How our Thanksgiving is different

Let me list the ways:

We raised and killed our own goose. The day before Thanksgiving, we had foie gras and crackers - my homemade crackers with Parmesan and pepper, some with just butter and a few whole wheat crackers.

On T-day, there's no sports, unless you want to include herding the goats into the long driveway to eat what remaining grass there is. Oh, and avoiding the geese (the six remaining ones). It is the lean time of the year for the goats.

Mike made me Parker house rolls - which I haven't had since I was a kid. And they're delicious! Even though dinner's not ready, yet, we each had one to try them. MMMmmmm...

We're having potatoes - layered with a layer of yam in the middle of it -- this way of prep looks very cool and we have goose fat to put in it - fat that Mike rendered this morning. Beans, spinach salad with mandarin slices in it (and pecans) with goat cheese medallions.

With this, a bottle of Newton unfiltered that we had for a while. It is a celebration of a debt paid that has been going on monthly for the past 11 years (minus one year).


I made a pecan pie yesterday, one that came from my Grandmother on my father's side that was given to my mother and I put it into our 'recipes we actually use' notebook. That notebook is getting quite full.

We sat in the front yard and watched as a tiny finch-like creature graced us with its presence. Yesterday, I was working in the garden (getting it ready for next year) and an armadillo strolled through the main part of the garden on its way to the creek.

And I was driving around picking up firewood and saw a killdeer again - this time hurrying in and out of the tree area I was driving around in. They lay their nests on the ground in the rocks, so I just turned the cart around and made sure not to bother them. Today, Mike and I wandered out there to see if we could find the ground nest, but no luck. They hide them really well and it could have been that this bird was scoping out a place for a nest and didn't already have one.

All the goats that are pregnant seem more so this week. Maybe that's because we're home to spoil them. We bought some cheap, cheap beet greens for them a few days ago.

While wandering around the garden today with Mike to find the armadillos, He stumbled upon a rotting watermelon that I'd forgotten was there. I took it back and threw it high into the air into the chicken gulag and it splatted nicely. The chickens love the fruit and the rind... leaving the very thin outside shell (until they get desperate and eat that, too).

It's been a good day. And in a few hours, the goose will be cooked and dinner will be served.

I bet your day wasn't like this one.

Vacation Days 3 and 4.

It's already starting to be a blur... yesterday, we killed and eviscerated a goose - one of the African geese because we want one for T-day and these geese seem to have the loudest sound to them and are the most aggressive. Mike did the killing (took two shots to the head), then eviscerated it (see photo with him with his hand up the goose's butt).

We picked up the cart (yay!!!!) and it works! All that was wrong with it was some bad battery leads. We could have fixed it (having already replaced the solenoid (Mike, again) as well as the brushes in the starter/engine).

The weather is in the low 40s for the low in the mornings, which isn't really too cold. We're heating the house with wood (abundance here) and I volunteered to help a friend out by burning her old records (checkbooks, account statements, etc...) , so that becomes our starter paper for the fires.

Mike has been cleaning out his garage (ah, THAT's what we did Monday) while I was doing other things. He needs to paint the garage and get going on putting up french cleats. Should be interesting.

The chickens are getting fatter and healthier with our regime of more protein-based foods as well as supplements of whatever we have in the house, including eggshells and leftover vegetables. We throw in a cup or so of dried cat food now and then for added protein. The eggs are normal again (not rough on the outside, normal-ish sized and good yolks.)

Brr... it's kind of cold and I need to start moving around or these old bones will start to creak more than normal.

Relaxing Vacation? That's for wimps

Vacation, day two.

It's Sunday and the requisite guns went off in the afternoon. Very near, from the sound of them. This is, after all, Texas.

Today's stuff: We finished the 'inside-the-inside" chicken coop, captured and relocated the barred rocks (that lay and are NOT for eating.) They seem happy, spreading their wings and turning over on the concrete blocks that Mike put underneath the heat lamp (so it doesn't burn the barn down).

I cleaned out the little chicken coop - which means rolling up the feedbags that rest on top of the hardware cloth. By the time it needs to be cleaned, the smell is overpowering. If this was summer and we were raising chicks, the hardware cloth would be all that was on the bottom and the poop and stuff would just go to the ground. But it's coolish outside and we got these chicks on the 5th of November ("remember, remember, the 5th of November...") and it's cold outside. So I use empty feed bags to line the bottom of their cage. This works quite well and is easy to roll up.

