To Organic or not to Organic

We are researching what it would take to make our farm "Certified Organic." I met with a guy from the Soil and Water Conservation Office today who gave me some paperwork to look over and so that is where we are right now. I really don't think we are that far off from Organic but I know there would have to be some changes and I'm not sure I want the government deciding how I run my farm. I guess it will boil down to how much it will cost (over $500 just for the initial certification) and would it ever work out to be a "budget neutral" item on our small farm. Would we be better off just staying "all natural" and not going the extra mile to Organic city? We'll see!

Snow on the 2811!!!

In a rare appearance ......we have snow! Or as a friend of mine put it, "a precipitation accumulation sensation!" The kids, of course, had to get out and play in it but I was content to sit by the fire and eat home made oatmeal raisin cookies. It is now 7:00pm and it is still coming down pretty good. The low for tonight is 26 so maybe we'll have some more play time in the morning.

Blackberries

Here is the beginning of our thornless blackberry trellis. It is 30 feet long and a little over 7 feet tall. So far all we have are the main posts up, but I thought it would be good to document the building of it in stages. When you can't farm full time you have to do things in stages as time, funds, and the weather allow. I got these posts up this morning before the rain came (again). As you can see the chickens were looking on with their usual curiosity.

Winter

Winter is definitely here! The pond froze completely over this week which has not happened in years. The high for today is 34!

We have a pig now. I made a great trade for her. I traded our horse for her. I figured trading an animal that does nothing but eat for one that we can eat was the best horse trade (pun intended) I have ever made. She is now big enough to process, so she won't be with us much longer. She has an appointment on the 19th. I really wanted to butcher her myself but in all my research it just appeared that I didn't have the proper set up for the scalding part to get the hair off and I also found out that skinning a pig is very difficult as well. Combine this with the fact that she weighs about 300 pounds and I just decided that I am not going to be able to process this one. We may "finish" another pig next fall and maybe I will be ready by then. I am going to cure the bacon and hams myself...that part looks pretty easy.

Fall in the South

Fall in the South is a beautiful thing. The cooler temperatures are like a breath of fresh air and the trees get all dressed up for the big event before shutting down for Winter. The sunrise this morning was one of those Clemson sunrises with the purples and oranges. The kids have been begging for a fire in the fireplace but Mamma has put the quiesce on that so far. She wants it to be really cold before we get the fire going. Get outside during this beautiful time of the year. Jack frost will be here before you know it!

Honey Harvest Day!

Well, today was an exciting day here on the farm. This picture is of my son enjoying some fresh honey from our hives. We don't get honey from our bees every year, mostly due to my lackadaisical bee management style, but this year was a good one for us. We got two supers full of honey. The white box in the left of the photo is a super. The super holds nine frames and the bees build their honeycomb inside each frame and then fill them up. Sometimes. Some years there isn't enough rain or there is too much rain, or the bees swarm (their natural method of propagating the species) and for whatever reason they can only produce enough honey for the hive to survive the winter and none for the beekeeper. Usually you will get about two and a half gallons of honey from a super and true to form we got five gallons from our two. That sounds like a bunch of honey but when you have a family of six and you use it to cook with, on pancakes, and for the topping of choice for the cathead biscuits, it is about a years worth. And you only "take off" the honey once a year so this is it until next summer.

There was a time when you would take off honey twice a year, once in the spring and again in the fall, but the fall honey was almost exclusively from cotton and there hasn't been much cotton grown around here in a while.

The man in the background is not me, it is my Daddy. He is wielding an electrically heated knife that cuts the wax capping off of each frame of honey so it can be extracted. After the cappings are removed, each frame is placed inside the extractor which spins around and the honey drains out the bottom where it is double filtered to remove big wax particles.

My Daddy is the one that got me into beekeeping. He's the kind of guy that thinks if he's doing something everybody should be doing it so when he started keeping bees, he thought we all should. And I enjoy beekeeping, but I just don't have the time to devote to it like I should, so my bees are "free range" bees you might say. They pretty much make it on their own, or not.

So it was a great day spending most of the day with my son and my Daddy in his "honey house" doing alot of "quality control" and replenishing the honey stores for the coming year. I also got to see my Mamma for a few minutes who sent me home with cases of canned goods! Double bonus!!! I should write a whole blog entry about her kitchen sometime! I think I'll remember today for a long time.

Farm visitor

I had an early morning encounter with a visitor over the weekend. I went outside about daylight to let the dogs out and there stood a large Coyote about 100 feet away right at the pear trees at the end of the garden. He (or she) looked at me...I looked at him(her) and it took off for the woods. We have heard them howling before but I have never seen one up this close before. I know that they know that we have chickens now... not a good thing. Our chickens are semi-free range in that they get out of the coop and wander around but only in a fenced area, so hopefully that will be sufficient to keep them safe.

The other concern is that when you have Coyotes you DO NOT have deer or turkey. And with Deer season rapidly approaching I hope the Coyotes will move on out of here.