Goat Milk

A huge part of being self-sufficient is producing your own milk from goats or cows. We have recently changed over to the cow, and I will post more on that later. Goats are relatively easy to keep and not as costly as a cow. I will post on the differences between goats and cows for milk in an upcoming post. I don't want to step on all my goat lover friends, but I have to say, I'm really enjoying the cows! While cow milk is more versatile, there's alot you can do with the goat milk. One thing is soft cheeses. Here's my recipe for an easy and delicious soft goat cheese:



16 c. raw milk
1/2 c. vinegar

Heat the milk in a stainless steel pot until bubbles form around the edges and it's steaming. Remove it from the heat and pour in the vinegar. Stir until curds appear, which will be very quick. Drain this in a strainer and let it sit for 10 minutes. Transfer the cheese into a container and refrigerate or freeze it. You can blend this if you want it creamy, such as using it for pasta dishes, or leave it in small curds and use as a dip. Experiment with adding things to it. The photo above is one I made for a spaghetti topping and on top of garlic bread. I added salt, garlic, and fresh basil. You can add pineapple with nuts, garlic with crushed red pepper, dill, minced marinated olives with garlic, etc. Have fun and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

Turkey Jerky

I meant to post this right after Thanksgiving, but alas! Here's what I do with extra turkey. I buy more than one turkey during the Thanksgiving season because they are so cheap. I cook one in the oven and just enjoy it. If it's too big for your family to eat two meals from it, use the leftovers for sandwiches or casseroles. With another turkey I cut the breast in nugget sizes and freeze this in pound sized containers or baggies and for future turkey nuggets (cooked just like chicken nuggets), and I freeze the dark meat for casseroles. Then with another turkey I make turkey jerky, which is the picture above. Here's the recipe:

(My measurements are general since I don't really measure - it'll come out just fine no matter what you do):

Cut strips of turkey meat into 1'4" strips (slightly frozen is easier to cut). Make enough of the juice to barely cover the top of the meat in your bowl. To make the juice, mix:

2 c. soy sauce or teriyaki sauce (if you use teriyaki sauce, add some salt)
1/2 c. salad oil
1 c. vinegar (you can also use 1/2 c. lemon juice instead)
1 c . water
2 t. liquid smoke
1 c. brown sugar or honey

Marinade for several hours then put in your dehydrator using the meat setting and as long as your machine tells you to. I always sprinkle each tray of meat with something different. Here's some ideas: garlic powder, pepper (red or Slap Yo Mama), ginger powder, onion powder and crushed red peppers.

Note: I use the Excalibur Dehydrator, which I love. Store the jerky in a breathable container to increase the shelf life.

Enjoy!

Organic Eggs

We are constantly asked if we sell our "goods". We have people interested in buying our eggs, meat, garden produce, honey, milk, etc. Most of the time I tell them we don't make a habit of it, but will sell at times. I've toyed around with the idea of housing more chickens or goats, for example, so we can have more naturally raised goods for people to buy. However, we have come to the conclusion that this is not a good idea. In order to raise chickens the way God intended them to live, you'd have to have an enourmous area for a large number of chickens. By keeping a smaller number of farm animals, you will have less land/pasure burden, less disease, less parasites, less work, and happier/healthier animals. The best thing you can do, is to raise what you need for your family...period. See my earlier posts on the blog for how to homestead in the city. If you absolutely can't homestead yourself, get educated on what brands to look for. We recently passed by a number of poultry farm (Tyson Farms) when we were picking up our Holstein. I'm not kidding when I say, you could smell death in the air. The food industry is an industry - this means they are concerned about the all-mightly dollar. They are all trying to get their products into the all-mighty Wal-Mart which is another blog all-together.

Here's a henhouse picture from an organic supplier.

