Category: Homesteading

Hawks and Eagles

I’m not sure if it is because the winter has been particularly cold or the local lake is drained and the ecosystem is disrupted … but we’ve never had a problem with hawks and eagles until this year. For most of the year, the buzzards keep them away. But this month! We lost a duck to a hawk — I came around the corner and saw the thing eating a duck. A week or so later, two ducks were missing and big feathery spots were in the duck yard. We put a small radio tuned to a talk station out in the duck yard — which seems to have helped there, but we lost two chickens today. I think a rooster tried to rescue the hen and was taken out. So Anya spent the day making scarecrows for both the duck and chicken yard. I mounted old CDs around the fence.

Sick Kitten!

Our younger cat growled at me when I picked him up this morning. When I put him down — he’s a bit of a growler — he had a bit of a limp. We kept him indoors and, as the day went on, his left hind leg got swollen. Scott took him into a local vet, and he had an infected bite! He’s got pain killers for a few days, and he got dosed up with antibiotics. I moved the cat bed into our family room so we could keep an eye on him as he sleeps and recovers.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Dark Cherries and Almond Flour

Anya made me birthday cookies! I wanted to save the recipe because they turned out really well.

 
Ingredients:
  • 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup almond flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 cup maple syrup
  • 1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1 cup frozen dark cherries, roughly chopped
Instructions:
  1. Preheat your oven to 375°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
  2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, almond flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
  3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the softened butter with the maple syrup until well mixed. The mixture will be looser than a typical creamed butter-sugar mixture due to the syrup.
  4. Mix in the Greek yogurt until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, mixing until just combined. The dough will be a bit softer due to the syrup and yogurt.
  6. Gently fold in the chocolate chips and frozen dark cherries until evenly distributed throughout the dough.
  7. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie to allow for spreading.
  8. Bake the cookies in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown and the centers are set but still soft. If you made really big cookies, this may be more like 20 minutes!
  9. Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Overnight Fermented Chicken Feed

I constantly read how awesome it is to ferment the chicken feed — except we’ve got a lot of birds, and it is cold outside (or hot) much of the year. So we would need a row of five-gallon buckets inside the house to manage the approaches I’ve seen where the feed sits and ferments for three to five days before it is used. I was curious how much fermentation you could get in 24-hours if you had some starter. So I took a scoop of chicken feed into the house & added a bunch of water. I let it sit on my nice, warm countertop for a few days. Then I put a day of food into a five gallon bucket & added my starter. Poured water over the whole lot of it & let the one bucket sit until I was going to feed the chickens the next morning.

Result? It’s got a nice sour/sweet aroma, was bubbling happily, and was well hydrated. The birds love the chicken food mash anyway, and a nice bucket of 70 degree mash on a cold winter day seemed like a nice treat even if the fermentation hadn’t gone anywhere. But it worked! I pull about a quart of the fermented feed to use as a starter, bring the bucket out to feed the birds, add more pellets to my empty bucket, pour the starter in, and cover it all with water until tomorrow when I do the same thing all over again.

IBC Lighting

We got a bunch of IBC totes for the price of a single one … storing water during the extra-wet parts of the year should let us get through the extra-dry parts without drawing on the ground water for crops. But the totes also glow in a very cool way when there’s a light source behind or inside of them. These would make pretty cool decorations! (and then I discovered that illuminated IBC tote walls are absolutely a thing someone else discovered)