Category: News, etc.

One of our pastures floods whenever we have very heavy rain. I’ve shown it before when it flooded. That time we had carp swimming in the pasture.

Yesterday, my neighbor Dustin sent me this picture.

Apparently this guy got washed into the pasture when it flooded, then decided to walk back to the water. Unfortunately for him he must have started walking the wrong direction and never made it. I’ve never found a crawfish in the pasture before, another first for us at Ninja Cow Farm.

I hopped onto our JD Gator the other day and happened to look down at the hour meter. That’s as close as it gets.

1000 hours on a Gator is getting to the point we may need to think about replacing it with a new one. If anyone is looking for a Gator, let me know. 1/2 of getting a new one is selling the old one.

Red meat is not the enemy

This past weekend, SWMBO went to the beach with her girlfriends, leaving me and the kids here to fend for ourselves. I had a weekends worth of work to do anyway so it was a relatively normal weekend with no big adventures planned. However, there was one thing we could do because the timing was just perfect. I could introduce the kids to the fun of peeps and a microwave!

I know we already have lots of traditions for Easter, but how many involve both sugary goodness and grotesque transformations before your eyes? I had the kids suitably wound up to blow up peeps and they were chomping at the bit to get started. Not till after dinner, I kept telling them.

Now that dinner was done…

This is what it’s about. Taking something simple and sharing it with the kids. They had a large time blowing up the peeps, then scooping up the sugary goodness. There was lots of make believe, joking with each other, and general happiness. You only see peeps out at Easter so this is a once a year event which makes it special. Hopefully it’s something we can do again in the future, I certainly enjoyed it.

And since we were being nostalgic. Who remembers Jiffy pop? Thanks Sarah for reminding me about this and telling me where you can still get it (Food Lion).

 

 

We get produce year round. In the winter, we get just barely enough. In the summer, we get inundated. Today, the first warm day we’ve had in forever, we got this.

That’s 1/2 of what we are getting today! There are 8 pallets of grapes in this load and that’s only half of this load! Anyone want grape juice?

In total, we picked up 32 pallets of food in one day, most of them 8 feet tall! That’s one and one half tractor trailer loads! I can’t even begin to estimate the amount of weight we hauled. The lettuce was all the farm tractor could hold, and the avocados were heavier than I could pick up. I had to change to the skid steer to pick them up.

There will be some full bellies on the farm tonight.

For those of you who haven’t been here in the last week, I thought I’d let you know that we’ve started remodeling our on farm store. That’s the room where we keep all of our freezers and our point of sale system.

This room was built in the 70s, for those of you who can’t date it by the wood paneling. It wasn’t the best for a sales room, but it was good enough and at least it was dry and safe. We had talked about updating it at some point in the future but this bitterly cold winter we just has decided to speed up our plans.

The water line for my office and for one of the cows paddocks goes through the wall of this room. It was installed in the 80s and was on an exterior wall. Whenever we had a freeze, the line would freeze but always thaw out again with no problems. When things thawed out this time, so did the pipe that was now broken. Of course, old wood paneling and water don’t go together well and the paneling was ruined. Also, in order to access the pipe, we have to tear out the wall and the ceiling partially to gain access. To keep it from freezing in the future, we needed to completely replace the pipe, and also relocate it, which meant tearing out the paneling and ceiling on the other side of the room. If we’re going that far, may as well do the whole remodel now.

The goal is to bring this room up to spec with electrical,  plumbing, insulation, lighting, and looks. The electrical is already done, and the plumbing will be in progress today. Then we’ll go back with drywall, paint, new lights, and a new sales counter. We will also be replacing one of the old windows with an insulated window and a window a/c unit, which seems like overkill now but will be welcome come July. Now when you come for a tour and/or a purchase, you should have a shopping experience as good as our meat.

Thank you for understanding while we go through this process. We hope to have it done in a few weeks and of course we will document the makeover here.

 

I have all the internal links working again so surf away on our site. However in order to get everything working, I had to turn off pretty much every plug-in on our site. That means that much of the extra functionality and customization is not currently live. I’ll be working over the next week to turn on individual plug-ins one by one till I find out which plug-in is causing the problem.

