Welcome to Rat Farm

I'm Judas of wingsofjudas.com! Art/weirdness: @wingsofjudas Rat Farm is a 10 acre homestead in Northern Minnesota, started May 2009. Growing Zone 4B. Original content documenting the journey & sharing what we learn. Self-reliance advocates, voluntaryists, & metalheads. Some witchcraft/Heathenry. RAT FARM GUIDE: - Introduction FOOD STORAGE: - Why to Store - How to Store - Where to Store - The Shelf-Life of Food - Food Rotation - Things to Avoid - What to Store - Ask Rat Farm - Questions Answered Virtual Tour: - Big Garden -- New Garden (Big Garden 1st year) - Backyard - Front Garden - Driveway Garden * Garden Master Tag (everything!) OUR PROGRESS: - Rat Farm by Year - Yearly Planting Lists - Yearly Harvests ALL CONTENT © J. BARDON Questions answered when I can get to them, keep in mind maintaining this blog is a job I don't get paid for! PLEASE DIRECT QUESTIONS TO ASKS to cut down on redundancy and benefit others. Homestead questions in private messages are no longer answered.

[ratfarm]

These have been in content appeals for several years, there's no way to alert them for re-review, emails asking for help have only gotten vague canned responses. These are clearly not offensive or violating anything. @staff???

One of them doesn't even show up on my appeals area in the blog maintenance spot, but when I manually scroll through my blog I can find it. So there may be other posts that are hidden and lost in limbo.

I am working on a backup master archive blog of uncensored goodness and want to post updates of everything, but I'm running a farm, homeschooling, got my kid in a million extra curric activies so he can be well rounded and it takes a shit ton of time driving all over, while working TWO JOBS. Did I mention the farm?.. Seriously being a content creator could pretty much be a job in and of itself. If only I liked to be paid with people reporting my way of life. 😂

SEND HEALING VIBES. ✨

Judas is tired.

[ratfarm]

I got reputation at the feed store as the “Rooster Recycler”.

Chickens have been trendy since Duluth lifted it’s city ban and chickens could be showcased proudly in designer coops in front yards rather than hidden in repurposed dog kennels behind garages. [Side note: I have a great love for the low-key pre-legal chicken keepers.] People get straight run birds (unsexed) and then the roosters grow up and start fighting or possibly off the neighbors crowing and surprise, nobody wants spare roosters. The birds sit on Craigslist and bulletin boards. People ask me what to do and I tell them to kill them, it’s easy. Make it a family project and a meal but they won’t. It’s too barbaric. They don’t mind eating the meat from the store but they outright refuse to be involved in where their food comes from. They want me to take their roosters and give them a good home. I tell them I will humanely dispatch their roosters and feed them to my dogs because the birds that come to me are rarely worth eating. I’ve had something like 20 odd folks tell me they will bring my a rooster they don’t want, but only a handful have made good on that. I always have a cage in the back of my truck just in case.

This guy was in very poor shape, he’d been attacked relentlessly his entire adult life by a more dominant rooster. They were probably in a small area where he couldn’t get away, he may have had trouble accessing food or water. He was a patchwork of wounds and scars and clealry very scared and unhappy. His toes were broken.

I butchered him in ten minutes with nothing but a hatchet; chopped head, legs, wings and skinned him out (which was almost impossible from all the scarring) then split the rib cage and gutted him. I used my bare hands. There was no reason to be afraid. I felt bad for this bird. Here was an animal that people felt self-congratulatory over finally surrendering to someone who was prepared to deal with, who spent his entire life in misery under constant attack, perpetually wounded and afraid. So instead of feeding him to the dogs I put him in the crock pot until the meat fell off the bones. When he was done I picked out all the bones and stirred in bar-b-que and tomato sauce with some cracked black pepper, garlic, and onion.

Certain folks who want a blog with pretty pictures and no substance will get mad at this post. I’ll lose followers like I do when I post about sick or injured animals or hard work that isn’t romanticized and ugly farm scenes. I’ll inevitably get threats for killing what I eat. But at the end of the day, you should ask yourself who was more merciful to this animal; the family that kept him alive in misery because they “like chickens” or the family that ended his suffering and found nourishment in his body?

March 23, 2017.

[plantyhamchuk]

Speaking as a vegan, this is the ultimate in ethical meat eating. 100% support.

BTW @ratfarm is amazing and honest and real. Go follow to see what it’s really like to homestead with animals.