The Cornicopia Research scored the top selling organic brands. You can visit their website and read the "Scrabled Egg Report" here: http://www.cornucopia.org/egg-report/scrambledeggs.pdf

Here are the top scoring brands per TCR:

1. Coon Creek, Mondovi, WI
2. Kingbird Farm, Berkshire, NY
3. Krause Farm, Engandine, MI
4. Cleary Family Farm, Plainfield, VT
5. Common Good Farm, Raymond, NE
6. Highfields Farm, VT
7. Misty Meadows Farm, Everson, WA
8. Old Friends Farm, Amherst, MA
9. One Drop Farm, Cornville, ME
10. Trout Lake Abbey, Trout Lake, WA

Here are some common terms you will see on egg cartons along with the industry definitions:

Certified Organic: The birds are uncaged inside barns or warehouses, and are required to have outdoor access, but the amount, duration, and quality of outdoor access is undefined. They are fed an organic, all-vegetarian diet free of antibiotics and pesticides, as required by the USDA’s National Organic Program. Beak cutting and forced molting through starvation are permitted. Compliance is verified through third-party auditing.

Free-Range: While the USDA has defined the meaning of "free-range" for some poultry products, there are no standards in "free-range" egg production. Typically, free-range hens are uncaged inside barns or warehouses and have some degree of outdoor access, but there are no requirements for the amount, duration or quality of outdoor access. Since they are not caged, they can engage in many natural behaviors such as nesting and foraging. There are no restrictions regarding what the birds can be fed. Beak cutting and forced molting through starvation are permitted. There is no third-party auditing.

Cage-Free: As the term implies, hens laying eggs labeled as “cage-free” are uncaged inside barns or warehouses, but they generally do not have access to the outdoors. They can engage in many of their natural behaviors such as walking, nesting and spreading their wings. Beak cutting is permitted. There is no third-party auditing.

Free-Roaming: Also known as "free-range," the USDA has defined this claim for some poultry products, but there are no standards in "free-roaming" egg production. This essentially means the hens are cage-free. There is no third-party auditing.

In conclusion, raise your own food or educate yourself on what companies are the best. Remember that industry organic terms are broad and not what you would think they'd mean. Only buy from "open gate" farms - this means you can tour them at any time (good luck with getting the large farms to let you do that, by the way). Even if you buy from small homestead farms, like ours, go visit it. We have friends who never let their chickens out of the chicken yard (which is always going to be bare ground). Ask what they are feeding if you are concerned about GMOs, antibiotics, or hormones. It's almost impossible to feed chickens non-GMO products, so any chicken that is fed grain, will likely be getting GMO products. It's easy to avoid medicated or homone infused feeds, but pretty impossible and quite cost prohibited to find organic grain without GMO or by-products. The only solution, in my opinion, is to allow the chickens to free range and forage as much as possible. It's quite the balancing act to allow our chickens to free range and forage, provide water access in various parts of the property, keep them safe from preditors while they are ranging outside the safe chicken yard, and somehow encourage them to go back to the chicken yard to lay eggs while they are "out". Thankfully, we really love our chickens so it doesn't seem like work. By the way, if you are one of our egg customers, the gates are always open for ya!

Harvesting Pears

Wondering what to do with your abundance of pears? We made Pear Bread, Pear Jelly, Pear Butter, and Pear Juice. And yes, we ate some raw.













Here's my Pear Bread recipe:

2 c. brown sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1/4 c. molasses
3 eggs
1-1/4 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1-1/2 t. ground cinnamon
3/4 t. ground cloves
1-1/2 t. ground ginger
1/4 t. ground allspice
4 firm pears, thinly sliced
3 c. flour

Preheat oven to 350 degree and generously grease two large loaf pans. Mix brown sugar, vegetable oil, molasses, and eggs. Mix in salt, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice. Stir the pear slices in, coating them evenly. Stir in flour. Pour batter into thte prepared loaf pans.

Bake for 50-60 minutes. Allow to cool in pan about 10 minutes before removing them and place them on a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!

Muscovie Ducks

We have really enjoyed our Muscovie Ducks. They are quiet (unlike guineas) and eat more bugs than guineas. They are an excellent source of meat and eggs as well. These ducks will roost in trees (at least that's what they tell me - ours hasn't figured that out yet) which makes them able to be safe at night while sleeping.

We house ours with the chickens. They have a large "yard" to forage in and a small tub to swim in (although there is a pond very close to them and they haven't figured out how to get to that either). They are excellent layers and will sit on their eggs well with good mothering skills. We just love our Muscovies!

