The more cow pies the merrier

Cow pies are so delicious and nutritious that's why we got more cows so we can get more of them.  In case you didn't sense the sarcasm here I'm just being sarcastic.  We are, however, getting more cow pies in the pasture because we just got another cow yesterday!  Yup, another pregnant cow.  Everyday we have been going out to the pasture to check on the cows to see if they have their babies yet...but no they haven't had their babies yet.  But don't worry, as soon as they have their babies I will post pictures on here.

So now we have a total of 4 heads of cows.  We don't know 

what to name the pregnant cows yet.  Udder 1 and Udder 2?  

One of my kids wants to name one of them Cloudy...😳 

I'm not quite sure about that name...but then why the heck not 

since they named their cats Scratchy, Stardust, Angel, and Midnight.

The new pregnant cow is the smaller black cow you see in 

the picture( the one looking at the camera and smiling for the picture).  

Dexter is the black one with a big fat head

On top of getting a new cow yesterday our friends gave us two Pygmy goats.  So now we have a total of 4 goats just roaming around in our front yard.  These goats we just got from our friends are really friendly and not skittish like our other ones.  They would even let you get close to them and pet them!  Needless to say my  kids are in love!  The Pygmy goats are simply just there to "mow" the yard and keeping the grass down or maybe for breeding.  They are even smaller than our mini Nubian goats.  

Meet Molly and Joey!  Is it me or goats just have some weird, crazing looking eyes?!

2+1=4

I meant to post this last week but I procrastinated...better late than never, right?

You might be scratching your head wondering why 2+1=4.  I'm here to explain why this mathematics equation is actually correct.

If you have been following this blog you already know we currently have one Dexter bull and a Dexter steer.  Last week we just got another Dexter and this time it's a cow. (Remember we had a whole lesson on different names we give cattle already).  This cow is actually a pregnant cow.  So even though we currently have 3 dexters on our farm we technical have 4.  And we will be getting 2 more pregnant cows in the next few weeks.

We are contemplating milking the cow after she has her calf.  We shall see.  We are excited to see the calf when it's finally here!

Dexter, the lady's man!  Already making friends with the new cow.
In this picture the cow has only been here for less than 3 hours.

A productive Saturday morning

We spent about an hour this morning picking dewberries.  We found some new spots on our property with lots of nice plump, juicy and ripe dewberries.

It was a very big bowlful of dewberries 

And a friend suggested making dewberry pancakes with buttermilk syrup with the dewberries we picked.  So that's exactly what we made for breakfast this morning.  I feel so accomplished already this morning!

I'm in heaven!

I just looked up a buttermilk syrup recipe online and found this one on allrecipes.com.  Allrecipes.com usually has pretty good recipe.  It's pretty good buttermilk syrup everyone loved it!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/59591/buttermilk-syrup/

Another one of those

We just got ourselves a steer last Friday .  Another Dexter.  As mentioned in my earlier post dexters are a smaller breed of cattle and are good for people with smaller acreage.  And for those who don't know what a steer is, steer is a less manly aka castrated bull.  Before I started getting into this whole farm thing I thought all cattle are just called cows.  Who would have thought they actually have a lot of different names for them?!  So for example steer as mentioned above is the castrsted bull, then bull of course means a male cattle, cow is a female cow. But why can't people just say castrsted cow and not come up with a different name, like steer for them?! Is it just to confuse people?!   Oh and then there's heifer and that means cows that have not had babies, and cows are just female cows who have had babies.

Well anyway, so the steer (you should know by now a steer is a castrsted bull!) we just picked up yesterday is just 6 months old.  So he's still kind of cute.  I decided to name him Ribeye and there was no objection from hubby and kids. 

And we shall call you Ribeye

He's only 6 months old so if we grass feed him only then he should be ready for butchering in another 18 months or so.  If they are grass fed only, which we intend to do, then you will get the best yield and still get good meat if butchered at 24 months.

Welcome to your new home, Ribeye

Another fact about Dexter is that if you are going to get dexters for the purpose of breeding then you probably want to get a registered one.  Registered Dexter is a lot more expensive than the non-registered ones.  Reason being the registered dexters have gone through DNA testing and are cleared of having certain genetic disorders that dexters are known to have.  With this particular breed of cattle they are known to have chondrodysplasia (chondro) and pulmonary Hypoplasia with Anasarca (PHA).  Chondro is a "Genetic mutation that causes defective bone growth...and it results in the animals appearing heavy bodied of short legs."  So basically it's some kind of dwarfism.  

The other one PHA is a little bit more serious.  PHA "indicates incomplete formation of the lungs. Anasarca indicates an accumulation of fluids in tissues and body cavities. PHA-affected calf may be tremendously swollen which would make delivery exceedingly difficult and potentially life threatening for the cow."  So basically the fetus and the mama cow could both die. 

So this is the little bit of knowledge that I have of dexters for those who might be interested in getting dexters.

Exploring his new home

Dinner served

We had pork chops for dinner tonight.  Most of the time pork chops are nothing really that special.  But tonight the pork chops we had for dinner are from the very pigs that we raised and recently butchered.

Dinner almost ready!

It was delicious!  They are pretty decent sized...a little tougher than the store-bought pork chops I'm accustom to but a lot less bright pink because there's no preservatives in my pork chops tonight!  And no added hormones or what not.  The meat itself taste really good and hubby noticed our pork chops soaked in flavors better than the store-bought ones as well.  We were very pleased with our dinner tonight!

This is one delicious meal!  I wish the mashed potatoes
I made tonight were home grown but they weren't.  Someday...

Raising your own pigs for meat might not be "cheap" but it's worth it.  If you go to the store and buy the "all-natural" or no hormone pork meat you will probably be paying double of what we paid for our pork meat.  For us this time it came up to be about $5/lb.  That takes into account of the expenses for acquiring the pigs, expenses on feed, and the cost of butchering the pigs.  If you were to butcher your own pigs you can probably cut your cost down by about half.  But we prefer not to do the butchering ourselves unless we have to.  

But in the future our cost would probably go down some because we would be breeding our pigs.  We would keep one or two piglets then sell the rest so that way we can offset some of our expenses.  At least for now that's the plan.

So to top off dinner we went outside to pick dewberries and had dewberries for dessert.  Oh I so wish we had vanilla ice cream to go with them though!  For those who don't know what dewberries are they are kind of like blackberries but they grow very wild around this area during this time of year.  They are a little more tart and sour than blackberries but nonetheless, very tasty.  My kids love 'em!  Right now we have them all over our property.

These are dewberries