Swim fetch fun

 After expertly moving all the sheep and goats out of the back pasture, Rialey got to play some swim fetch in the pond.

Then the thought occurred to me, what if something went wrong, and I had to go in after her. Rialey's a great swimmer, but there I was standing there with a 7 month old strapped to my back. Although Elliot has been taking swim classes, I'm not sure he's quite ready for an inter-species water rescue. I guess we'll stick to dry land play for a while.

Sleep, barn doors, and my Gwenny

We are pooped. The holidays and the packing have taken their toll. I treasure getting to cuddle up with my little guy every night and snuggle and nurse our way to sleep.

Meanwhile, up in North Carolina Anthony is hard at work getting the farm ready for all of us. He and his father built and painted these amazing doors to close off a safe room for the sheep and goats to overnight. I can't wait to see them in person. 

We lost my babygirl Gwen last year on Christmas Eve. I realized this year that through the magic of things like timehop and facebook memories, I'll get to relive her swift and horrible demise in pictures every holiday season.
That's why I was so happy to wake up this morning to this picture of my girl in her prime during her visit to a physical therapist for her knee. She was a an ornery and hard-headed goat who was so smart and funny and sweet in her own way. I still miss her every day.

Gettin Hitched!

  I would like to apologize for the long delay in posts here. You see, the Big Onion and I have been a little busy the last couple months....getting married! 

  We had the wedding here on the farm so life got a little hectic for a while with all the planning and preparations. We also provided a lot of the food for the wedding including our very own chicken, rabbit and lamb. We provided our baker with blueberries from our bushes and lemon curd made from our trees and eggs for the cake filling. Big Onion even had a selection of homemade brews for people to drink! We entertained our guests with a viewing of the Saints game for the reception and had a huge bonfire out in the pasture afterward.  

  It was a crazy couple of months, but we managed to pull off a fun, if unusual wedding that was a real reflection of us as a couple. I'd like to share a few of our engagement and wedding photos with you...

 We had to get a shot with our little Gwenny. 

 Of course we wore our boots for the shoot, and I wouldn't be caught dead without my trusty hat! 

 The sheep were happy to provide an interesting backdrop. 

On to the big day....

 Little miss Gwen was our flower girl. She wore a lovely wreath around her neck and a wonderful and trusted friend armed with pockets full of corn walked her up the isle for us. She kept herself occupied during the ceremony by nibbling on the front hedges. They needed pruning anyway.

 Luna was our ring bearer, and of course she took her job very seriously. We wouldn't have dreamed of having our big day without including these two girls in some way!

 And of course we had to get some shots with the birds. Can you believe they got me in a dress and make up?!

Wonderful day. 

Who's in charge here?

"Um, Gwen. 'Scuse me."

"Sorry, I need to get through ... pardon me ... um ..."

"Ok, I'll just squeeze through ..."

Princess Gwen needs her beauty rest and cannot be disturbed. 

Doing my best impression of a human scratching post. 

Our special needs chicken

 You may recall a while back I posted a pic of a young chicken with a deformed beak with the comment "This guy is NOT a keeper."

Well, it turns out that statement was wrong in two ways. First of all, that guy turned out to be a girl. Secondly, that ugly little chicken is staying.

Aside from the beak problem, she actually turned out quite pretty though much smaller than her siblings.

 As I said in the previous post, while growing up she was always first to the feeder, but this smart little girl actually figured out how to fly up and into the hanging feeders for a private meal every day. This was a very good thing because her beak deformity makes it hard for her to get food down.

 She is such a friendly chicken that we decided to intervene a bit. Now every day this chicken is first out of the coop and allowed to climb into the bin of chick crumbles to fill her craw before anyone else it let out. She also has a cage set up in the poultry house with food and water that she will bug me to lift her into midday.

 To top it all off, she's a really nice chicken. Perfectly happy to be picked up, petted, and even perch on my shoulder. I've taken to calling her Betty (get it, Ugly Betty? ha ha), and I think the name really fits her. Betty will even come running when you call her.

Chicken photo bomb!

 Proof it's not easy to take a picture of a chicken on your own shoulder.

Saying goodbye to Mawmaw

On Saturday, we attended the funeral of one the most important people in my life, my Mawmaw. Mawmaw died a couple weeks ago after bravely battling cancer, but the storm delayed her funeral until today. I don't usually talk much about the goings on in my personal life on this blog, but Mawmaw was such a huge influence in my life growing up that I feel like I should share a little bit about who she was here.

