Mud Puddle Farm

02/01/2026

Mr. Mud reinstalling a dutch door on the barn last night. He had a lot of help from Ricky.

Salt and her new lamb, whom we have named Sugar, were quiet spectators. Sugar is growing so well, and Salt is turning out to be the best Mama!

01/28/2026

I know I said I would update on the dog. And since I said I would I overwhelmingly then didn't want to! But it will have to wait. I will share about our newest farm baby born today instead!

When kids came home from school this afternoon about the same time we got home from the coop with a new trailer of pig feed, i told them if they hurried with afternoon feed chores we would go to the community center right away to play with friends on the playground.

But kids immediately ran back inside from the barn carrying a newborn high east friessan ram lamb instead! Last year Pepper had a ram lamb and Salt had nothing. She just got fat instead. And I watched Buddy, Dumas, and Oni fight over her all summer and late into the fall. Usually when our girls are bred, the rams at least leave them alone. So imagine my shock when I race out to the barn this afternoon to realize that Salt had been more than just fat!

Both mama and little boy are doing well. Tho she is so fat, I didn't notice vafs until I felt this this afternoon, her fleece hasn't been crutches, she hadn't been given a prelambing cdt shot, I hadn't prepared a jug for her with extra bedding or a heat lamp. (I know they can be dangerous but heat lamps in January in our unheated barn are a must here for lambing and kidding.) So we raced to prepare a jug with fresh straw, a heat lamp, and some molasses water for Mama as well as her own tub of horse hay before heading over to the community center. Mr. Mud watched and made sure little boy was successfully nursing to get colostrum. I'll milk mama out for the first time when we get back home for the night. A cdt shot and crutching will have to wait for tomorrow when the vet is open. We've never had a lamb born here before the end of March, so it's quite a shock!!!

01/13/2026

Just a boy and his dog hanging out
On a round bale
On a hay wagon🤦‍♂️

01/11/2026

What do you do for a little girl on a sunny but cold winter afternoon when she just needs to move her body, work her muscles, and feel the burn? You give her a hammer and crowbar and let her go at the sheet ice in the backyard!
We are big believers in deep labor. Sometimes just making your body move in a way that provides resistance and gets your blood flowing is the best kind of medicine.
She was out there for over a half hour crushing ice, feeding her body, and feeding her sensory diet. She came in happy and put the tools away for the next time she just needs to go break ice.

01/01/2026

Hoping everyone had a good Xmas and wishing y'all a happy new year. Before he left for work and our new years celebrations got underway last night, MrMud had the treat of castrating the Paul brothers.

These two guys are the only spotty ones from our current litter. The gilts are almost completely pink. They are also super sweet.

Mr. Mud dreads castration day and forgot to get himself some ear plugs this time. Our Basher is also a bit obsessed with YouTube personalities, which mr. Mud hates, so to lesson the demand of this necessary task, he told us all he was castrating the Paul brothers yesterday. A real treat! 😳 He said it will also make them easier for him to eat eventually too. I'll agree to anything we can to make sure the job still gets done, so I just shrugged.

Mr great and Terrible wanted to watch but also hates the noise, noise, noise, so opted to get his winter gear on and observe through the closed front door.

And then Jake and Paul we reunited their mother, Dutchess Megan back in the barnyard pen, and are seemingly none the worse for wear today.

12/22/2025

If you're not really a lamb person but love pulled beef, you should really try stewed lamb shank. It's considered lean and tough so not a cut you're likely to find in the store, but... omg! This has been cooking all day with Moroccan spices. I was really skeptical, but it is the most soothing meal served with green beans and buttered mashed potatoes for a cold winters night. It was born and lived it's whole life right here on our homestead.

12/20/2025

Guess I should stop hoarding all the cuteness over here... Finally took pics when I sat with them today. Five babies, three gilts and two soon to be barrows. They are already growing so fast and will likely be ready to leave here the end of February. Mom is Dutchess Meghan and won't be sticking around here long term either... at east not in animated form. She is a first time mom, and is an attentive mom now, but had ten live babies and only five survived despite our best efforts.

Because she refused to keep her covered hut draft free and labored halfway out of it for hours in the bitter cold she had a case of pneumonia that developed and was started on penicillin right away for several days after giving birth. Meat withdrawal times for muscle meat is only 7 days, but we try to practice nose to tail around here so will be waiting at least the 51 minimum days to have her butchered ao we can still safely consume the kidneys.

