Changing times!

Hey and welcome back to the farm. We haven't had a whole lot going on around here lately since Frank has been pulling opening shifts at work for the past week and a half. I did manage to score 4 young chickens for our flock at an animal swap last weekend. We fixed up the coop and got them all situated in there and then got our four remaining chickens back into the coop. I thought finally I would have them off my back stoop and then I go out later in the day and the coop door is wide open! Come to find out Carl and Judith (two of our little dwarf goats) saw me throwing food in there and took it upon themselves to push the door open and go in for a snack. I never thought I would need a latch for the chicken door, the chickens weren't going to open it. Well apparently I do now. So I got that all fixed up for now and it took me FOREVER to get those chickens back in. Esp. since I was on my own with Frank being at work. I asked the girls to help but they were almost more of a hinderance, it was so cute seeing them trying though. They like to look at the chickens but not get close to them unless someone is holding them still.

On another note the next couple weeks are going to be so busy with getting the girls ready to start Preschool on Sept 4th. Madelyn got accepted into Head Start for Hanover County so i'll be dropping her off at her bus pick up by 6:55 am everyday (talk about a life style change there) going back home and getting Baylor ready for her ride to her school. She's only going to be going for two half days right now and hopefully we can expand that a little more into the school year to three half days or three full days, we'll just have to wait and see. And finally, I got the job! So a lot of changes going on here in the next couple weeks. I'm so sad to be leaving my Trackside family but it's time to be a grown up. I'll be working days now and getting benefits so i'm super stoked! Still some rotating weekends but that just gives me days off during the week to get appointments taken care of! Between me and Frank we'll have to figure out a new schedule for feeding the animals but it will all work out. So wish me luck and i'll keep you posted on how things go! 

Holy Hot Sauce!

Hey and welcome back to the farm! So this week we haven't had to much going on. We moved a bunch of animals around on different leads to try and ease the amount of animals eating all the grass in the main fence. Since the baby piglets are getting in and out of the pig pen on their own we decided to move the mama out into the main fence and put Miss Piggy and George back into the pig pen. They were just tearing up the nice pasture making pig mud holes and it really was frustrating me. They were always getting into the baby pool we use for water for all the animals and making it so muddy also. Super annoying! Other than that just a normal work week. The girls had a sleepover at my moms Friday night and came back spoiled with clothes, new shoes, and Minnie mouse lunch boxes for school that are super cute! What are grandma's for right? But seriously my mom is the best, Thank you mom!

The other thing that we got into this week is that Frank decided to make his own hot sauce from our jalapeno and habanero peppers we're growing. I don't know how this will turn out but we'll see! We started by washing and cutting all the tops off the peppers. Then into the blender they went and the smell alone was hot! I had to send the girls to their room to play it was so intense. We added the salt and now it's sitting, fermenting, in our laundry room for now. We got the recipe from Mother Earth News magazine, it's a great resource with all kinds of great articles. If you want to check it out here is the link: Make Your Own Hot Sauce

I'll keep you posted about how this goes along, we'll see! Thanks for stopping by and see ya'll next time!

Chicken Thighs

Hey ya'll! I recently googled a new recipe and after we tried it we found it was super easy and really good. I normally buy chicken breast and we make tacos or bake it but this time we tried chicken thighs. They turned out really tender and juicy and the kids actually liked them and ate all of their dinner. So needless to say they are a favorite around here now. I've found that the skin on, bone in ones work better but boneless worked as well. Just have to adjust the cooking time. Your supposed to mix all the spices together but I just shake them onto the chicken one at time and it turns out just fine. One less container to wash right? Happy Cooking!

Baked Chicken Thighs

8 Bone In Chicken Thighs
1/4 Tsp Garlic Salt
1/4 Tsp Onion Salt
1/4 Tsp Oregano
1/4 Tsp Black Pepper
1/4 Tsp Paprika
1/4 Tsp Thyme

Preheat oven to 350, mix all the dried ingredients in an bowl together. Brush the chicken thighs with olive oil and sprinkle the spice mix over the chicken. Bake in the over for about 1 hour. The juices should run clear and if use a thermometer it should read 165 degrees.

