220910 Farm Days

This picture is me bucking hay for the winter. Buying hay bales a 100 at a time made for a long day of loading and then unloading and stacking them in the barn. I still have aches and pains from that 19 years later.

The early days on the farm, when I was younger and stronger, were the best days there. We had a half acre garden that produced potatoes and all of our vegetables and there’s nothing like picking tomatoes right off the vine and having them right away. Joyce canned a lot of tomatoes. This aerial picture shows our garden and some of our property back then.

When people at work found out we were raising sheep, I got a lot of teasing about that. We had raised calves before, but 400 pound calves are strong and not always gentle in their manners. They are downright difficult to handle. Sheep, on the other hand, are much easier to control and are not as expensive to raise. We never made any money raising either calves or sheep. We could butcher the lambs and they were tasty, especially the ribs. Joyce became adept at cooking our sheep. Many people do not like eating sheep and the reason is commercially butchered sheep are almost always older sheep despite them being marketed as lambs. Older sheep are not good to eat. Real lambs (less than a year old) are the best to eat. We had a lot of cold nights where we had to go out to the barn to check on new lambs being born and ensure they got up and started nursing. Selling wool in the late spring did offset the cost of feeding the sheep in winter.

We did make some money raising chickens and selling their eggs. There were always more requests for eggs than my 60 plus hens could supply. Brown eggs were the most popular. Our free range hens made the best eggs ever. Those eggs had much more flavor than eggs from a grocery store and they were wonderful for baking cakes and bread.