Thursday, October 16, 2008

It's harvest and Brian's well let's just say swamped!

There are two times of year when you can do discing this is one of them - although we will not be doing this anually we need to do some initial prepping to flatten our fields so we can start to develop them as no till pasture for rotational grazing. As they are they have deep ruts, trash trees, brush and are unusable. So I said ok honey now's the time he signed off and I wasted no time! : ) with in two days I had Greg on our place with some REALLY big equipment!! whooo hooo!! watch out!!



This is what our pasture looks like now!! I've learned a ton this week about grass and field prep!! So greg will come back in the spring harrow and seed, and by mid summer green grass and happy cows!! - another thing I learned in addition to things about soil and grass is abot pigs! --

you will notice the pigs looking on as greg fixes a tire.. the pigs are out as I had to take down there fenced area to let greg till and thought "hey they won't go far" WRONG!!! a pig can go really far and quickly and are REALLY hard to get back where you want them ... plus the fact that I had no where to put them till he was done and I could put back there pasture... humm can you say "freshman farmer" again!! well they quickly learned clementine would give 'em hell unless they stuck with me so with out too much stress I managed to keep 'em wrangled for a few hours till I could get the e-fence put back up... all are safly contained : ) whew I won't do THAT again : )



there was an exciting moment on greg's second day here he got his BIG rig stuck - so I drove our crawler (I think for only the 3rd time ever : ) and we hooked up a chain and tried to give 'er a tug that it was laughable! these trractors are HUGE so he called his brother who brought over an even bigger tractor! wowzers :) I think they where having fun!



As of this week our meat birds are all done for the year we now have 20 in the freezor and now I'm done with meat birds till spring when I get another round of little chirpers : ) in the mean time good eats in the freezer!




those are the layer in the background - and the meat birds in there mobil chicken hut



we got all those beautiful tomatoes made into souce - first through this thing Brian bought at a garage sale like 6 years ago that I thought he'd NEVER use.. well slap me that thing worked great and then I cooked it down for a few days on the wood stove and into more jars... I'm sooo done with canning now!!! extra credit for any of brian's old biking posy who can id his shirt! : )





and last but not least the elk came for another visit! sadly the big old buck is gone I'm sure someone's trophy he was amazing!! but there's a young one in his place...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh, the pigs don't come like the chickens, eh? That was a funny visual, Clare - although probably not funny at the time. Pigs are very very fast, as the feral pigs in Marin demonstrated!
I have a modern version of Brian's tomato machine - I got it at Ratto's in Oakland about 20 years ago, and I love it! Every year I used to buy tomatoes at the Farmers' Market and run them through my tomato machine - but this year I harvested my heirloom organic tomatoes from the plants I got from Copia! Lots of tomatoes! I cut them in half on their equater, sprinkle with S&P, drizzle with olive oil, then put them in the oven at 225 degrees for 12 hours or so, until the juices have all been sucked up into the fiber. Then I run them through the machine - the sauce is very good as is. I freeze mine in plastic freezer bags to save space - that's not very green, I know. Joan bought a tomato machine for herself last year after she saw mine.
Love all your adventures!
Lois