Breakfast Casserol

Good afternoon ya'll! So with the girls starting preschool in September I've been trying to come up with quick breakfast ideas. We also have all these potatoes that need to be used since I still haven't solved the pressure cooker problem yet. So I decided to try to throw together a breakfast casserole that can be made ahead of time and you can just microwave what you want to eat in the morning. It actually turned out pretty well. Tomorrow we'll see if the kids will actually eat it though, that will be the real test. We used 1 lb of sausage from the freezer, half an onion, half a green pepper, 12 eggs, and probably 1 lb of diced up potatoes. Oh and cheese, have to have cheese! Salt and pepper as well for taste. We cooked the sausage and potatoes first then combined all the ingredients in a dish and cooked it in the over at 350 for about 25 minutes.  I'll let you know how the kids like it. Please pass along any tips or recipes ya'll use for quick breakfast options! 

Looks super good!

Hay Bales and Piglets!

Hey Ya'll! We've had a busy day yesterday here on the farm. In preparing for winter already we had our hay bales delivered yesterday. Four huge bales, and they are super heavy if you haven't ever tried to move them. Of course they just rolled them off the truck into the drive way so Frank and I had the chore of getting them down by the fence tucked away with the tarp over them. It doesn't look that pretty unfortunately, but its practical. The animals are really enjoying the hay already.

We also have piglets! I don't actually know when they were born I just found them when the kids and I went down to check on the electric fence. I don't usually go into the barn every day and I guess Peppa was hiding them in there and now they are starting to venture out and about. They are super cute but definitely little squealers, hopefully they will only be around for 6-8 weeks.

 The work is never down around here, especially when we keep adding animals to the mix. Our next project is going to be trying to  get the basement set up a little bit better so I can get storage shelves put up for our canned vegetables. If I can figure out how i'm going to start canning since our new house has a glass top stove and you can't use a pressure cooker on a glass top. Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks for stopping bye and we'll see you next time!

Lazy Days

Hey Welcome back ya'll! Not a whole lot going on around here this past week. I've been picking up an extra night of work the past couple weeks so that has cut out one day of pool time or anything extra fun we might get into. Esp. since we usually use my other two days off to fix fences, swap animals around, or fix the garden. This week we planted two new green pepper plants and a few rows of corn in what was the green bean garden bed. We also dug up the onion garden and I went back to small plastic buckets for the green beans. That should do much better that this previous round in the other garden bed. It's only been a few days and everything is starting to sprout, even the potatoes!

Good news also, Madelyn was accepted into the Hanover County Preschool program! Yay! Now we just have to wait and see if they will let Baylor transfer to that program or stay where she is in the two day program. I'm hoping they will let her go into the full day program just because it will be easier for transportation purposes. Anyway Frank is working on making his own hot sauce with all of the peppers we have been growing so we'll be posting that process soon as well! Also wish me luck because I've had a couple job interviews and one more lined up for this week! Here's hoping! With the girls starting school this fall it's really time to try and find a more Monday through Friday job with weekends off. Any leads send them my way! Thanks and see ya'll next time!

Oh and one more thing! Congratulations to my brother Marshall and his wife Kenzie on the purchase of there first house, its amazing ya'll!

Finger Painting

Beefy has arrived!

Welcome back Ya'll! We've had a busy couple of weeks around here. Time just flies by! Firstly it was finally time to cut back our potato plants. Then you have to let them sit for 5-10 days. We didn't quite get as many as were expecting but we still did get a big storage bin full of them so i'll take it! I think it was because of the dirt we used. We had a whole truck load delivered when we started building the garden and it wasn't exactly the kind I wanted. It was a mix of dirt and that clay dirt. So to fix the problem we spent all day yesterday tilling the garden beds; adding good dirt, compost, and pig manure. This hopefully will yield more potatoes since they will be able to grow in better soil. The next round is planted and now we can just wait and see. Look for a canning post soon!

