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Making peach wine here on the farm

Summer peaches
One half of the peaches, plus the calm before the storm. Everything at this point is still clean.

One of my farmer friends caught up to me on Saturday when we were at the market. He had some extra peaches, bruised but otherwise ok, that he wanted me to take. Of course he wanted them turned into something palatable and drinkable. I was happy to oblige since just like Vegas, the house always wins. He’ll get some alcohol but I’ll get plenty for doing the work. For my part, I’ll have mostly labor in this project with very little cost.

Summer peaches
The other half of the peaches, plus some blackberries and blueberries for snacking.

This is the other half of the peaches. Probably about 85% of the peaches were usable. They were super ripe so there were a number of peaches on the bottoms that were squished. We didn’t waste those peaches, we just made the pigs happy with them.

Starrlight peach mead from Pittsboro
What’s making peach wine without some peach primer.

I just happened to have some peach mead from Starrlight Meadery in Pittsboro, NC in the cooler. What could be better to have on a day you are cooking up some booze than some appropriate booze made by professionals. What, you haven’t had mead? You don’t know what it is? This is a problem, one you should rectify as quickly as possible. How about a wine that is older than agriculture? Pittsboro isn’t that far, take a drive and visit Starrlight for a tasting. You’ll be glad you did.

Juicer, after juicing 8 gallons of peaches.
Remember I mentioned the calm before the storm? This is what a juicer looks like after 8 gallons of juice. I’d already stopped and cleaned it about 4 times while juicing.

Normally when making something fermentable the instructions are to mash the fruit and put it into a primary fermenter with a strainer bag. Then every day you open the container, punch down the raft of fruit that floats to the top, and reseal. SWMBO had bought a juicer some time back and I thought I’d give it a try. Turns out it works wonders. Unfortunately, it does have a hard time keeping up with my volume levels. After 8 gallons of juice, it was a bit worse for wear. Not to worry though, it cleaned up in just a few minutes.

Peach juice for peach wine.
The fruits of our labor. 8 gallons of peach juice, split between two buckets.

The end result. 4 gallons of juice per bucket. This was the primary product, I then added 5 pounds of sugar per bucket, champaign yeast, and water to top off. The specific gravity before I closed it up was 1.12. Everything is percolating happily at the moment, unlike this morning when I found one of the air locks had clogged with peach sediment and the primary fermenter was blown up like a balloon. I’d say it was about 2 hours from blowing its top and blowing sticky peach juice all over the kitchen.

Fortunately I checked the buckets first thing and found the problem. Therefor I get to sleep in the house tonight and not the dog house.

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Dottie the milk cow has been bred back

File this post under the category of TMI.

Yesterday when we went to milk Benjamin was extremely interested in Dottie. In fact when we brought her back to the pasture Ben met us half way back because he simply walked through the paddock fence looking for his sweetie. Today, he paid her no mind so I do believe she has been bred now. That means a few things.

One, we will dry Dottie off the end of February to give her two months with no milking and no calf at her side. This will let her recover some body condition.

Two, we didn’t have a repeat of Maggie. Our milk cow is bred back with no issues, no broken back.

Three, Benjamin is not exactly faithful. This morning he was chasing Love, the cow, trying to woo her to his affections. He paid Dottie no mind. He’s kind of a love ’em and leave ’em kind of man.

Rainbow over a farmers field.
This isn’t the rainbow of love, but it is a rainbow I saw a few days ago just down from the farm. You don’t get one of these every day so I wanted to share it somewhere on the blog.
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Look what is growing in our pasture

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As I’ve said before, we feed a lot of fresh produce to our cows every day. One of the side effects of feeding all this produce is that some of the seeds end up germinating and growing new plants. Here we have a cantaloupe plant that has found itself a very nice spot and is going gang busters. It has set two fruits so far but there are dozens and dozens of flowers and we should have more cantaloupe than we can use in a month.

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Here is a shot of the entire plant. It just keeps growing. The reason this is amazing is that before we started our current practices, it would have taken a pick axe to dig through the hard clay soil in this pasture. Now this cantaloupe is growing on a patch of black dirt with lots of organic material and with no assistance from us. Because its novel and because we like cantaloupe we will let it grow and mow it once it’s done. However, if the soil will grow a high value tender plant, it will surely grow some nice grass. This is just a sign that what we are doing is working.

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Pricing has been posted for our beef we selling

Grass fed and finished ribeye steaks
Mmm, yummy, yummy beef.

Sorry it took too long to get the pricing up. I’ve updated the beef page of our website with pricing.

