Growing Animal Feed

Growing some of our animal feed is something we have wanted to do for a long time, but it's a goal that is not easy to meet overnight, in a year, or even over a couple of years. This summer we have been able to make a little head way on this project, and we want to share what we have learned.

In the spring when everything was turning green, I started gathering grasses and weeds to feed the chickens. Our chickens are not out ranging at this time, but they do have a run outside of the chicken house. We need to add a chicken proof barrier along the bottom of a couple of gates to keep them on their side of the yard and out of the garden. So, for now, they get some kind of greens almost everyday along with other garden or kitchen scraps as they come along.

In the early spring, I started to feed them beet greens as soon as the plants were big enough to spare a few leaves.

I also planted some new comfrey roots to expand our ability to provide more animal feed. This patch had really done well. For most of the summer, the chickens received a handful of comfrey leaves almost everyday. This was a great addition to their feed. The goats like them as well, but since they had lots of good things to eat out in the pasture, they were not a crazy about these leaves as the chickens were.

We grew some sunflowers this year to be used as animal feed for both chickens and goats. Our patch was about six feet by thirty feet with four rows of plants. Here is our harvest. All of these plants were grown from seeds we harvested last summer from our very first plants. I think there were about six of them. It's good to know the seeds are easy to save and replant. If we wanted to grow enough to feed a little all winter, we would need many, many more plants than what we grew this year. But it is a start.

 
The corn we grew ended up being dried for the animals instead of canned for humans. Sometimes things just end up that way. It is interesting to see how it has dried, and figure out an easy way to remove it from the cob. Once it is this dry, the kernels separate from the cob fairly easy just by rubbing two cobs together. I will keep the dried shucks to see if the goats will be interested in them this winter. Another thing to learn. This small amount of corn won't go very far as animal feed, either, but it has been a very interesting learning experience.

 

Now that the fall crops are up and growing well, I pick a batch of greens for the chickens every morning. They get a bucket full of turnip greens.

Turnips, Kale & small Swiss Chard

Add a handful of kale.....

 

 And a handful of beet greens.

The fall carrot crop is growing pretty well. It will be interesting to see how the animals take to carrots, turnips and Mangel sugar beets as a source of winter feed. Very interesting. This is something I have wanted to try for a long time.

 Our patch of purple hull peas has been taken over by the grass and weeds. But before that happened, we were able to pick several batches that had dried on the vine and fed them to the chickens and goats. They were all more than happy to eat them, the chickens just the seeds, but the goats, pods, seeds and all. This is a very easy crop to grow that is highly nutritious, for both animal and human.

I still throw in a few comfrey leaves every now and then, but I am letting the comfrey put energy into their roots for winter. The original comfrey plant I added to the herb bed about four years ago stays green until about January when our weather turns cold. I have been surprised every year that it takes that long for it to die back. It starts peaking out new leaves in late March when it starts to warm up, but doesn't produce enough leaves for fresh feed until sometime in April.

The amount of feed we are harvesting each day for our animals really doesn't amount to a whole lot, but it is a start. There are some other things we also want to try. Our friend Grace found a article in Mother Earth News that talked about Austrian Winter Peas that can be used for chickens and deer. Some folks also eat the shoots in salads saying they taste just like peas. It is better known as a cover crop for fixing nitrogen in the soil. After Grace told me about them and I read about them, we ordered some seeds. It will be another thing we can try for animal feed. Thank you, Grace.

If times get hard and we have to provide for ourselves and our animals, this small amount of experience will hopefully help keep us on our feet while we learn even more. Challenges will always come our way, and we have had more than a few this year. Even so, our little animal feed growing project has taught us a lot. And we hope to learn even more through the winter and during the growing season next year.

Until next time - Fern

Alarming Ebola News

Ladies and Gentlemen, I know we are a home preparedness site, but there are some things happening in our world that I would like to share with you. This topic is not going to be about how to can squash, or who makes the best kitchen knives. This falls in the category of the sky is falling, the theater is on fire, and the wolf is at the door type scenarios. We at Frank and Fern, find it sad to feel the need to bring you this information. Please read with an open mind, do your own research, and formulate your own thoughts. Here are some links to people that we read, and for the most part, respect their research. If this information is true, then we're all in trouble. Serious trouble. I hope these folks are wrong. Decide for yourself. Our practice is not to post on Sunday, the Lord's day, but we felt this information needed to be made public. We think the good Lord will understand.

Frank and Fern

Ol' Remus at the Woodpile Report    

The Ebola Farce

 Mac Slavo at SHTFplan.com   

Disaster Teams Were Notified Months Ago They Would Be Activated in October

  

Grain Grinder, Manual Type

Hi Everybody, Frank here.

