One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books to read about the farming/food industry, Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal! by Joel Salatin. It’s a great read, filled with humor and information. It will seriously blow your mind!
Also, I got Joel’s latest book Folks, This Ain’t Normal! for my husband for Christmas (sort of a dual present as I really wanted it for myself 🙂 ). I’ll let you know what I think!
We had a “Pig Moving Day” earlier this week. One of our sons was given the task of bringing some hay down to the new area to put in the shelter…..
We finally got some snow! Not much but enough for the kids to go out and build some Snow Goons.
But… Alas… when you have farm animals things don’t always go quite as planned.
Our Tamworth sow had her litter of piglets last week. I have to say that the first time we ever saw piglets born it was the most amazing thing Ever!! We were used to seeing puppies whelped, since we’ve been raising Golden’s for over 10 years, and we were totally not prepared for the piglets. They come out… running! literally they shake themselves off and start jumping and running around. They start foraging almost immediately
It is pretty darn amazing! We tend to do things as natural as possible here on Tomcova farm. The way nature intended. Pigs are herd animals, they don’t like to be alone. Even the “teenagers”
This “young” lady saw an opportunity to get some cuddling in and just laid right down . I think the newborn liked having another warm body to cozy up to. Ham, our Tamworth sow, loves attention and showed off her new babies to us.
Soooo cute!!!
Remember what it was like to be a kid during the Holiday Season?
Living in an old house has it advantages…
You never have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.. there is always a breeze. You don’t have to worry about finishing your basement, you can’t… it’s dirt, or in our case cement poured over a dirt foundation. Having an old house and an old piece of property is fun because you get to uncover all sorts of things outside. Old stonewalls buried with time, old flower beds neglected and grown over. Your animals dig up old bottles and metal farm implements buried long ago. You discover, living in an old house, that water will find it’s way into any crook and cranny. Any crack in that old cement that was spread over the rock /dirt foundation.
We have lived through 9 winters here. Our first winter we ran out of oil the first 3 weeks in November, it was a full tank. See above mention of breezy house :). The second winter here we had a lovely snow storm, which left such a white fluffy covering on the ground that the kids were beside themselves with excitement for the chance to sled on our awesome hill, right next to the house, in fact it slopes toward the house. Then… it rained on top of the snow, it froze and rained again. It never occurred to us to check our basement, the basement in our old house NEVER leaked, unless you left the hose on in the basement window of course.
Well, I went out for something and saw that our driveway was a virtual river and there was a significant amount of water pooled by the house. Not thinking a whole lot about it I went on my merry way. Upon coming home, the water seemed much deeper against the outside of the house. I went in and said “honey, maybe we should check our basement”. He went down and sure enough there was about 6 inches of water in our basement. The next 2 hours were spent outside trying to chip chanels in the ice to divert water away from the house.
This has been our life in winter for the past 9 years. Loving the snow, loving the warmth the woodstove provides, loving watching the kids sled on our hill, and cringing when the forecast calls for rain and freezing temps.
Fast forward to this year. My dad and a dear friend with a lovely Kubota with a back hoe (ours doesn’t have one) are digging out the driveway, laying down some flat stones and regrading the driveway. I have high hopes and am looking forward to a winter that I hope is, water in my basement free 🙂
Stones waiting for their new home
Getting the crushed stone
Dumping the stone… but the trailer is still full…
The kids couldn’t pass up on this!! Several of them had to run up the pile of stone to “push” it down!
Who needs a roller coaster when you can ride the trailer back down?!
Starting the move to their new homes by the new drain
Ready for the next one
It’s all very exciting!!
Well, Ginger is at it again. The other day she made it back into the house and strolled through the kitchen. She sauntered through the dining room.
She quizzically looked into the boys room, where she saw……
Daniel’s bed and decided, “what a great place to visit, why.. I can see outside… look at all those silly hens pecking around in the leaves, walking on the hard ground…”
Cheeky girl!
We’ve been busy here on the farm…
There’s been clean up from the hurricane
There’s always an audience when there is work going on
We’re getting our wood supply up from the woods
We brought in the wood rack
We processed a ton of peppers that had to be picked before the first frost.
I neglected my beets and didn’t thin them, so I got a bunch of tiny beets 🙂 sooo yummy. Those had to be canned.
