Off-Grid Homestead Update
Silver Oak examines my brother's windmill in preparation for setting up our own
This blog has been rather quiet lately. We’ve been spending time with extended family. It’s refreshing to stop and connect with family we don’t get to see very often. But we’ve also made a little headway here on the homestead, so here’s a brief overview.
We lost one of our kids (goats, that is) to tetanus last month. We’ve never vaccinated for tetanus unless there were problems. This year after dehorning the new kids, three of them contracted tetanus! That still has us a bit puzzled, but we’re blaming the fact that they are sharing the barnyard with the horses. We hope to have that remedied by next year’s kidding season.
We had tetanus anti-toxin and penicillin on hand to treat them right away, but discovered too late for the first kid that our vial of penicillin was no longer effective. A new one yielded better results. First they get a shot of anti-toxin, then penicillin each day for five days. Tetanus causes their muscles to contract and they can’t walk or jump around like normal. Their legs get stiff, then their necks, and then their jaw (lock-jaw). If caught quickly enough (hopefully before their jaw stiffens) it can often be treated successfully.
In our 16 years of raising goats we have had only two kids with tetanus before now. The first died within 48 hours because we didn’t know what to do in time, but the second was successfully treated and recovered. Now to suddenly have three in one year! It may be worth always vaccinating them immediately after dehorning, much as I hate those mercury-laden vaccines! We treated their seared horn buds every day with triodine, but they still got tetanus. Are we missing something?
Poor Alex gets poked with the needle
We fed him milk with a large syringe...
...and made him as comfortable as possible, but sadly he did not make it.
On a positive note, Silver Oak did finish framing the back end of the deck! A temporary tarp blocks the cold wind, and the screen will come later. One day good friends from PA came and he helped frame, and my dad helped another day.
Finishing the wall with plywood
Painstakingly fitting the sill...
...to complete the wall
My mom also came and helped to start painting the big shed. The front with the most tedious work is almost done!
My mom and Blossom trim out the barn doors
This end is nearly finished
We tried to fix a soft sandy spot in our lane that tries to swallow little cars. When it’s wet it’s fine, but several dry months have made the sand really loose, especially in that spot. We added gravel, which improved it, but we’re not sure if that will be enough.
Filling the loose ruts with gravel
When cleaning rabbit manure out from under Evenstar’s rabbit hutches, we found HUGE earthworms! They were carefully transported to a new home in the garden.
These are some grown up worms!
Silver Oak is in the middle of erecting our new windmill to pump water from our well! We’re not using any big equipment to dig the holes or set up the tower, so it is taking more time and man power.
The base is assembled...
...and deep holes are being dug
We built a rocket stove on our deck, not expecting much smoke. It took less than 30 minutes to assemble 16 fire bricks on a block base made of things we already had from our big Craigslist purchase in December.
Our new rocket stove
It took much longer to get a fire going properly and make popcorn on it. It took forever! And it smoked like mad, all over our deck and into the house before we got the windows shut! It was a bit discouraging. I was really hoping to use it to heat pots of food which could then be placed in a basket slow cooker to finish cooking, using absolutely no fuel except for a few of the many sticks found lying on the ground in the woods. This smoking dragon not only smoked up our deck and house but made my pots terribly sooty and black. Ugh!
It took longer to get the first fire hot than it did to build the stove!
Finally it was hot enough to make popcorn with my hand-crank popper.
The next day I examined the instructions again and discovered we didn’t do a few things right, like make the center bottom brick thinner than the others with a thicker brick in front for the burning sticks to rest on, allowing air to flow under them. Hmmm. Perhaps that was the problem. We’re not giving up yet. As soon as we can we plan to move it off the deck and to the side so smoke won’t be drawn up there, and make those minor changes to hopefully stop the smoking problem altogether. According to the instructions a rocket stove is not supposed to smoke! We’ll see.
The brick on which the sticks lay should be lower to make the cavity larger, and a large brick should be placed in front of the stove on which to rest the outer ends of the sticks and allow better air flow.
Next time I’ll share some things we’ve been doing with extended family. It’s been a busy month!