[ratfarm]

Reblogging for @plantyhamchuk’s commentary and to add some of my own on a divisive topic:

As long as I’ve been publicly discussing homesteading I’ve been getting blowback from vegans, sometimes to the point of sickening hatemail that involves bad things happening to my family. It’s gross but I do my best to ignore it and remember there are jerks from all walks of life lest I start to think all members of a particular group are represented by those who act up. On that note, being a jerk is a really good way to push people away from your cause, don’t do that if you want folks to hear you out!

This is a reminder that we can walk different paths and still have common ground. This is the kind of exchange that’s so important in a world where we are increasingly polarized and pitted against each other in intense tribalism in the form of political and social factions. It’s incredibly important to be able to have rational discussions and look at complex issues with nuance.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is “reactive stances” as they pertain to politics and social issues. For example, say some vegans attack others for eating meat and those meat eaters turn around and start fetishising bacon as a response. We see this every day with various opposing ideas, especially across social media. I take this concept to heart and think about how I conduct myself because I don’t want to be propelled by anger and it’s easy to fall into that. That fact is, that shit’s stressful and being a jerk back won’t change minds, all it does is feed echo chambers. Middle ground is what will save us. When our breeder/pet goat buck died unexpectedly and my son was beside himself after losing the animal he raised, a friend of ours used it as en excuse to lay into us on the subject of veganism. The situation regressed to being so over the top (he got on a tirade comparing us to the movie “Deliverance”) that we ended the friendship. We were all very heartbroken about our goat but it was other vegan friends who sent sympathetic messages, proving that we can not only coexist but maintain meaningful relationships despite our differences in philosophy. They showed that we can walk different paths without demonizing each other.

The vegans that know me know how I care for my animals and respect that, even if they don’t want to live the same way I do. Likewise, I can completely respect their decision not to support the meat industry. In fact, that’s a big part of why I started raising my own livestock. I also started to do it because I like animals. Not everyone will believe that but I truly do. I wouldn’t put in the money or extensive labour if I didn’t like them, no matter how much I enjoy raw milk every morning.

Despite my belief in small ethical farming practices, I know not everyone has the resources to do what I do, just like not everyone has the resources to get all their calories from plants. Not everyone can flourish on a plant based diet and meat from small farms is more expensive. The problem on either side of the food debate (and others, like the localvore or organic movements) is we too often presume to know what is best for others and fail to consider things like access, or financial/health limitations. I don’t want my food ethics to be valued above people any more than I want us to be so far removed from our food as to cause the situation detailed in the original post. I’m not willing to let people starve while we drastically restructure our farming methods. Change will take time and work and while decreasing consumption is one factor, supporting alternatives to factory farming is another very important part that we can’t ignore.

I love all my animals and I eat my friends. It’s not easy or fun, but it’s life and survival and my decision. I want everyone to be able to talk about ways of raising animals better without fear or judgement for doing so. If we can navigate this issue then I have no doubt we can get through ALL the tough stuff society clashes on.

[ratfarm]

Reblogging the unrebloggable????!!!!

IMPORTANT READ.

[ratfarm]

Tumblr is deleting my farm posts for "Gore and mutilation".

I had a lot of really cool shit lined up to start posting again, now I can't even see the deleted posts to archive them. The reblogs are gone. Everything.

The link in the email notification about this doesn't work, but I guess someone threw a hissy fit about butchering. If this was the Rooster Recycler post I'll be pissed because that was a long explanation about the ethics of meat and raising chickens and how backyard city dwellers were abusing chickens.

I've been seeing a lot of farm/rural/animal communities threw the ringers lately by animal rights extremists and to be honest, harassent and death threats were a big part of why I stopped updating initially.

This shit is out of hand and it's being used as censorship. AT THE VERY LEAST I DEMAND A COPY OF MY DELETED CONTENT TO ARCHIVE PERSONALLY, or the TEXT which was long and important and the whole point.

@staff

[ratfarm]

Our biggest brownest goats gave us an amazing kid this year and I have some excellent surprises to share!..

TEST POST. If everything works I'll be mass updating. 🤞

[ratfarm]

Probably a dumb question but what do you do with your food offerings on your altar? Like do you leave them to rot, or burn them? But if you burn them what do you do with the ashes? I've never done any consumable offerings because I've no idea what do with them like I don't want mould but I feel like it's rude to take away the offering to bin it? Halp

@drop-the-dagger-romeo It's not a dumb question at all! If it's an outside altar I'll leave offerings to rot or be consumed by animals. Inside offerings I'll leave for as long as is hygenically reasonable depending on what they are, then I throw them outside. Water offerings (indoors) I'll pour into a special houseplant when I bring the next day's water.

