Rooted Ridge Homestead

12/18/2025

The girls were out and about on cleansing (💩ing) flights today, and started dragging some of their dead out of the colony. I'm sure they'll be back at it tomorrow!

12/11/2025

Do you see the little stinker? 🔍

Egg loading.....5%.....

12/11/2025

My sweet baby JJ, is not a baby anymore. She's our first calf born on our farm, October 25th, 2024. Her future baby daddy (if all goes to plan) has just been delivered to my tank. She grew up so fast. 🥹

12/06/2025

Our sweet Maisy. ♥️ Fun fact: when we first got her, I thought about naming her Jello, due to her ear tag being 1JE1105. I'm glad I stuck with Maisy instead. She had never been milked or handled when we first got her, but boy is she a smart and trusting girl. I don't even have to lock her head in the stanchion during milking, because she stands like a perfect angel for me. I absolutely could not have asked for a better first milk cow.

12/05/2025

This girl is absolutely too gorgeous and unique to not have a name, but I'm not sure what to call her. Help a girl out!!

12/03/2025

I love the cow race every morning. ♥️ Little Girl wins 99% of the time. 😂

11/27/2025

Meet Louisa — the newest (and chunkiest) addition to our homestead. 🖤🤍

Recently, this sweet girl showed up, lurking around our homestead. I live-trapped her, and brought her into the humane society to get scanned for a microchip, thinking she might have wandered from a nearby home. What we discovered was… quite a story.

Her chip led back to someone living across M20 and down 8 Mile Rd — someone who had adopted her from the humane society on August 30th of this year. The shelter called him, and not only did he not remember he had her, but he said he didn’t want her. A quick search of his name showed a long history of m**h-related charges, including a m**h lab bust. So needless to say… Louisa is much safer with us.

Because he surrendered all rights to her, we didn’t have to do a stray hold. She’s already spayed (not pregnant — just delightfully chunky 😄) and ready to start her new life.

When I looked over her records, I noticed a comment that all four of her canine teeth were cracked. I lifted her lips to take a peak, and sure enough, all four of her canine teeth are broken off — tiny little stubs now. She’s clearly been through some rough chapters.

And yet… she is the friendliest, most trusting cat I’ve ever met. From the moment I released her from the trap, she glued herself to my side. After everything she’s experienced, she still leans into love without hesitation.

Her shelter name was “Belly,” but that chapter is officially closed. Her new life starts here, and her name is Louisa.

From stray ➜ to forgotten ➜ to unwanted ➜ to HOME.

Welcome to the homestead, Louisa. You’re safe now, you’re loved, and you’ll never be on your own again. ❤️🐾

11/23/2025

It's good to be back home. Spent a few days visiting friends and family in Wisconsin, and now back home watching the clouds with Little Girl. ♥️ I love her with all my heart. She makes a pretty good back rest, too.

11/15/2025

I spy with my little eye.... 🥚

11/13/2025

Constantly a game of hide and seek around here...these were in our crawlspace entrance.

11/10/2025

Here it is!

In this video, I give a brief tour of our newest project. We've turned our Heatmaster C150 outdoor wood boiler into a stock tank heater for our cows. This wi...

11/10/2025

Project complete! This past summer, I looked into how much it would cost to get our old boiler fully repaired and in operable condition. We limped it through last winter, but the repairs it would have taken to get it up and running just weren't worth it for such an old unit. It would cost almost as much as a new boiler. So we opted to install a new boiler. On the way home from the dealer, I had time to think. I don't usually have the time to just ponder, but a 2 hour drive by myself allowed my brain plenty of time to start churning out ideas. And so, the plan to build a stock tank heater was hatched. Our new boiler only had a single input and output, unlike our old boiler, which had two. So I engineered a design that would split both the return and supply lines into two. One would go to our house as it always had, and a second would be connected to a new insulated pipeline out to the new fence. We rented a mini excavator and trenched in a water line from our house to the boiler for a hydrant, and continued the water line alongside the new insulated pipe out to the fence line where a second hydrant was installed. We then buried an old, leaky stock tank, and cut a hole in it to make way for the insulated pipe. The original plan was to nest a second non-leaking Rubbermaid 100 gallon tank into the buried one. However, both our Rubbermaid tanks had irreparable leaks, and Rubbermaid has since changed the design on *only* their 100 gallon tanks, so the new design would not nest into our old tank. Fortunately, the 50 gallon tank is still the old design AND nests into the 100 gallon tank decently well. So rather than buying two new tanks (💲💲💲), just to cut a hole in one, we opted for the smaller one. We knew we'd have to refill it often, but it was better than cutting a hole in a perfectly good $100+ tank for a project I wasn't quite convinced would actually work out. I bought a heat exchanger off Amazon, along with a couple of temperature sensors, and I now have a heated stock tank! So far, it's been working perfectly, with the water temp holding around 50 degrees. The boiler efficiency was also unaffected! I couldn't be happier with how it turned out, and I know I'll be doing this down the road with a 150 or 200 gallon stock tank setup.