We’ve had a break from the summer heat this week.  I’m hoping it isn’t going to get as hot as it was.  The humidity and the heat and me being pregnant weren’t very enjoyable.  I found myself walking right back inside to the air conditioning and being very thankful for the cool air.  I have no desire to live without air conditioning!

I wish I was in a condition to be working on a Fall garden.  However, I’ve given up on the idea and turned my focus to getting my house organized and prepared for the birth.  I’ll think about gardening and flowers and all the wonderful outdoors work that I love later. 

Our boys, however, have spent a considerable amount of time in the summer heat working on the farm.  They’ve been running fence wire to contain animal in new grassy paddocks.  Hopefully soon, we will decrease our cow and pig population soon as we take a bunch of them to the butcher this Fall. 

The younger ones have enjoyed swimming in the little plastic swimming pool in the back yard.  We had an interesting incident the other day when the girls were swimming one afternoon.  I heard them screaming and yelling and found them very upset at our friendly milk cow, May.  She had found her way to the back yard and noticed the nice cool water the girls were playing in.  She proceeded to drink the swimming pool water and didn’t mind a bit that the girls were very upset about the situation.

I’m in the last part of my pregnancy.  It’s been a brutal hot summer although we are thankful it hasn’t been hot with a drought.  At least we have been getting rain even if we do have high humidity levels…at least everything is still green and growing!  It’s always a challenging time for me when I am carrying around about 30 extra pounds, can hardly breathe and can’t see my feet….oh yeah, and with 8 other children running around.  However, we’re off to a good start with the month of August and hope to see lots of progress in preparing for the baby to arrive in September. 

The kids are very excited about the new baby.  My rambunctious 2 year old takes special time out of his busy day to come sit by me and pat my belly gently…occasionally offering the baby a kiss.  My 9 year old made an unsolicited, loving comment to me the other day on how I must be getting close to having the baby because I “look just like the sheep do right before they give birth.”   That was nice to know

We are hoping to get some new blog posts up soon about some of the happening things here on the farm. 

The boys finished up castrating the rams and pigs today.  It really amazes me how young men can work and produce when given the challenge to do so.  We are looking forward to all the beef, lamb and pork later on in the fall…and yes, we will be selling a lot of our farm raised meat.  We’ve really been able to see significant growth in the lambs, cows and pigs this summer.  Though it has been very hot lately, we have had some rain to keep the fields green and brush growing. 

This year we have maxed out our pasture land and have been making efforts to clear some wooded areas to make new pasture land to expand our grazing areas with the increase in our animals.  It’s a very slow process.  We are looking forward to the fall and winter to give us the opportunity to work in the cleared wooded areas and hopefully get some fencing, gates up and watering infrastructure figured out. 

There is lots of firewood to be gathered, which we plan on starting soon.  If only more hours in the day….

If you have a farm, you might someday have a pig.  If you have a pig, you might someday have more pigs?  If you have a herd of pigs, chances are you might need to know how to castrate your own pig?  or at least know someone who knows how to do that!

We started with just having one pig at a time, until last year when we decided to try out 3 pigs.  Those pigs multiplied and this year we will be offering farm raised pork later this fall. 

Pigs are super cute when they are born, but escapee piglets quickly become quite the farm pest.  In my opinion, they rank up there with ornery goats.  Maybe I’m tainted in my opinion of pigs because of my own experience with them recently, but once one or more pigs invade your garden and eat your plants and garden produce and steal your chicken eggs, it’s hard to really like them.  At least with the pigs, I know I’ll get paid back in sausage and ham one day. 

We had a momma pig have 5 piglets a little while ago and if we were good farmers, we would have castrated the boars when they were just days old.  However, we neglected to take care of that early on but decided that the two boars we have needed to be castrated before they grew any bigger. 

With my husband in town working, our two older boys, who are 12 and 14 years old, had several “taking care of business” farm chores to do this week.  One of those items on the list was castrating the rams and boars.  After our morning meeting, I sent them out to take care of the animals, along with their two younger brothers for backup support. 

