From the monthly archives:

December 2009

Lovely Lard

December 24, 2009

I know. No one cooks with lard anymore. But that’s because y’all are crazy. Lard is amazing, awesome, lovely stuff. I use it all the time. I don’t buy into the “fat is bad” argument, at all, actually, but especially for lard, when it’s produced from heritage breed pigs out on pasture. If you’d like [...]

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Upgrading Fedora Disables Postfix

December 23, 2009

The preceding was a public service announcement. I’ve recently upgraded our server from Fedora 9 to 10 and then to 11. Both times the upgrade process disabled Postfix. This is annoying.

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Livestock Guardian Dogs

December 22, 2009

For anyone who has been following us at all this year, you’ll know that we have had a HORRIBLE predator year. There was the bear who ripped the door off of the chicken coop and had a mighty chicken dinner. We probably lost 50 turkeys, at least, including the hen who was raising two ducklings [...]

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A day in the life of …

December 21, 2009

There is a fun group on Flickr called A Day in the Life of …, and four times a year at the changing of the season you are supposed to take five photos that illustrate a day in your life. Today is my eighth time participating. (I have a collection of all of the sets [...]

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Balage Babble

December 20, 2009

I was mentioning to our Hay Guy (Keith Short in Langdon, NH) that Ella Mae produces more and creamier milk on grass than on hay. He said he had just the thing — balage. We knew people fed that to their cows, but didn’t know if the sheep could eat it. When Lisa was talking [...]

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An Acre is not an Acre

December 19, 2009

Someone mentioned that a lot of people would think that 340 acres was big ag. Actually, if we were farming 340 acres, I’d agree we were big ag. Instead I’ll tell you something about New England agriculture. Virtually all of us own a lot more land than we farm. I once explained the situation to [...]

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Off to freezer camp

December 18, 2009

We took two eight month old gilts off to the butcher today. These two girls were supposed to be sold to someone, who backed out, never showed up. I decided to raise them for us instead of selling them as breeding stock again. They were born in April, to Pomona, and lived their entire life [...]

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