We seem to have been on a losing streak lately. Stone Tree Farm is reeling from its losses. The little lamb in the middle there is still mourning her lost ram twin and I am sure the flock as a whole is grieving as they ponder the disappearance of 5 ram lambs and 1 fat, barren ewe. On the plus side, the lamb chops are delicious.
We ended up having one of our Angus steers converted to meat as well. It was pretty horrific. We had him with our neighbor's freezer bound steers in our holding paddock and those steers were beyond wild. They broke our fence, raced over a mile down the main road, terrorized the owners of a horse farm, and managed to gouge, cut and maim our steer in the process. He was too badly injured for recovery so when the butcher returned, our steer went as well. (I use the word 'return' because the butcher and his assistant had tried to help Dan corral the steers but finally said that the steers were too wild for them and left). Our poor neighbor came back from work to angry horse owners, dazed Dan, and destruction. Loss: 1 steer.
This is one of my deeply-adored roses. See what has happened to it? Birds, that's what. I keep it covered with netting at night and when I'm away from the farm but the birds peck right through. New Zealand is really, really tough on gun ownership but if I show the authorities this picture perhaps I could get a license and hide out in the garage waiting for my marauding birds. Below is a picture of a rose bush they have not yet demolished. Note the difference.
Loss: 2 rose bushes.
And finally, the loss that has hurt me the most. I was pretty torn up by the end to our gentle steer but yesterday one of my egg-laying pals got too adventurous and stuck her neck in the possum trap. Rest in peace, my friend.
Loss: 1 chicken.
Until next time.
When I was in grade school we had a positive deluge of "thinking" arithmetic problems that went something like this:
John and Mary had twin boys. They decided to drive with their new twins to visit family. The trip usually took 7 hours. John filled the car with 19 gallons of gasoline. How far did they travel?
I never had a clue about any of them. If you are staring bemusedly at the above problem, you know how I felt. So bear with me as I try to explain our great duck debacle. Hopefully, it will make more sense that the math problems.
We went to a nearby duck farmer who grows duck eggs commercially. For obvious reasons he didn't have much use for male ducks. Most he sold to Chinese restaurants in Auckland but he saved out 10 prime ones for us. We bought them and took them to the market garden. They escaped from the market garden. Well, 9 did. One we had already dispatched to make us a duck dinner.
So here we have 9. Then 2 drowned!! Now we have 7. Dan and Yael had been very busy and had not had time to kill the others so the ducks had pioneered their way up to the pond and had settled in nicely. Several weeks later, Dan and Yael hike up to the pond to dispatch the remaining 7 ducks. Several hours later, they are soaking wet, irritated, and clutching 6 droopy ducks.
These ducks are killed, plucked, and two are cooked. The other 4 are in the freezer. The ducks on the table smell great with my patented orange juice and honey glaze. Strangely, no one seems very hungry. Dan eats corn flakes, Yael pushes the meat around and leaves it on the plate. I (who had carefully not watched when the ducks were killed) ate well. The kids decided they didn't like duck. They never tried it. So I had 2 ducks that I consumed over the next few ducks.
Now if you have done your math, you know that we still have one duck unaccounted for. Sort of. The last any of us ever saw of him, he was waddling purposefully down our driveway headed toward the duck farmer's place. I hope he made it.
Til next time.
There has been so much happening that I don' know where to start. So I guess I'll start with explaining this picture. The sheep are in the shearing yard waiting to be shorn, de-tailed, and castrated. The 2 steers are curious. Our 3rd steer is staying far, far away. I think he knows what's next.
What's next is cutting out the rams, non-producing ewes, fat ewes, etc. and 1 steer (the one that doesn't seem curious at all) and moving them down to the quarantine paddock where they wait for the home kill truck to come and turn them into dinners. Hopefully, a lot of dinners.
The sheep move placidly to their fate. So does our steer. One of our neighbors has decided to piggyback onto our home kill (a common practice; we've done it ourselves) so he wants to move a steer in with ours. Doesn't happen. His steer resents it - mightily - and Dan, the shearer, his dogs, and our neighbor all end up with 2 of the resentful steer's buddies in our paddock with him.
Dan is none too happy. The steer is "wild, very wild" and most of his morning has been spent trying to get him into the paddock. But worse lies ahead. The next morning Dan goes down to oversee the home kill (I never go near it; I want to enjoy my meat without the memories). He doesn't come back for, like forever. When he does, he is shaking he is so upset.
It turns out that the wild steer and his wild buddies broke down the paddock fencing, raced around terrifying our steer and bolted out the paddock down the driveway, down the gravelled road and a full kilometre away to the main road. In the process they tear up some horse paddocks (Dan says the woman there was semi-hysterical and was not placated by his explanation that these weren't his steers). The home kill guy and his assistant were gamely racing around trying to help.
The neighbor had gone to work all unaware of the drama unfolding behind him. He was mortified when he heard about it but Dan was not into any blame game. It wasn't his fault; it just happens. A wild steer is a fearsome thing and these had literally charged Dan and the home kill team. They finally got them back into the neighbor's paddock but it was too late for the home kill guy to do his thing. They couldn't manage to separate out our poor steer (Dan and Yael tried several times) and he was left bewildered and bleeding from the other steers' horns and the barbed wire.
