Ninja Cow Farm LLC

No cow pics today. I have a video of two cows fighting all over the pasture this morning after milking. However as I have said here before, black cows in the black of night just aren’t very photogenic. I do have a picture of the pigs as they enjoy their Thanksgiving feast.

I fed them till they were ready to pop. Then I loaded ’em down again. They are sleeping in the sun now with a pile of food still in the trough. Its a good day to be a pig.

The cows also had their Thanksgiving breakfast of a new paddock and a new roll of hay.

So while all the critters are having Thanksgiving, I am working on Christmas. Spork doesn’t know it yet but he is getting a knife for Christmas. And not just any knife but one I hand made for him. Today I worked on a custom sheath that is stamped with his initials and the year.
Here is the sheath after I have just started.

And the final product.

Its a big day in a boys life when he is old enough for his first knife. I have about 4 days invested in this present so I hope he takes care of it. Whatever he does with it I am excited to give it to him.

I promised a while back that I would share some info on our wood burning boiler. Here is a shot this morning of the boiler as I was putting some wood in after milking.

We use the boilers hot water to heat the entire house and to heat our domestic how water. Compared to the heat pump, its a very warm heat. It’s also nice for the domestic hot water because it’s effectively unlimited and it’s very hot, about 150 degrees which SWMBO loves.
In the picture above you can see part of the wood that we keep seasoned and ready to burn. Here is a video we did on the wood rack if you are interested in how we handle the wood.

Here you can see the back of the boiler with its green spray on foam, transfer pumps, solar connections, etc. This part of the boiler is basically forgotten as it just quietly runs day and night. There is another part of the system I will share another time, the part in the house where all the heat transfer and control take place. I will share that in another post later.

Here you see the business part of the boiler. This is todays load of wood. Since it’s going to be in the upper 40s today, I didn’t need much wood. I will restoke the boiler tonight with more wood because we will have cold weather moving in and we will be going into night time. It will probably take about double this amount of wood.

Every day we go to the farmers market to pick up fresh food for our animals. The farmers are happy because we provide a service and the animals are happy because they get a smorgasbord of veggies and fruits. Here we have two of our farmers when we arrived to pick up with some stylish Thanksgiving headwear.

Well once again I was out of town. I worked to put some posts together ahead of time so everyone would have something to read and so it wouldn’t be so obvious I was gone. No sense advertising you aren’t around publicly. After a week in Las Vegas (it was business, snore) it was great to get home this morning. Although getting to bed at 3am was a bit late and the 6am milking alarm was a tad too early. I am pretty jet lagged today but will soldier through.

All that was worth it though to be able to come home and make the morning smoothie for the family. In the picture above you see some of the ingredients, real coconut, watermelon, peaches, strawberries and fresh cows milk. No sugar or extra gunk, just fresh and frozen fruits. It was yummy!

But he presented me with this the other day. It is pretty neat when your kids develop their own personalities and humor and start bringing you the jokes.