Everyone says that chicks have to be at a certain temperature before they have all their feathers, but that's just plain poppycock. We have a heat lamp in this little coop and open the small door, and guess what? The chicks don't opt for heat, they opt for freedom (the chicken coop is about three feet off the ground, has a ramp and opens into a five by seven or so yard just for them).

While I was cleaning out the chicken coop, I left the door to the main coop open and Mike was yelling - Did I want the goats in the chicken coop and did I want the chickens to come out? - He was being facetious and angry - but you know, it's not like it's life-threatening. I screamed at the goats to get out and only two chickens escaped -- both which came back or were captured during the day and brought back.

I also gathered a bunch of leaves from the backyard and dumped them in the middle of the chicken yard. Chickens love to scratch around in the dirt.

Finished digging up and re-potting the three Thompson seedless I thought were pretty dead, but one of them has a leaf - a GREEN leaf on it that's coming out (the weather has been quite mild in Texas this winter - so far). I think another one of them is still alive, but we'll see. I repotted it (and put the new container in a container of rainwater, only to lift it out and have the water pouring out the bottom of the pot - right onto my jeans.

Mike has begun to prep for painting the garage - which means moving heavy equipment around so that the walls are bared. He cleaned out the garage and cleaned off the workbench. With all his shiny new equipment, it's kind of cool to watch him transform our garage into a workshop.

We also let the goats in the front yard for the first time in a long while -- and had to sit with them so that they do not destroy the fruit trees by getting on their hind legs and leaning on the branches.

We saw a tiny bird today - not familiar with it, but Mike saw it hopping around the trees a bit. So he put out a thistle feeder and I had already refilled the bird feeders today.

I also cleaned out the pond filter - and Mike noticed that we now have three frogs living there - or I should say three MORE frogs, because he swears that these are not any of the ones we got out of the pond when I cleaned it a few weeks ago and drained it.

Last night I didn't sleep so well (a combination of hot chocolate, caffeine and over-tiredness). And now I just want to snooze like there's no tomorrow.

Signing off.

Murder in the afternoon

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Okay! ARE YOU READY??? OKAY, NOW, RELAX, DAMMMMMITTTT!!! Or, otherwise titled, "Vacation, Day One."

We always say we're not getting out of bed until 9am on vacation days, but we always get up right around 7. Maybe stay in bed an extra thirty minutes, each of us thinking about the day ahead. Which is a waste, you know.

Yesterday, Mike called the Kenfield Golf Carts on Pond Springs Road, way the F)*()#$# on the other side of Austin - to find out that they're open today from 9 to Noon... and it would take us - or so we thought - about 50 minutes to get there from the house. So Mike starts a little after nine am to get the cart put back together (he replaced the brushes in the starter/engine and the solenoid a few weeks ago. Neither made it go). The starter wheel now just turns slightly. But it still don't go.

In two hours, Mike has to put it back together, fill one of the wheels with air in the back and reseat the bead on it. We cleaned it up and then tried to get it onto the truck bed. After two hours of exertion and while we're just leaving the farm, Mike said: "If I was going to have a heart attack, I would have during all this," We only had just slightly over an hour and ten minutes to get the cart to the cart shop and finally, we were on our way. Out the gate, then to the second gate near the road.

"Wait! Stop!"

What now?

Barbecue had escapes the confines of the farm and was just casually walking down the road. Great. Stupid dog. Get her into the driveway, close the outer gate -- which means she'd be without food or water until we got back home.

Then we head to the shop, but Mike insists on taking the toll road to 620 and then to 183 or some such nonsense. It takes a long time, we're both stressed and when we pull into the shop at 12:05, everything looks closed. We catch someone who says the manager's inside and we plead our case... we've come from Bastrop and, implied, it's a long drive. They let us us. It is Mike's way of pushing it, you know, but even he was getting frustrated by slow drivers, red lights and, um, driving for miles out of the way. (ducks).

