July newsletter from the farm

Fresh, a documentary about sustainable food, came out in very limited release this spring. Being unable to find any showings in Illinois, we decided to host a screening right here on the farm at 7 p.m., Friday, July 31. We'll be watching the movie in the barn closest to the road. If you've never been here before, you can come at 5:00 for a tour of the farm. Bring a picnic supper and eat under an oak tree. We'll have drinks available for purchase, as well as farm-fresh produce, goat milk soap, and wool products from our sheep.

This Saturday, July 11, we have Canning 101: How to Make Jam at 1:30. Price of $28 includes a quart of u-pick black raspberries that you can take home to eat fresh, make into a cobbler, or can your own jam.

Next Saturday, July 18, at 10 a.m., we'll have our popular Morning in the Life of a Dairymaid class, where you'll meet cows, learn how to milk a goat, and how to make cheese, yogurt, and buttermilk. Cheeses include mozzarella, chevre, riccota, and queso blanco.

We are considering raising more pork for the freezer, so if you are interested in buying a hog or half a hog, please contact me to reserve one. We expect them to be processed around November or December. Price will probably be around $3 per pound plus processing.

As for turkeys -- I'm glad we didn't take deposits! We had one mama hatch nine babies in May, and within three days they had all disappeared. We had another mama hatch nine babies in June, and so far, she still has eight of them. They are in a movable pen, so they get plenty of fresh air, sunshine, and grass -- and they are safe from predators. We also hatched two batches of turkey eggs in the incubator, with very little success. Our hatch rate was about 15%. Without dragging you through all the math, I'll summarize by saying that we have about a dozen turkeys that will probably processed for Thanksgiving. If you are interested in a Thanksgiving turkey, send me an email, and I'll put you on the waiting list. Repeat customers will be given first priority. Deposits won't be due until August, when I have more confidence about the number of turkeys we will actually have available.

We videotaped the birth of one of our goats in January, edited it to less than six minutes, and posted it on You Tube. To watch Carmen give birth, click here. We've started an Antiquity Oaks channel on YouTube and hope to post more videos of life on the farm.

Other news – we have a summer communication intern who is working on a complete redesign of the Antiquity Oaks website to put a new emphasis on our educational opportunities. As you know, we've started offering more classes this year. We are working on creating internship opportunities, as well as a membership option. If you have been living vicariously through us and wish you could spend a day or two out here, working in the garden, playing with baby goats (yes, that really is a job), and making cheese or soap, drop me an email.

I hope to see a lot of you on July 31, for the screening of Fresh and a discussion of local, sustainable food.

If you would like to subscribe to our newsletter through Yahoo, click here. You can email Deborah at Antiquity Oaks dot com for directions to the farm or to make reservations. Otherwise, use the comment section for questions of a general nature.

Triplet kids

Yesterday, we went to an early Independence Day celebration at my husband's sister's house, and we returned home to a happy surprise -- Caboose had just given birth to triplets. The kids were all still wet, and only two were wobbling around. Caboose is one of our best goats in both show and milk, and her kids are quite popular. It's not much of a surprise that she had three. She was pretty big, and she usually has triplets or quads. I'm glad she had two does though, because there were several people who wanted does from her. You can see one and a half of the does here. The little buck is laying down behind the girls. I took four pictures, and sadly, this was the best of the bunch. They were all lining up beautifully until I pulled out the camera.

We have five more does due to kid in the next month, including Viola the la mancha, who was bred to a Nigerian buck, so she'll hopefully have little earless goats. Even if they are born with Nigerian ears, though, there are people who want them. A lot of people seem to be getting into dairy goats this year.

Did you say you were busy?

Before I beat myself up too much about not posting, I looked at previous years to see how consistent I was in June. Not good. In fact, I actually posted twice as many times this year in June. It's a sad catch 22 -- I'm so busy in June (and July) that I don't have time to write about all the things I'm doing!

Saturday and Sunday, Katherine and I did soap making and spinning demonstrations at the Pontiac Heritage Days festival. She spun up seven balls of Latte's fiber, which I will be using for my afghan when I get back to knitting in the cooler months. (Don't you just love her 1840s work dress?) I made three batches of soap, including lavender-ylang ylang, lemongrass, and orange essential oils.

Monday, we sheared the rams. Other than Margaret getting whacked in the kneecaps by Rambrandt, it actually went pretty well. Then we moved the sheep from the east pasture to the west pasture. That did not go as planned, but we did eventually get all the sheep over there. The frustrating part was when White Feather decided to take her lambs back to the east pasture. She just won't leave, even though there are no sheep left over there. The two old llamas are staying with her, so hopefully they'll be okay.

We've been busy making cheese and picking mulberries, cherries, and black raspberries. We've made raspberry pound cake, raspberry crisp, mulberry muffins, and raspberry-cherry jam. It was Jonathan's first foray into jam making, and it turned out quite well. Today I also made yogurt and buttermilk, and I made two loaves of multi-grain bread. We'll use one of those loaves to make French toast for tomorrow's breakfast.