For those of you who have contacted me to buy some beef, now is the time. I’m traveling all day today but will be back this evening if someone wants to pick up beef. I’m around the rest of the week and this weekend as well. Just contact me via email at dan@ninjacowfarm.com to make arrangements to stop by.

I don’t expect this beef to last too long based on the people who’ve already told me they want to buy some. It’s first come, first serve.

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Benjamin, our super star bull

I mentioned Benjamin in this morning’s post and it occurred to me that I had not actually made a post about Benjamin. Benjamin is a bull we purchased last year from a fellow cattleman who was getting out of the business. Benjamin is a Spring Field bull which means he’s a superstar, bred for performance. When we give tours, even people who have no idea about cows remark about Benjamin and how massive he is.

Spring Field Angus bull next to a belted galloway steer.
Benjamin, grazing next to a year old ninja cow (Belted Galloway cross)

There is a bit of an exaggeration in the above picture because Ben is a bit closer but it’s close enough to get the idea. Benjamin is easily twice the size of the year old steer beside him.

Spring Field Angus bull utilizing a fly treatment rub
Benjamin enjoying a back scratch

I noted in some previous posts that the flies were especially bad this year. We did do something about it. We built the contraption pictured above, with Benjamin as the Vanna White model. This mobile back scratcher lets the cows rub the areas where the flies congregate and treats them to try to keep the numbers down. In case you’re wondering, the wheels and tires are from the bent axle we replaced on our little trailer. Nothing goes to waste. As you can see Benjamin barely fits under the metal cross bars. The year old calf in the first picture can’t even reach the white part to scratch his back.

Spring Field Angus bull, Benjamin.
As nice of a bull as you’d ever meet. He literally eats out of our hands.

Benjamin is a good bull, and will be with us another 18 months or so before he moves on to a new owner. At that time, Boyd will take over as our herd bull and we will sell of Curious so there’s no incest. That’s assuming father and son can get along for that long.

We’ve really added some nice genetics into our herd with Benjamin and that should continue with Boyd into the future. Boyd likely won’t be the specimen that Benjamin is, but after what happened to Maggie, I think I’ll take a bit smaller bull.

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A new calf. #7 had a little bull calf, #43

 

New born bull calf.
Little #43, born just a few hours before, trying to enjoy a nap.

Wednesday of this week we were blessed with another little bull calf here on the farm. This is another Benjamin calf. For those that don’t know, Benjamin is our bull. Benjamin is HUGE and as nice of a bull as you’d want to meet. He eats out of my hand, gentle as a lamb and is usually the last one out of the paddock or to the food when we feed. However every once in a while a bull calf will test him and end up on his butt for the effort, usually after doing a flip or two. He does make some pretty calves though.

New born calf
Baldy markings on #43

Benjamin is a full-blooded black Angus, with no white markings on him at all. Our cows are baldy Angus, with white faces and some white markings. It’s neat to see the calves which have smaller white markings but Angus shining through.

New born calf
A perfectly bad picture. I couldn’t get the calf to stand in the right place.

I didn’t want to take too long at this point. We had just ear tagged this calf and banded him (that’s how you castrate them young) so besides being born, he’d already had quite a day. I didn’t want to pose him too.

 

Ear tag for calf.
Ear tag for the new little calf, just before being applied.
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Surprise! We have beef for sale!

Freezer full of beef.
Our freezer, full to the brim with pasture bred, born, and finished beef.

Friday Spork and I took the new reefer truck(that’s a refrigerated truck to you snickering out there)  and picked up Sam from Chaudhrys. We had enough truck to pick up 30 cows so I was a bit worried we didn’t get enough meat from one cow because the meat looked pretty puny in the big truck. However when we got home and started packing the freezer, we filled it to overflowing and had to put the rest into another freezer. I guess there was more there than I thought.

In talking to SWMBO this morning, she’s agreed that we could sell some of the beef we have to make a bit more room in the freezer just to be organized. If you’ve been asking me when we’ll have beef, now is the time. Shoot me an email if you want some. We have all kinds of cuts and will be updating pricing on the website as soon as possible.

Now, onto the rest of the story.

Spork riding in a big truck
Spork riding back from picking up Sam, dead asleep.

As you can see, not only did Spork get to ride along (I love home schooling) but he was able to catch up on his sleep as well. Don’t let the snooze fool you. He worked hard on each end of the trip and was a joy to ride along with for the hour trip each way. As you can see we had the windows down on this trip. It was mid-July in North Carolina and it was about 84 degrees, low humidity, and a light breeze. It just doesn’t get any prettier.

