When is the best time to calve

Its mid-autumn and our nine angus-cross heifers are currently calving. This may seem an odd time of the year to have calves, and certainly in the temperate areas you would expect to see baby calves and lambs in spring, but in the sub-tropics we can do things a bit differently as we don't have a cold winter.

Read the rest over at my house cow ebook blog.

eight acres: what time of year is best to have calves?

Buy my ebook "Our Experience with House Cows" on Etsy, Lulu and Amazon, or email on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com to arrange delivery. More information on my house cow ebook blog.

Reviews of "Our Experience with House Cows"

Kim from the Little Black Cow Blog

Fiona from Live at Arbordale Farm

Marie from Go Milk the Cow

Renata from Sunnyside Farm Fun

Gavin from Little Green Cheese (and The Greening of Gavin)

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Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo. Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

Getting started with beekeeping: how to harvest honey

While honey is not the only product from a beehive, its the one that most beekeepers are interested in and it usually takes a year or so to let the bees build up numbers and store enough honey before there is enough to harvest. There are a few different ways to extract honey from frames. We have a manual turn 2-frame certifugal extractor. A lot of people with only a few hives will just crush and strain the comb. This post is about how we've been extracting honey so far (four times now), and there are links at the end to other bloggers who use different methods so you can compare. Choose your frames Effectively the honey is emergency food stores for the bees, so you have to be very careful not to take too much from the hive. You need to be aware of what is flowering and going to flower next and the climate. Particularly in areas with cold winters, where the bees cannot forage for some time. We are lucky to have something flowering most of the year and can take honey

Homekill beef - is it worth it?

We got another steer killed a few weeks ago now, and I weighed all the cuts of meat so that I could work out the approximate value of the meat and compare the cost of raising a steer to the cost of buying all the meat from the butcher. My article has been published on the Farm Style website , which is a FREE online community for small and hobby farmers to learn everything about farming and country living . If you want to know more, head over the Farm Style to read the the article and then come back here for comments and questions. Do you raise steers? Is it worth it? Do you have any questions? More about our home butchering here .

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