12/15/2025

I love this for birds. But have sadly found plastic does not work for lining farrowing pig huts here Hubby made a hut for a lady about to farrow and we moved her into it last week. She tore most of the plastic off to use as bedding and threw most of the actual straw bedding we provided out of the hut, and then decided to have her babies during our last polar vortex cold snap last night, laying halfway out of her hut to nurse them. And it didn't go so well.

Mini pigs develop lots of fat and thick coarse hair and live in our Iowa winters just fine, but their babies aren't born that way.

I'm grateful as a homesteader, we generally collect a bit of everything at the right price. Cardbord from Aldi boxes and used sheet metal covered insulation we got this summer on marketplace are currently going up to line the farrowing hut walls instead. Because they aren't as easy to get their teeth around and rip back off.

The whole point of this lifestyle is to make do with what you have.

We saved feed bags and shavings bags to cover draft holes in our chicken pens.

We recycled and reused the plastic instead of going to buy another roll. We have a roll but doing this helps us stretch that and use it for bigger projects.

I was able to get this done in an afternoon with a staple gun.

You’d be surprised what you have laying around and can use if you just think about it.

11/23/2025

Naw. Xmas will be coming soon enough. We really like leftovers, so will be having a hoglet and a turkey again this year for our harvest meal.

The hoglet was born and raised here and well loved it's whole short life. And a friend was given a free turkey she got that she won't be using this year for our more traditional white meat eaters.

We will be eating a lot of lamb this winter though!

11/17/2025

Using retractable hoses for the winter that were easy to store inside was a big game changer for us last winter. I hate bringing heavy hoses inside to leak out everywhere and become a tripping hazard.

Mr. Mud is busily digging up our spigot before the ground freezes to replace the rubber washer on it so it doesn't freeze on us this year and stops leaking.

And hog feed got moved closer to the house now so we can start fermenting buckets again since don't stretch a hose all the way out to the pasture in the winter anyway and we feed wet mash. (I'll link research on that in comments)

When temps become such in January and February that we need to use tank heaters to jlkeep drinking water thawed everyone gets moved into the barn and barnyard where there's electricity.

Curious to know how everyone else deals with hoses and watering animals in winter.

10/06/2025

Harvested all our buttercups yesterday. 11 firm skinned squashes isnt bad for seed not being planted until July. Kids will have fresh pumpkin pie when they get home from school today. Once fall harvest starts and larders start getting full, only then am I ok welcoming fall and all things pumpkin spice.

This is what abundance looks like in October. A wheelbarrow full of squash and gourds, and another full of sunflower heads. What might look like simple fall decor is actually nature’s storage plan.

✨ Fun facts you might not know:

• Winter squash (like butternut, kabocha, and acorn) were designed by nature to last through the winter. With a good cure (a couple weeks in a warm, dry spot) they’ll store for months in a cool basement or pantry. In the days before grocery stores, these were families’ “fresh produce” all the way until spring.
• Sunflowers aren’t just pretty faces! Once dried, the heads are packed with seeds for eating, planting, or even feeding livestock and chickens. One flower head can hold up to 2,000 seeds!

So while modern life tells us to buy food every week, the garden quietly reminds us with a little wisdom and some old-fashioned work, you can plant once, harvest once, and eat all year.

09/21/2025

A friend recently gave us a big cache of expired milk, much of it still unspoiled. As I already mentioned, boiled buttermilk syrup is probably our *favorite* use of old milk and is great for stronger tasting small ruminant milk, much like making caramels.

It's also great for soaking feed for farm animals, particularly if you ferment it to remove the lactose first. But one not often discussed use of milk is as a foliar treatment for vegetable plants. Milk has natural antifungal properties as well as being a much better source of bioavailable calcium, whereas egg shells actually are not, for plants. So its great to apply to both the leaves and root zone of affected plants.

Whereas you want to use something like skim milk for fattening pigs, in the case of plants, whole milk or as close to it as you can get, diluted 1 to 2 parts water, is what you want to use to treat things like powdery mildew and blossom end rot.

Reapply to affected plant leaves every 2-3 days until you see improvement. We loose over half of our cucumber crop to powdery mildew and blossom end rot every year, but I'm hopeful what's left of this year's crop is recoverable. Bottoms up!

A pic of one of our cucumber patches with a fresh milk mustache.