We’ve made it! We had a pretty mild winter, and while it’s been slow to show its face, spring has finally sprung at Seven Wonders. We have long winters here, and the high desert means we get very cold temps through the nights well into the summer. Our growing season is just 67 days…which means while the rest of the world is getting their gardens planted, we’re just barely waking up from under the snow.
I’m not the world’s most passionate gardener- and it takes a lot of passion to grow things where we live. I’d rather spend my time with the animals, prepping our soil for gardening and hay growing with their amazing contributions. So for us, spring looks like digging through all the spent hay and manure that’s accumulated through the winter, and preparing our animals for the two major events on our farm: calving for the younger cows, and butchering for the older ones. The circle of life holds us close here, and it’s both brutal and beautiful, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
For prepping our pastures, Mike uses our skid steer (we have a Kubota SSV 65) to scoop the manure from our compost heap and around the main pen where they hang out, and deposits it around our pasture. Then a neighbor who has an apparatus for dragging manure comes and drags it through our pastures, breaking up the manure that’s been left there throughout the winter as well. It’s amazing how this process feeds our otherwise pitiful rocky soil and prepares it for growing hay.
For the cows, I make sure each of our cows who are preparing for spring calving is set up for success. The milk cows are dried off 2 months before calving, meaning we slowly stop milking them (usually over a week, I just take less each day until they’ve run dry). For both beef and milk cows, we make sure they have access to minerals and have been dewormed with our herbal dewormer (I love molly’s herbals from mollysherbals.com). I check my calving kits (which are mostly just gloves, lubricant, and old towels), and I make sure I have a gallon of molasses on-hand for mamas after birth (I give 16 oz. molasses per 5 gallons of water as soon as I see them after calving- often the morning after because I wake up to a happy calf and its mama).
I try to keep 3 cows to calve in spring (between May and June) and 3 cows to calve in fall (usually September to October). This typically lets me have milk throughout the year, so long as cows are bred on time. If (like this year) we have issues with breeding timing, I have found that I can buy quality cows from a nearby dairy to get me through our dry periods, and once my main cows calve, I sell the short term cows as trained hand-milk cows to local homesteaders. I love this option so much that I’ve actually started a milk cow business! So far I’ve sold 7 milk cows to local homesteaders, and I’m planning on selling at least a dozen more before the end of the year. By doing this I help a dairyman who loves his cows avoid sending those that don’t fit the mold of the dairy industry to the auction, and I train and place them with families who are looking for well-bred, gentle dairy cows for their families and communities. It’s been a beautiful way to fill a need, and it fills my spirit and helps our family financially. What a blessing.
We thank our animals for their sacrifice and the gift they are to our family and our community every time the butchers come to us.
The hardest part of this season is butchering. We have a mobile butcher come to our farm twice a year, and we try to harvest 2-3 cows each time. The mobile butcher is a blessing to me- they come and cull my cows right here on the farm, and they can dispatch them at a distance; meaning my cows can be peacefully grazing in our pasture one second, and be gone the next. They never suffer or know stress. We harvest every bit of our cows that we can, and what isn’t turned into food (or supplements like collagen and tallow) for us becomes food for our soil. We can nourish our entire farm, and a lot of our community, with their contributions. It’s sad for me to say goodbye to these beautiful creatures we’ve cared for, but I’m so grateful for all the ways their sacrifice extends their life through connection to so many new living things.
We’re in our fourth year on the farm now, and it’s the time when we realize we’re in this for the long haul. Not because we subscribe to someone else’s farming method, but because we’re finding our own. So many common “homestead” things don’t work for us, but we’re carving out a road for ourselves. It’s amazing how this works. I’m laughing at my notes from all the homesteading books I read in the years before the farm- so little of what I thought would be our method has actually transpired. But in the space of that has been enormous self-discovery. We’ve become braver. We’ve become innovators and ingenues. My beliefs and ideals have been challenged, but I think we’ve all come through stronger in what we believe and stand for than I ever could have imagined. It’s hard to be this close to our food- and yet it’s the only way I want to live, for now and forever. We can do hard things! And hard things done in great love are always worth doing.
xoxo~ Lauren