Sorry, no pictures of the actual process…I wasn’t about to go document the process.   They had helped their dad on the cows, sheep and another pig, so I hoped they could figure it out by themselves.  My husband assured me they could do it.  An hour later, they came back in the house looking like they had just butchered the pig by the look of their clothing, however, they assured me the pig was fine and their backup support almost fainted so they didn’t need their “help” with the after lunch lineup of sheep. 

Later on that day, I was in the kitchen preparing supper and opened up the refrigerator drawer to find a nice reminder that I’m a mom of farm boys:

I’m serious when I say that as a mom of 5 boys, I still don’t get it.  Whether it’s spitting on the clothes iron to see if it’s hot enough, consistently trying the laws of gravity or putting pig testicles inside my refrigerator, boys continue to challenge and confuse me. 

Gardening is hard work.  Or at least it is for us!  It’s frustrating when you work so hard planting your garden only to look out the window one morning to see the goat eating up all your hard work and the chickens scratching up all your newly planted bean rows.  We’re trying to keep at it because we enjoy the rewards of working for our own food, but with being very pregnant and the extreme heat and humidity lately, the weeds are winning out. 

Earlier this summer, there was much excitement when we picked the cabbage we planted earlier this spring.  Beautiful, non-perfect, organic cabbage heads.  I cut up one head of cabbage and sauteed it with garlic, onion and some of the pak choi chinese cabbage left in the garden.  It was better than delicious.  We all enjoyed it not only because it tasted great, but it was all our hard work paying off in the form of good food from our own garden.  I also used the cabbage to make homemade cole slaw.  Delicious! 

Now our only garden rewards are the tomatoes.  Though not as abundant as last year, they are very prized and welcomed. 

It seems silly that something so simple could bring so much satisfaction….but it does. 

As a family, we are far from recapturing the lost art of gardening.  We’ve had many set backs this year and low garden production.  I’ve ended up buying more produce this year.  However, I know it is just a season and am thankful that we are learning from this hard gardening year that will hopefully make us more productive in future years!

For several years our family has been raising our own meat. We’ve found that not only is it a healthier alternative but it is much cheaper than buying meat from the store.

Pro’s of Raising Your Own Meat:

1. Home grown meat is a healthier alternative than buying prepackaged feed-lot meat at the store. If you want to avoid the antibiotics, fillers, colors and solutions, raising your own meat is a sure fire way to know what’s in your meat and where it comes from. We’ve also raised pastured pork and found huge differences in the quality and taste as well as the assurance of knowing what goes into our pork.
2. It’s cheaper! We were shocked at how cheap it is to raise meat. If you have an initial purchase of around $300 for a calf and raise him for 18 months on grass, he could yield you around 500 to 600 lbs of meat (at around 1,000 pounds live weight). Depending on where you live, you will have the costs of feeding hay through the winter and you will have the butchering costs. Raising pork will have additional costs of buying corn, however you should be able to pick up a feeder pig from around $25 to $50.  We’ve been raising all natural, grass fed meat on our own land for much cheaper than what we could ever regular store bought and the high quality, all natural grass fed meat for. Even if you buy a whole, 1/2 or 1/4 cow from a farmer who raises beef, you will do much better than buying those individual cuts in the store. Before we could raise our own, we bought beef from a local farmer. Even paying around $4.50 a pound for 1/2 a cow ended up being an incredible savings considering that you are getting everything from hamburger to steaks and roasts!
3. It’s rewarding!  Raising your own meat is incredibly rewarding.  The time invested into raising your own meat is an experience your family won’t forget! 