A Bigger Backyard

We've had a few people ask why we aren't adding new items to the blog. We are so excited to have expanded our "backyard", so we're trying to get that in order. We bought 16 acres of land, and a house, in the country. There are many differences to having a hobby farm in the city versus the country. Some we were aware of; some are a surprise. Kevin is working tons of forced overtime, so our process is very slow right now.

Let me share with you the blessings of God for our family - this land has some cleared areas and some raw beautiful Big Thicket woods - all fenced, established (though horribly grown-up with weeds) garden plots, old fruit & nut trees (again, out of control and not managed), a small pond, and a timber exemption (meaning super cheap taxes). We are so excited, yet overwhelemed due to the fact that the land was not managed properly. We have cleaned up the garden area enough to plant the end of season okra and fall tomatoes and are now working on an area for the chickens to provide them with a safe area for open foraging all day. I will post a photo when we're done.

We harvested some pears yesterday so I will post a couple of pear recipes that are good.

We also added guineas and Muscovy ducks to our homestead. Both of these do great with bug management and the guineas are an alert system. I'll post of photos of them soon.

The bees are doing good and if I could read their minds (if they had one), I would say they are enjoying the natural water source and nectar sources. One hive got ants in it, which is a new problem for us. If you have any solutions for that, let us know.

As soon as we get settled in, I'll add new posts and pics. We are so grateful to God for being able to buy this property.

Raising Quail

When you have limited space for your hobby farm, or you are in the city, you may want to consider raising quail. They are easy to keep, require very little space, are quiet and can provide you money, eggs, and meat. We raise Coturnix Quail (Japanese Quail) primarily. In seven weeks they will start laying and are big enough to slaughter.



This is our basic quail house. You can use a basic rabbit hutch for a small number of birds. You can easily keep 20-30 birds in here. We keep our immature birds in here and move them to the breeder box cage when they are mature. The breeder box cage has multiple seperate cages to divide them which helps you keep the ideal ratio of male:female birds together. A good ratio is one male to 3-4 females, depending on the male. The males are darker than the females and will frequently be seen mounting the females and pulling feathers off their neck. Yeah, not very romantic.

You will want to build your breeder cage with a slight tilt on the bottom the eggs will roll to the edge for you. We have an opening on our edge with the wire flooring extending past the bottom of the cage and the edge rolled to catch the egg. This is nice so you don't have to open the cage daily and upset the birds.



This is our watering system. We use the same set-up for our chickens - see that post for the bucket photo and directions. You may be able to see the small wooden box in this cage. We put dried grass clippings or small leaves and let them use this for dust baths.

With proper housing and diet, your quail will produce lots of eggs for you. There will come a time that you will start wondering what to do with all those eggs. Here's a picture of our babies hatching in the incubator. Yes, the egg turner is still in there - we obviously didn't count our incubation days right! We eat some (fried, scrambled, boiled and pickled) and incubate some.


Later I'll post some quail egg recipes. Yummm!!



Once you get used to all this, you will want to progress to the next stage: butchering the quail. This is not hard to do - imagine yourself going dove hunting and cleaning the doves. You'll get about that much breast meat, by the way. Some people like to cook up the entire bird, but to me, the dark meat is so small on this bird that it's just not worth it. You can cook quail just like you cook chicken. If you find the taste different, just use half chicken meat and half quail meat. At this point, I don't find alot of value in butchering these birds. It's a bit too much work for the little bit of meat. However, in honor of trying to live a life where we waste nothing, we butcher at times but mainly reserve it for when we have an abundance of birds or need to cull out aggressive ones.



Finally, how do you make money off these birds? We sell them at times from one week old to mature. You can even sell the dressed out birds frozen (meat).

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it gives you another avenue to explore in trying to live off the land and provide inexpensive yet high quality food for your family. There's much more you will need to know if you plan on incubating quail. This post will give you enough to get started and let you decide if you think quail will be a good addition to your hobby farm. Get 6-10 quail - keeping in mind the proper ratio of male:female with the goal of raising them for eggs. Once you get that down and have become successful at using your eggs, you will want to learn more about breeding them. You will need an incubator, a brooder box and have a basic understanding of breeding to prevent in-breeding problems.

As always, we want to remind you to start small and expect big results!