First and formost, today is the day of the official launch of vaughnshire.com! So if your reading this on the day it was posted you are one of the first official visitors to the new site. Welcome! While we have had the site for awhile and have been experimenting with different formats and content management options we went back to the tried and true WordPress Blog! In times of busy stress and hard work, stay with what you know.
Secondly, today is the first day for Bonnie Blue at Vaughnshire. Who is Bonnie Blue you may ask? Bonnie Blue is the new Blue eyed family milk cow. It’s true she is a second hand cow, with a second hand attitude. In fact she might call into question the calm gentle spirit Guernsey’s normally exhibit. But she is still our very own supply of fresh milk. Not only of fresh wholesome milk, but there is something more about the Guernsey, they have a special beta protein which has been shown to reduce the risk of heart diesease.
What is in there?
It’s Bonnie Blue!
We’ll be posting more on the Guernsey’s in general and Bonnie Blue specifically in the near furture. But for now, enjoy a hearty “how do” from Bonnie Blue.
We have a handful of boys running around here and they always amaze me with their unique boyness that still baffles my feminine mind. The way they look and smell…and dress is uniquely different…at least around here. The camo hat and pants, the pockets full of….well, junk, the million questions I don’t care about, the things they find funny and entertaining…..well, they just aren’t me. That’s ok…that’s why I enjoy them so much. They are full of busy, boy energy.
We recently purchased a hardback book series written by the author R.M. Ballantyne who wrote a series of Christian adventure books for boys. A quote from one of the books:
Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system…. They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…. R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters
Two of my boys just finished The Gorilla Hunters and have been talking about it for days. They each revisit parts of the book that they found thrilling and engage in animated conversation over the adventures that Ballantyne wrote about in the 1850’s.
The only caution I would give is that these books will inspire your boys… not only in conversation….but after your 10 year old reads The Gorilla Hunters or The Pirate City or The Young Fur Traders and has just memorized a deck of survival cards….don’t be surprised if you walk in your kitchen one morning and see something like this appear on your kitchen “What’s For Supper?” board:
My daughters comment as she was starring at the kitchen board was “What is wrong with them?” She further added, “I would never write anything like that mom…”
The “turtle blood” had me asking “…drinking turtle blood??? Where did you get that idea???” My 10 year old left the room and came running back with a deck of survival cards and pulled out the turtle card…promptly turning over the card he read….”Edible…if water is unavailable, you may drink turtle blood to maintain hydration until water can be found…”
It was once common place for homemakers to have certain chores or activities set aside for a certain day of the week. For example, Monday was wash day, Tuesday was mending…etc.
I have adopted a similar time management system for our home in order to take control of certain activities or chores and relieve my mind of other chores that seem to endlessly hang over my head…like house cleaning.
Here is an example of how you can assign days to your chores:
Here is a look at how our “Tuesday is Meal Prep Day” went. On Tuesday, we spend a large amount of time in the kitchen preparing freezer meals, preparing snacks and other food items that will aid us in a smoother, less complicated week in the kitchen. I cook every day of the week, however on Tuesday, if I can get a head start on preparing food, it saves a lot of time and energy. For example, today we:
cleaned out second refrigerator.
made two gallons of blueberry tea for the week.
filled a large container with chopped carrots, celery and cucumbers.
prepared a large bowl of peaches and pears for lunch or to be served with breakfast.
Chopped several lemons ready to go for our water and tea.
turned 4 packages of crackers into peanut butter crackers for snacks.
made a squash casserole that can be heated for supper one night.
baked 5 dozen cookies.
filled a large container with chopped onion to be used in the meals throughout the week.
made supper before noon- chicken pot pie and green beans
cooked a whole chicken to be used on meals during the week.
made chicken broth for later on in the week.
put beans on to soak for a meal on Thursday.
created a “hawk food” container for the bird and put all the unused meat scraps that were getting old into that container.
provided the pig with lots of scraps.
Much of the prep work was done today, which will save me a lot of time throughout the week. Next week, I hope to start incorporating some larger freezer meals into our Tuesday prep day.
The first, most important step to having a successful meal prep day is to arrange for the little ones to be entertained for a while.