Other Considerations When Raising Your Own Meat

1. You will have to invest your daily time into raising your own meat. That means you will need to monitor them, making sure they have enough water and grass:  a great chore for your children to keep up with!  Our cows and sheep are easy to care for.  For pork, you will have to invest more of your time in oversight. From our experience, pigs are more high needs than cows or sheep, although they yield a high amount of meat in a shorter amount of time. 
2. You will need to have the fencing and land space to raise your own meat. OR you could work out a deal with someone who has land to graze your animal on their land for a fee.
3. It takes time. Raising a cow for beef could take a good 18 months. We usually take our pigs to the butcher in 6 to 8 months. We haven’t figure out the lambs yet… we’re still experimenting on the age and weight of when to take them in.

On Saturday, we loaded up a few of our field stock and took them in to the butcher. While I was at the butcher shop, I bought some sausage ($2.49 lb) and hamburger ($2.89) to hold us over the next few weeks while our meat was being prepared. I don’t have our costs for raising the meat and butchering it yet..but I hope to post those when I get the final totals from the butcher shop.

When I started out to make a water work for the farm I had no idea I’d get so much help from above.

We are currently under flash flood warnings which means that our “seasonal” creek is flowing at capacity.

Enjoy the picture, we will be back to posting more soon.

I know I talk a lot about the Katahdin sheep we have.  We really do love the Katahdin hair sheep!  Someone asked us not too long ago why we have sheep on the farm.  The reason we chose the Katahdin breed was because of several reasons:  they do well in the South, they have hair and not wool so you do not shear them, they are excellent mothers and give birth easily (in most cases), they are resistant to many parasites and are relatively care free.  Right now, we are keeping all of our ewes and are selling the rams or raising the rams for meat.

Sheep are amazingly different compared to goats!  They are much easier and less hassle!   They also are easier to raise for meat compared to a cow.  A cow is much more time intensive and during the winter requires more care and food than the sheep do.  The sheep have been very hearty in feast or famine, flood or drought, bitter cold and extreme heat.

No..the baby isn’t dead…he was just born and is resting.

This morning, one of the ewe’s had twins.  She had one baby ewe and one ram.  We are thankful that the momma ewe and her babies are thriving and bounding across the field on this fine spring day.

Louisiana is one of the original ewes we bought.  She had twins last year too.

Warning:  The FDA has banned the use of Sassafras because it has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory rats.  As such, sassafras is considered a controlled substance and can not be sold in processed food products such as bottled root beer for the retail market. 

Here on Vaughnshire, our woods contain a old fashioned ingredient that old timers used to use to make a delicious carbonated beverage know as root beer.  That ingredient is the Sassafras root bark from the Sassafras tree. 

This wholesome drink, which was made every spring in the households of our American forebears, is a delicious as well as healthful, and it is a pity that the use of genuine root beer is dying out.  The sarsaparilla, yellow dock, dandelion, burdock, and hops used for its making were all products of the nearby woods and fields.  Bark of the wild cherry was sometimes put in, birch bark also, and elecampane, and the aromatic spikenard.  In springtime children went out with a trowel and basket, and their intimate knowledge of the growths about them helped to their brewing. (Homemade Root Beer, Soda & Pop)

Last week we made trip into town and went to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few grocery items.  I bought some all-natural root beer and ginger beer which spurred on the kids interest in making our own homemade soda and pop.  I had bought the book Homemade Root Beer, Soda & Pop over a year ago.  The kids eagerly picked it up and started reading…and soon started asking anxiously if we could make the homemade root beer.  

Little did I know that we already had the ingredients available to start a batch of root beer. 

My 12 year old read the directions on how to make homemade root beer with great interest and then exclaimed…”We have Sassafras!” before he ran out the door.  A little while later, he came in the house dragging cut branches and dirty roots from the Sassafras trees located in our woods.  A few of the older children started to cut and clean the roots, while another one read the directions outloud. 

They started with cutting the roots off the Sassafras sapling trees. 

We were all amazed at the smell of the sassafras roots.  They smelled like root beer!

We were not exactly sure how many roots to use for one batch (about a gallon).  The recipe we were using said use about 20 inches of sassafras root, the thickness of a pencil. 