I don't think it's disrespectful to let nature take offerings, at least not in my practice. It can even be an auspicious event, say if ravens eat food for Odin, or an inherent part of the offering if you're sending things to the underworld, etc. If you're in a populated place, composting or burying is also fine. You could burn and scatter ashes, but that seems like a lot for work.

We do have a child who occasionally eats sweets off the altar, but he "asks" first. I'm not precisely sure if he gets a response, but our gods like children. We've settled for making him wait a while before and being clear that it's someone else's present. Oddly enough, the dogs never steal food off the altar. Some of them will steal my dinner from the counter, but not the altar. Go figure.

[ratfarm]

Scenes on the farm: most of the goats, a buckeye chicken with an overgrown beak before I clipped it, and Papa’s hair getting long! c:

July 25, 2017

[cloud111]

How old is that chicken? Sensory nerves grow in a few weeks after hatching, beak clipping after that should be really painful :/

[ratfarm]

This chicken is three months old and this is an overgrowth which is fine (and necesarry) to cut. Chicken beaks continually grow and are worn down through use. If you watch chickens, they wipe their beaks on hard surfaces and file them. Occasionally beaks will out of control or in the case of this hen, grow faster than she can keep up (I've trimmed her three times between July and December).

If you were to look at the area trimmed and the piece that came off you'd see it's just hard beak: there's no nerves, no blood, no soft tissue. It's the same as trimming a toenail. It's impossible for a chicken to feel this because there is no nerves in the end of a beak, just like there's none in the end of their talons or the outter part of a hoof. What you're thinking of is debeaking, in the link there's an image where you can clearly see the missing portion of the upper beak, whereas after trimming it just looks like a normal beak again. This is basic chicken care, Google "overgown chicken beak" so see how bad it can if left untreated.

I know the tags said you don't want to see animals unnecessarily hurt, but an overgrown beak will prevent this bird from eating, drinking, and cause a horrible death by starvation.

[ratfarm]

Back to Hartley! We left even earlier after noticing a class on break outside everyday. So this time we did our kid ride with time for Jr. to get in on a game of catch befor his class started.

Lieblings had to work so I hit the trails solo. In just a few days I've gotten a lot faster and better at them and I've been adding up the miles from the map and doing just over four on challenging terrain. It's not that much, I used to ride 7 miles through the city when we lived in town, but that was also on streets and flat paved bike trails. I was carrying my satchel across my body and getting tired of it banging around and creating a hot patch of sweat on my side/back so I took an old Duluth Pack shell bag that had the strap removed and cliped it to my waist carabiners. It makes a sweet chaos bag and is big enough to hold my sketchbook, writing tools, and various odds and ends. I keep my metal waterbottle on my key clip on the other side. It was hilarious to take a break and watch the spandex-wearing bro dudes go by on expensive bikes and giving me weird looks, but I'm managing the same trails as them in Doc Martens and cut-off workpants on my old Rock Hopper. :P

I'm REALLY liking mountain biking, it's a ton of fun and feels like a full-body workout. My favourite part of the trails is the Root Canal (lots of turns and rocks) and then it opens into a beautiful swampy meadow with a boardwalk through. It's absolutely elating to glide out into this beautful sunny open area and catch your breath as you gaze around after bombing down the shaded trails.

July 27, 2017

[ratfarm]

Hitting the trails again at Hartley! Small Friend likes going over the damn bridge.

We kept going while he was in day camp. Liebling's fat bike is really sweet, I can see why they've gotten so popular around here. I'm riding his old mountain bike he gave me years ago (I love it and switched back to it after trying a fancy new one) and it's pretty capable, but I find myself worried about bending rims on the jutting rocks and other obstacles if I beat too hard on the trails.

The Hartley trails are a BLAST. I used to ride in this park when I was a kid (either here or Lester, depending on whih relative I was with) but I think they've done a lot more with them since then and now everything is mapped and rated for diffuclty like the ski trails. The whole Nature Center and related school and acitvities is very new. It's a pretty sweet place. I brought Jr. here for a parent/child reading group for a while before we took the plunge with day camp.

July 26, 2017

[ratfarm]

Scenes on the farm: most of the goats, a buckeye chicken with an overgrown beak before I clipped it, and Papa's hair getting long! c:

July 25, 2017

[ratfarm]

Judas Jr. started a week of summer day camp at Hartley Nature Center yesterday. He had a blast and that night we grilled venison and hotdogs and had a fire in the yard with smores. Since we homeschool this was a good way for him to have time with oher kids but without the drawbacks (including massive time sink) of traditional school. Everything is nature-based and interactive with a lot of outside time.