Chaudhry’s did a great job with our cow, packaging, communication, etc. The only hiccup we had was they didn’t box our meat for us, which I’m used to. It’s not even remotely a problem, except I didn’t have boxes with me so we had to scramble a bit but it all worked out fine. Next time I’ll have plenty of boxes with me so we’ll be prepared.

Steak and eggs, pasture raised, organic.
Breakfast of champions, natural grass-fed beef, scrambled cheese eggs from our chickens, and fresh cantaloupe.

We had dinner plans last night and tonight so I couldn’t whip up a test steak to see how everything came out which was driving me crazy. What to do? How about steak and eggs for breakfast? The verdict? Holy cow! Quite simply the best grass-fed beef I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some “good” grass-fed beef. I cooked these steaks the way you DON’T cook grass-fed beef, fast and with high heat. The steaks were tender, juicy, and flavorful. It’s really hard to get fat into a grass-fed cow but with our methods it seems to have worked in this case very well. When you consider that our cows receive NO COMMERCIAL FEED, no GMO, no hormones, etc, etc it’s pretty exciting that we can finish a cow to this quality. Fat equals flavor and fat is what you need to cook with high heat. We have fat in these ribeyes and they are wonderful. We have a number of ribeyes so we can spare some, along with sirloin steaks, hamburger, stew beef, etc. SWMBO has decreed that no filet mignon’s (her favorite cut) will be sold so I apologize in advance if you want some of them.

Ribeye steaks, ready to be cooked.
Ribeye steaks, ready to be cooked.

Here you get a better look at the marbling in these ribeyes. Ribeye is usually the most heavily marbled cut and has the most flavor. That’s why it’s a prime cut. High end cattlemen have ultrasound machines where they measure the fat on the ribeye before the process the cow to make sure there is enough for the cow to grade out well. Of course we don’t do that here and rely on the old eyeball and experience to tell when a cow is ready to process. Sam looked ready and boy was he. This is a beautiful ribeye with lots of white flecks in the muscle. Those flecks are the marbling that we are after. Seeing that much marbling is what caused me to cook the steaks hot and fast. Our steaks will stand up to the grill.

Cotton, our great pyreneese enjoying her breakfast
Cotton enjoying her breakfast

Of course we couldn’t leave out our hard-working guardian dog. After we’d finished our breakfast, Cotton got to clean up all the scraps and bones. She was a happy dog this morning.

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What our animals eat, besides grass.

Cows enjoying a buffet of fresh vegetables
Cows enjoying a buffet of fresh vegetables

I’ve posted here many times before about this topic, but it’s routine that I get questions from a new reader or customer.

“Do your cows eat GMO grains?”

“Do your cows eat corn feed?”

What you see in this picture is an example of what our cows eat every day, except for in the winter when they eat lots and lots of hay. Our cows eat produce coming from two different farmers markets every day, 365 days a year. Here you see them happily munching on a large pile of summer sweet corns husks. Each pallet (there are two full pallets in this picture) is full of watermelons and mixed in the whole shooting match is tomatoes, zucchini, squash, cantaloupe and anything else you can imagine growing in a garden in the heart of summer. This fall there will be winter squash, pumpkins, lettuce, collards, etc. The cows have about 1000-2000 pounds of this produce a day. This is a supplement, one that they LOVE by the way, to the intensive paddock shift grazing that we do on our farm assuring that our cows get the best of the grass we have each day. At no time do our cows get ANY commercial feed. In fact, at this point, nothing on our farm is getting commercial feed, including the new batch of meat chickens we just received.

Speaking of the new chickens. Here is a test run of the new setup for feeding them. We scavenged a sink and disposal from someone’s kitchen remodel. Luckily we were able to get a nice big 3/4 hp garbage disposal in excellent shape. A quick build by Miguel to get everything mounted and wired and we have a very functional food mill. It does a great job grinding produce into a mush and along with a little water it makes a wonderful chicken food mash. The baby chicks have been started on this mash since day one. At first I was worried they wouldn’t like it but after giving them a little time to figure out what it was, we found that not only did they eat the mash, they absolutely cleaned the bucket. By clean, I mean it looks brand new and polished when they are done. There is NO waste, NO cast-off like there is with chicken feed. For those of you with chickens, you know that they toss an unnerving amount of their feed when they eat. They aren’t messy, they just don’t care much for the commercial feed. Every single speck of mash is gone when they get done with this new setup. I’m already excited for October when this batch of chickens is ready, to see what a difference sunshine, exercise, and a pure vegetable/bug diet does for them.

Anybody want to come process chickens in October?