Here’s the recipe we used: 

20 inches sassafras root
1 piece vanilla bean, 3 inches long
3 to 4 quarts of water
1 3/4 cup of brown sugar
1/8 teaspoon ale yeast (also 1/4 cup lukewarm water)

1.)  Place the root and vanilla in 2 quarts of water and simmer, uncovered for about 25 minutes, adding the sugar near the end.  The water should take on a pronounced red or dark orange color and the room should be filled with a strong sassafras aroma.  If color and aroma are weak, add more root.  Remove from heat and let cool for 30 minutes. 

2.)  Put 1 quart of cool water into the jug.  After the sassafras mixture has cooled for 30 minutes, pour slowly into a jug.  Add water to the jug, leaving a headspace of about 2 inches and aiming for lukewarm overall temperature.  Allow to cool if it is above lukewarm.  Cap the jug and agitate vigorously. 

3.)  In a teacup, combine the yeast and 1/4 cup of lukewarm water, and let sit about 5 minutes.  Add the yeast liquid to the jug, agitate, and then bottle the beverage.  After about 48 hours (check sooner in warmer weather) check the carbonation;  when sufficient, refrigerate. 

The next day, we checked our brew….the fermentation process was definitely working.  The jug was bulging and there were bubbles around the top of the liquid. 

We released some of the pressure and checked for carbonation.  It was very weak carbonation, so we capped it and left it to do its work the rest of the day. 

After about 36 hours, we had a pretty carbonated root beer beverage!  It was very exciting for all of us!  We enjoyed our homemade root beer for lunch with our ham sandwiches!

We were pretty impressed with the carbonation.  It is truly an amazing thing that you can ferment something with yeast and end up with something carbonated!

We made another batch of root beer with some alterations, this time steeping the roots overnight like you would an herbal infusion.  The first batch tasted good, but we wanted a stronger root beer taste.  We also added a bit of licorice root and a bit of cinnamon.  We also bruised up the roots before simmering to release a bit more of the sassafras aroma and taste. 

Our next batch is fermenting now so I’ll post the results when it is finished. 

If you are interested in making your own homemade root beer or ginger ale, I would highly suggested getting a how to book on the subject.  There is a lot that goes into the process besides just reading a recipe. 

This is the book that we have been using.  It has been very informative and educational:  Homemade Root Beer, Soda & Pop

We are trying our hand at growing peas this year.  We planted Little Marvel peas from the cheap .20 cent seed packages I bought.  We’ll see how they do!

The Little Marvel pea is supposed to be a shorter vine. It is considered an old time favorite! It yields large dark green 3-inch pods with 6-9 large, sweet peas. Thrives in the cool temperatures of spring and fall. Great for freezing. 

My children love peas, so I am hoping that we can grow a small crop of them successfully. 

One of the side benefits of raising animals on our farm is that we have a lot of good compost!  If I had extra kitchen scraps I would add those to our compost pile, but we need all of our kitchen scraps for animal food now.  This year our compost pile had mostly old hay, grass clippings, leaves and cow manure that decomposed over the winter. 

We didn’t plow up our garden spot this year.  Strange, I know….but it actually didn’t need to be plowed up.  We left leaves and hay on it over the winter, so what didn’t decompose, we raked back and planted in the moist soil. 

We also spread out our compost over the garden area.  We noticed a large red worm population as we were spreading out the compost….which we were all very happy about.  My 9 year old was telling everyone how beneficial garden worms are for the garden.  Worms eat the dirt, chew it up and then spit it back out making really great dirt for plants to grow in.   

Here are a few of the sheep last summer.  The herd has grown quite a bit since last year.  
This year we’ve already had 3 sets of twins since February.

It is truly amazing how much this agrarian life has transformed our thinking and deepened our understanding about life.   I was in the kitchen and noticed our herd of sheep walking through the side yard headed down the drive way towards the road.  The sheep are usually on the other side of the property in a good fenced area, so seeing them in the side yard sent me quickly out of the kitchen announcing to the closest boy in the house, “The sheep are out!”

