Growing in the Journey

Our journey as a family of coming from residential Connecticut to rural Oklahoma has been wild and woolly. Learning to trust God when it feels like we are walking on the water...on the ocean. Discovering His character in every moment. It's been good and so very hard.

There are seasons in families. I recently realized that I had left one season and moved to the next. The first season in a family is one of babies, toddlers and young children. Parents learn to function without sleep. One minute they pour out love on their little angels, the next they are trying to erect boundaries between them and the tiny sucking sounds of need. You fight for that date night, you fight for bedtime, you are creating structure in your home to help you survive and love well.

The next season is the one that we are in. The kids have gotten older, and all the seeds you planted have started growing. Lovely. ;) Now is the time for more character training, but even more important, learning to do life WITH the kids.

Looking back at Ct is easy to see what wasn't working. It's always easy to look back and see. :) Our lives centered around Church and finishing the work on a house we'd been working on for eight years. Other than that, we were bored. How to does one do life with family? What is family?

It was time for my husband and I to define who we were as a family. What was our family culture? What made us tick? It wasn't about Adam and I and little kids any more. It was about creating culture with three little people. What did we have that we could pass on? Who were we and was it worth expanding on? Our dream was to have a family culture that could build multi generationally. But we were clueless how to do it.

Becoming farmers was an accident. At least, we didn't see it coming. Our plan was to move to a certain part of Texas/Oklahoma and begin a new season there. That didn't happen. So what do you do when you move to rural Oklahoma and have two acres vs a tenth of an acre in Ct?

You buy a goat. ;)

We just bought nineteen acres with a huge 60x40 shop, another small insulated shed and a double wide trailer. The trailer needs work, and we plan to replace it with a 'real' house someday. But for right now it's perfect. Financially we are finally in a position to save, to build, to repay some debt, and to have fun.

We are doing life as a family. It takes a lot of training the yuck out of our kids and some out of our selves, because we had deceived ourselves that we were still in that first season. Our current season is even harder, if done well. Less about bedtime and more about quality time. Less about boundaries and more about pastoring little people. We can do this! We are strong. Because we are weak. :D

Motion Study

Farming seems to all about controlled chaos. Domestication of animals has occurred over thousands of years, and the trade offs are sometimes good, sometimes bad. Chickens can't defend themselves. Unless you're a rooster aiming for a little girl's bare legs. Little girls make scary predators. ;) Although, my two girls happily defeathered about ten roosters and Micaiah was fascinated by the innards. Guess they are pretty scary. :D
We are raising heritage hogs, and heritage means they aren't quite as dumb and sweet as today's animals. Occasionally they consider tasting you.
Goats haven't changed much over the eons. They are still bright and mischievous. Always unexpected, looking for a way out and around you, willing to butt you or lick you.
I'm learning about cows this week. My landlord is out of town and I get to help him out with his Jersey momma and three babies. Cows are pretty stupid, but they make up for it with size. If you don't have your wits about you, you might get stepped on.

Everything costs money. We could be intimidated by the sheer scope of it but that's no fun. So we have started small. Cattle is extremely expensive so we've started with pigs and goats. Pigs and goats can also be expensive, but if you shop around and buy unregistered you can find a deal. It's all in how you want to spend your money. Have a hundred dollars? Buy a pig. Get the pig pregnant. Sell the ten piglets for a hundred dollars each. See? Easy. Or you could spend that hundred on a new phone. Or clothes.

You have to like what you do. Money is important, but if you do what you enjoy you can do a lot of it. And money follows. We haven't made any money yet...but we aren't bored. ;)

What I'm learning now is that farming can be a lot of work, or it can be streamlined. I'm milking my neighbors cow and I'm learning what I will need when I get one of my own.

I want to build a small dairy. A small barn with a concrete floor, a table and a fridge. A small milking machine and a cream separator. Nothing insane, just properly equipped so it's not a hassle. A cow can produce huge quantities of milk. My house fridge can't keep up. Every day I've been skimming cream and pouring out three gallons of milk to the pigs. Crazy much?

I love this part of what Adam and I are doing. Right now it's haphazard. It doesn't make money. It takes time. But we are learning and dreaming, tweaking and streamlining. By the time we can afford more expensive stock we will have learned from the cheaper stock. And had fun along the way. :)

 

New Additions

We are so busy lately. It's so easy. And fun. We love to build, and we have years of pent up energy that is begging to be expended. Farming is a long, slow investment, and at the beginning the only reward is work and enjoying animal personalities. Days go by and we just feed them and hang out with them, then there are days crammed with buying more, transporting them, penning them, and catching them after they escape. 