Mawmaw was the most caring and giving person I have ever known. She loved taking care of people and animals. Mawmaw had the ability to calm crying babies just by taking them into her arms and holding them close. The family tells stories about her sleeping on the bathroom floor with an alarm clock and tiny, sick puppy and waking every few hours to give food and medication that kept the little creature alive. Once she babysat a duckling for us while we went on vacation. She kept little Sedrick in the house and delighted in hand feeding him peas and letting him follow her around.

Toward the end, when she was so sick and bedridden, she insisted that I bring baby Gwen to meet her. Gwen hopped all over her bed and even all over her, and she thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. I remember her telling the little goat that now she was one of the family, one of our babies. That we would always protect, take care of, and love her.

Mawmaw taught me to love and appreciate food. We even referred to the creations of her kitchen as "Mawmaw food." She was the kind of wife and mother that would cook for her family from scratch at every meal, often times using ingredients she had grown and preserved herself. I remember as a kid helping to can vast amounts of tomatoes that Mawmaw would eventually turn into her amazing chicken spaghetti, "mawmaw soup," and jambalaya.

She was a huge supporter of our farm. She was the very first to put in orders for ducks, chickens and even a rabbit. She insisted on paying us for the dozens of duck and chicken eggs that be brought her no matter how many times we refused payment. Mawmaw was never able to visit the farm. She just was not healthy enough in the last 8 months to make the trip. She always talked about the day she could come here and sit and play with all the baby animals.

After the funeral, we all gathered at her house to celebrate her life with friends and lots of food. After a lifetime of enjoying "Mawmaw food" I felt like I should do something special honor all those delicious meals. The Big Onion and I put together a few dishes that came almost exclusively from the farm: egg salad from our duck's eggs, chicken salad using one of our chickens and chicken eggs, and goat cheese courtesy of Josie and Thea with blackberry sauce from our wild bushes.

Just before we were leaving and I thought I had finally run out of tears, my mother took me aside and handed me a photo album with this written in the cover...

It was an album of pictures of me growing up. There were only a couple with both me and Mawmaw together...

What struck me about these pictures is that she is not looking at the camera. She is smiling at me. That's exactly how Mawmaw lived her life, worrying about, caring for, and putting the needs of others before herself.


No matter what I write here, I feel like I cannot do justice to what an amazing woman she was. So many of my life's choices were guided and influenced by her strength and her gentleness. I just hope I can someday become half the woman she was.


A note from Big Onion: Kaela was worried about whether or not this post belonged here on the farm blog. I don't think there's any better place for it. Mawmaw's love for life, for animals, and for good food is something that was passed on to Kaela, instilled in her from a young age. This love for animals and for the food they provide is what I think led her to want this farm so much. To raise animals in a way where they are seen as more than just a food source is something that Mawmaw was always happy to hear about. When we knew she could not make it out to the farm we took some videos to show to her -- I wish I could have recorded how happy and proud she looked to see what we had accomplished in such a short time. She appreciated all of the work we had done and continue to do, more than anyone else we know.

We love our animals no matter what their ultimate purpose may be, and knowing that we raised our animals in such a way always made Mawmaw happy. Without her encouragement there would likely be no farm. We here at HighTail Farms owe her a lot for that, and for that reason she most certainly deserves her own post on this site.

People always say that their family are their biggest fans, but it's rare that family can be their biggest inspiration as well. Thank you, Mawmaw, for believing in our dream and encouraging us in the amazing way that you did and continue to do.

Weathering Isaac - Pt 1

Hurricane Isaac
Photo courtesy of NOAA

For a while we had been hearing talk about a tropical storm that might hit Florida. Nothing we here in South Louisiana were too concerned with.

Well at some point over the weekend, Isaac bypassed Florida and headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Projection maps started pointing the storm for our area and saying that it would become a hurricane before making landfall. We still weren't that concerned. A little category one storm? Please! Plus our farm is about an hour northwest from New Orleans. Surely we were far enough inland that any storm surge flooding wouldn't affect us.

By Monday evening we were pretty certain Isaac was headed our way so we battened down the hatches around the farm. More than anything, we were concerned with high winds blowing things around and knocking down trees, so we put away anything laying around and moved the ducks from the very last, very open pen into a slightly smaller, more enclosed area. BigWig, our big rabbit buck, got moved out of his ground level cage/tractor and into the raised cages of the poultry house next to his ladies. We also filled every bottle, jar, and pitcher we could find with water and put bottles of water in the chest freezer.

Tuesday we did all the normal chores of feeding and milking and whatnot. We kept the birds in their enclosures and just waited and waited. We twiddled our thumbs and looked out the window to see the occasional clam breeze and slight sprinkle. We started thinking, 'Is this it?' All this fuss over some light rain and cool breezes?

Then Tuesday night the rain started. We could hear the wind gusting by our bedroom windows. At about 5am we lost power. When daylight came, we ventured out into the storm to take care of animals.