Secondly we have two new arrivals to the farm! Welcome our new Nigerian Dwarf goat Rick and surprisingly we now have a Jersey Calf! We were planning on getting another male goat to bred with our two female dwarf goats Maggie and Judith but the cow was somewhat an impulse buy. We have been toying with the idea of a cow for a while but I've been on the fence about it. They get so big and  I just wasn't sure. Plus they are expensive, normally a few hundred if not more. However I was browsing craigslist and found a post for a baby Jersey Cow for just $100! Apparently he was so cheap because he still has to be bottle fed twice a day. So now that's added on to my daily to do list. He's so cute though! He's not getting a name, (Frank is calling him Beefy) I thought about calling him Hershal but have decided against it. Ya'll can probably understand why. We'll have him for maybe year or less and then should get about 600 lbs of meat out of it. In the end i'll let you know if this was all worth it or not. Stay tuned. In the mean time here are some super cute pictures of him!

In the Weeds

Hey and welcome back! So our garden is just growing and producing a ton of peppers and we're finally starting to get tomatoes. This is first year we haven't gotten red tomatoes before the summer solstice, but we did start planting later this year due to having to build the garden. However I think we made a bad call with the beans. In past years we always used buckets, like we did with the peppers and tomatoes, but this year I really wanted to do garden beds because I just think they look better. Well apparently I didn't take into account that the buckets keep weeds from growing up around the plants. So our garden beds become over grown with weeds and I just didn't keep up with them. Needless to say it became a huge pain when I finally went out there to get the job done. So now I have to figure out how to keep weeds under control if I want to continue to use garden beds or go back to buckets. Google here I come...

We have two new additions to farm as well, i'll be introducing on the next post! Along with how our potatoes are doing. I should have potatoes out of the ground by the next time i'm back! See ya'll soon!

My poor onions didn't even grow

Happy 4th of July!

Hey ya'll! I hope everyone had a blast this past fourth of July! It's one of my favorite holidays and we had so much fun at my dads river house. This year my brother, SIL, and their two fur babies came down and stayed the two days with us also. It was so nice to get out there and just relax and have fun. We had all different floats to play with, went on a couple boat rides, and Madelyn tried tubing for the first time and loved it! Obviously not by herself; she went with my brother, Safety first! Of course the one down side to having animals is you have to get back home to take care of them so we packed up after lunch Thusday and headed home. Everyone survived the night without us, Charlie wasn't to happy about having to stay outside overnight with the big dogs. We wrapped up the day fixing our electric fence for the little goats and FINALLY cutting back our potatoes plant. So in 5-10 days we can start digging them up! I'm so excited to see what we got this time and then its on to planting the next set. Anyway my work week is just starting tonight (I work weekends and am off Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays) so i'll be checking back in Tuesday! See ya'll then!

Welcome Daryl!

Welcome back ya'll! I'm so excited to share that we have a new addition to the farm! His name is Daryl (keeping with my Walking Dead theme) and he is a hair sheep. They are good for breeding and also are meat sheep. They don't have wool so we don't have to worry about shearing them either. He's still a baby and is so cute! He's about the size of a young Lab to give you a comparison. We should be getting a couple ewes (females) soon to start breeding with as soon as they get old enough. Get ready for super cute lamb pictures in the future!

We've also been tryin to figure out why Carl isn't growing. We've ruled out parasites and anything like that so I think he's just the runt (he was a triplet). Our other two little girls Judith and Maggie didn't seem to be growing either so after a lot of research we think we figured it out. Judith and Maggie are dwarf Nigerian goats so they are going to stay small and hence we probably won't be able to bred them with Billy. Billy and Daisy are Alpline goats, which is what Carl should be as well since we know exactly who he came from. Now we need to decide where to go from here, stay tuned!

And Last but not least we think Peppa is pregnant so we should have little piglets here in an few months! Life on the farm, never a dull moment!

