after cutting the venison into smaller chunks, we started grinding away.

We added some duck fat that we saved from our last roast duck, since venison is not very fatty and we didn’t want to meatballs to be too dry!

This is what our ground venison looked like after we were done:

Then we added some of our sage:

And our garlic:

And a couple of our eggs and some bread crumbs for texture.

Then we cooked them up in a little olive oil:

We cooked up a rue (after the removing the meatballs from the pan) using the oils and fats from the pan, coconut milk, flour, and olive oil. We added some more garlic, salt, and pepper and once the rue was almost finished we added the meatballs back in to let the flavors meld.

We served it over rice and then promptly inhaled it:

Yummy!

.:.

Free Ranging Chickens (Going Everywhere From the Pig Pen to the Woods!)

July 15, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

We recently have set our chickens free!

And I mean REALLY free!

They are free to go anywhere on our land that they want to, except the garden (which is why we’ve electric fenced the garden out) and the carport (just because it gets on my nerves)!

Electric fencing around the garden.

The reason we made this choice is because we were tired of having to move their house and pen every week or so, and our flock is growing and we don’t want to expand the size of their space.

So, we decided to set them free and move their house way across our front yard to the edge of the woods.

You can see the chicken house in the distance behind the duck fence!

They still get locked up in their house at night, since ground predators are a threat, but so far the aerial predators have not taken any standard sized chickens. A bantam has gone missing, but we expected that we might loose more chickens when we gave them free range of the whole property. We think it’s a risk that chickens would like to take, considering how much happier they are! We’ve kept 3 of our hybrid roosters, in addition to Rex, so that they can help protect the flock in the case of an attack. We’ve started calling these roosters the Musketeers, since they often stick together.

We are really happy with our choice to allow them to be completely free range, except for one thing… The eggs! Only a few of them are still laying their eggs in their house, and we have had a really hard time finding their other rouge nests. Even when we find one and replace some of the eggs with golf balls (so they don’t know that we found it) they still abandon that location and look for new places to lay eggs.

An old nest spot was in the monkey grass under this oak tree.

At this point, we’re only finding about 5 eggs a day, and even though this isn’t enough to sell any, we still feel like it’s all worth it. Because they are free ranging we feed them so much less food, so they are almost free to keep around!

The funniest thing about having them free ranging everywhere, is seeing the places they choose to go. One hen always sleeps in a tree in the backyard, and many of the younger hens like to hang out with the pigs all day! The Musketeers high-tail it over to the backyard in the morning to get some of the leftover turkey food that the cleanup ducks missed! I just have to watch out for Rex when I’m outside, since he’s started attacking me again lately!

Two of the Musketeers are hanging out in the backyard with the turkeys!

Three cheers for free chickens!

.:.

A Blackberry Adventure!

July 13, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

It seems now, as I write this, that blackberry season is over on the homestead. We were hoping to harvest 50 quarts but we fell short this year, landing somewhere around 15. Not nearly as much as we wanted, but it definitely is a great start since last year we harvested 0 quarts!

The picking process is simple, really. You just have to be a little thicker skinned than usual and get used to getting scratched and hurt (not such a new concept around here, really!).

We both got suited up with long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, a hat (the brim really helps by keeping briers from smacking you in the face), and a glove.

Jason after a round of picking.

We tied the baskets to our front, as though we were carrying basket-baby-bellies which allowed us to keep both hands free. We could fit about 4 or 5 pounds in the basket before it got too full and heavy, which meant that we could pick for at least an hour without having to go back to the house to drop off our fruits.

Emma wearing a basket.

Jason had a different tactic than I did. I chose to wear a glove on my left hand so that I could grab briers and pull them closer to me to pick the berries with my right hand. I would pick up to 10 berries, letting them collect in the palm of my hand before dropping them off in the basket. Jason chose to pick with both hands, without gloves.

We decided to have a competition to see who could pick the most, with points lost every time you yelled out in pain from a brier sticking you (which was often). We imagine that the game is one we can use to get our kids to pick blackberries with us (and one that we imagine will make them tough!).

Once we were done for the day we weighed our fruit (I won!) and we rinsed them outside with the hose.

Then we brought them in to dry. We spread them out on a towel and turned on a fan.

And once we decided they were dry enough, we filled up quart Ziplocs with them and labeled them.

Now we have at least 15 blackberry pies for the fall and winter. Yay!

.:.

A Fantastic Farm to Your School Day!

July 8, 2015 / Emma / 1 Comment

KW Homestead’s first Farm to Your School experience was a great one, with another school visit coming up on July 9th!

I just wrapped up the 2014-2015 school year as a Teacher’s Assistant at a school in High Point, and Jason and I decided to offer a free Farm to Your School adventure to the kindergarten, first, and second grade kids that I worked with everyday. A few days before the last day of school, we packed up our chickens, ducks, and a really friendly piglet named Half Nose and carted them over to Johnson Street Global Studies K-8 Magnet School.

Each of the 6 classes had 30 minutes to enjoy the animals… A perfect amount of time for the kids to get quality time with each set of animals. I ran the Pig Station, where students got to pet and scratch our piglet. They were lucky enough to get to her some of her piggy noises, and some of our favorite questions were:

“Is she wagging her tail because she is happy?”

“Why her her hair so scratchy but her skin so soft?”

Jason ran the Duck Station and the kids were able to feed the ducks and watch Jason employ some of his ninja skills while catching a duck for them to pet. Some of our favorite questions from the Duck Station were:

“Why do they sit in the water and then drink it?”

“Why do they always walk together?”

Each classroom teacher supervised the kids while they looked at the rooster and hen, and they loved hearing the rooster crow and (their favorite) watching both chickens poop!

We had a fantastic day, and the time we spent sharing our animals with the kids really flew by… I think we found one of our passions!

If you are interested in booking Farm to Your School at your school, church or family get-together, send us an email at ourochreway@gmail.com and check out our Farm to Your School pricing page!

.:.

KW Homestead

Pasture Raised Poultry & Edible Landscaping Plants Since 2013