Peaceful Heart FarmCast

In today’s podcast “Best Animals for a Homestead” is the topic. We have tried many animals and plan to try a few more. The best animals for a homestead will depend on your goals and land situation. I’ll talk about our thought processes and how we came to choose our animals and specific breeds.

Let me take a minute to say welcome to all the new listeners and welcome back to the veteran homestead-loving regulars who stop by the FarmCast for every episode. If it were not for you, this show would not exist. I appreciate you all and hope you and your families are doing well. I’m so excited to share with you what’s going on at the farm this week.

Because this podcast is generally about the best animals for a homestead, I’ll keep the garden and fruit portion relatively short.

The garden is amazing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We love this ground cover. The plants are thriving like they never have before. Even with the harsh heat we have been experiencing, everything is thriving.

The tomatoes are coming on strong. There seemed to be only a few tomatoes for a while, but now when I go out there, I see every plant has many, many tomatoes. It won’t be long now. The only type of tomato I am growing this year is a paste tomato. I will get my slicing tomatoes from other vendors at the farmer’s market. My tomato crop is specifically designed to produce lots of tomatoes to be used in making tomato sauce and barbecue sauce.

Peppers are up next. You can’t have tomato plants without pepper plants. They are all doing so well. The sweet banana peppers starting bearing first, then the jalapeno and cayenne started ripening. I’ve harvested only one green bell pepper but many more are in the near future. The plants are strong and bearing lots of fruit. They just need to get a bit bigger. It’s going to be a fabulous year for peppers. That green bell pepper was out of this world. I like to cut up a banana pepper and sprinkle it over my eggs while they are cooking. The peppers get cooked just enough to add their fabulous flavor to the eggs.

All of the potatoes have been harvested. We had about 75 square feet of red potatoes and 25 square feet of Yukon Gold potatoes. Most of them were quite small but also quite healthy. They are the size of new potatoes, about two to three inches in diameter, and I am treating them as such. Rather than curing and firming the skins, I’m letting them be with their thin skins so perfect for boiling and roasting.

In the past we have lost many potatoes before getting them out of the ground due to rotting with fungus. Again, this time all healthy. I’m ready to plant again.

I started picking the crowder peas a few days ago. And then again last night I picked them again. I will wait another day or two and give them another go. I have great luck with crowder peas every year. It appears this year will be a bumper crop year.

This is my first year for really growing basil. I am really pleased with how easy it was to grow this herb. I’m packaging up 2 cup bags to take to the farmer’s market. Come see me on Saturdays in Wytheville, VA 8 am to noon. I’m including a fresh Basil Pesto recipe with every purchase. If you’re not in my area and want the recipe, I’ll put a link in the show notes. Or just hop over to our website at Peaceful Heart Farm dot com and select “recipes” from the menu. It will be at the top of the list.

The Oregano and Thyme are also doing well. The parsley and cilantro don’t look so good. I’ll have to investigate how to do better with those two. I think the Rosemary will also do well, but it grows much slower. Because we have lamb, we use a lot of rosemary. And I love it when it’s fresh. Dried works okay. But fresh is the best. I have a little bit of mint growing here and there also. I want to try a mint sauce recipe with our lamb. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that so far and am looking forward to it. I may make some mint jelly as well. Sometimes mint sauce recipes use mint jelly or offer it as a substitute ingredient.

The blackberry bushes are producing lots of fruit. However, it is such a jungle down there I’m not really able to harvest it. We have been doing other tasks and have let them get overgrown. Blackberry canes are very prolific. Perhaps you’ve had some wild ones invade your space. They can be a real pain. Most of ours are thornless, but there are many wild volunteers that make picking the berries a greater challenge. Certainly not as much of a challenge as picking from a patch that is entirely wild with an abundance of thorns, but a hindrance just the same.

I really enjoy picking berries when there are no thorns. Well, I guess we need to just take a day to go in there with hedge trimmers and cut out the...

Prepare for disaster is a motto I grew up with living in rural Michigan. Back in the day, when the power went off due to a winter storm, it could be off for several weeks. Today we have much better electrical systems and our current provider has kept us in good shape. We have never been without power for more than a few days. But even that can be disastrous if we are not prepared. Today I want to talk about how we prepare for disasters that may or may not happen.

First, let me take a moment to say welcome to all the new listeners and welcome back to the veteran homestead-loving regulars who stop by the FarmCast for every episode. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I appreciate you all so much and I couldn’t do it without you. It’s midwinter and life goes on here at the homestead.