The sheep are actually our 12 year olds.  He is the shepherd and loves raising his sheep.  He knows each of them by name.  He knows them from afar off.  He knows when one is missing.  He knows when his sheep are  about to lamb.  He usually knows if they are having twins or a single birth just by the way they look.  He knows his sheep, even if many of them look exactly alike to me.  They are distinctly different looking to him because he cares for them on a daily basis.

So the sheep were out, heading towards the road and our 12 year old ran out of the house and called the herd back in the familiar, “Sheep, Sheep, Sheep” call he gives to signal them to come to him.  They turned and started “Baa-ing” at him and ran towards him and followed him back to the safer pasture.

As I watched him take his sheep back to the pasture, I was quickly reminded of the Scripture, John 10:27 “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me..”

When he came back inside, I told him how amazing it is to see his sheep turn when they hear his voice but even more amazing is how we are like sheep and have a Good Shepherd who knows and cares for each of us!

The example was amazing to see in real life…as are many of the agrarian life examples we have seen and experienced while living here on the farm!

We are starting to see spring around the corner.  Sure, it’s 30 degrees outside now….but the sun was out today and it warmed up enough to send the kids outside in a coat to run around.  We’ve had a long, cold winter and we are very ready to thaw out a bit.

I’ve been aching to start gardening.  We’ve been pouring over seed catalogs.  We have a lot of seeds already that we saved from our plants last year, but it is always nice to look at all the nice pretty pictures in the seed catalogs.  I love all the variety that the heirloom seeds offer.  Green stripe tomatoes, yellow and red stripe tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, orange tomatoes, purple sweet peppers, chocolate peppers….  all amazing fruits and vegetables that God created for us to enjoy that are rarely, if ever, seen in a grocery store.

Here’s some of our garden load from last year’s garden.  We grew several different varieties of tomatoes.  We not only enjoyed the wonderful taste of heirloom, home grown garden tomatoes, but we all enjoyed watching our tomatoes grow and marveled at the diversity and uniqueness of these rarely seen garden varieties.  By the way…Wow, look at that green carpet of grass!  We’re looking forward to seeing that again!

I just found out about this great conference going on in our backyard this weekend, March 5 -6 by TOGA (Tennessee Organic Growers Association).  (Thanks Donna for letting me know!!!!)

It sounds like a wonderful conference if you are in the area.   Saturday has a full line up of great speakers.  Joel Salatin is on the line up several times with talks on:  Marketing, Local Food and Salad Bar Beef.  The Barefoot Farmer, Jeff Poppen, is also scheduled to be there and speak.

Cost is $50 for just Saturday as the Friday Farm Day Tours are sold out.

Check out more information here:  TOGA 6th Annual Conference

Odocoileus virginianus – Albino Whitetail Deer

How often do you get to see an albino deer in the wild? Depending on where you find the statistics on the web, you have somewhere between 1 and a million to 1 and 100,000 chance that you will see one.

But the real question is how often will you actually have a camera with you when you see one? I couldn’t find statistics for that one! But what ever the odds are, we were blessed with both of these “against all odds” events a few years ago. These were taken on Hwy 46 between Grassland and Leipers Fork, just south of the Harpeth River.

I originally posted them on the Vision Tennessee site, which has since been removed, so I thought I’d keep a copy of them posted here.

Of course, this is a good opportunity for a redneck test.  When you see this picture do you admire the incredible diversity of creation or do you say to yourself, “hum – bet that would make a good roast”?  Admittedly, I had an internal conflict.  First I said “wow that is an incredible creature”, then I lamented not having my gun… then I realized I had my camera.  I quickly snapped these shots and turned the truck around and pulled into the driveway just above the rise seen in the picture below.

