Re-laoding

The other day I was lucky enough to get to reload the 243 shells I had fired over the last few years.

Most of these round were spent on controlling our groundhog population. Groundhogs may seem harmless to most people but their holes can really damage the haymaking equipment and have undermined the driveway and threaten the stability of the pond wall.

I mention this because when we first moved to the farm I had hoped to use the rifle mostly to hunt deer to provide meat for the family but I found that I spent most of the rounds killing groundhogs. These rounds, 100 grain full metal jacket, were not ideal for hunting small game. Providentially,we had to switched the bullet to a 85 grain hollow-point because they were really the only ones available. These will be much better for knocking down groundhogs. Actually, we did 20 100 grain solid rounds and 25  85 grain hollow point.

We are really lucky to have friends who have the reloading equipment set up and have a small stockpile of powder so I certainly saved some money thanks to their generosity. I was thinking about the sustainability of firearms. The only reusable part of the round is the casing. The used shell has to be cleaned, lubricated, ground down a little and a bevel added to prepare it to receive the slug or bullet. The old primer is removed and a new one added. Powder is weighed out and added to the casing (this is a delicate procedure). The slug is then pressed into the end.

So I am not sure if it would have a smaller carbon footprint than buying them factory made but it "felt good". That maybe a rather weak argument for doing something that took up most of my morning but I will definitely do it again.

 K

January Cold

 It has been amazingly cold this year. So far we have had 3 "polar vortexes". The nights have been bitter. It has caused us as a family to stamp our fossil fuel feet to drive away the chill leaving big dirty carbon footprints. We have managed to burn a lot of gas in the furnace. The ductless heat pumps have struggled to create warmth.

My hope and prayer is that the cold is killing some of the emerald ash borers that have been killing the ash trees. That it might have knocked some other pests too.

The frozen ponds ave allowed me to chop down some of the European Alders around the pond. They are weeds in many parts of North America and in New Zealand. They are weeds here on the farm. They are very useful trees though. To understand them better I read about them and found that in Europe they had many traditional uses. They have great herbal properties, their leaves can be used to catch fleas and flies, used as fodder for all types of livestock, the wood was used for smoking food and making charcoal. The wood was also used for forms and foundations in Venice. I hope to find time experiment with some of these uses over the next year.

I felled these trees with an ax and have developed a small passion for ax work. There is something very satisfying about it. Exploring the idea of doing some more "traditional" forestry work.

K.

Mulch

Thoughts about mulch.

There are two large piles of mulch, made from the tree trimmings the power company created, sitting around. I  noticed this morning were giving off steam in the cold. To my mind that means that they are decomposing. Now no addition of biomass to the farm is a real loss but it does seem like a waste to have it rot away to nothing.

I am not sure what to do with it other than just spread it around. It seems like it would make an surface for paths etc in the short term but I don't want it near buildings because I don't want to attract termites.

I read that Thomas Jefferson used woodchips and manure to create "hot beds that he used to start early peas during the cold of winter. Anyone uot there experimented with this? Have any thoughts or tips?

K

Butchering and bunnies.

This afternoon we went to our friends Matt and Rhiannon Hogan's where we helped butcher 4 chickens and took possession of a rex rabbit.

Butchering the chickens was a chance to try a "power plucker" first hand. The power plucker is a small 30 dollar device that attaches to an ordinary power drill and is designed to speed up the plucking process. It did speed up the process but still left quite a bit of hand plucking.

The four chicken were an experimental breed called "freedom-rangers". This breed, which originated in Burgundy, France, is supposed to produce excellent broilers on pasture and free range diets. The birds were large and heavy breasted with a good amount of fat. I think that we will order some in the spring.

We took the rabbit because it's temperment didn't make it a good pet. Rex rabbits were developed in Paris in 1919 for the velvety texture of their fur. I would like rabbits for meat. The Rex breed is not a meat breed but they are hardy and can live outside. We will see if Bun-bun will make a good sire.

K.

Timber

During the summer we had a storm that bought down a large Cherry Tree across the driveway. I thought that the timber seemed too good to waste and after some consultation I arranged to have it milled.

I am not sure how many board feet it amounted to but it seems like it is enough to do something substantial with. It is a rich red-pink color and smells interesting too.

What I learned from this experiance is that is probably worthwhile to have timber milled and at only 60 dollars a tree I will do it again soon.

Swine

The newest and most exciting thing to happen recently is that we went over to the Mounts farm last Sunday and purchase 3 Duroc pigs. Fall is usually the time for butchering pigs but we will be purchasing ours and doing the difficult thing of raising them though the cold winter months.

Wikipedia says of the Duroc that it "is an older breed of American domestic pig that forms the basis for many mixed-breed commercial hogs. Duroc pigs are red, large-framed, medium length, and muscular, with partially drooping ears, and tend to be one of the least aggressive of all the swine breeds. They also have an excellent rate of gain."

The 3 we are getting are barrows or castrated male feeder pigs for fattening up and butchering.We visited the pigs last week just after they had been castrated and the females of the litter had had their ears snipped as part of their registration process. (I joked with Moshe about snipping his ears so everyone knew when his birthday was.) Despite this it was a great visit and left us all feeling a little more enthusiastic about farming.

The boys an I worked on cleaning up the rooms where we had kept our pig from last year, Sausage Suzie. We are keen to make it a cleaner, safer and more secure space. The bigger challenge will be to create outdoor pens of grazing and training them to follow us to forage for mast in the woods and not run away and get lost. Sausage Suzie spent a couple of nights in the wild and survived but it is not a gamble we want to take again.

K.

winter wonder

"The wonderful thing about tapping trees is than it gives you a view into a world that would otherwise be hidden; the workings of a tree's anatomy." - Linda Wigington.

So, it begins. We have tapped the maple trees for the first time. We used the maple taps Emily's mother had gotten from Ed Crago. They had been sitting in the barn at the woods house since the eighties. They were very rusty. I soaked them in CLR and then brushed the inside with wire brush and then cleaned them on the grinder. I tapped the tree in the front yard which was to act as a kind of barometer of the sap run. It came out almost as soon as the bit cut through the bark. I rushed to finish cleaning a handful of taps and went out to tap some of the trees in the grove between the oil wells. We got a bucket or so in the first afternoon. W

e boiled it on the induction cooker outside. I managed to burn the first two batches despite being warned time and time again that you have to be constantly vigilant. Eventually we managed to make a batch. It tasted quite amazing. It was really a beautiful thing.