There has been some spooky news in our country lately. This has given Fern and I a reason to think about our homestead situation. So, this morning Fern went out and dragged in a product that we bought a couple of years ago and have never used. We have lots of things like that. Things we have stocked up on and never used. But, today was the day to try out one of our manual grain grinders.

This product is a Wonder Junior and it's manufactured by Wonder Mill. Our electric grain mill is also made by Wonder Mill. The electric one turns at significantly greater 

speed, since the hand mill is rated at one human power. It's not rated the highest of the hand grain mills, and it's not made for industrial or agricultural purposes. But it was rated consistently among the good to better hand grain mills. So here is the results of our test today.

Assembly was pretty straightforward. It is durable enough that when I tightened all of the pieces down, nothing fractured or warped. The instructions are self explanatory. They're written in plain English, by someone whose first language is English. The reason I mention that is I buy some radios that the manuals are in English, but you can tell it's not the writers first language. Back to the mill.

Okay. It's assembled. Instructions are easy to follow. Here goes 1 cup of hard red winter wheat, and you know who starts cranking. The instructions say that if the grinding is real difficult, then release a little pressure off of the grinding plates, we did, and cranking was much easier. But the flour was still too large of a grit, which the instructions addressed. We were to grind it once, resulting in a more coarse flour, tighten the grinding plates and re-grind it a second time. The instructions were correct. It took a little bit more time, but it was much easier to grind, both times. So, again, the instructions were right.

I am so funny.

You can remove the handle if you choose, and attach a pulley wheel kit assembly. We did not purchase this option. It also comes with a little gizmo type drill bit, which is an optional accessory, and use your electric hand drill. We did order this attachment, but I can't find it. So. After watching the video of how to remove the handle, where this man used his fine adjusting tool, more commonly known as a hammer, to pry loose the handle. Well, the one in the video had obviously been removed a few times before. You would now say that mine is definitely a used machine. There are a few dings and chips in the back side of the handle, but I got it off. The video made it look real easy, but they have editing. 

So, what I did was after removing the handle, I replaced the retainer bolt back into the auger, found the appropriate socket size, which I will share with you is 13mm, and that little gizmo turned just fine with my battery operated hand drill.

We have since ordered the little gizmo bit attachment thingy, that is made especially for this hand drill type purpose. Remember, I lost the first one. I do believe a larger drill, like a 1/2 horse, with an adjustable trigger for speed control, would be a better choice. That's what I will use next time. But, it worked just fine grinding the wheat. I have a large, older electric hand drill that I use for much heavier jobs when I really want to twist the head off of something. Back to the mill.

This mill comes with two sets of grinding plates. One set of grinding burrs is for dry items like corn, wheat, barley, things with a much, much lower oil content. The other set of grinding burrs are made of stainless steel, which is made for things like peanuts and other oil producing type seeds or grains. So, if you're into making peanut butter, stainless steel is the way to go. Or, if you choose, you can use the stainless steel all the time. But if you do mess up and use the stone burrs for something like peanut butter, it will not ruin them, you will just have to spend a little time washing them with a very coarse type brush.

After having used the mill, some of the flour was a little difficult to contain. While we were ordering the hand drill bit attachment, we also purchased a flour guard. This should make clean up significantly easier, not that it was difficult at all though. 


Overall, I found the hand mill easy to assemble, the instructions were easy to follow, we only ground a dry type grain, which was wheat. It gave us a nice flour, and it was easy to disassemble and clean. I can't speak to it's long term durability, but it appears to be well made from durable products. I do have another hand mill that I have also never used. It comes from my Y2K days. And it's not going to get used in the near future. The Wonder Junior made by Wonder Mill appears to be a good quality product. If you have any questions about this particular product, I hope this helps. And, yes, I have the ability to recharge my hand drill batteries if the electricity goes off, because I know somebody is going to ask that question. At my age, I would not want to crank this mill enough times to make four or five loaves of bread. 

If you have items, like I do, that you have bought, put in storage and never used, now is a good time to try them out. You never know when you are going to need them, and I'm as guilty as anybody for not having tried all of my stored items. But that's just the way it is. I would certainly encourage you, if you haven't, to pick out one and make sure it works. Now I'm going to go find the Ben-Gay, my arm hurts. Just kidding.

We'll talk more later, Frank.