As you can tell from the different shots, I was able to spend a few moments watching them.  Once I was in the driveway I was trying to figure out the best way to get close to them.  As I was headed down one side of a rock wall the three deer headed up the other side.  I heard one of them break a branch or make some noise and quickly ran back up towards the edge of the driveway to see the two brown deer dart across the other side of the road.  The white one was scared by the car and circled back within 20 feet of me.  Unfortunately the shot was washed out from the reflection of the sun either in the guardrail or the stopped car – I forget.

Either way, it made for a fun mini adventure on the way into town and some pretty cool pictures to look at.  Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

One of the reasons we moved to the farm was in search of a slower paced life that allowed time for “one another”.  It was seeking meaningful relationships and finding the time to invest in other people’s lives.  In short it was looking for community.  Not the old Cheers theme of community, you know the one, “Sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name” – it was more than that.  It was to know, more than to be known.  It was to serve but at the same time having the stability and certainty that others would also serve you in a time of need.

As I compared those goals that we had as a family to the stated goals of the “Slow Food” movement web site; Slow Food USA, I found myself in substantial agreement with many of the ideas they put forward.  Check out the Slow Food Manifesto:

• Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.
• We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.
• To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.
• A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.
• May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.
• Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.
• Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.
• In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.
• That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?
• Slow Food guarantees a better future.
• Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.

That is a pretty fair statement of the conditions of the modern man both churched and un-churched as they say.  But in reading this I was faced with several questions.  Isn’t that what we lost when the South was conquered by the Union?  Isn’t fast food the crowning symbol of progress – the promised utopia the industrialist, forced upon a once contented slow paced Southern people?  Is the manifesto really “progressive” or is it merely recognizing some truth prophesied of long ago.  As I processed these thoughts I reached for my copy of “I’ll Take My Stand“.  I’ll give you a quote from the introduction by Louis D. Rubin, JR. which I think speaks to the heart of the fast food, fast life issue many are seeking to overcome today.  In 1962 he wrote his first introduction for the second edition:

…the Agrarians were not economist.  They were humanist…  And the real values they were asserting in 1930 were not those of “material well-being” or of neo-confederate nostalgia, but of thoughtful men who were very much concerned with the erosion of the quality of individual life by forces of industrialization and the uncritical worship of progress as an end in itself….

Humanism, properly speaking, is not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel.  It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.  And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older south and of other parts of the country that shared in such a tradition… We can not recover our native humanism by adopting some standard of taste that is critical enough to question the contemporary arts but not critical enough to question the social and economic life which is their ground.

This in a nut shell is where Slow Food will fail.  It wants us to pretend to slow down and attend our Slow Food meetings on Tuesday night, but the reality of our age is that all those who do will be at the drive through window for breakfast as they rush off to their city jobs on Wednesday morning.  We can’t be critical of our cuisine without recognizing the economy that drives it.  It is one thing to call for local food, organic food, or “humane” food; but it is another thing to live in an economy that allows one to pay the farmer for his labors.

I guess the short of it is this; we not only need sustainable farms but we need a sustainable way of life.  This global economy consumes us until we are gone and then it sets it’s sights on our children.  The Twelve Southerners fromVanderbuilt detailed our departure from a sustainable life and foretold with alarming accuracy the challenges we face today when the work was originally published in 1930.  The Twelve Southerners were able to put forward a holistic work examining multiple facets of our culture and the challenges industrialization brought in the areas of art, education, economics, politics, family life and structure, and many more areas that are tied directly to the community we no longer enjoy.

It is certain that our diet has changed, but what is less evident is the changes that take place within a man, his beliefs which make up his faith and practices.  To say it simply, the reason we have a hard time finding community today is our priorities have changed.  They are not based on our belief in God, but what brings us pleasure in this economy.  Or as some have said, it is based on what is good for our “personal peace and affluence”.  The real challenge lies ahead.  It is one thing to see the challenges, but it is another thing to swim upstream to attempt to make the changes needed to reclaim a sustainable life.  Many will fall pray to the allure of money and the wealth this economy can promise.  But the answer is not to have more money to invest in making changes.  I would bet that Slow Food USA has a good fund raising machine.  But yet the reality of their lives, even the structure of the organization, works against their stated goals.  The answer is to be a people who are not swayed by money, but driven by principles.  God places value on family and relationships long before wealth.  To finish the quote from Rubin:

It was not their (the agrarians) assumptions that one first achieved material well-being, then used it to further “the more spiritual side of a good, full and happy life”; on the contrary, they insisted that any attempt to divorce economics and labor from “the more spiritual side” of one’s life brutalized the labor and cheapened the humanity.