The herb garden was in desperate need of weeding, as well as the vegetable garden and the flower gardens, which we worked on yesterday. Thank heavens for this nice cool weather we've been having lately! But we still need to get some more transplants into the vegetable garden. And being one to never quit, I've bought my annual supply of lavender plants to kill. Seriously, every year I buy lavender plants, put them in the herb garden, and watch them die. If anyone out there knows how to get lavender to not die, please let me know. My dill, parsley, sage, rosemary, and lemon thyme transplants are all thriving nicely.

The person who contacted me about becoming a homesteading apprentice disappeared -- never emailed to let me know that she was no longer interested. That was disappointing, mostly because it delayed me from posting an ad on Local Harvest, which I have now done. Hopefully, someone will contact me about that. In case it isn't really obvious, we could use a couple extra hands around here.

Tired

I can't believe I haven't posted since Sunday. I had so much I wanted to write! Then life happened. At least I only have two days left to teach, and I'll have two months vacation before starting again in August.

We had a big party for my husband's family on Father's Day, then the refrigerator stopped working. It was running non-stop and couldn't get any colder than about 50 degrees. Since it is only four years old and already needed a repair last year, we decided it probably wasn't worth saving so we went shopping yesterday and bought a new one.

I had to go to Urbana on Monday to check out my oldest child's new abode, and grading has been keeping me terribly busy. In fact, I'm getting home and then having to spend a few hours grading, so I'm only getting about six hours of sleep each night. I know six hours is enough for some people, but not me, sadly. I wish I could survive on only a couple hours of sleep each night. Sleep really seems like a waste of time, but it's necessary.

Lucky for me, Mike and the kids sheared most of the sheep yesterday while I was teaching. I've asked Margaret to write a blog post about it, but I'm not sure if she will. I did take a picture of her and her dad -- they reminded me of the Pig Pen character in Charlie Brown! They were covered with dirt from head to toes, and they smelled like lanolin.

Most of the rams and wethers still need to be sheared, so I'll probably wind up helping with them next week. Today, the hay from our field was baled, so that needs to be picked up and stacked. Problem is that only Jonathan and I are home, and it's supposed to rain tonight, so it'll be interesting this evening. A load of alfalfa is also supposed to be delivered tomorrow.

And did I mention that temperatures are hovering in the mid-90s with "real feel" temps above 100?

Berry-picking time has begun

I ate my first fresh mulberries a few days ago and had my first mulberry muffins on Wednesday. I love mulberry muffins. I just use a blueberry muffin recipe and substitute mulberries. Now, we're talking about making mulberry smoothies made with our homemade yogurt.

Cherries are also starting to ripen, and at the end of this month, we will be drowning in raspberries that grow wild in the woods. At the end of July, it will be time for blackberries.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads who read my blog!

Time for ducklings

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been worried about not seeing three of our ducks for a month now. I've been hoping that they were setting, rather than being digested in a coyote's stomach. Thursday night, we were eating dinner on the deck, which overlooks the pond, and I shrieked, "Ducks!" and pointed towards the edge of the pond near the chicken house. Mike thought something was wrong, but I quickly corrected myself by adding, "Baby ducks!"

We now have six ducks again, and they have seven ducklings following them. I have no idea which ducklings belong to which ducks, but it doesn't really matter anyway. One thing I've learned about domesticated ducks and geese is that they fully support the idea of a village raising a child.

On a sadder note, the mama goose has finally given up. There is only one egg left on her nest. At least she is not injured. Perhaps in the goose world, she is considered a less-than-adequate mother, but I'm glad she ran when the coyote kept coming back to her nest. The last poor goose stood up to the coyote three years in a row. She was badly injured the first two years, and this year, she was eaten.

I shouldn't get too excited about the ducklings, however, because there is a giant snapping turtle in the pond, and she eats all the ducklings that swim out there. Trying to keep ducklings out of a pond is not an easy task. Two years ago, Margaret and I tried to catch ducklings. After an hour of running around, I wound up with heat exhaustion. It is not an experience I want to repeat. Unfortunately, we really didn't learn much from the experience, so I'm not terribly optimistic about our chances of trying to help.

It's baby goat time again!

If you want to see what's in my pantry, you'll just have to wait, because I have much more exciting news to share.

Yesterday, a reporter from the local daily paper was here interviewing me because we'll be demonstrating spinning and soapmaking at a local festival at the end of the month. We were talking in the living room when Mike came through the door and said, "Jo is kidding. The first kid is halfway out." I grabbed a couple towels and ran to the barn.

The first kid was laying in the straw behind Jo, who was laying there like she was having a day on the beach. I picked him up and laid him on a towel in front of her, and she immediately started licking him while I cleaned mucous off his nose. Katherine arrived, then Mike and the reporter. As soon as he heard it was a little white buck with black spots, he went back to work in the other barn, thinking this would be the only kid. After all, Jo was not very big, and we were expecting a single kid.

Less than five minutes later, she pushed again. A big bubble appeared under her tail, and a moment later, a kid plopped out onto the straw. I started to dry it with the clean towel and placed it next to its brother. It was a doe!

