Mud Puddle Farm

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.

09/21/2025

Our pole beans got planted late again this year, not til the end of June, a week after fair. And the Seychelles seed I had was 5 years old already. And I didn't get them all trellised either. Some are even growing up our apricot trees instead!

But even a late start with improper infrastructure is still better than nothing when you're just trying to feed yourselves. Youll never get ANYTHING if you don't try at all.

So here's our first five gallon bucket of snap beans for the year. Now to get them snapped, washed, jarred, and canned. Cannot cheat and just freeze them in bags this year. Freezers are all full!

I will grow this variety again and hopefully do a better job getting them in sooner andgetting a trellis up first. Unlike my usual scarlet runners, the blooms aren't spectacular, but they are well suited to growers with overfull plates or executive dysfunction. Being a variety that is slow to put on seed, they don't get big and woody too quick if you get behind on picking the patch! Patience is a good quality to have around here!

09/12/2025

A friend got us a wifi extender for the barn. And we should have a full security camera system up and running by Xmas. I'll be able to go longer without scanning out our kitchen and bathroom windows. 21st century. Last month we were on our way to Osage to pick up a new to us egg fridge and freezer... Got as far as Carpenter when a kid who had other plans that evening so stayed home called to tell ustherence was down and pigs were out.

Happy to move into the 21st century soon!

Plan your barns and outbuildings with the future in mind, says this long-time farmer, whose “small” operation has outgrown several barns and sheds — and isn’t done yet.

https://www.grit.com/tools/barns-and-outbuildings-zmaz06ndzgoe/

09/06/2025

Perfect nearly fall day for a campfire today.

We had a mini pig boar we had kept uncut and used to breed back that we were finished with. Rather than castrate him and wait for the taint to be metabolized so we could no longer smell or taste it, we opted to take him to our friends house our of town to be butchered last night. then we brought him back this afternoon to be roasted over a fire out back.

The fire is fed exclusively by yard waste gathered from the backyard, then the meat will be cut up and canned to be used as cat food for our farm cats. Recycled spaghetti sauce jars too. Then the fire will be used to roast weiners and smores with the kids tonight.

Nothing wasted!

08/28/2025

All but the youngest Mud Puddle Farm kiddo have resumed public school here for the year this week.

And lo and behold we forgot to buy ziplock bags to pack school lunches. And do not own enough tiny reusable containers for all the things.

Cue mighty vacuum sealer to the rescue! It's not just for homegrown produce and home-raised meat. Might save a sahm mom's tail making kids lunches at three am too.

We also grew that there vacuum sealed cucumber from seed. And it will likely be devoured first... And I really do mean devoured... Even if I forget the ranch.

Hope y'all have a great day!

08/21/2025

Four summers ago, when we were just starting out with new birds and babydoll sheep here, I tried to plant a big vegetable garden out in the now summer pig pasture without enough irrigation. A lot of things didn't germinate properly, including this acorn squash.

I guess it just needed more time because this spring it finally came up on it's own. And we haven't watered it once! Harvested all this off one plant today as we get ready to rotate pigs into that section of pasture.

08/19/2025

First Cherokee purple of the season. Took a few blushing tomatoes to ripen off the vine to prevent bursting. Marauding band of chickens pecked them instead... lesson learned. Many more tomatoes in the jungle ready to ripen and many more still green. Vines are still blooming like crazy too and the pole beans are just starting to put on!

Many around us will be putting gardens to bed around labor day when our big harvests are just starting to come in! Pumpkin spice anything isn't permitted until September 21st around here!

08/11/2025

Its a waiting game here. Original 3 year old plants have berries that are starting to ripen. But suckers from this year are still just flowering. Guess Ill be drying ripe berries til I have enough ripe from the hedge.

08/06/2025

Some leghorn lady is gonna be pretty butthurt today...

08/04/2025

Late getting the gardens in yet again this year. But we finally have our first crock of lactofermented cukes of the season!

The black things you see floating in the brine are fox grape leaves. They're another edible weed around here. Adding edible high tannin leaves from things like raspberry, blackberry, grape, or the tea plant helps maintain crispness naturally. We like our pickles to have a big crunch but won't add alum the way my daddy did when I was growing up.

This was also my grandmother's red wing crock. (We use a plastic liner tho because we haven't tested the crocks for lead and though otherwise awesomely sustainable, two of our kids had lead poisoning as babies.)