Let us not sell our soul to a faceless nameless corporate economy that is always promising morebetterfaster of what ever it is we think we need.  This new economy, this idea of slow food or eating local produce, is really the old economy, of relationships, time redemption, and of being close to the land that God gave as a gift to sustain our very lives.  It’s agrarian at its core and it’s hard work.  But, it is worth every moment when you consider the community being developed as we order our lives in a simple honest and just manner.

This report, by Stephanie Dearing, discusses Monsanto’s intent to re-engage in the research and production of GMO wheat:

After Monsanto announced its plan to revisit gm wheat last year, having received the support of an international farmer’s coalition, a worldwide movement opposing the yet-to-be developed grain product is growing…

Monsanto spent under $5 million developing its gm round-up ready wheat, but scrapped the product in 2004 after consumers around the world voiced their opposition to the product…

But last year… Monsanto purchased a biotech facility in Montana specifically for the purpose of developing gm wheat.  The company spent $45 million purchasing WestBred.

…Seed companies would obviously benefit from the development of a new commercial product that is accepted by consumers.  However, farmers are predicted to be benefactors of a gm wheat that is drought tolerant, because they will not experience the same level of crop losses as they would otherwise.  The key is consumer acceptance of gm grains.

These points are taken from a press release from WORC.  If you have not looked into the technology behind the GMO “movement” let me recommend a quick view of, “The Future of Food“.  When someone tells you that we need GMO seeds for some lame excuse like “our wheat production is down”, you can refer them to this list, or if they are inclined to read the actual report, it can be found here, and more articles are found here.  For now, in my best David letterman voice, the Top ten reasons Monsanto should never develop GMO Wheat:

Can you think of any others?

Orange Peel Tips: (HT to Living Green)

- Due to the high content of flammable oil in orange peel, dried peel makes a great firestarter or kindling

- It seems that cats don’t like the smell of peel, so you can place them around plants where you don’t want cats digging

- Using a “zester”, the top layer of an orange peel can be scraped to produce zest. This can then be used to strong flavor to foods, such as sauces, soups and salads. The zest can be dried overnight and then stored in airtight bottles for future use.

- Dried orange peels can be placed in a cloth bag and placed in closets and cupboards to reduce musty odors

- A puree blend of orange peel and water can be applied to an area to discourage ants from crossing.

- Most insects hate limonene – the oil in the peel. Small piles of zest can be placed around an area to keep it free from flies and mosquitos. A great way to enjoy a picnic without having to use commercial repellents or insecticides!

- To deodorize a garbage disposal unit, throw down a few peels while it’s operating

- Candied orange peels are a tasty treat that seem very simple to make. Plenty of recipes can be found on the Internet.

So the children were right, our dairy goat, Mally, had twins!  Finally on Feb. 1st, she gave birth the day after the other goat had her baby!  Newborn goats are so cute!  She had one doe and one buck who have some very nice Alpine colorings.  The momma and babies are called Cou Blanc Alpines which means that they have literally a ”white neck” – white front quarters and black hindquarters with black or gray markings on the head.

Our daughter had a nice surprise out in the pasture yesterday. 

One of our goats gave birth to a very cute little mixed nubian alpine doeling, which we weren’t expecting.  The boys found the baby and thought it belonged to Mally, the goat who we have been anxiously awaiting to give birth.  They ran inside to announce that Mally had her baby!  We were all excited and jumped up from the table to go see!

We soon discovered that the baby wasn’t Mally’s and was in fact from one of our other goats — a first time momma.