Wintertime; planning on the Bog
The snow is falling here in NY with nighttime temperatures falling below zero and a daytime temp around 20. It’s been a colder winter compared to last which is a good thing and a bad thing. On the plus side, I am relieved to know this summer’s bug populace won’t be as plague-ey as last year. We had a very buggy summer following our warm, wet winter of 2020-21, and with an excessive amount of moisture we dealt not only with massive swarms of gnats bothering the horses but also mosquitos and deer flies galore. Plus, I can’t abide mud, which is a given when the temperature refuses to become cold enough to turn our winter storms into snow and freeze the sodden ground.
The Pony train from left to ride; Pregnant Dulce, Demi and Orion’s Aetos walking back to barn on the other side of their L -lot for water.
Providing they have plenty of hay, the horses don’t seem to mind the cold weather at all; in fact it tends to make them spicier and I will often look out the window to catch Rion and Demi play fighting and galloping through the drifts.
On the negative side, the cold weather severely limits our (mine and the kids’) ability to get outside to burn off energy, and horseback riding lessons are only bearable for me to offer until a certain single digit temperature. Not unlike my little three year old son I am an extremely high energy person who can be a little unbearable when I don’t get enough exercise or mental stimulation. In the more cold temperatures we are unable to get out and get work done due to the heavy loads of snow, I am often concerned as well that he may frostbite something important in his inability to understand why he has to keep his mittens on when he plays with his toy tractor with the bucket scooping snow.
Last year, due to our warm wet winter, I attempted to get a head start on the battle with massive swarms of flies by subscribing to Spalding Labs’ fly predators in late winter. Spalding Labs ships in the spring time before the flies start really buzzing around. They come in these nifty little baggies in their pupal stage, once they start to emerge from their little cocoons they can be released on the environment to make an impact on the immature fly larvae.
While it didn’t eradicate flies for me, my chickens and guinea hen are pros at scavenging for bugs and probably thought I’d bought them buffet dinners once a month, I can’t imagine the flies if I hadn’t had any of them at all. Don’t know if I’ll do that again though, but I have a couple months yet to decide!
I keep myself busy with paperwork; farm simulations, plans for the year, scheduling down to the letter each month of the year and what I need to do in them. I also probably get myself into trouble ordering chicks and arguing with myself whether I can afford the financial burden of adding other classes of livestock to my farm plan to keep me busy. The latest of my “too much time on my hands” plans has been the idea of bringing in bottle calves to raise out and potentially breed/start a herd or, in the event that I decide it was a bad idea, to put in my freezer or auction off at a certain weight.
I don’t ever like to do things with a “this is definitely the plan” frame of mind. I find homesteading changes regularly year to year and depends on finances, weather and my own time management or lack thereof. But here now in January I tend to try to keep myself busy and excited enough to make it through the worst of our winter weather with these little miscellaneous “this would be great!” ventures. My primary business is the katahdin sheep and horses, anything else revolves just enough to keep me on my toes.
In 2019 I experimented with calves by trading a nanny goat for a weaned bottle calf heifer, she was on the small side for a Holstein calf so we imagined she was likely the progeny of a cross. Two months after purchasing “Arya” I decided I wanted to have a friend for her so we plunged in and bought a cute little jersey bottle calf named “Delphie”. I bottle fed the Jersey with fresh goat’s milk, $1.25 gallons of whole cows milk from Target and an egg a bottle from my own chickens. I really enjoyed raising the heifers. In the summer I sent them over to my parents farm for my brother, who was raising beef cattle, to fatten up on their acreage since we have a limited amount here at the Bog. Unfortunately a few management errors wound up with Delphie, who’d come from a nice clean, tested herd, ending up at the neighboring farm in a not-so-tested herd of beef cattle and being bred by a Hereford. At that point I decided that I didn’t want to bring her back to my house, in an effort to keep somewhat of a clean status.
Arya however came home over the winter and in the summer we ended up breeding her to a Dexter bull. Eventually my brother decided to trade me four Katahdin sheep for Arya, now called Rosie, who is nearing her first freshening and I cannot wait to meet that little Dexter/Holsteinx calf. I learned a lot from those two girls, familiarized myself with cattle and spent a good period of time desensitizing the Holstein to touch all over her body, for hand milking in the future, and halter/leading. There are some things I might do differently in the future, and my infrastructure was not quite up to par for full sized cattle, but the bottle calf to heifer stage was nothing short of wonderful. Dairy calves at auction here in NY are extremely inexpensive. I will likely end up with them in the future. The question just remains; when?
