I'm honestly glad 2020 is almost over! This entire year has been one upset or another. It seemed the whole world including the weather went cockeyed. We should be used to it with a name like Cockeyed Homestead, right? Well, sort of. Even for us, it was bad. Just like for everyone else.
The summer drought for us lasted about week tops. Never again will I let Mel have total control over the garden again like 2019. The lesson was learned the hard way and this year was spent fighting weeds again! It stayed cool until June 23nd. That's unheard of in Georgia! Then within days the temperatures shot through the roof with highs into the 90s. And, the rain and wind we got has been almost nonstop. We were hit from the south and east with remnants of hurricanes one after another. Even the hurricanes went through the alphabet ending (I think) with Zeta although the season is over, I still remember a Thanksgiving week more than a decade ago when a hurricane made landfall on the east coast. The week before Thanksgiving, the Weather Channel was tracking four tropical depressions and saying hurricane season wasn't over yet.
Our property has mostly been mud. At times, mud over ankle deep. It didn't do the garden any good with so much rain. No flooding because of the slope we live on though. We had flash flood warnings after warning come across our cell phones all spring, summer, and fall so far. The garden for vegetables was a bust with stunted growth, drown plants, withered plants, or weeds smothering the life out of them. The only saving grace was the abundance of fruit available for the picking.
We are still $300 short of buying 100 lbs of propane to cook with. Sigh! Any extra monies we saved was ate by car repairs. We did manage to build a new coop and run for Mel's Chicken Farm operation.
COVID-19 hit us quite literally. We've spent months trying to regain our stamina. Issues with my brace, not with standing, caused quite a few more days cramping my usual spring into summer and now into fall routine. In other health related news or more of the same, it seems that the virus not just affected Mel's lungs and stamina, but also her heart. She's been trying to throw herself into Congestive heart failure. She's on a constant supply of Lasix now to prevent her from going into full blown heart failure. It seems I'm rubbing off on her and actually living together we are now sharing ailments too.
Mel's budding egg sales operation dwindled and died before her eyes as mandatory shut downs across the state dragged on. Facebook marketplace, where Mel got most of her new clients (because the farmers market closed also and Craig's list is a joke to sell anything local), deleted her advertisement stating she was selling animals which is against their rules. Unfertilized eggs are live animals!? Go figure. To complicate matters further, there isn't a live person to contact about it. So her customers to date only buy about 11 dozen eggs a month. Our hens produce 22 dozen a month. There's only so many eggs I can store in long term stores, feed to the critters, and use each month.
The "community" dogs have suddenly decided that it's great fun to chase and kill our free ranging hens. We've lost four in the past month. Now that Kassity is busy with her puppies, it's up to Nnyus to lead these four dogs off the property away from our chickens. She's done a decent job because we've only lost four. But still, we can't afford losses like this. They might have only been $3 chicks, but they are now layers and worth a lot more.
Kassity's puppies are three weeks old today. Their eyes and ears are open. They are still trying to get around their fat bellies to walk on all fours. It's like watching your own children take their first steps. The pups have learned to growl at each other and a low bark so they aren't so whinny. Right now it's cute, but that will soon wear off. It's like when you teach your babies how to talk, but you don't have a mute button for them later on.
We are concerned about Kassity. She is literally skin and bones now. I got her on the scale this week and she's lost twenty pounds of her pre-pregnancy weight. We are feeding her four times a day and twice the normal amount of the recommended but still her ribs and spine are showing. Every bit of that food is going towards milk production for her babies. We had tried to feed her more but she refuses to eat it. We've supplemented her feed with protein rich foods stuff (human) like yogurt, eggs, leftovers, cheese, and extra raw meat to her food to no avail. Her skin just hangs on her bones. She no longer lays with the pups because if she's in there with them, they'll suckle at will. She put her pups on a feed every 3-4 hours schedule out of necessity. Her poor nipples are raw. I started rubbing A&D ointment on them. God help her, the pups are beginning to teethe now too. Any nursing mother (past or present)can empathize her pain.
With all this other stuff going on, we got a round of hay delivered. Yes, it cost me more, but it was worth it not to have to figure out how to get it to the house. I do miss Mel's Chevy Silverado. I'm still looking for a truck. Mel's Blazer is being eaten away by rust and age. Almost every month something breaks or has to be replaced, but at least it's a running vehicle. For the past week, we've been steadily pulling the round of hay apart and carting down 24' to the third tier down from where the hay bale is.
"Dear Santa, we need a free ('cause we're broke),small, running truck and tractor for Christmas! It doesn't have to be new just in good shape. I've been very good(said with fingers crossed behind my back). Honest."
In between times, I'm picking up twigs and sticks from the piles I've stacked all year for kindling for the wood stove. All six piles are roughly12' in diameter and about 5' high. They are roughly within east reach of the house (10'-20' from either door. I filled two 55-gallon, black trash cans to overflowing (I made a trail of 2' broken branches and twigs in my wake) and them up the ramps into the screened back porch. I barely made a dent in the pile. This is a good thing because there'll be many more trips like this before spring thaw and the nighttime temps are over 60.
We finally managed to replace (read purchase) our 6" chimney pipe assembly for the wood stove, get it painted, and installed this week. The one we replaced was rusted through in places. We have to replace it every three or four years because of rusting. We'll sand off the rust spots at the end of each winter and respray it with high heat spray paint before we store it away until we need it again. This time Mel screwed all the pieces together. The first time in seven years!!! Before, at least twice a season it has fallen into pieces and had to be put back up. I think she's finally learning. We were thinking about building an actual chimney covering, but it won't do any good because in three years this trailer will be gone and a brand new garden space will be in its place. In other words, it would be a waste of money.
