Happy New Year! plus a look back at 2023

Happy New Year!  We are looking forward to 2024 being our best year ever on the homestead.  We now have places for guests to stay with us and people who are looking forward to visiting.  That’s really exciting!

Now, for a look back at 2023 and the end of 2022.  Just before Christmas 2022 we got our first new piglets.  Thelma gave birth to six healthy babies and took excellent care of them.

My son visited in January and we had an amazing time with him!  He took pictures all around the property and made a picture book as a present for us.  We also harvested our first sweet potato patch and had fun doing that! It was eye-opening to see how many different mushrooms we had growing on our property in January, some of which are edible!

Unfortunately, as the piglets got older, Thelma and the babies started escaping our portable electric fencing.  Taz, the boar, respected the fence and wasn’t a problem.  So, with a bribe of food, we moved Thelma and her piglets to the front of the garden that had permanent fencing until we could get a better place for the pigs.

In February, we had a mobile vet come out to vaccinate our does and help us handle scours (very loose poop) in our buck.  The vet told us that our pig Louise, was in fact, Louis, so he shortly went to the butcher for processing. We found out that Kunekunes have wonderful meat but very little bacon.

Now, you might wonder how we could have made that mistake (and why someone who should have known better, sold us a boar for a sow).  In all the time we had Louis, he never acted like a boar and a pig’s testicles are very close to the body.  His were always covered with hair — we had no clue!

In March, we got a more permanent corral fenced for our buck and the pig area fenced and electrified.  There were two separate areas, so the piglets were kept in one and Taz and Thelma were housed in the other.  They were both over a year old before their mating produced results, so that seemed like a good option.

In April and May 2023, we got our first goat kids!  Ms. B had a boy and a girl and Ms. G had two girls.  We named them Headbutter, Little Girl, Star and Nostar.
All four were healthy and the does did an excellent job of feeding them.  We built a milking stand and got the does familiar with eating there and having us touch their udders, but never collected any sizeable amount of milk.  (Obviously, we hope to do better in the new year.)

The summer in Florida was really hot and wet.  Keeping pigs in one area is good for not losing them, but also makes for very muddy areas when there is significant rain.  Thelma gave birth again to six piglets in August, but didn’t survive doing that with the heat.  We took her carcass to the butcher and received some very yummy pork!

The piglets were immediately moved to a large cattle watering trough that was filled with hay.  We wanted them to stay warm, but also had to give them milk and colostrum if we wanted them to survive.  Once the piglets understood what was in the bottles, it was no trouble feeding them.  I took a large piece of styrofoam and made a hole for each bottle so we could feed four at once.  It was still a feeding frenzy!

What we didn’t realize was that the pee from the pigs was building up ammonia in the bottom of the trough.  Two piglets died within a month.  We cleaned out the trough, added clay kitty litter to the bottom and thought our problem was solved.  Two more piglets died from the ammonia inhaled earlier.  They had probably been weakened but took longer to succumb.  We cleaned the trough out again, added more kitty litter, and supplemented the remaining pigs with Sweet Iron, a mineral supplement that provides what they would have gotten from their mom.  I’m happy to say that the last two piglets are doing very well and spend their days in the chicken yard, protected from predators!

Toward the end of September, Ms. B’s kids were getting weaned and we started keeping Headbutter, who had been neutered, with his dad as a companion.  This worked out pretty well, except Headbutter was getting really fat!  We cut back on his feed and gave him browse and hay mostly.  At the end of November, he collapsed from what we believe was a B-vitamin deficiency.  Despite an emergency call to the vet, he was too far gone, and within 24 hours of us noticing a problem, he was dead.  This was also a learning experience.  The goat carcass was taken to the butcher and we got the meat and pelt to use.  Now, all of our goats are getting regular B-vitamins in their food and minerals.

We home-processed one of our male ducks for Thanksgiving.  He was more feathers than meat, although the meat did have a good flavor.  We might try raising turkeys in the new year.

Our final Christmas gift from our animals was a litter of six piglets born on Christmas Eve!  Both the mom and babies are doing well!

Besides the animal experiences, our gardening got somewhat better.  We picked our first peach, blackberry, elderberries, hot and mild peppers, papaya, and a full bunch of bananas.  The bananas stayed green the entire time they were attached to the plant.  But within a day of cutting them off the plant, they started turning yellow.  We got about 40 delicious bananas from that one bunch!

Another gardening surprise that turned up late in the year was a patch of Everglade tomatoes that grew with the native beauty berries over our septic tank location.  The tomatoes are the size of blueberries, but very flavorful!  They apparently found a place they liked after being deposited with pig poop and went crazy!

We moved our pineapple plants out of the main garden and into a spot just outside the does corral.  They are doing very well there and have pepper plants, a raspberry bush, and asparagus growing with them.  My husband created a garden with moringa that is getting bigger.  My son and I also tried to create some flower beds with Jerusalem artichokes, mustard plants, creeping thyme, and nasturtiums.  The artichokes grew and produced a few flowers, but none of the others survived the summer.  I sowed nasturtium seeds again later and did get some flowers.  Now, I have morning glories growing there, so we will see if I get more flowers! 

We had an enjoyable Christmas and can look forward to more adventures in the future!