We chatted with the reporter, thinking that Jo had given birth to buck-doe twins. The next thing we know, she made a little noise, and I saw another bubble appear under her tail. A third kid went plop on the straw, and I used the already-wet towel to dry off the nose as I looked under the kid's tail to determine its gender. Another doe!

Both of the girls are already sold. The one that's about half white will be going to a woman who only lives half an hour away, and she has already come to visit. The other one will be going to the East Coast this fall with six other kids. As for the little buck, I don't normally keep them as bucks when they come from first fresheners, but this little guy has some great genetics behind him, so it is very tempting. I will wait to see how Jo's udder develops and how she milks before deciding if he'll get to hang on to the family jewels.

My history with organics

After reading Carolina Trekker's comment on yesterday's post, I thought some of you might like to know a little more about my history with organics. It starts a long time ago, when I was just a young 'un. My mother had grown up during the Great Depression (she was 40 when I was born), and she was a big proponent for the newest "food" in the grocery store. Didn't matter what it was, she'd say, "Eat that. It's good for you." Seriously, she'd say that about potato chips, frozen pizza, and canned Spaghetti-Os!

It should come as no surprise that I was sick -- a lot! By the time my first child was born when I was 24, I had started to think that maybe I was sick so much as a child because my diet was not particularly nutritious. But in my mother's defense, let me take a step back. When she grew up, you could say, "It's good for you," about everything that was edible. It was before the days of 8-syllable ingredients on food labels that were six inches long. People only ate food. There was no high-fructose corn syrup, margarine, or hydrogenated vegetable oil. And my mother had grown up on a farm, so she ate a lot of fresh, organic food.

The big buzz words after World War II became modern and scientific. And like almost all Americans, she jumped on the bandwagon and started buying margarine and using chemical pesticides in her garden. But with people like Eleanor Roosevelt trumpeting the superiority of margarine, it should be no surprise that most Americans switched to the artificial "food."

When I was pregnant with my first child, I honestly thought I was having a nutritious meal when I ate a cheeseburger and fries. I had my meat, my dairy, my starch, and my vegetables (pickles, lettuce, and potatoes). Yes, I seriously thought potato chips were a vegetable. I had the four food groups covered! What more did I need?

Luckily, after my baby was born, I went to a La Leche League meeting, and they were talking about nutrition. Someone had created a nutrition game, and the only thing I remember 21 years later was one of the questions. "Is a cheese sandwich a nutritious lunch?" Good thing I didn't get that question! A woman responded that it would be nutritious if you were talking about cheddar and whole wheat bread, but not so nutritious if it was white bread and American processed cheese. Was she speaking English? There's a difference between breads and cheeses. And that's where my nutrition education began. I started reading everything I could find on nutrition. I didn't want my children to grow up sick all the time like I had.

So, in the late 1980s, I began feeding my family homemade whole wheat bread, buying organic food, reading labels, and cooking a lot from scratch. A year later, we became vegetarians, and all three of my children were raised as vegetarians. For years, I rolled my eyes as people told me that my children were going to be anemic, weak, and sick -- as they were taking their own children to the pediatrician, getting tubes in their ears, and giving them antibiotics on a fairly regular basis. My children were never sick.

To this day, my 16-year-old has never taken antibiotics. My 18-year-old son was on antibiotics when he had an abscessed tooth, and my now 21-year-old daughter took them when she had Lyme disease at age 3. If they get a virus, they go to bed for a few hours, sometimes a day, and they're fine. My youngest had an earache once, but it was gone by morning.

If you've read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, it should not be a big surprise that we're so healthy. We "eat food, mostly plants, not too much."

Tomorrow, you'll get to peak inside my pantry.

Coyotes are makin' me mad

Of course, getting mad is not going to do one bit of good. But it seems like it might make me feel a little better to go outside and scream a few profanities into the woods at the coyotes that are no doubt hiding in there.

Monday night, I had just laid down in bed when I heard the most horrid, long-winded screech. I flew out of bed, screaming that the coyotes were attacking something, and I went running out the dining room door, barefoot, in my gown. Jonathan went running out the front door. He got a lot farther than I did, since he was wearing shoes. He went to the chicken house and said he didn't see anything. The chicken house was closed up tight, and there wasn't a predator inside.

As it turned out, Mike had just pulled into the driveway, and he and Margaret also heard the torturous sound. He asked me what it was. I said it sounded like a chicken, but Jonathan hadn't found anything. Mike thought it sounded like a goat kid, and there is a doeling in the pasture just behind the chicken house, so he went out to check on her.

Instead, he found a badly injured chicken just outside the fence to the goat pasture. Just as Mike found her, Sovalye the Anatolian arrived. He had been in the goat pasture when the attack occurred. I was surprised that the coyote dropped the chicken, but the only way out was past the house, so I guess the coyote figured it would be tough enough to get past us by himself, and he should forget the chicken.

The chicken was dead by Tuesday morning.

"Uncle!!!!!"

Screening of FRESH scheduled on the farm

At 7 p.m. Friday, July 31, we'll be hosting a screening of FRESH! on our farm. Here's a trailer:



If you're not in our area, check their websites for screenings near you, or you can buy a DVD and host your own screening.