Our Winter Squash Failures

Two years ago I planted a number of winter squashes in May. They struggled through the hot part of the summer, but produced very well, eventually. That summer we tried a number of different varieties to see how we liked them. These included Buttercup, Cushaw, Hubbard and Acorn. The Hubbard didn't produce well, but tasted okay. The Acorn didn't produce well either. We had previously grown Butternut and Spaghetti squash. The Butternut was okay, but we didn't really care for the Spaghetti squash.

Immature Buttercup, September 2013

The Buttercup was prolific, and although rather ugly and warty, tasted great. The flavor is very similar to sweet potatoes. We peeled off the worst of the warts, cut them in half, removed the seeds and placed them face down in a shallow baking dish with a small amount of water, covered with foil and baked. They were so good, we didn't even add butter. Another plus for the Buttercup, is that they are great keepers.
 

Immature Cushaw, September 2013

The Cushaw squash produced very well, also. The flavor wasn't as sweet, but they were huge. We were surprised. The volume of edible squash is very large. This squash freezes well either in chunks or boiled and mashed into a puree type consistency. One of  our goals is to can some of this squash, but we haven't achieved that goal yet.

Both the Buttercup and the Cushaw make great squash pie which we enjoy every winter.





The last two years I have planted our winter squash in late July or early August. I figured it was still hot enough for squash to grow, but closer to fall, which is when I thought a winter squash should be grown, like pumpkins. It hasn't worked out well at all. Both last year and this year the plants have suffered from powdery mildew, had the flowers affected somewhat by potato beetles, still had to contend with some squash bugs and just overall haven't thrived. This year we will be lucky to get 3 decent Cushaws. We only planted one variety this year because we wanted to save the seeds. It was difficult not to plant the Buttercup because we really like them, too.

The last Cushaw on the vine for this year. We hope it gets bigger.

Next year I will plant the winter squashes when I plant the yellow squash. In May. There may be locations where the winter squashes do better later in the season, but it just doesn't seem to be the case here. We really were hopeful about this crop. Our goal was to be able to store at least 20 large Cushaw. They are very nutritious and so are the seeds, which is an added bonus. Squash seeds also make good animal feed for chickens and goats.
 

Our Cushaw harvest. All 2 of them.

We are glad we have had time to learn the most effective growing patterns for the vegetables we like. The knowledge that some crops grow and produce better than others in our location is valuable information. There are always things that come up that compete with the time and effort needed to grow and preserve food. This year has definitely been one of the less productive years for us. But, in the midst of the gardening and preserving disruptions, we have still learned a lot of very valuable lessons. For that, we are thankful.

Until next time - Fern
 

Health News - Beware of the Dangers Out There

Most people probably realized that it was just a matter of time before the first case of Ebola was diagnosed and announced in this country. But just the fact that it has happened is enough to make your stomach tie up in knots, isn't it? And then the spread, changes and fatality from the Enterovirus are another cause for concern.

This seemed to be a good day to share some more headlines. Do your own research as well. There are many things happening out there that may show up on your doorstep, like it or not, prepared or not. It's a good time to review your preps and fill in any holes you find. If you are not in a homestead or retreat location, it would also be a good time to review your exit plan. The example of medical martial law that we had the advantage of observing from across the ocean, is definitely something to take into account. Are you ready for that?

We had a couple of posts involving Ebola and health issues a short while back that I am going to link back to. One of them covered extensive steps to take if you need to quarantine your home to protect your family from contagions. There are many supplies and things to consider, and this article, although lengthy, covers it very well.

• The five biggest lies about Ebola being pushed by government and mass media

 

• Outbreak Jitters: How Can We Trust the CDC on Ebola?

• What You Need to Know About the Ebola Outbreak

•  Dallas parents fearing Ebola remove children from school

• What Preppers Are Doing About Ebola

 

•  Mosquito Virus that Walloped the Caribbean Spread in U.S.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the best medical system on the planet. We have things here that other countries can't even imagine. There is some criticism right now about our medical services and their short comings. With the recent introduction of "Obama Care" there is both positive and negative criticism. But that does not change the fact that we have the best medical care available to mankind in this country.

As you are aware, the system inside this country has had a deadly virus introduced into our advanced medical system. A few days to a few weeks from now, we will know the results of this one man with Ebola. Everything maybe hunky-dory, and this will just have been a scare on the radar. But there is also a possibility that things are not going to be hunky-dory, and this may be the beginning of a major infestation of our country. Only time will tell. During this time period, you might want to seriously evaluate or re-evaluate your family's medical preparedness plan. There are some times you don't get a second chance. Give it some thought, because this virus travels at the speed of a jet. It might be a good time for a family chit-chat. It's a good time to prepare. Seriously. If it passes. Great. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. That oil light on your engine, tells you something. It's blinking red right now.

Frank and Fern