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Basics of Canning

What do you think of when you think of canning? Do you think of your grandma slaving in the kitchen for hours making a dozen pints of green beans? Do you think of water bath canning or pressure canning? Does it seem intimidating, or does pressure canning seem scary?...

Egg Collection (by a princess)

Peyton in her Princess dress collecting eggs Greg has been gone this week on his annual week-long backpacking trip.  This is the 33rd year he & his buddies have picked a national wilderness and gone off on a backpacking adventure.  This leaves Peyton and I home to...
Nuisance Creatures on the Ranch

Nuisance Creatures on the Ranch

We all have those pesky creatures in our lives, the ones that annoy us to no end, right?  Well, at the Ranch, we have many different versions of them.  Some cause lots of problems on top of just being a pain in the rear to deal with.  We are going to...

Automatic Feeders

Last week, we touched on automatic watering systems, so it is only natural to cover automatic feeders. All animals are different and require different types of feed and feeders. We will touch on the styles we have around the Ranch and their functionality. Some are in...
Automatic Water System

Automatic Water System

              Greg has designed an automatic animal and plant water network over the years. It is quite amazing. There are several components to the network. We need to water each of the 27 fruit orchard...

Cornish Cross Chicken Harvest

Let’s start off by saying I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July holiday. Ours has been the same since we moved to the Ranch four years ago. We get up in the morning and run the 5k race through the Molalla parade route. We watch our local festive parade, and then...
The Cycle of Life

The Cycle of Life

There are always weeks around the Ranch that seem to have more death than others. Sometimes it is planned; others it is not. It is just is a part of our business cycle. On Monday morning, Greg saw that one of our ewes was acting strange. After closer examination, he...
Our Journey of Having Pigs

Our Journey of Having Pigs

When we first started, we bought three piglets. They were kept in a pen (which has now become the duck pen). To eat like a pig is an understatement. They would eat and eat and eat… whatever you gave them. They were confined to about 200 SF, and over time, it...

Life & Balance

How often do you wake up with a plan for the day, and when you look back on the day as you crawl into bed, you realize that not one thing went as you had originally planned? That is not saying it was a bad day, just not as planned or maybe as productive as you had...

The Orchard

Our orchard is the center of our pastures. We walk through the large 12-foot-wide arbor filled with honeysuckle just starting to bloom for the season, up the corridor, and enter a 7,500 SF oasis. It holds 27 different semi-dwarf fruit trees with most being varieties...