We milked goats and fed poultry. We found that the wind and rain had been blowing right into the worst possible side of the poultry house and onto our youngest chickens, turkeys, and guineas. Big Onion grabbed an armful of feed bags and the staple gun and braved the storm to tack up some cover for the poor soggy, young birds.

The chickens and the turkeys seemed ok, but the young guineas were extremely wet and cold. A couple looked like hypothermia had set in: they were confused and barely moving. One somehow got stuck under a much larger turkey (not the brightest birds in the world) and didn't seem able to walk. We tucked the young, sodden birds into an empty food bin and moved them inside the house to dry off and warm up. Without power we couldn't even offer them the comfort of a heat lamp, so Big Onion used the gas stove to heat some water and give them a hot water bottle of sorts. We ended up losing two of the guineas just from being unable to keep their body temps up.

We watched the sheep rush out during the brief breaks in the weather to graze for a few minutes at a time before the driving rain forced them back under cover.

Since our house plumbing is hooked up to a well with a pump, no power meant no water to the house. Big Onion, being the brilliant and resourceful man that he is, had the idea of running about 200ft of hose from the barnyard, which on city water, across the backyard, and up to the house. Somehow his scheme worked and kept us in water throughout the storm. (Note from Big Onion: this is probably not the safest thing to do but it worked as a temporary fix!)

I'm proud to say that despite being hit by a hurricane that had winds gusting up to 80mph, none of our animals went hungry. It may have taken a bit of insanity on our part, but we made sure to milk both goats twice a day and get every bird and rabbit fed on their normal schedule. I took a peek at the creek that runs through the middle of our property just after we had finished evening chores on Wednesday and it was about 1 foot below our bridge. I commented to Big Onion that the bridge might wash out over night if the creek got any higher.

That night once all the animals were fed and tucked away for the evening, Big Onion and I cooked up a hearty chicken stew, played cards by candle light, and waited for the storm to pass us by.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

More fruits

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we were SO lucky to get a place that had so many wonderful things already in place. This week we are particularly grateful for all the fruit trees, bushes, and vines there were already in place and thriving when we moved in.

 The corner of the backyard has this massive muscadine vine that we have been keeping an impatient eye on all these months. Well, this week we finally had just a few of ripe grapes that we were quick to harvest and pop into the freezer until we have enough ripe grapes to start out own batch of muscadine wine. Yum!

The other fruit we have been keeping a close eye on is the giant cooking pear tree on the other side of the yard. It's branches have been looking heavy with fruit and the occasional rock hard pear bomb would come falling down.

 We decided to give it a good shake and see what we could get. I stood back and watched while the Big Onion all but swung from the branches, and the pears came raining down! All counted we ended up with 21 pears. Apparently pears aren't like apples in that they do not ripen while on the tree, you have to harvest them and store them for a while for them to soften and sweeten. Since we are pretty sure these are cooking pears, I'm not sure how soft or sweet they will get, but we tucked them away into our smaller refrigerator to ripen before they get juiced and turned into cider.

The ever present Josie and the turkeys were both on hand to help dispose of any damaged fruits. This series of photos just cracks me up....

New Hire

Since August 17th is apparently National Black Cat Awareness/Appreciation day, I figure today would be a good day to introduce the newest member of the HighTail farms crew....

This is Hunter Ratsbane 

Hunter has been hired to the recently created Barn Cat position. It's creation was necessary due to the recently discovered conspiracy taking place amongst the rodent population on the fram to deceive us into thinking that our large flock of otherwise healthy, happy ducks have mysteriously stopped laying altogether for the last few weeks.  In other words...

Damn rats been stealin our eggs. Hunter's (hopefully) gonna fix that.  

I had a heck of a time getting a decent picture of the little guy. He's black as night and since he's only about 3 months old, he is completely incapable of holding still long enough for the shutter to go off.

 This is the box he showed up in. His name originally was Panther, for very obvious reasons!

He took to the barnyard right away. Here he is meeting Josie for the first time. Since then these two have had a rather rocky relationship. Josie has no patience for this little upstart stalking and pouncing around her yard. Hunter, on the other hand, LOVES her fresh milk and has become my best milkin buddy always there in time to steal those first three squirts!

 See? He's already doing his job guarding the nest boxes! 

Big Onion is head over heels for the little guy. I think they bonded on the initial drive to the farm.

Hunter was completely flipping out in the car, yowling and ripping at the above pictured box until he tore his way out. Then he immediately climbed into the Big Onion's lap and fell asleep. Since then, Hunter has been his "Little Buddy" who follows him around for chores and rides on his shoulder whenever he gets the chance.

...and I guess I'm pretty fond of him too.