He's never been away from both of us before and I felt extremely anxious about leaving him with what is essentially a stranger. He's never even had a babysitter, instead we've coordinated work schedules so he always had one of us and I stayed home with him for the first several years. So rather than drop him and go, we busied ourselves on the bike trails for the duration of his class. That way we were on the grounds if he needed us. It was really nice and fun for all of us and we even crossing paths a few times while his group did outdoor activities.

We brought his little balance bike/kickbike along and arrived early so he could ride with us beforehand. I can't praise this style of bike enough. The whole training wheels method is rediculous because kids just learn how to ride a bike with extra wheels. Once those go off they then have to learn balancing from scratch and it makes no sense. On a kickbike it's a regular two-wheeled bike but without peddles. Kids use their feet to run and push the bike, they glide with their feet up and put them down instinctively when they need to and end up learning how to ride intutively. The also seem a lot more agile and capable racing around dirt, grass, and mud.

July 25, 2017

[ratfarm]

Picked up this old freezer on the side of the road (along with a fridge) last summer and decided to swap the chest freezer in the kitchen with it. The chests (which we have two of) have a capacity of 5 sq. ft., while this one is 15!!! All the shelves are cooled too, which I've never seen before.

It was rather gross on the inside but a few hours of podcasts and scrubbing with vinegar took care of that. The chest freezer will go in the basement with the other one. Now I'll have more capacity for meat and dairy as our farm expands and this will be a lot easier to organize and dig through for day-to-day use with the basement freezers serving as bulk overflow.

July 23, 2017

[ratfarm]

Failed at getting a good video on the Alpine Coaster but you get the idea. My phone was in a weird video mode so this is way slowed down.

EDIT: Lots of cool videos of the ride on Youtube.

July 23, 2017

[ratfarm]

Family outting off the homestead! We road the alpine coaster at Spirit Mountain and it was super fun! It goes up to 26mph (you control the speed with hand breaks) and zips through the trees and overlooks Lake Superior. This is the ski hill that in recent years have expanded to summer activities with their "Adenture Park", including adding really sweet downhill bike trails.

We had dinner at Clyde Iron Works. It was out first time there and REALLY good. A number of local places we once enjoyed have been overpriced letdowns in recent years, but we'll defnitely go back there.

Finally a stop at Lester Park. We went to the old swimming hole I used to bike two miles to all summer as a kid. It's been called "Keep Smiling" since before I was born and attempts to cover it's namesake grafitti always prove futile. We've had a lot of rain this summer so the falls looked like they do during spring melt. Some summers this section slows to a trickle. The basin warms up and makes it nicer to swim in then Lake Superior (which stays cold all summer and is where it empties into) but the water flows through enough that it doesn't get gross, either. Watch out for snapping turtles downstream.

July 23, 2017

[ratfarm]

Dreadhawk.

I got a new battlejacket that fits better and is black! Getting to know it a bit before swapping patches but it feels real nice and doesn't get snagged while I work like the old one.

July 22, 2017

[ratfarm]

I've been hunting for a railroad spike to give to Lieblings for our 13th wedding anniversary (which was last month) and tonight I finally found one! It had to be one I found myself in the wild and I was starting to think the slow tourist line wasn't active enough to jiggle any loose, but there it was at dusk.

I've appointed it a lucky talisman, it means "wherever you've come from and wherever you go, I'll be by your side".

July 22, 2017

[ratfarm]

The barn, nice and clean stall side but not-quite-there-yet left... Eventually the other side will get stalls too, as well as along the back.

The herd eating, Cream's face in the second one cracks me up. The hay is sunbleached and not very pretty, which only changes palatability and carotene content but they like it. Hopefully it wasn't cut late? I've been dragging out the hay on a utility sled (for towing behind snowmobiles) and making them reach through the fence for it to prevent waste. Otherwise they like to throw it everywhere and walk/poop all over it.

July, 2017

[ratfarm]

Inside the goat pen and puppy shenanigans.

Luci stole a pair of Jr.'s underwear while he was swimming an brought them over to sheep try and engage them in a game of tug-of-war. They weren't terribly interested. =P

Luci pals around with the lamb and they actually do play together. For whatever reason the goats ignore him so he latched onto the puppy. I've also seen the lamb chasing roosters around the yard and grabbing their tailfeathers in his mouth! It's a real sight to gaze out the window while doing dishes and see him crest the septic mound pasture in hot pursuit.

July 21, 2017