It’s SO green here! It seems like we had a rather slow spring this year, but everything is mostly leafed-out now, and there are plenty of late-spring flowers in bloom. Lots of stuff going on in the shop, and around the homestead too.
Our flock of banty-chickens had been free-ranging all winter (boy did they make a mess in the tool shed!), and in order to keep them from tearing up our small raised-bed garden, I had to get some things fixed on the steel chicken tractor I built a number of years ago. The chicken tractor was a cool concept- it lifts off the ground on it’s wheels a few inches for moving via the throw of a lever. Unfortunately, chicken manure is VERY corrosive to the steel tubing I framed it with. After some repairs though, I’m confident it is good to go for a few years yet. We’ve got most of the chickens penned up now, with the exception of a handful of broody hens who have little chicks, or are still setting on eggs in hidden nests scattered around the place. Atlanta and I both grew up with chickens- and these bantams are some of the most prolific setters we’ve seen.
Atlanta is putting in a very small garden this year, focusing on a couple of raised beds, which she’s taking her time with due to baby Robert’s arrival in mid-February. In the raised beds, she’s putting a handful of tomatoes and peppers a few sweet potatoes, some okra, some herbs and flowers, and a few other vegetables later. The kids are helping refill the raised beds with composted hay and cow manure from where the cows are fed their hay in the winter.
I had the interesting experience a few weeks ago of butchering an 8-month-old bull calf that had gotten to be a liability and a little dangerous. I have routinely butchered animals for meat my whole life, from squirrels up to deer, but had never tackled something as big as this calf by myself. In fact, it turned into such a job that I called in backup- my apprentice and right hand man Elijah came and helped me finish. We then ice-aged the meat for ten days or so, and Atlanta and I then packaged it. We were blessed to be able to borrow a large meat grinder and saw from a friend, which made the job go smoother than it would otherwise- and we filled the freezer with ground beef, soup/broth bones, steaks and roasts- what a wonderful thing!
Recently, I also got my first nice flintlock! A dear friend decided his reproduction Pennsylvania smooth rifle named “Mordecai” needed a new home, so he gifted/traded it to me. A nice surprise- I’ve wanted a good flintlock all my life, but it was going to be a while yet before I could afford one. Flintlock guns were really what started me down the path at a tender age to becoming a passionate history buff, which in turn led me to get into blacksmithing- but I will save that story (and more details and pictures of Mordecai) for a separate post.
In the shop, we are still plugging away on my backlog of orders for tools and custom work- and slowly making progress. I’ve stopped taking those kinds of work until we get caught up completely, but we can’t cut off cashflow, so we are focusing on developing and marketing our more profitable offerings of hooks, nails, pot racks, and similar home furnishings. If you are interested in a pot rack, go check them out on our kitchen page - they are 20% off for a couple more days. We are also interested in pursuing wholesale relationships, so if you are a designer or retailer and you’re interested, please do reach out. We’re also not at all giving up on tools and custom work, just focusing on clearing that backlog before we carefully move forward on those things- I have had way too many orders get long overdue, and as honesty, integrity, and customer satisfaction are more important to us than anything else, we want to try to get on top of timely fulfilment as far as it is in our power to do so. If you have a custom job you’re interested in getting done, but you have time to wait, we are happy to put you on a waiting list to contact when the backlog is cleared in another month or two- and we are also all ears to ideas for more home furnishings to add to our standard offerings. Now that we have Elijah, and he’s getting up to speed in his forging skills, we are really just doubling down on trying to grow the business this year in earnest. Feels wild to be transitioning from being overwhelmed with work to needing more, but I’m excited for that!