We headed to Der Wienersnitzel (one of those places we don't have on our side of the world, but it's a Kristi place, not a Michael place.). I had gotten a Saveur baseball gimme cap in the mail while Mike was enclosing Barbecue in the driveway and wore it to the fast food place. Oh, the irony.

So we come back and hey, it's time to rest, right? I was a little restless having been in the truck for three hours and went to take the rest of the hay from the hay stall (we always let the goats in to clean up after we've fed them all that's in there). I look and what looks back at me is a sleeping possum. I run like hell to the house while Brisket, the dog, who's not used to seeing me run so fast, barks like crazy at me.

"Get the .22!" The possum must have been there a long time under the pallets that we put on upright cinderblocks. It had made a nice little nest. The last time I raised the pallets, I noticed that the hens had been laying there... at least there were a ton of eggshells everywhere. Now I know why. Mike suspects that when we let the goats in to graze the final bits of hay before we put in the new stuff, that they ate away part of the top of this creature's 'hole' in the hay. Also, this is probably the same possum that both Brisket and Barbecue had cornered in a tree a few weeks ago.

It was a convenient arrangement: The possum simply lays around, waits for the hens to lay or goes and gets them from nests in the barn and eats them, then goes back to sleep cozily under the pallets. I'd been wondering about Brisket and his harming chickens enough to kill them, but now I think he had some help. Also, the goats tend to stand around and stare at something with their ears on high alert when something's off or odd in the neighborhood. We just haven't been paying attention.

Mike put his boots on -- after thinking we were, you know, going to have some downtime, and gets the .22 from the place we keep it, goes to the barn and shoots the possum in the head. I feel completely helpless as I grab a shovel and went to our pet cemetery to start digging a hole, leaving Mike to shovel up the creature, find something to put it in, then collect the bloody hay in the hay stall, as well. My hole was in the wrong place, of course, and was dug into very hard dirt (as really, no rain and all that creates a very hard tundra here). So Mike dug a new hole, as well.

So finally, we can rest a little, lay in bed a bit... but then we're just laying there after all the commotion and it's hard to close our eyes, much less sleep.

"Hot chocolate?"

"Sure!" Why not, the day is young.

One of the reasons we moved out here to the country is to have more "active" lifestyles (I  have a lifestyle???!!) 
At our last place it was too easy to sit before the TV and vegg out.  So now we have these 15 acres and around a hundred and forty some odd animals and things are busier.  Very busy.  Just a partial list of what needs to be done.  

The aforementioned trailer repair.  You never know how much you use something until it's unavailable.  

The cart.  That gets used daily for transportation around the place, as a wheelbarrow, for cleaning out the barn, for planting, harvesting, moving machinery, collecting animals, and sometimes it's nice to drive out to a seldomly visited area and have a glass of wine and discuss things.  

The deck.  I've been working on it for nearly a year and it's woefully incomplete. I'm redoing a section now and I expect some progress to happen here pretty soon.

The backyard fence. Bad dry rot.  It doesn't help that the goats rub up against it to scratch.  Several posts are leaning precariously.  This is a big project as there are 52 posts that need replacing.  

Vineyard gate. To provide easy access without having to go through the barnyard.  When you open the barnyard gate there are over a hundred animals that all want to stand on your feet and see if you have anything to eat. Avoiding them whenever possible is a good thing.

Herb Garden. Kristi had built a large, great herb garden.  Basil higher than your waist, even if you are a tall person.  Oregano, thyme, fennel, Lemon balm, catnip, rosemary and others.  Alas, it was build over a buried electrical line that runs between the house, the shed and the pond.  As we watered the herb garden, it would short a splice in the wire and the power would go out to the shed and pond.  So the garden had to go.  It needs to be relocated before spring.

Greenhouse. I had chosen a rigid clear plastic panel for the roof and walls.  Unfortunately the plastic I used was very brittle.  Just 2 months after I built the greenhouse (converted a large animal shelter) we had a hailstorm that battered large holes in it.  I have to remove all the panels and replace it with a different material.  The time for this project is right now. Since the greenhouse is best used Fall, Winter and Spring.

Pond. I have to put something in for geese and waterfowl.  We only have a barrel for them now and it's too small and gets fouled to easily.  This won't be huge, but maybe a couple of hundred gallons with a liner.  Then the geese can swim and dive and produce more geese for the freezer.

