Destructive Ducks?

It's been a couple of weeks since G planted some willow bushes along the fence in the duck pen. . 

At that time, he took away the fence blocking them from going into the front yard. The ducks have been behaving themselves. Or, they've at least stayed on our side of the fence. They do love eating the leaves at the bottom of the bushes. 

I hope they're not eating too much of them. It's too much gets eaten, the plant might not make it through the winter. G says that these plants are very hardy and the ducks won't be able to kill them.

The last batch of trampoline chickens are growing more and more comfortable with being set loose. They love to follow the goats around. We saw a chicken sitting on top of a goat one morning.

This one likes to dig through the goat food.

 

A neighbor gave us a few bushels of spilled corn to feed our animals. We've been giving the goats some every day now that the pasture is eaten down and winter is coming. The chickens like to get in on the morning feeding too!

We had a drizzly day last week, and almost all of the chickens were roaming the yard even amid the rain. I have never seen Dixie look so bedraggled. 😆 One of the roosters even roosted outside in the rain; he likes to roost on top of the milking stand we have outside the shed and the fact that it was raining didn't stop him. I was initially worried about them being out in the wet, but they know where shelter is and they can go inside if they want to, so they must want to be outside!

Egg Scooper

I saw an idea for this online and knew I had to make one for our homestead.

This is an egg scooper! You just need a pasta spoon, duct tape, and a long stick. 

Some of the chickens like to lay their eggs behind a pallet we have screwed into the wall so the goats can't move it. That also means we can't move it to have easy access to the eggs. My hands are small enough I can squeeze them through the slats, but G is the normal egg getter, and he has to go through the long way. 

Instead of showing his hand back there, he had been using a board or a hoe to roll the eggs closer to him. As you can imagine, that resulted in some egg breakage. When I went out to test the egg scooper, I found a broken egg back there. 

The scooper still worked, and was actually quite good at flinging the broken egg out of the pasture into the swamp. The goats and a couple of chickens followed me down to the north end of the pasture, curious what I was up to. 

Jaron came too. He loved the wind on his face. 😍

Prosthetic Phase Two

Things are moving along for Jaron's prosthesis. We went to have him try on piece two of three. This second piece will be the connection between his silicone sleeve and the actual attachment that gives him more length in his arm. When he's older, this piece will allow a variety of attachments to connect to his sleeve (go get refitted every 6 months, so it won't be this exact piece but something similar to it). 

They had to mark the edges of the semi squishy black piece so that it lines up with Jaron's body and is symmetrical and even. They took measurements of his existing arm to make sure that the attachment will match his real arm as much as possible. This will hopefully prevent any imbalances in the body when he uses his prosthesis. 

They used two popsicle sticks taped together to be the model as they figured out the best angle for the bend and the best length to make piece number three.

Here's Jaron wearing piece number one and two.

Can you see the little white knob on the inside of it? That is the button that releases piece two from piece one. 

We left piece number two with them to fine tune. Hopefully piece number three will be finished soon!
 

Frost

We were down in Texas for a pediatric brain injury conference to see what we could learn for Jaron. We were gone for almost a full week. I did a quick sweep of the garden before I left, mostly picking ripe tomatoes. At one point, the forecast showed a frost while we were gone, but the last time we checked the forecast before we left the temperature had gone above freezing. I thought it would be safe to leave some of the tomatoes on the vine to ripen. 

Unfortunately, the forecast changed back and it got very cold. I came home to a very dead garden. 😅

Crispy tomato plants (although that made it very easy to find the tomatoes). 

Stiff basil. Good thing I picked most of it before I left. 

Bye bye peppers.

My oregano and rosemary weathered the frost okay.

Looks like the kale got munched by deer.

Some of the summer lettuce reseeded and is now ready for eating! 

I ended up with quite a few green tomatoes and shriveling hot peppers. Gonna have to scout the Internet for a couple of recipes. 🤔

RMH Meal

It's been a busy few days! On Wednesday this week, we served a meal at the Ronald McDonald House in Rochester in honor of Jaron's one year birthday. 

The night before, G and I made six batches of gingersnaps to bring to the NICU staff and also share with the Ronald McDonald House staff. 

This is the second time we baked a massive amount of gingersnaps, and I'm happy to report that it went even better the second time. Seems like we are getting our system down! I measure everything out and G stirs. I roll cookies into balls and he mans the oven. 

Wednesday morning before we left, we prepped apples to make homemade applesauce. We got to Rochester around noon and I immediately started making homemade bread. In the end, I made 10 loaves of bread. We made 10 batches of goulash soup, a gigantic roaster of applesauce, lettuce salad with tomatoes from our garden, and frozen chocolate chip cookies. G wanted to have everything be homemade, but I told him there was not enough time to make homemade cookies and homemade bread, so he would have to choose. It was an easy decision to choose bread over cookies. 

Thankfully, we had some help in the kitchen. Every time a family serves, there is a host volunteer. Ours was Jill and she was amazing. Derek is a staff member at RMH specifically working with nutrition and kitchen stuff, so he stuck around to help us as well (prior to RMH he worked as a chef).

Once I got the bread rising, we took a break to visit our NICU nurses and doctors. The visit took longer than expected, so some of my bread was overproved. You can see those flat loaves in the picture below. 

Thankfully I had the idea to put some of the rising bread in the fridge to slow down proving. That worked really well and the final four loaves of bread were a lot more shapely. 😅

Jaron hung out in the baby carrier for a while, spent some time in a rocking saucer (he loved that!), and got held by a lot of the staff. He had a great afternoon. So great, he skipped his nap. 

Whole we served the meal, another volunteer entertained him. I fed him supper and the volunteer took him back. She eventually got him to sleep at 7:45pm! 😳 Normally bedtime is 6:45. 

So, no pictures of Jaron from the day. We almost didn't get a picture of us either. The host usually takes a picture of the family serving the meal, but it was so busy, everyone forgot. We took a picture after cleanup by our sign. 🤷‍♀️ 

We served 55 people and had about half the food we prepared leftover. So, note to self, next year make half! Leftovers got boxed up and put in kitchens for people to eat as leftovers in future days. We were able to take some home too and send some home with volunteers. 

All in all, it was a very fun experience and brought us so much joy to be able to give back to the organization that helped us so much just last year. We plan to make this an annual tradition around the time of Jaron's birthday. 😊

Harvesting Nettle

The last time I was at my parents house I took the opportunity to harvest some nettle. It had gotten chopped down a while ago, so there were a lot of small regrowing plants.

I harvested with gloves on and stored the leaves in a ziplock. 

When I got home they went straight into the freezer since I didn't have time to work with them. I will probably put them in soup when I do get around to using them!

Garden Update

A few things linger in the garden...

Carrots coming along nicely: 

We thought this was a watermelon that didn't develop all the way. G actually brought two to the goat pen to give them and smashed one before he realized they were spaghetti squash. 😩

Turnips and rutabaga look pretty similar. The potatoes are the ones grown in ground in the garden. I'll dig the container potatoes soon. I have a feeling there will be many more in the containers...