Posts Tagged by Death
Ups and Downs with Our Sheep
| March 1, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
On January 13th, one of our ewes, Big Mama, gave birth to two lambs, a ram and a ewe. It was cold and rainy, but we try not to baby our animals so we didn’t do anything extra other than make sure they had plenty of drinking water and corn. The next morning, the ewe baby was stuck hanging upside down from the hay feeder. Who knows how long she had hung that way. Once… Keep Reading
The Seesaw of Life
| January 10, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
I think my experience of life and death in food production is more like a seesaw of life than a “circle of life”. In Barnward Irony, Gene Logsdon talks about his troubles trying to keep broilers alive in the heat – a problem we had at The Wallow in 2011, our first year raising broilers. We are in a record-breaking heat wave as I write this, and as we are learning, these broilers have very… Keep Reading
Cosleeping Safety and the Milwaukee Billboards
| December 11, 2011 | Posted by Issa under Parenting |
I’ve started looking into cosleeping in the wake of the Milwaukee anti-cosleeping billboards. I said to a friend recently that there’s something fucked up in Milwaukee to have caused all of their recent deaths, so that’s where I started in my research: what the fuck is happening in Milwaukee? I started with the 2010 City of Milawukee Fetal Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) Report. It’s immediately apparent that Milwaukee has an abysmal infant death rate, which is… Keep Reading
Sooner or Later
| July 26, 2011 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
A couple of weeks ago, Joshua was out of town. He normally moves the sheep each day, but with him gone the job fell to me. I walked out one morning with Dylan in a Moby wrap. I fed the pigs. I let the chickens out. I moved the fence so that the sheep could walk from one paddock to another. Three sheep bounded happily over to the new forage. The fourth sheep… where’s…? Baby… Keep Reading
Processing Roosters
| February 28, 2011 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
This is a cautionary tale. On a homesteading blog that Joshua and I both read, a reader recently asked how to get started with various “green” and “getting back to the land” type ventures. The blog author suggested starting slowly so as not to get overwhelmed. Joshua and I agreed that that’s not really our method. We like to just jump on in when the time is right, picking things up as they come along.… Keep Reading
Eating Meat
| July 21, 2010 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
I have said for a long time that if I couldn’t kill an animal for food, then I would want to become a vegetarian. I’ve never said that I had to kill an animal, or that everyone should. I never actively sought out the experience of doing so. But, I said that if the opportunity arose and I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t want to eat meat anymore.
I’ve always wanted to be closer to that process and to learn how I felt about it and to see how that would affect my thoughts on eating meat. Keep Reading