Rose Petal so sorry about losing your goat
I know that is a loss you don’t take lightly on your homestead. I love your rocket stove! The Viking built us one too I guess one thing us homesteaders dont’ want to be without is a way to cook a very clever idea to have one! Your barn looks great too! Thanks so much for linking up to “The Ole’ Saturday Homesteading Trading Post” blog hop this week and I hope you come back next week as I love reading your posts!
Thanks for hosting once again, Karen. Yes, a way to cook does seem to be a priority in homesteading.
Hi Rose Petal and family,
So sad about your goat, it looks like its finally time on earth was very peaceful- for what it was going trough.
I cant wait to hear more about your windmill and the rocket stove.
We are FINALLY moving into our off the grid homestead (in Florida) this June. Its been a long time coming, but your posts have been very educational and inspiring along the way. Cant wait to put to use some of your many fine ideas. Esp. your tips on making milk goat not taste goaty.
Thanks for all your posts!
I am soooo excited for you! Please do let me know when you are moving and how it goes. And I will post progress on the rocket stove and windmill. Thanks for stopping by!
I’m sorry to hear about your little goat kid
It can be a tough life on a homestead.
Found you on Clever Chicks and would love to have you join The HomeAcre Hop on Thursdays at:
http://www.theselfsufficienthomeacre.com
Thanks Lisa, I’ll be there Thursday!
We’ve had heartache with tetanus as well, we lost two calves one year. It’s painful to watch them suffer, do absolutely everything you can to ease their discomfort and to heal them, and then have them not live through it. We’ve changed some of our procedures and have never lost another calf. (visiting from Homestead Barn Hop)
~Taylor-Made Ranch~
Wolfe City, Texas
http://www.taylormaderanch.com/blog
I think anyone with farm animals for any length of time faces the loss of animals sooner or later. It’s one of the tough and undesirable parts. Maybe you have some tips for us about avoiding tetanus that you could share. I’d love to hear them.
In our case we were banding yearling calves. We’d had no problems banding newborns and cutting the yearlings but we thought given the wet conditions we’d try banding these boys instead. They ended up being too old to band with the bander we were using (they make banders big enough for grown bulls but we were using our regular bander) After 2 of them contracted tetanus and died we began exclusively cutting the yearlings and only after a tetanus shot. Never really thought about the dehorning causing tetanus as well so your post has given us information we hadn’t thought of before.
~Taylor-Made Ranch~
Wolfe City, Texas
http://www.taylormaderanch.com/blog
Yes, I can see how banding would pose another risk for tetanus. If I remember correctly the kid that we lost years ago (the first one) got tetanus after it was banded at a few weeks old. Thank you for sharing!
Your porch is looking nice. I’ve never heard of a rocket stove. If cooking on it’s hard on the pots, try putting a thin layer of dishsoap on the outside of your cooking pot before putting food inside. Just be sure to not get soap inside the pot or leave any on your hands while you prepare the food. The dirt comes right off.
Oh, I’m so glad you took time to share that, my dear Anita. I should have known you would have words of wisdom about that. I am going to try that soap thing…maybe I won’t have to ruin my pots after all.
Please feel free to tell me anything like this that would be helpful. You have a wealth of knowledge from your experiences…I have so much to learn!
Oh Rose Petal…..I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your goat kids…..loss is so hard! I’ve lost several of my chickens lately and one of my five precious rescued cats… to a predator, not sure what kind. It’s so hard….
Just a note about tetanus…..we use strong probiotics daily (yep, even the dogs, cats, AND chickens get them) and have seen some pretty awesome stuff. My son got tularemia (rabbit fever) a couple of years ago, after rabbit hunting for the first time in many years. It took two weeks for the symptoms to show up and they were the strangest set of symptoms ever. He felt bad, but didn’t want to go to a doctor! After talking that Saturday morning at breakfast, we were discussing what might have brought on the symptoms, and there was nothing that we could come up with. I told him that I knew HE knew how important it was to keep things really clean (he is a taxidermist), and how a family member years ago had gotten rabbit fever from cleaning a rabbit. (You can’t get the fever by eating the rabbit tho…it only happens when blood or body fluid enters through cuts.) When I mentioned the rabbits, he informed me that he had indeed gone rabbit hunting just two weeks prior and had gotten two! I ran and looked up the symptoms for tularemia and he had every one of them! And they are symptoms that you just wouldn’t have for anything else. It also said that if you did nothing it was fatal, and that it required the strongest antibiotic to treat it. I told him I couldn’t understand how he had contracted it, as much probiotic as we take, and he told me that he had run out of it several weeks earlier and was still out! Yikes! I gave him a quart with the admonition that if he wasn’t seriously better by Monday we were going to the doctor- like it or not. He took it all weekend…..a LOT of it….and by Monday he was 75% better, and fully whole in two weeks.