Here is where a bit of explanation is needed. Yes, we raise the steers to be killed and eaten. They aren't pets, they're food. But, and it's a big BUT, we want them to have as good a life as possible while they are our responsibility. This means free ranging, never shutting them in dark, dank stalls, real grass to eat and fresh water to drink. We use no hormones, chemicals, etc. on them and generally speaking they are calm, gentle giants who die without any trauma. They literally never know what hit them. And that's the way we like it. So when a steer we raised from a youngster for over a year and half is mauled about like ours was, it is painful for us as well as him.
Dan wanted to take him back into our paddocks and let him recover but he was too beat up and so the home kill guy came back 2 days later and put him out of his misery. For those 2 days we tried vainly to get near him to assess his injuries, etc. but we could tell that it was just adding to his stress so we finally just went down there several times a day to be with him.
All in all, a very miserable week on the farm. And I'm not done yet. Stay tuned!
The other day we bought 10 ducks for our consumption. These are they being deposited into the market garden in the above picture. We thought we would eat them over the next few weeks starting with immediately and processing (killing, defeathering, etc.) them and then freezing them. I wanted them in the market garden so they could eat snails, slugs, etc. and fatten up while helping me prepare the garden for the Spring planting.
They had another idea. Their idea was no killing, no eating, and no confinement in the market garden. It all started when I drove past the day after we bought them (and killed 1 for that night's dinner table - it was delicious). We were down to 9 ducks but when I glanced over from the car I could see that the gate had collapsed and the ducks could leave at any time.
So I went down to shut it. I could shut it all right but the ducks ran at a rapid waddle straight out the gate before I could get there and dived into the stream runoff from the pond above. I tried to catch them and herd them back into the garden. You try it some time. 9 ducks; 1 human, and water to slip into and hide in the reeds. The ducks won.
For the next 2 weeks we were all up to our eyebrows in work, kids, and lambing season. The ducks lurched about in the red, red barn paddock undisturbed and frankly, little thought of. I didn't even bother counting them each day as I went down to water the steers. There were always a few who wouldn't be with the flock but in the water somewhere.
How true that was! Dan found 2 dead in the stone water trough!! They had drowned. I still can't believe it. They drowned!! Who knew that ducks could drown. Not me.
Til next time.
I came back to the farm last Tuesday evening laden with goodies from the apartment. Dan had given me the kitchen scraps for the compost pile, the table scraps for the chickens and a broccoli for me. I plopped everything on my kitchen counter and went to bed.
In the morning I composted the kitchen scraps, gave the chickens the table scraps and ignored the broccoli. Big mistake! The rest of Wednesday was spent running errands, etc. But when I got back home in the late afternoon, every square inch (or metre as they say here) reeked of fish - old fish. I did the bloodhound sniffing thing and circled in on the broccoli. I lifted it up and lo and behold there lay a fish head happily rotting away on my counter.
I muttered angrily to myself (expletives deleted) and gave the fish head to its intended recipients: the chickens. You can see how thrilled they were at this largesse. That is the ignored fish head on the right.
Thursday I spent in Auckland and when I got back I was too tired to track down the continuing fish smell. I figured it was lingering since I had the apartment shut up. On Friday morning my disillusionment was complete. The fish smell was pretty darned strong. So I did the bloodhound thing again and finally found a large pool of fish blood that had spilled down the back of the counter and pooled on the floor underneath. It was big enough for Smudge to swim in. All I can figure is that the fish head was frozen on Tuesday, thawed on Wednesday and dripped, dripped, dripped. I'm not sure about the time line. Whenever I question Dan all that happens is that he has another laughing fit. Wasn't that funny to me.
Until next time.
The above picture is compliments of my son. The massively yellow thing is real butter made with real raw milk. Remember I told you that he had made it once before and it took forever! Well, this week he tried again and it only took a few minutes. A bit of reflection told us that the difference was that the butterfat was very, very fresh - only a few hours from udder to us.
It also tastes good. I prefer my butter with a bit of salt added but since the shaker is on my table, I add some when no one else is around. We are becoming so successful at feeding ourselves that we are thinking of ways to try to recoup some costs. So far I have come up with a bunch of ideas that have been rapidly shot down. My latest is growing Manuka wood and starting some bee hives. It seems that Manuka honey is a superfood and has great health properties to it. Sounds good to me. Unfortunately my son (the same one who made the butter) pointed out that I have to carry an ephedrine kit since a bee sting could kill me. Perhaps being surrounded by hundreds of bees is not the smartest possible life decision. Still, if I had life insurance, they could make out all around.
So I am back to dreaming of raising ducks or meat chickens. Right now our egg chickens are putting on a splashy display of 5-7 eggs per day from 10 chickens. Pretty impressive since they aren't supposed to lay in the winter. Luckily the family loves eggs (I don't). I will eat them but I don't go out of my way for one.
The steers are still porking up even though the grass is not too good but winter will come to an end soon and I shudder to think how big they'll grow once they get into new grass.
In the meantime the Suffolk sheep continue to do their duty. We are up to 14 lambs with 6 of them sets of twins. That comes to 11 Suffolk moms. We are waiting on the other 3. And then it should be the Romneys turn. The Suffolk were covered by a Romney ram but hopefully the Romneys waited for the stud Suffolk ram. I'm not sure though since 1 Romney has already given birth and not a Suffolk characteristic to be found in her offspring.
All in all there is abundance all over this farm. I just have to figure out how to make some money at it. Perhaps I could offer the farming experience for a day at $100 per head. Some lucky people could weed, feed chickens, mend fences, shovel manure, chase ewes, haul water and pay for the privilege. Perhaps I need to refine the concept a tad.
Til next time.