The cold weather has been consistent for weeks. Not too cold, getting just below freezing at night and 40s and sometimes 50s during the day. This is a typical Southwestern Virginia winter. I look for a few days of freezing weather sometime in the near future. A typical winter will have at least four or five days when the temperatures drop all the way to the teens and occasionally single digits overnight. That four or five day stretch usually happens at least once and sometimes twice, usually in January. It hasn’t happened yet. Still waiting for that shoe to drop. We did have some unseasonably cold weather in December, but January is proceeding right long the normal line.

The cows are handling the cold weather as they always do. It amazes me that these animals can go through the winter without seeming to notice it too much. I go out there and the cows are moseying around, eating grass and/or hay looking like they don’t have a care in the world. If they are eating, they are laying down, relaxing and chewing their cud, again, like they haven’t got a care in the world. Personally, I don’t handle cold very well, but I’m so glad they do.

The donkeys handle the cold very well also. Their coats are full and thick. Just about everyday they come up to the milking shed looking for a treat. Scott or I will give them a small handful of sweet feed and a petting. When they are finished, they head on down to the creek and out to pasture with everybody else. Our donkeys are the friendliest animals on the homestead.

The sheep and goats always prepare for disaster in winter. They have really thick coats. Our goats are cashmere goats. They have a really thick undercoat of cashmere that they shed in the spring. Our sheep are hair sheep which means they also grow a thick coat of wool and shed it in the spring. No shearing for these sheep. I was watching the ewes graze in the front pasture. Just like the cows, not a care in the world.

The quail are even more amazing to me. They have feathers and I can’t see that they have any extra feathers for winter. Whatever they have is what they have and that’s it. My ladies and gents have it better than they would out in the wild. There is a box shelter where they can get completely out of the wind. They can huddle together for added warmth. Sometimes I go out there and they are kind of fluffed up, but other than that, not a shiver. Nature is amazing.

This time of year is the time to plan for the spring garden. What plants will we grow? How many? What will be rotated to another location? And so on. I’m a bit behind on getting started with that but I just can’t seem to drum up the energy. It’s too cold and I don’t want to think about going out in the garden when it is cold. Anyway, I’ll get to it in the next couple of weeks.

The creamery roof is nearly complete. Scott is putting the finishing touches on the peaks. He spent much of the day yesterday rigging up a way to safely move around up there. Today he is full steam ahead getting those ridge caps completed.

Still to come is all of the ends of the building above the ground floor. I think they are called dormer walls or something like that. It’s basically the area from the top of the block building to the peak of the roof. All of that will be covered in the same metal as with the roof.

It’s cold out there every day. And every day Scott is out there working in it. He doesn’t mind the cold and he prepares for it with layers of clothes.

Speaking of being prepared, let me get into how we prepare for disaster. Some of it anyway. I could probably talk all day long about how we created and executed our plan. Some of it is still in progress.

No matter where you are in the world, there is always something you can do to prepare for disaster. You simply never know when power is going to be out or something disrupts the flow of goods. For instance, I got caught short this summer because there was a shortage of canning jars and lids. In the end, I did have enough for ...

So much going on with spring births on the homestead. And abandoned lamb was the immediate task to take care of today. A quick trip to town to get supplies and now I’m late getting to this podcast. That’s what it’s all about on the homestead. I have so much to share with you today and most of it is so much fun!!

I want to take a minute and say welcome to all the new listeners and welcome back to the veteran homestead-loving regulars who stop by the FarmCast for every episode. I appreciate you all so much. I’m so excited to share with you what’s going on at the homestead this week. As I said there is a lot of it and all relates to spring births.

Before getting to that abandoned lamb, let’s start with the garden and the birthing of new plants.

If you are new to gardening perhaps you are not familiar with the terms spring garden, summer garden, and fall garden. Spring is the time of year to plant crops that thrive in cool weather. Some can thrive in the heat, like maybe potatoes. But most spring garden plants require cool temperatures. Things like lettuce and spinach will simply give up and go to seed if it gets too hot. Other things like root crops will just not grow in the heat. Their growth stalls and there is nothing to do for it but try again in the fall when the weather cools off again.

This spring we are planting two kinds of peas, snap peas and shelling peas. Shelling peas are those green peas that you buy frozen or canned. Snap peas are best for salads and such. They are eaten pod and all, though they can be shelled as well. But the pods are sweet and crisp.

I’m not going to plant potatoes this spring although Scott did dig up the potatoes that we had left in the ground over the winter. They were just starting to sprout and grow again. Really, we should have had them out of the ground a week or so ago before they sprouted. Fortunately, there are not tons of them. We will be able to eat them before they get soft. In the normal course of planting, I would have planted some of them for a new crop. I have enough potatoes and will forgo them this spring. Perhaps in the fall.