I paired down animals this past year pretty heavily. I am on the precipice of lambing season, awaiting my small flock of replacement KHSI registry recorded katahdin babies to be born, and have ordered a batch of turkey and duck chicks from an online hatchery, as well as meat birds and a few Americana egg layers to replace the 3 year old hens that I have now.
For as long as I can remember I have had fowl in my life; my parents raised copious amounts of chicks when I was a youngster for meat and eggs, and I got into the ducks and geese when I was a teenager. I never really became emotionally attached though because of an overabundance of predators and not being able to keep them alive for very long. The first spring that we lived here at the Bog I had a Buff goose hatch out 12 goslings with a Pilgrim gander and within a week all 12 had disappeared; flown off by an entire family of Red Tailed hawks that took up residence above the pond on which they lived. It was heartbreaking and I was left with a financial deficit for the summer and no birds to raise for breeders or put in my freezer.
This year I am going to attempt to try again with the geese and ducks. I have two very nasty guard Pomeranian Saddleback ganders who I am hoping to pair with a few geese for hatching eggs. I was also gifted 9 various straight run ducks so I am hoping to have an abundance of hatching eggs to incubate and have excess drakes to put enough home grown duck in the freezer for my family of four. Eventually I may find myself setting up some kind of system with hawk net so the waterfowl have a safe run back to the pond, but will have to put my mind to how I can do it without making the place look even more redneck than it does! This also dredges up the idea of an LGD for both the sheep and the waterfowl, which I have been pondering for some time but haven’t been quite ready infrastructurally to really go for it. My husband, who is the one putting a wrench in that idea, argues that we don’t have enough land to warrant an LGD and the neighbors might not be particularly happy with a dog barking all night. I say predators don’t care if we have land or not, we have prey, and I’d like to raise up a guardian dog to put with the animals before we end up with a problem, not get caught without one when the problem manifests. It’s not that we don’t agree on the acquisition of a guardian dog, because both of us want one eventually, but yet again we are faced with the same question as before; when?
When is the right timing to do something that you want to do? I am inclined to think I would like to have the ducks line up, otherwise known as having my ducks in a row, before adding another venture but often in life the ducks don’t ever line up at all… Patience I suppose is key. We’ll just start with them all going in the right direction and go from there.
I have a list of property management ideas as well that will hopefully be accomplished this summer; cement pad installation for the barn, gravel drainage, swales and tiles for the horse pastures and around the barn, new arena fencing and round pen footing, footing the permanent chicken coop and ram and ewe’s winter paddock in wood chips to combat mud with carbon, etc. I have a lot of lists. Fortunately for me this paperwork and planning is extremely cathartic in a busy day of chasing my over-energized son around the house and cuddling an exceptionally cute baby girl.
These are just some of the things that I ponder during the winter. The summer season tends to catch me off guard and my time flies out the window before I knew I had any free time in the first place. We spend so much of our short summer, which we are given in Upstate NY, attempting to make something of the farm that we don’t ever seem to have the time to sit still and ponder about how to improve the system. Winter becomes a season of planning and thinking, of being forced to sit still long enough to formulate an adjustment to the system and improve the homestead.
We are also planning another AKC Belgian Malinois litter. I have several ideas for kennels and a management system to make the potential litter of 10+ “maligators” easier to raise and care for during their active phase just before heading to new homes.
The last litter took me by surprise when Zena had ten pups in our tiny 1,000 ish square feet house and I’d not set up any intentional areas for them to roam and be well… pups…. in. My winter planning and list is a strategy to mitigate these potential pitfalls by allowing me the time to simulate scenarios and rearrange them if they don’t make sense or play out the way they should. Risks such as “What happens if the pups are loud enough to wake my kids in the middle of the night for two weeks straight?”
In this way I am able to take some risks, management wise, before anything is decided, and any issues that could crop up happen on paper; not whilst I am in the thick of it with a litter of pups!
Of course, all of this work takes funds to make happen so out come the creative ideas for side hustles to garner some kind of finances for these big dollar projects, like perhaps planting seedlings and a bigger garden system so I can stock a road stand with vegetables, eggs and whatever else my creative heart desires. Sometimes I feel a little bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into wonder land when I am cooking the books. Pages and pages of ideas, sketches of pastures, kennels and flower or vegetables gardens populate my farm binder, along with sheets of finances and calculations etc.
Our goal on the homestead is to find a symbiosis between a business that can afford itself and a sustainable lifestyle and hobby. It all started because I had horses and, as those of us with horses know, they are not cheap to care for or feed in any aspect. Big animals create big bills. Realistically I know that I will likely never make any sort of income on my little homestead. Currently anything I have ever made is invested back into the care of our little sliver of heaven but… in the cold of winter, a girl can dream!
