We wrapped up work on the Chicken Mobile Home (truth be told, there are a few details to finish, but it probably is as finished as it is going to get). If we get a string of warm, dry weather we’d like to paint the plywood, but that’s a bit of finesse that is rarely …
I was surprised to see a drawing of a pig with wattles in Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals & Plants Under Domestication. Here is the accompanying text: Another curious anomaly is offered by the appendages, described by M. Eudes-Deslongchamps as often characterizing the Normandy pigs. These appendages are always attached to the same spot, to the …
Today I spotted my first flowers of the year. I found these flowers in wet, low lying woods. I believe these are Anemone hepatica, although if anyone wants to disabuse me I’m willing to listen; I’ve never been a competent taxonomist. The snow is entirely off the fields, with only small patches in the shady spots. All over …
Pileated woodpeckers spent the early part of the winter boring out some of the Aspen (Poplar or Popple) trees behind the house. I’m not sure what influences their choice of trees. The trees they chose don’t look much different than their unscathed neighbors, but obviously they have very specialized knowledge about what they are doing. From …
We are pleased with the way the new mobile chicken coop is shaping up. We welded in new angle iron floor bracing, then installed slatted floor. The floor is only rated for 10 pounds per square foot, so working inside the coop requires us to carefully keep our feet over the steel bracing. The weight restriction …
Here’s another sausage recipe we’ve made a few times and enjoyed: Creole Chaurice Sausage. The recipe comes from the Times-Picayune Creole Cookbook from 1904. Andouille is the Creole sausage that everyone’s heard of, but a well-made chaurice deserves as much recognition. Its name indicates Spanish roots related to chorizo. Chorizo has evolved along divergent paths, so …
After years of using cobbled-together, disheveled shelters for the laying flock, I’ve decide it is time to build a substantial shelter. Three years ago a neighbor down the road gave us his old trailer. He custom built it for for raising pigs so it had a shelter at one end and slatted wood decking. The decking was rotted out, …
Last week I read Old Yeller to the kids. As our family is attuned to the agricultural details of books, it engendered some discussion of the livestock husbandry practices of the story’s Texas frontier settlers. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of the account, but there was strong internal consistency and attention to detail, so I …
I thought I’d put together a few blog posts on some of our favorite sausages and include the recipes we’re currently using. Note the temporal adverb “currently”; these recipes are always under development. Probably the best place to start is Sweet Italian Sausage. This is the workhorse sausage around here. Sausage really only needs a few …
The farm dog has an important role so we try to give an adequate compensation for the services rendered. Lando eats a local, organic, raw-foodist diet. This isn’t any sort of carefully sequenced, portion controlled diet. It is more of whatever comes to hand, and on a farm with livestock, there’s really no shortage of food for him. …