We tried some new recipes… mmmmm Dutch Boys…
We had a freak snowstorm, that was just beautiful, though we can say that because we didn’t lose power with this storm, but many people in our state were without power for over a week!
The day the storm hit we butchered one of our pigs. We left him to hang overnight as the weather was bad and it was getting too cold and wet to continue. Our friends at Morningstar Meadows Farm invited us over to watch the Steelers game and I offered to bring some food with us…. figuring we’d all share leftovers (which we did) and my husband went out and cut a shoulder off the front of the pig to bring. Oh My! Soooo good! I keep saying it’s all about the food and you know… it really is!!
The week before the snowstorm our eldest daughter got married! She chose a very special day, October 22nd. It is the day my youngest daughter was born last year, it is also the anniversary of the day I married my very best friend :).
Here is my whole family!! We are truly blessed!
A few people have asked, so this is what pastured chicken looks like at the final phase of processing. Yummm…..
They say that good fences make good neighbors. I’m not sure about that when it comes to people, but it is certainly true when it comes to animals, especially when you just happen to have one of the most respected organic gardeners growing his stuff just a few hundred yards from your several hundred pound, eat-anything-that-even-resembles-food, field plowing machines – otherwise known as pigs. We found this out the hard way one day not so long ago when I got a call at work from my lovely wife. There was panic in her voice. The kind of panic that exudes hopeless, foreboding fear. “What happened? Are the kids ok?…” I asked. “The kids are fine. But Ham’s out. We don’t know where she is. One of the neighbors called and said that their young daughter thought she saw a bear in her backyard. It must have been Ham, but she isn’t there anymore.” (Ham is the name of our matriarchal, very stubborn and rather large Tamworth sow.) I tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry. She’ll turn up at dinner time.” But then a thought occurred to me… “Only – *make sure* that she doesn’t get to Wayne’s Organic Garden.” I said. “Anywhere other than that!” “Oh, I doubt she’ll find that.” Said my wife. “She would have to find her way through a maze of trails. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Guess what.
It seems that master chefs and health conscious consumers aren’t the only ones who appreciate the freshness, quality and superior taste that organically grown brings. Ham was very happy with her find, but the organic gardener was not, let me tell you. Understandably so. Thankfully one of the workers at the garden had the presence of mind to grab a cattle panel and loop it around Ham, trapping her til we got there. To make matters worse however, we really didn’t have any easy way to transport her. We have a trailer, but it takes time and effort to transfer a 400 lb sow up two feet. We didn’t have that much time. We were contemplating alternatives (think “Ham” dinner for us and the organic gardener) when some very gracious alpaca farmers from down the road showed up with their ground level trailer. To make an even longer story shorter, with the help of the handy trailer, we were able to get Ham home and secured before she was able to do any significant damage. But the lesson was learned. No more Mickey Mouse fences.
Now, armed with a little experience (and perhaps a whole lot of motivational fear) we are building new fences. We are currently fencing in approximately five acres of woods and rough pasture so that we can permanently pasture and rotationally graze our herds. This is actually what we’ve planned to do all along. We try to raise hogs in a way that is most natural to them; in a way that mimics, as closely as possible, their natural habitat. By putting them to pasture and rotating them to new pasture every so often they will always have fresh forage to consume, roots n-such to dig up, and clean, natural pasture to live in. It not only produces happy, stress free pigs, it also produces the best pork that can be had.
By a stroke of luck, we found out through a friend that an old farmer a couple of towns over just happened to have several piles of cedar posts lying around his farm. Cedar! To quote Jeremiah Johnson, “You can’t go no better.” And at a fraction of the cost that pine posts goes for to boot! We scooped up a bunch and we’re now in the process of drilling holes and setting posts.
Of course, this is Connecticut. “Drilling” isn’t always the best way to describe post hole making in these parts. The picture below started as a nine-inch wide hole, and goes down to approximately 24 – 30 inches deep. That pry bar is around five feet long, and I needed every inch of it to get those boulders out. If all 100 or so holes go this way, look for me at the next Mr. Universe competition.
 | April Gustafson on our pups… |
 | Steve on our pups… |
 | Dawn A Perry on our pups… |
 | Lori babin on New Golden Retriever Puppies o… |
 | Karen Lipp on New Golden Retriever Puppies o… |
Tomcova Farm 