Toritos

Lots of exciting things have been going on around the homestead the past week.

We now have two mostly brahma (father full-blood, mother 3/4) bull calves that Dane will either train to be oxen or we will use one as our bull and eventually eat the other. Teams of oxen are very common here, and having strong work animals does sound very appealing to us. After all, the grass is plentiful and fuel for the tractor is a never ending expense.


Dane got the gate for the hydroelectric dam built. This is a picture of it right after he got it painted.

Dane has also nearly got the field above our garden ready for planting corn, beans, squash, watermelon, and cucumber. I think the next step is to spread the fertilizer and lime and then work it into the soil.

Here is a picture of the bamboo chicken tractor that Dane is working on. We have so much bamboo on the property, and many people like to build with it, so this is his first attempt at making something with it.

The children have gotten really good at moving the cows around. In the picture below, Abby is moving the gray cow out to her grazing area, early one morning.

Dane and I were researching how to make our own rennet for making cheese and we found online that vegetable rennet can be made from boiling the leaves of the stinging nettle plant. It turns out that we have lots of "ortiga" on our property, a variety of stinging nettle, so we picked some and cooked it up. In our research, we also found that stinging nettle is very healthy to eat with a nutritional value similiar to spinach, so we ate it. Next time, we will actually have to test whether it will set our milk for cheese.

This next picture is of a beautiful moth that made its way into the house. She decided to lay eggs (that we promptly removed) on the curtain before we let her back outside.

This moth we found up in the second story. I heard a big commotion of flapping wings against one of the windows and I thought a bat must have flown into the house, but upon further inspection Dane found the moth. The picture doesn't do it justice, but the moth had a wing span of at least six inches.

The next two pictures are of some wildflowers that the children picked around camp. We have some really neat and exotic ones coming up right now.

Well Abby, Joseph, and I are preparing for our trip to Buenos Aires to apply for Joseph's CROBA (Consular Report of Birth Abroad) and for his U.S. passport. Since his Argentina passport photo turned out pretty bad, and they printed it anyway, we decided that he should practice for his U.S. passport photo.

OOps, how did this one get in there?