This is only a partial list and there are new items that pop up frequently.  Of course there are projects that look like emergencies and have to be done immediately.  Those don't appear on any list.  Well, gotta get to it...

Finished stuff

Finished: The buck pen. The pea chicks. One of them drowned and one just disappeared. I suspect the hawks that have been squealing in the mornings here, but it's just a guess. With raccoons, possums, dogs, coyotes, etc... there's always some predator or the other around to let you know that life is fragile.

Unfinished: The deck project. Fixing the trailer so that we can go pick up compost and such - which means replacing all the rotten boards - basically all of them. When we last put the tractor on it, the wheels crashed through the boards. It's time.

We have made progress this last year, though... finishing the chicken coop, figuring out how to rotate the fields so that the goats have enough to eat all the time, fixing the fencing (but not the long part) so that the goats can't go eat the neighbor's pasture. Buying a livestock guardian dog, buying stuff for Mike's eventual creative works in wood (and cabinetry)... it has been a big year.

Oh! And we bought twenty merlot grape vines (two-year-old vines) to plant in the spring. This will require putting in a new gate on one of the fenced in areas where the previous guys who owned the place had a horse shelter (a lean-to). The whole area is divided in two (not evenly) and is about 20 feet wide and about 100 feet long. We had grown gourds successfully there a few years ago and are now going to make that our vineyard. It only has a foot gate in it right now, so that will have to change and put a gate in large enough to accommodate our tractor and cart.

Right now, I make wine with a mash of black, seedless grapes from the store, with regular yeast and sugar. It works and is probably better than what we've been drinking. I put a balloon on top of the glass jug the mixture is in and when the yeast action is over, the balloon will deflate and it will be ready to rack a few times for clarity and to get the yeasty taste out of it. Then it will be drinkable.

Oh, the cart. It's broke. We just replaced the solenoid and it still didn't work. Advice online says it might be brushes in the starter area (technical term) and those will come via UPS in a few days.

We also ordered a new replacement canning element for our stove. We have three and when we lit this particular one up a few weeks ago, the rods in it sparked and hissed. Time to go.

Just made pea soup and the first batch of fruited sorbets for the year. Low-fat, but higher in cals. However, it IS something sweet and if I had my druthers, I'd probably just eat chocolate.

Who wouldn't?

Fall blues (and greens and yellows...)

Our chickens were beginning to tell us that they didn't have what they needed -- they gave us a very wrinkled egg one day and I went on the warpath. More oyster shell (free choice), more protein, better and fresher water... And so far it seems to have worked. We have 36 chickens... wait, we have more, but that's coming... we have had 36 chickens for some time and lost three of them. One to Brisket - perhaps two, really, who thought the chickens were play things and were a little rough with them. We lost a few red hens - the ones we were supposed to eat, but couldn't catch (ten of them hid in the forested area behind the barn), and one more, I think, just died of a heart attack.

But we weren't getting any eggs, so Mike, almost single-handedly, added another three feet of fencing around the chicken area and completed the last segment of regular fencing. So now there are only three of them that can get out. The other 33 stay in the large area which has a ten by 20 space inside and about double that outside. Now, with the regime of very clean water, with oyster shell and more protein, we get about a dozen eggs a day. This still isn't very good, so what did we do?

We bought more. And because we bought some really foul fowl (cornish, instead of cornish-cross), we were looking at a whole year of not having good roasting or smoking chickens. So guess what? We bought more!

We bought 25 more cornish-cross (The right ones this time), and 25 more barred rock chicks (for eggs. they'll produce in another 5 months).

The photo shows them in the old chicken coop, with a heat lamp and feed. Mike had them shipped and when he arrived at our tiny little post office in Bastrop, he could hear them in the background being quite noisy. A few people stopped him and were surprised that anyone still purchased chicks through the mail, anymore. "Oh, how cute!"

We also have a rat in the tack room. We bought some traps and are hoping to capture it at some point.

The geese are fine. Too damned fine, if you ask me. I think I saw two of them mating this afternoon - they were using our stock tank (which now needs to be cleaned out) to do this deed, even though there is a piece of plywood floating in it (it should be hung over it, but it fell and the bungee cords are also in the water, now).

More later if there's time...