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)

Comments

How to make coconut yoghurt

Lately I have been cutting back on eating dairy. I know, I know, we own two house cows! But I am trying to heal inflammation (bad skin) and dairy is one of the possible triggers, so as a last resort and after much resistance, I decided I had better try to cut back. Its been hard because I eat a LOT of cheese, and cook with butter, and love to eat yoghurt (and have written extensively about making yoghurt). I had to just give up cheese completely, switch to macadamia oil and the only yoghurt alternative was coconut yoghurt. I tried it and I like it, but only a spoonful on some fruit here and there because it is expensive!

The brand I can get here is $3 for 200 mL containers. I was making yoghurt from powdered milk for about 50c/L. So I was thinking there must be a way to make coconut yoghurt, but I didn't feel like mucking around and wasting heaps of coconut milk trying to get it right.... and then Biome Eco Store sent me a Mad Millie Coconut Yoghurt Kit to try. The kit is…

What to do with eight acres

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog. It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for. Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”. Today I will try to answer this question.

Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money. I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else.

If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for. Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can find in your price range. Look for clean water in dams, bores or wells, either on the property …

We don't have any cling wrap either

Last week I wrote about how we don't have a microwave and I really don't miss it. So continuing the theme of "weird things about my kitchen", we also don't have any plastic cling wrap or paper towels. And we haven't had them for so long I can hardly remember why we ever needed them.

I always thought that cling wrap was wasteful. Not just from an environmental perspective, but I also didn't like spending money on something that I only used once. When I was at uni and took sandwiches for lunch, I used to bring home the cling wrap and use it again until it didn't stick anymore. One year when we did Plastic Free July (I can't remember when exactly - here's what I wrote last year) we decided to stop using cling wrap. I used up the last of it recently when we were painting (its really hard to renovate without creating waste) - its handy for wrapping up paintbrushes and sealing paint temporarily, however I do not use it in the kitchen.

The pape…

Eight Acres

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