Small World

It's time to start the 2012 garden with the arrival of celery seeds.  Last year we started celery in January, put them out in April or May, and enjoyed wonderful celery in the fall.  It was such a success that we're doing it again.

As long as we're going to have the lights on, we thought we'd start some lettuce too.  In only 5-6 weeks we'll be eating fresh lettuce.

The first step is to bleach the pots.  I skipped this step once and not a single seed came up.  They probably tried, but were immediately done in by fungus.  So, we bleach. 

We continue thinking about growing the business part of our homestead life.  I talked to a lady who has a small dairy in northern Idaho.  They sell their milk at the local co-op but their operation is pretty small — three cows and several goats.  Hearing that they hand milk the whole lot made me feel a little woosy, but I got over it. 

She had a critical piece of information — insurance.  We haven't been able to find liability insurance for our small operation, but their agent was able to find some.  I called and got a quote.  It's not cheap but it's doable. 

In talking with her we discovered that we both bought our cows from the same dairy in Emmett.  Christina has been such a blessing to us and she talked about their cows in the same way.  Those folks in Emmett are like a mustard plant, sending out seeds of grace all over Idaho.

My second call was to that dairy.  We told them we were thinking of buying a cow and they said they'd look over their herd.  Our criteria were a cow with a due date about the same as Christina's so we could keep our time off, teets long enough to hand milk, and an easy going cow who will be nice to Christina.  I hope they have a good match available.

Knowing that we may have more milk soon, and still getting a lot of eggs, we put an ad on craigslist.com.  My worry is getting enough customers to sell the milk of two cows.  We are selling 9 gallons a week of Christina milk right now but we decided we could go up to 13 in this interim.  It means no cheese-making, but we'll make up for it later.  The ad has been up for four days, advertising eggs and milk, and we've already gotten seven inquiries, each wanting about two gallons a week.  Yeah, I think we'll be able to sell it all.