This is Reese. She's an Alpine. We bought her because we have four bottle babies and formula is gosh darn expensive. I picked her out of the herd because I like her color and the tightness of her bag. Unfortunately she's not producing enough so we need another. Lol! 

This is Abraham. So named because he can't have pork and we are hoping for many children. ;) He keeps running from our Duroc girls but hopefully he will grow a bigger pair and chase them back. ;)

This is Maggie and Emma. Berkshires. Berkshire meat is considered the best pork. Recently Maggie was mauled by a neighbors dog and had to get stitches. We are still watching her to see if she will be ok. 

I'm down to fifty seven of these guys. About half are roosters and will be butchered in a month. About time too; they are getting aggressive. Fun fact; young rooster crows sound a bit like a dying cow. 😉

Baby Love

Last Friday I got a text from a guy selling goat bottle babies at a steal. He had five bucklings and I said I'd take all five. So I lowered the back seat in my Pilot, laid down a tarp, loaded Micaiah in the back and went for a road trip to Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The road to Fayetteville was hilly and windy and it took an hour and a half to get there but it was worth it. Micaiah played with her stuffed animals and asked minimal questions. ;)

Adam couldn't make it for the trip and as I hadn't met this guy I took Jesus and some insurance with me. ;)

Everything was easy and above board and I left with these noisy guys.

I have it on good authority that I'm crazy. I have no issue with that. ;) We got them home and fed them. I'm probably going to sell three and buy a doe in milk because milk supplement is stupid expensive. While I was gone Adam fenced in a garden for me and put the piglets in to till up the soil. We added the kids and a couple chickens, hopefully to teach the piglets not to eat them. The piglets aren't tilling fast enough so I'm going to move them and put one of the big guys in. Here's Micaiah being cute! Today I told her that everyone is good at different things. She replied, "Kind of like I'm good at being cute?" Yup. ;)

Mudding And Charcuterie

This last week we bought a walk in freezer for $150. It's enormous. I think...we haven't assembled it yet, just carried it. :P

My husband found the listing on Craigslist. The lovely lady selling it asked if we had four wheel drive. Yes, we do. I didn't think about the implications of that.

It was about an hours drive, and we loaded it in about half an hour. We had driven over a slightly muddy area behind their house to get to it, but did not realize how heavy the freezer was. It took us two hours to get out. We were exhausted. But we have a freezer! Lol!!

Whenever we butcher a pig, we will have the option of making something like a honey ham, or a country ham or prosciutto. I want to do both, but either way we have to hang it somewhere. This freezer will work great because you can assemble and dissemble it wherever you are. We are renting, so we didn't want to build something stationary. Who knows how this will all turn out, but it's fun!! And heavy. ;)

Before We Kill And Eat You

Provocative title, eh? Actually it's a title from a missionary book I read as a teen. :D It's what I think when I watch my dogs catch and play with wildlife. Moles, mice, field mice, rabbits, and chickens. Grr.

My only problem with them, aside from targeting chickens, is that they don't eat what they kill. They play with it, chew the head off or not, and then leave dead things in my yard. This isn't cool. I mean, I could be paying less for dog food and they are killing willy nilly. They don't even sell the pelts on the black market. These aren't poacher dogs. They are morally corrupt hunting dogs.

I usually forgive them because they are cute and I feel no responsibility for their souls. Just revulsion. ;) Here is an item from yesterday. I think it's a field mouse. As big as my hand.

Poor little guy. Well, maybe the coyote population will diminish if all the mice are gone. :) As long as my dogs keep to mice we will be on good terms. If they keep attacking my chickens, all I can think of is that scripture quoted in Shawshank Redemption; Judgement cometh. :D

Backroad Rambling

I had to get out of the house today. I'm a homebody so it takes a while for cabin fever to set in, especially in the country. It's been cold the past week and although I thought spring was right around the corner, I'm being denied my chance to dig in the ground. There are signs of life though. It will be soon.

I took Eben and drove around the backroads around our house. Tahlequah is at the base of the Ozarks so there are both hills and plains, rocks and creeks. So much stuff to look at. I love the back roads here; farms and hillbillies and cemeteries and Baptist summer camps. I let Eben pick the direction at each crossroads. It was fun to explore. I'm also checking out routes for my bike rides.

There is a tree beside the house that is about to blossom. I think it's an oriental pear.

Here's a fun sight on a backroad; wonder if the farmer would let us have worship there. ;)