There are some good ones but the one I use that is the strongest I have found is InnerGarden, found at gobeyondorganic.com. It is soil organisms grown on blackstrap molasses and fermented. Powerful stuff. (You can even use it in open wounds on animals and livestock.) Instead of just one strain in one family (think acidophilus) it is multiple strains in multiple families! We take a small amount of this daily, as well as consume my homemade kefir. Everyone gets it. And in times of sickness, which are extremely rare around here….we alternate with colloidal silver. We use the company Utopia Silver and it can be ordered here (http://www.utopiasilver.com/affiliates/jrox.php?id=443) …..it’s 50% off right now. Most of the time we need nothing other than those two…well other than a healthy diet.
Since the strong probiotic strengthens the immune system, and since tetanus is a bacterial infection like tularemia, it is possible that you could sidestep this horrible disease in the future. We even choose not to vaccinate our cats for anything except rabies because in 22 years we’ve not encountered anything that we couldn’t handle. Well, except predators in the case of Skidd, and one other of our babies, our 14-year-old killed by a neighbor’s dog that got out of his fence and came to our front porch.
I find it is easier (and healthier) to strengthen than to vaccinate….
Just a bit of info…..sorry this was so long.
Thank you for sharing all of this valuable info, Babsy! Our family uses probiotics (mostly kefir at this point) pretty regularly and when we are fighting a cold or something we use ionic silver with good results. But I’ve never heard of the powerful probiotics you are talking about! I am definitely going to look into Inner Garden. We use ProBios for our animals if they are sick or on antibiotics, but not on a regular basis, and a good look at the junk in the ingredients has been for some time making us wonder how it could actually be good for them.
Just curious, how do you get Inner Garden into your animals every day?
Sounds like a lot is being accomplished…sorry you lost your kid goat too.
Thanks for your comment, Nancy.
Sounds like you are busy. Thanks for posting at Wildcrafting WEdnesday.
You are welcome!
I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your website and blog. I live in N. Florida but we have a lot of the same critter and weather situations that you do. I am so blessed to see the children planting the garden and I hope you have seen the last of the freezes for the year. I have had great success on our own one acre using a combination of mulch and rabbit manure in the vegetable garden. Before I put down the mulch, I use a layer of newspaper or plain cardboard to help keep the weeds down. The worms break everything down by the end of the season.
I’m so glad you stopped by and introduced yourself! We’ve done the newspaper and cardboard thing too, especially when starting a new bed. It works great, as long as we keep a thick layer of mulch on as well.
We did have 29 degrees again last night! Tonight should be more like 33. We must cover our tropical trees when that happens and put candles under them. It’s a pain, but I’m thankful for the option of doing it! And I’m glad it’s not getting hot yet.
Thanks for sharing this on The HomeAcre Hop! I hope you can join us tomorrow for a special announcement!
http://www.theselfsufficienthomeacre.com/2013/03/the-homeacre-hop-9.html
Thank you Lisa!
Thanks for sharing your talent on The Creative HomeAcre Hop!
Our next party goes live Sunday morning at:
http://www.theselfsufficienthomeacre.com/2013/03/the-creative-homeacre-hop-6.html
If you have a blog hop, please check out The Linky Love Party…a place to share your parties with other bloggers! Grab the button for an easy way to search for parties every week!
http://www.theselfsufficienthomeacre.com/2013/03/lets-party.html
I’ll be there, thanks for hosting!