Every animal on our property needs the pigs

I have found the pigs to be surprising in their usefulness. Yes, they are delicious and extremely cheap to keep spring through fall. I didn’t expect the million other things they’ve done for the property and those that live here.

First of all, when we bought the pigs we had a problem. I actually asked game and fish to come out and try to figure out what was murdering all of our poultry. We lost a lot of them; peacocks, ducks, chickens, etc. It was determined it was likely a raccoon and we couldn’t catch it because it kept breaking out of our live trap. I had just accepted the end of poultry keeping. Then Joey was brought to our property and suddenly the killing stopped. We haven’t lost a single animal since getting Joey 4 years ago. So, highly recommend putting a boar in your barn. Apparently nothing wants to mess with one!

Next pig benefit is the way they roam the property digging randomly. Our property needs some disruption. It also unearths things for the poultry to eat. They love to follow them around picking up things they’ve dug up for them.

One very unexpected thing is that the pigs have absolutely no problem breaking the ice in the waterers. I try to make sure they have fresh, unfrozen water twice a day. It’s cold while I’m at work though. It freezes over. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out to give them more water to find the ice broken and random animals taking advantage. I’ve found the cats in their water. The chickens, of course. Wild birds and rabbits. Water isn’t found often around these parts and in the winter it gets rough. The pigs are personally responsible for hydrating every animal on our property.

They also keep the chickens warm. I’ve found the chickens sleeping on them when it’s real cold out. Oh piggies, I do love you!

Gardening Fails

I’ve had a lot of garden experiments happening and I feel confident in saying I can’t garden. I try and fail spectacularly.

2 years ago I added rotting bedding and manure from the barn to my garden rows and I really though that would be spectacular. All of that hay mixed up with poop had to be the perfect garden fertilizer/mulch. It was a decent mulch but I can’t say that anything I planted into it did better than anything else. A depressing failure.

I have lined my in ground garden with newspaper several times and then mulched over the top of that with wood chips. With the transport equipment we have (nothing more than my car) buying wood shavings in bags is the best I can do. This does very little to suppress the weeds and even though it has been breaking down over the years it seems to not be feeding the soil at all.

I get giant bags of leaves from my work. I happen to know they do not spray so I feel confident taking them. I will say that things grown in the leaves do do better than the other growing mediums, however the leaves have a very difficult time sticking around in our Wyoming winds.

So come spring I have a new plan, one I have resisted for ages. I am going to weed fabric. But more than that I have to do something to help my soil. I’m going to collect as much cow manure as I can (in rubber maid tubs, transported in my car). I plan to manure and then weed fabric. I might put wood shavings over the top of that. I’m undecided. I think it will be ugly but I am so hoping it helps me grow something, anything.

I will be sharing another post full of my greenhouse woes. It is not holding up this winter unfortunately. It was also a disappointment during the growing season. While things grew very large in it I did not get very much fruit at all, and that is with us

The Homestead Dinner Process

Step 1: purchase breeding stock and breed pigs.

Step 2: Butcher pigs.

Step 3: Prepare trimmings for grinding

Step 4: Grind sausage

Step 5: Prepare filling and refrigerate.

Step 6: Prepare pasta.

Step 7: Fill pasta with pork sausage filling.

Step 8: Enjoy the perfectnss of your home made ravioli

Step 9: Cook in a white wine garlic sauce.

Step 10: Enjoy!

Greenhouse is nearly done

I have been busy during quarantine preparing the greenhouse for spring planting. I have bags and bags of leaves from my work to use as mulch. My son’s old bed frame as a nice trellis area and a drive to get it done.

First I had to dig a trench under the wood frame for the greenhouse and fill it with rocks. I got to thinking that having planting beds against the frame would really speed up rotting of the greenhouse. After brainstorming several solutions with the people at permies.com I decided the easiest, and probably most effective, would be trenching and filling with rock, making a french drain of sorts under the greenhouse frame.

Then I broad forked the in ground greenhouse beds. Our ground is hard clay and this wasn’t easy! Then the kids assisted me in spreading mulch.

Then I put out the giant pots. I intend to use these to plant things the ground squirrels can’t resist eating. These are not filled yet but I have started the process by putting a bunch of dead branches in the bottom of the pots. I will fill them with compost as soon as I can get some.

I hung some pots up around the walls for storage and because I love the look. Added solar lights, which aren’t super bright at night but work well enough and I do enjoy the look of the lights.

I intend to make a potting bench on the right side of the back wall. I have water barrels coming and am going to wait for them before I build the bench. All in all I am excited to start planting!

Window Greenhouse- structurally complete

To view my previous greenhouse post look here.

I finally installed all of the windows and was ready to start sheet metaling the rest of the structure. It was slow going as I could not work in the wind and yet again, I was pregnant.

On a nice day I recruited my child slave labor to clean the windows. It was a messy job, cleaning the kids up afterward was just as much work.

Still. my children did a good job cleaning all the years of grime off of those windows and the greenhouse looks very nice clean.

Now is the tricky part, sheet metal. Wyoming is WINDY. I was only able to do this in bits and pieces as I waited for periods without wind. I felt like it took forever, but in reality it was probably just a few weeks.

Fully enclosed in metal I only had the finish work to do. I debated the molding portion of this project for awhile before deciding I would use fence pickets. They were the perfect size, required no cutting width wise, just length.

I should probably stain/paint or somehow otherwise seal the wood pickets to prevent damage. I may get around to that eventually, or I may not and regret it years later. Who knows.

Honey Harvesting- worth it?

I must admit, as wonderful as having our own honey is, that was a heck of a lot of work. It wasn’t even the spinning that was bad but the clean up. Of course, we did harvest in our house, next to the wood stove (so the honey would be warm and easier to spin).

We had the fire roaring and took turns spinning frames as it was still a lot of work and required holding the spinner still so it didn’t rock all over.

Daughter is happily taking her turn

I had experimented with the hive by having some frames with foundation and some without. Of course, the frames without foundation did not have the comb aligned so that it would fit in the spinner. Thus, I removed it and stuck it in some cheesecloth to be squished and drip out with gravity.

Bottling honey

I wanted to have little, adorable jars of honey to give as Christmas gifts. These turned out so well and were so well received that I may get more bees just to do this again.

As the bees died I scraped all of the wax off of the frames and began melting it down, over and over and over and over and you get the idea. This is the final product. One candle jar full of clean bees wax. No idea what we are going to do with it.

All in all it was an experience. Again, I was pregnant, so the workload was really hard on me. We are enjoying the honey, we estimate 2 gallons worth, but I don’t know if it was worth it.