I have yellow, red and white onion sets to plant. Onions make bulbs according to the amount of light they need. There are short season, mid-season and long season varieties. Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and other northern states can grow those long season varieties. During the height of summer, the hours of daylight are significantly higher than we get in Southern Virginia. And farther south from us, only the short season varieties will grow. The farther south you get, the more equal the day and night hours become. While far in the northern States like Alaska, they have sunlight nearly 24 hours at the height of summer. Of course, it is dark for nearly 24 hours in the winter also.

Strange place, Alaska. I was there twice. Once near the spring equinox and the days and nights were fairly equal. But the second time I was there in July, just past the summer solstice. The sun was still up at midnight. It dipped below the horizon for about 3 hours and then daylight began to show once again. It happened in Germany also. I was there in August and it was daylight past 11:00 pm and the sun was back up long before I got up in the morning.

So that’s the story of onions. The rest of the garden will get planted in May. That will be the green beans, herbs and crowder peas.

The 500 strawberry roots are all planted and looking great. Leaves are visible on almost all of them. The beds look fantastic. Scott did a great job there. That bank of strawberries will also have four sections of culinary herbs. I already have a good stand of thyme and oregano. Inside I have started more rosemary as it didn’t do so well last year and I just let it go over the winter. It can survive the winter but needs protection. It did so poorly that I just decided to start over this year. And just today I got some garden sage seeds to fill in that fourth section in between the strawberries.

The blueberries and blackberries are leafing out. The blueberries will bloom soon and we will have berries around the first or second week of June. The blackberries will be ready in mid-July.

On to the cows.

Last time I talked with you, we had one calf. Now we have three. Rosie, our new Jersey heifer gave birth to Princess. Then Cloud gave birth to Winston. And finally, Claire gave to birth to a, yet unnamed, bull calf. No one has had any trouble so far, knock on wood. Butter and Violet have a bit of time to go before giving birth, Late May and early June respectively.

Now to the fun part of the cow story. Rosie, though she is her first calf, was giving about 2 1⁄2 gallons of milk per day. We were estimating in the beginning because Princess was getting her share so we guessed about how much she was drinking. We were getting abo...

For a little change of pace, Popular Cheeses is today’s topic as I’m sure I’ve worn you all out with all of those raw milk podcasts. The recipe today is a fun, quick and easy method of making your own fresh cheese, or as the Mexican cheese lovers call it, queso fresco.

I want to take a minute and say welcome to all the new listeners and welcome back to the veteran homestead-loving regulars who stop by the FarmCast for every episode. I appreciate you all so much. I’m so excited to share with you what’s going on at the farm this week.

• Homestead Life Updates
• Popular Cheeses
• Queso Fresco

Just a few quick notes here. The most important news first.

We have a new calf. Cloud gave birth to Luna on the 23rd of November. She was a healthy and vigorous 70-pound heifer. Mom and calf are doing really well. The other cows are drying up for their winter respite from producing milk.

Scott finished all of the blocks of the interior walls in the creamery. He is off to other tasks for the past few days. Fixing fences and preparing the pastures for winter grazing and hay-feeding as we move into the winter season on the homestead.

The sheep and goats are doing well, though we are missing two goat girls. All of the goats were escaping, as goats do on a regular basis. Scott fixed the place in the fence where they were escaping but we are still missing two. Scott also moved the goats from one pasture to another so perhaps the stragglers simply haven’t figured out where everyone is at the moment. There are gates open at various places so they can get inside a pasture and closer to the main group. No sign of them for a couple of days. We will keep our eyes open and do some serious searching if needed.

I had the pleasure of making a meal for the women staying at the homeless shelter sponsored by our church. We always have an abundance of food and this is a great way to help those who are less fortunate. Homelessness is running rampant in the US. I could just complain about how bad it is and look for the government to step in and do something. However, I wanted to make a real difference. Most of these ladies are either mentally ill and incapable of caring for themselves or have issues with drugs and/or alcohol. It’s a difficult situation and one without an easy solution. I do what I can to ease their troubles with a good hot meal on a cold night. I’ll be providing these meals 2 to 4 times per month throughout this winter. Cooking for 30 is a challenge but I’m up to it.

Last night, along with the meat loaf, green beans and chocolate cake, they got to try my very excellent mac and cheese. It was as big hit. The popular cheeses in that recipe are gruyere and cheddar which I will be touching on in today’s podcast.

Let’s talk about some of the popular cheeses; how to recognize them and what to do with them. As I have talked about previously, cheese results from an interaction between milk and bacteria or an enzyme called rennet. For more information on basic cheesemaking please see my previous podcast, “The Basics of Cheesemaking.”

In a nutshell, the milk proteins (casein) coagulate, forming the solid curds, which then are separated and drained from the liquid whey. Additional processing, both before and after coagulation and whey separation, include: adding special cultures and bacteria, yeast or mold; salting; pressing; aging; and curing. Various combination of these processes create the variety of cheeses available today.