If you note that our site is down, or you see any issues, please let me know at dan@ninjacowfarm.com so I can try to fix it.

Thank you

Dan

Yesterday our website broke. I, and tech support, have no idea why. The only thing we know is that when we turned off a feature called permalinks, the site came back up. What this means to you is that all our internal links are broken so if you are on a post and I conveniently placed a link to another post somewhere, something I do all the time, that link doesn’t work. I’m sorry. I will be working on this as soon as possible but today I have to farm instead of nerd so I’ll get to it asap. Until then, if you are looking for a certain page, just type it in the search bar and you should still be able to find it directly.

My apologies. We work hard on the website to make it useful and entertaining. Something outside of our control has jammed up the works.

When I was a kid there was a well publicized movement about latch key kids and the horrors of what happened to these unsupervised children. I don’t know if this issue was the beginning of helicopter parenting or if that developed on its own. When I was a kid, you rode without a helmet on your bicycle, played with fire, climbed trees, and got poison ivy routinely. As parents, we are extremely fortunate because by living on the farm, we are able to tell our kids to get outside and come home when the sun goes down. We have three neighbors who also live on the farm and who also home school so there is almost always a few parents around at all times, and all the kids know one another.

Last weekend SWMBO informed me that she’d have to go out for a few hours in the middle of the day and that I’d need to watch the kids. That was fine, except I was covering for both Miguel and Emily who were both off of work. That meant I had to go to the markets and do our normal daily pickup. The other families were on the farm so it was decided that the kids could play outside in the beautiful weather and I’d check on them coming and going. As I pulled back onto the farm with a trailer and truck loaded with produce, I found this.

This is Swift Creek. It borders one side of our land and is a pretty hard boundary to our property. We really never cross it for any reason. Of course the other side (which is EXACTLY like our side) is mysterious and magical. I know, because when I was a kid it was the same way. I pulled up to find the girls, along with their friend all crossing this downed tree to get to the other side. All three can swim, and the water was only a few feet deep and slow moving, so it really wasn’t a big deal. When they saw me, the girls were worried they would be in trouble. Having been a kid, I knew how cool it was to get to the other side. I grabbed a handful of fresh bananas I had on the truck and walked down to the creek.

King and Ruby were both with the girls, and King had apparently made repeated attempts to cross the creek by walking across the downed tree like the girls were doing, except he kept falling in. He looked like a drowned rat and was shivering and cold. The girls, who were wading waist deep in the water seemed not to notice the frigid water temps.

All three girls on the other side of the creek. Muddy, soaking wet, and not really wearing all their clothes but enough that they would be ok. With everyone safely across, I left the bananas on the sandy beach for a victory picnic for their return and wished the girls well. They were delighted and spent some time exploring before coming back. In another few weeks there will be snakes, bugs, briars, and all kinds of reasons to not cross this creek. The girls had hit this opportunity at just the right time and I’m glad they did.

Farm girls aren’t born, they are made, one adventure at a time.

This isn’t quite the same as getting your face on a box of Wheaties but it’s just as good to me. My own personalized farm mug, complete with industrial handle. This was a gift from our great friend Kristen. Apparently she makes these things custom, which is too cool.

This is the perfect gift because sometimes after a week of farming I need an industrial drink and this is just the mug! Plus it must hold a gallon of whatever you put in it and it has a built in drinking straw so it’s easy to sip my concoction while I relax. With my drinking problem, this will be the perfect mug for the king farmer after a hard days work!

 

What’s this? SWMBO? Who put that on there? She doesn’t herd cattle, wrestle pigs, or castrate calves! All she does is plan and cook three meals a day, home school the children five days a week, manage the household, manage the budget, do all the shopping, handle all the pets, schedule everything, and deal with me. I mean she’s probably done by 10am with that schedule! Why does she gets a mug and I don’t?! I’m the farmer, I’m the one that needs a cool personalized mug. Well, and Miguel, since he does all the actual farm work. I wonder how I get a mug in Spanish…