October 12, 2009

Sorry for the light posting lately. When we leave the farm for a 10 day vacation, the workload is a bit overwhelming when we return. We still have about 8 yards of concrete to pour this month in the ongoing conversion of the dilapidated greenhouse into a garage and machine shed. And the contractor asked us to hold up on siding it until the concrete was done so they could work at it from all sides! I have a bad feeling I'm going to be out there in the snow nailing up vinyl siding. But we got our wood stove installed so I'll be able to come in and warm up. Our computer is in the same room as the stove and all this typing is making me sweat.

We separated the calves from Sugar last Friday. They took to drinking milk from a bucket like pros. Actually I bought buckets with rubber nipples thinking they would want to suck but it's much faster to just slurp it up. Taffy bawled so much she had completely lost her voice yesterday. Her moos sounded like croaks. It's coming back some today. Sugar is going with the flow like she always does. Porter doesn't seem to care as long as he gets his milk.

Since the separation, we're getting between 5 and 5 1/2 gallons of milk a day. This morning Jennifer got 3 1/2 gallons, gave the calves 1 1/2 (3 qts. each) and put 2 gallons in the fridge. Tonight I got 2 gallons and gave it all to the calves. The best part is we have CREAM! We'll make some butter by the end of the week and maybe celebrate the weekend with a little ice cream. You haven't lived until you've eaten homemade butter pecan.

All of the butchering is done for the year and we're now looking ahead to sheep breeding. The sheep will be shorn before the end of the month and we'll put the rams and ewes into two breeding groups in early November. Guess I better get to work on finishing the barn remodel so the rams have a place to live. Right now they're bunking in with Sugar because the calves are closed in their old stall.

Last but not least, our internet here on the farm is now smokin'. For those of you outside the normal cable or DSL area, I highly recommend this and this. We have the mifi connected to a cradlepoint router to make it a little more powerful and give us an ethernet connection for the desktop. The antenna really pulls in that cell signal. We're getting download speeds of over 1.5 Mbps.