{"id":2686,"date":"2012-10-29T15:24:57","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T19:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/?p=2686"},"modified":"2012-10-29T15:24:57","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T19:24:57","slug":"winter-camein-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/2012\/10\/29\/winter-camein-october\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter came\u2026in October"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Thinking back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter, we looked outside to five inches of new snow and nighttime temperatures in the low teens. And it’s not Halloween yet. Yuck! We still have a lot we want to get done before the real winter. Hopefully, the snow may melt and we will have a few nice days to get ‘er done yet. I hope, I hope.<\/p>\n

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The barn’s ready for its sheet metal roofing and we’ve ordered it and crossed our fingers for nice weather. But we don’t always get what we want, so if it doesn’t get nicer, that sheet metal will lay in the barn and wait till spring. That’s the way it goes. Sort of like our “wedding” cow, Lace. We’ve still not been able to get her bred back. We had the vet out and she passed her health bill clean. And we’ve had the inseminator out a dozen times. Tried hormone shots several times and finally ran her with the bull all summer. I don’t think she’s bred. But we had her blood tested last night and in a few days we’ll know if we can keep her (she’s pregnant) or not (no dice). We love our milk cow; she’s the best cow we’ve ever had. But we can’t afford to keep a “pet” cow, so we may have to ship her. Neither of us could eat Lace, no matter how hardcore homestead we are. Are we disappointed? Sad? You’ve got that right. But we’re still praying for Lace\u2026and us. I’ll let you know when we find out.<\/p>\n

Right now grain prices are so high because of the drought that corn belt hog farmers are gassing baby pigs by the thousand because they can’t afford to raise them. It seems that pig farmers aren’t getting enough at market to be able to afford to feed them. How sad. We ended up keeping three gilts from our two litters because the prices were so low. We hate to butcher gilts, but I’d rather do that than take a beating at the sales barn. Farming, even on a homestead scale, is tough sometimes. But we keep plugging along because we love the life. Like the old-timers say “the meal ain’t all gravy!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book, The Long Winter, we looked outside to five inches of new snow and nighttime temperatures in the low teens. And it’s not Halloween yet. Yuck! We still have a lot we want to get done before the real winter. Hopefully, the snow may melt and we will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,11,13,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/JackieClay\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}