There are several subgroups that I will talk about today. Based on processing techniques, cheeses fall into a few select areas. There are hard cheeses, semi-hard cheeses, semi-soft cheeses, and soft cheeses which come in both fresh and ripened varieties.

I’m going to give a very brief overview and description of a few popular cheeses and how each might be used in your home. Brief overviews and a select few is all I will have time for today. If you’d like more information, please comment below the podcast and I will answer your questions to the best of my ability.

Hard cheeses have been aged to reduce moisture content to about 30%. Hard cheeses often are used for grating. Maximum flavor comes from freshly grated cheese. Some of the most popular cheese in the category of “hard” follow.

Asiago: asiago is an Italian cow’s milk cheese with a tangy, nutty flavor and a texture that varies depending on the age of the cheese. Asiago is white to pale yellow and melts easily. Wendy’s fast food restaurant makes an asiago chicken sandwich. This asiago is sliced, not grated but certainly melts well. Yum, yum.

Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parmesan): True Parmigiano-Reggiano is a cow’s milk cheese from an area in Italy near Parma...

Our raw milk cheese creamery was the center of the day today. The construction is moving along nicely. Our state inspectors made an appearance and helped us out with details on safety measures. We work with them every step of the way to make sure all safety concerns are addressed.

I want to take a minute and say welcome to all the new listeners and welcome back to the veteran homestead-loving regulars who stop by the FarmCast for every episode. I appreciate you all so much. I’m so excited to share with you what’s going on at the farm this week.

Winter animal care was high priority today. Let’s talk about that before we get into the details of our lovely raw milk cheese creamery project. We check up on the animals regularly. Some we can easily see in the front fields and every time we go out the driveway. Others are out there in the back fields. It takes a bit more effort to check up on them, but rest assured, they are not out of sight, out of mind. I’ll start with the cows.

Our beautiful Normande cows are the centerpiece of our small farmstead raw milk cheese creamery. It is our habit to check on them first. I say first, but they are all out there together. And while we may be aiming at the cows, sometimes it is the sheep or goats that we encounter first. Many times, it is the donkeys. More on that later.

There are five big girls in our current herd. I say big girls because these five have already had a calf. We have our newest arrival, Rosie, who is still known has a heifer. That means she has never had a calf. I guess technically she is a bred heifer. She has never had a calf but is currently pregnant. Currently she is in a pasture with the younger calves so we can keep a closer eye on her as her pregnancy progresses.

Anyway, of the five big girls, four are pregnant. Everyone looks healthy and happy. Claire barely looked up as I approached. She was far too busy eating grass to give me much notice. Violet always looks up whenever we come near. She wants attention and yet she doesn’t want attention. I guess what she really wants in a treat. But they don’t get treats in the winter. Only during lactation. So, she will have to wait until late March or early April to get any more treats. Butter is quite open to petting, while Buttercup avoids it at all costs. Cloud has had her hooves repaired but she is still quite standoffish when out in the field. All of them are easy to get close to when they are up in the milking shed. Funny how that goes.

The grass in those back fields is holding up very well. They are literally still eating green grass and it is coming on close to mid-December. Scott believes they will not need hay until late February. I can’t tell you how great that is for a couple of reasons. The cost, of course, is always the first concern in my mind. I do all of the accounting and cost is always on my mind.

The next great thing is that the green grass is always going to be better nutrition and the animals truly prefer grass to hay. We want to keep them on green grass for as long as possible. Ideally, we would be able to graze them all the way through the winter until the spring grass appears in late March. That is a goal we likely will not meet for many years. We would need additional pasture, especially as we are on a path to grow our herd.

If we double our herd size, having green grass available to them for the entire winter is a really long shot without clearing some of our wooded areas and turning them into pasture. That’s a huge job for the distant future. They do fine on hay. It’s just similar to having a burger and fries when you really want a nice traditional home-cooked dinner. Sure, the burger and fries will keep you fed. But the real treat is that homemade roast leg of lamb with macaroni and cheese on the side. Throw in some crowder peas and it is a meal to be savored.

Speaking of savoring a good meal, the sheep will continue to eat as much grass as they can scrounge. When the pickings get slim, the cows will rush to the hay as Scott brings it into the pasture. However, even when they have hay available, the sheep are going to go for every little bit of grass they can find. They eventually go eat the hay. And shortly thereafter, they are right back out there grazing on little bits of grass.

One of the regular exercises we do when checking on animals is counting them. Well, we don’t really count the cows. They are all grazing quietly in the field and we simply identify them by name. The sheep can be a little trickier. They hang out in a bunch and they move together almost as one unit. Trying to pick out individual animals is nearly impossible. Even counting bodies can be a challenge. One method that works well is for Scott to walk toward them from one side and I hang out toward the other side. As they...