We've broken out our needlework. Mel crochets and I knit. She's working on new bath mats for her bathroom and I'm working on an afghan for my bed. It's now cold enough that we don't mind the extra warmth the yarn provides. When I get bored with knitting, I'll switch to the spinning wheel and make more yarn or plarn to work with. I actually had to buy an additional merino fleece this year for the first time in about five years to have enough fiber to blend our remaining stockpile of angora and have soft enough to be next to your skin yarn. It'll only be a 20% blend unlike the 50% to 100% angora I'm used to spinning. I'm gearing up for the next year's farmers market for selling new and upcycled goods, and Mel's eggs. I imagine by next spring the market will be open
I only water bath canned fruits, jams, jellies as they came into season on my propane turkey fryer base semi outdoors in our screened in back porch this year so far. All the veggies, that I bought in bulk, I blanched and froze them. This all was preplanned to take advantage of the cooler months before the snows. It warms our screened in back porch wonderfully. We've only dropped down two of the three plastic sheeting enclosures for now. In about a month, we'll drop the third side to protect our citrus trees in pots, overwintering my pepper and tomato plants, and for seed starting next year.
Soon there'll be room in the freezer for my half hog I helped butcher last week with a new to homesteading family. I took my knives, designated hammer, and designated bone saw, but he had a band saw which made things much quicker. I also kept the intestines for sausage casings. I actually kept quite a bit of what they would have discarded. I offered to show Mrs. Wannabe Homesteader how to do anything with the off cuts, but she wasn't that into homesteading that far yet. Their refusal is my gain. It reminds me, I still got to strip and clean the intestines again before I make sausage with them. They'll be packed in salt in the refrigerator until I'm ready to make the sausages. By February, the hams, link sausages, and bacon will be ready for the smoker. Yum! February is going to be a busy, short month. It always is because of my systematic way of growing and purchasing meat. You see there is a strategic method to my madness.
What do I mean by systematically buying meat. Well, I only have one freezer for meat and one for vegetables supposedly. There's overflow that happens that may delay certain purchases. This year I bought produce in bulk rather than harvesting it over weeks so I chose to blanch and freeze it. There was room in my vegetable freezer for six bushels of tomatoes, 1/4 bushel of yellow squash, 1/4 bushel of zucchini, 1/4 bushel of sliced and diced onions. Nut a cubic inch was left so everything else went into meat freezer. The corn kernels, spinach, green and black eyed peas, green and small lima beans because the half lamb I bought was halfway depleted and the pork was depleted except for the five packages of pork chop which were moved to the inside the house refrigerator/freezer.
As fall hit with the cooler temperatures and all the fruit was canned, it was time to start on the vegetables. The spinach, greens, yellow squash, onions, zucchini, and whatever else I wanted to put in there like bags of ice would stay in the vegetable freezer as I processed the tomatoes into dices and sauce because that alone more than 3/4s emptied the vegetable freezer. Next was all the rest of the vegetable I didn't mind eating canned.. This emptied up space in my meat freezer for deer and pork. This always happens late fall. In the spring, It's time for lamb. In the late winter around February it's beef. Twice a year (maybe) it's chicken. The reason this is a maybe is now we have quail to supplement our poultry wants. Not all meat will stay in the freezer. Some will be canned and some will be freeze dried for "extreme long term" storage. Remember, I only use my freezer for short term storage which for me is 3-12 months max. I can for a period of 3-36 months. I dehydrate for 5-72 months. I freeze dry for shelf life up to 30 years not that I'll have it that long. There's my food stores mentality. There's no separate extended "If the SHTF" stores. It all gets put in rotation. It's all my working food stores and my SHTF prep also. It's only common sense, right? If there is no more stores we'll get by and that all anybody can expect or do. No hysterical panic buying here. <
getting off my soapbox now>
The covered screened porch will also be warmer in there when I can up my orange marmalade, citrus and salad in late December or January. Why wait so long to can these? This past week I bought a three pound bag of navel oranges thinking there had been enough time for last year's harvest to be depleted. I was wrong. From that bag of oranges, I ate one that was not dried or drying up. I was so disappointed.
Still, the year as a whole been all that bad considering. Unlike city folk, we haven't had to learn to be self sufficient and economize resources. We know how to forage and preserve food for the long and short term. We know how to recycle/upcycle, and make it or make do. Raise/hunt for and butcher our own meat. We don't lack of things to do or go still crazy at home. We're homesteaders already. In spite of it all, we've gotten things done. The new chicken coop and run are ready for when the coyotes become more active when the daytime temperatures fall more. The hens and Big Red will have their safe winter enclosure in style. Even though they'll be 360 degrees enclosed, it's not such a bad prison for only four months out of twelve.
Meanwhile, the young chicken roosters are awaiting their date with the ax as soon as they start to crow. They'll make a wonderful addition to my food storage building. So what if they are not fryers (10-14 weeks old), they will be pressure canned and come out just as tender. Just as Big Red, our 3 year- old RIR rooster, would be if he ever attacks me again as bad as last time. I was lame, more lame than usual, for almost a month from the puncture wounds.
Well, that's enough updates of what we've been up to? How's your week been?
Y'all have a blessed day!
Cockeyed Jo