Daryl

Goats, Pigs, and Chickens Oh My!

Hey Ya'll! It's been a scorcher this week! I was just out feeding and filling all the water for the animals earlier and thinking about how hot its been and how I haven't even posted about them yet. We currently have 10 chickens, 2 guineas, 1 duck, 2 cats (well 3 but the kitten is going to his new home soon), 3 dogs, 3 pigs, and 5 goats! Whew...It started with our oldest Charlie who is a Brussels Griffon and grew from there. Then came Haven, a black lab, and Zoey, we think either a lab/pit mix or lab/boxer mix.

Charlie with Madelyn

Our Goats are Billy, Daisy, Carl, Judith, and Maggie. If your a Walking Dead fan you'll notice I've started naming our goats from characters on the show. Billy and Daisy are our adults right now that we breed and sell the babies. We just bought Judith and Maggie to increase our herd so when they are bigger we can bred them as well and will have three breeding females. We had an interesting experience when Carl was born this year. He wasn't able to nurse so I ended up bottle feeding him. He lived in our laundry room and is now more like a dog than a goat. He's my baby! Follows us around and is very loving and social. We also learned how to milk a goat so look for future post about making goat cheese and soap!

Carl (he's grown some now of course)

Daisy with two babies we sold.

Our pigs are name Miss Piggy, Peppa, and George. If you have small children you'll know where the last two names came from. We just Miss Piggy has become a pet so she most likely won't go into the freezer but hopefully the offspring of our two younger pigs will keep us supplied with plenty of pork so we can cut costs at the store. Similar situation we with the chickens, eat and sell the eggs. Which, if you haven't tried farm fresh eggs you are missing out! The guineas are actually really good watch dogs and keep the bugs down. They are so loud when something new comes near its almost super annoying. Between them and the dogs no one can sneak up in this yard! Anyway on with the rest of the day! Thinking about taking the kids to the pool since its so hot out. I hate being cooped up inside. If anyone has any ideas about how to keep two almost 4 year olds entertained in this heat send them my way! Have a great day!

Garden Beds?

Hey all! Let me first say that gardening does not come natural to me at all. I don't know why since my mom and my grandfather all have green thumbs, I guess it decided to skip a generation. Frank however has always been into it and has gotten me into it as well. We've been growing different vegetables for years and now that we just bought our first house in January we decided to build our "forever" garden. Although we're already talking about expanding and changing things up next season. Anyway, for anyone asking themselves if they should start a garden I say go for it! It can be as big or small as you want and there are a ton or websites out there to help you go in the direction you want to. We picked the best spot in the yard to get the most sun and started there.

Then we just measured out how big we needed it to be to accomadate the amount of raised beds and buckets we would need to plant in. I'm not going to go into the actual amount of work and how we built all the beds in this post, i'll save that for another day. However we did need to get 2x4s and cemented them into the ground and bought the fences from Home depot and just screwed them in. Again not going to go into all the measurements etc. After we got the fence up came the garden beds, buckets, and then the planting started. This whole process took a couple months considering we could only build on Frank's two days off and all the rain we got. 

These 3 beds are all full of potatoes.

The far beds are lettuce, beans, and strawberries. The buckets have tomatoes and peppers.

Pre Plants

And this is what they look like now. We are about a week away from harvesting potatoes and starting again!

Here is a great link for lot's of different idea's for raised beds, have fun!

Raised garden beds

Hello!

Welcome to Miller Love!

A new blog dedicated to all things family, farms, gardening, and plain simple living. We have a small "homestead" as my husband calls it located in Beaverdam VA. Let me introduce myself; I'm Heather Miller along with my husband Frank, and 3 year old twins Madelyn and Baylor we strive for enjoying life simply (as simple as life can be). Through this blog we'll strive to let you into our life of constantly moving parts between working, farming, gardening, cooking and just living life to the fullest! I'm so excited to join the blogging community and can't wait to see what this has in store for us! Talk again soon, off to feed the animals!

Madelyn an Baylor with one of our goats Carl