The eight year old worked hard all morning and baked the most wonderful chocolate chip cookie I have ever tasted. I was so proud of her…not only of her baking skills, but the fact that she was learning the arts and sciences of how to manage a large family with little ones literally under foot while at the same time attempting to quadruple a cookie recipe she had never made before and keep up with the long list of meal prep to do’s we had hanging on the kitchen wall. We checked them off the list as we completed them and at the end of the day we had a great sense of accomplishment and work well done even with the dips and bumps in the day.
Today, I picked the first fruits out of our garden and while it was a small amount…a handful of different hot peppers, it was exciting and increased my anticipation of soon gathering more fruits from our garden in the very near future.
As I have mentioned before, we have a few gardening areas this year. One raised bed is home to a variety of veggies and herbs that was prepared using the lasagna method of layering composted type materials: old barn hay, compost, potting soil, peat moss etc. Another one of my raised beds was tilled up by hand using the dirt already in the bed. Our next garden spot is a larger row garden the guys plowed up with the tractor.
Garden 1: Very maintainable with very little weeds. We occasionally pull up a immature stray weed. Overall the soil is easy to work and the plants are growing great. Ideal and one I will be duplicating.
Garden 2: Lots of stray weeds that are easy to pull up, but is harder to keep weed free. Actually since I have corn and okra growing in this bed, it isn’t a priority to keep weed free since corn does fine with some weeds.
Garden 3: In our large garden, we are growing nice green grass and rocks along with our veggies. The row garden is 100% more difficult to groom than the lasagna layering bed. However, it is the first year we have worked this space so we are hoping to add lots of compost to it over the winter and prepare it for a nice big spring planting with less weeds.
I do have a natural herbicide recipe that my friend let me know about, made with vinegar, soap and canola oil that I am planning on experimenting with, until then, are garden days are on Wednesday morning and I will tackle the weeds then…
In the future, a well worked row garden spot and lots of lasagna beds would be ideal.
She is my garden helper and today she learned the art and science of old fashion hand-picking pest control. Although she had her own way of disposing of the pests….a big slap between her hands, I still prefer stepping on the pests with my shoe. At any rate, we accomplished the same goal—ridding our plant of a few beetles that decided to have our bean plant for lunch.
No bunnies…Does rebred on June 18th. The boys reintroduced the does to the buck on June 22 and noticed agitated behavior from the does. The assumption is they are pregnant this time.
We have since learned that our hawk is a American Kestrel Falcon. It is a beautiful bird that has provided us with much amusement and wonderment over the last month. Whenever we are outside, it is right near us perching usually on a fence post or a tree limb within sight. While working in the garden is it not uncommon for this bird to swoop down and sit right beside where we are working and wander around us. The most incredible thing is when we can hold up a piece of meat, call him and watch it swoop out of the air and come take the meat right out of our hand. The other day I was in the garden working by myself and noticed he followed me to the garden sitting on the fence post near where I was working. I placed a small dish of water down on the ground and he hopped down to drink from the dish. Afterwards he wandered around my feet for a while and didn’t leave until I left working the garden.
This is not a shot of him swooping out of the air, but still neat footage of hand feeding a hawk.
We are gearing up to begin posting many of our own adventures in Christian Agrarianism and large family life here on our farm. I will be transitioning over many of the blog posts that we have written about our farm adventures as well as our story from Corporate American work to working from home and running our family farm.
Stay tuned….
Our pet hawk that we rescued several weeks ago is getting much bigger. He will break the skin if he pecks at you, however he is conscience of who has been feeding him. He was let go several days ago and did not fly far, only up to the electric pole wire. He eventually flew on top of the house and had a misadventure when he tried to land on the round vent that spins on top of the house. The wind hit it and it began to spin…as did the hawk. After going round and round a few times, he eventually fell off and stayed on the roof of the house watching the kids play in the yard. Pierce walked around the yard with a large stick with a piece of meat stuck on the end. He thought the hawk might fly down and get it.
The boys have been able to walk up to the hawk and pick it up and return it to its cage, however, we let it out again today and placed a pie tin on the the top of the cage. He will eat out of Paul’s hand or will eat off the pie tin. At this point we are unsure of what we are going to do with him as we thought he would fly away when let go. We are unsure if he will stay or fly away since he was an abandoned baby and was hand fed and had lots of attention.
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