Grace & Grit Farm

04/22/2026

Our last ewe…finally… gave birth to her babies. She looked like she was due any day for the last couple of months and it’s no wonder.

She had triplets!

They all were born with beautiful coloring. But, all rams, but that’s just how it is.

I’ll be curious to see how they grow up, what their progeny will look like.

04/17/2026

My husband is a pretty good negotiator. He sold the tractor to a bee keeper and part of that negotiation included trading to include 3 nucs of bees.

The last couple of days have been filled with prepping for bees. We put together some new hive boxes and frames, painted them, and prepped the beehive spots.

This morning we woke up early and went and got the bees with the girls. When we got home we installed the nucs into their perspective new beehives. We were anticipating them being angry and touchy. But they were the opposite, which was a relief.

We also took a peak at our other hive to see how they are getting along. I gave them another box to expand into the beginning of this month. Which of course aggravated them as we did this without smoke.

Once I thought we were done. I started to take off my bee jacket and then I went close to the hive and proceeded to get stung several times. I’m not positive on how many times I got stung, but we counted 6 stingers.

I took some Benadryl and ice to the stings. I tried to get the stingers out as soon as possible, so I’ll have less of a reaction.

I’m curious what my face looks like for church on Sunday.

I included a picture of some bees, if you look closely you can see the queen in the picture.

03/21/2026

First hive inspection of the year!
Somehow, the bees worked hard during the winter and filled up a whole flat with brood and honey. They are on their way to getting split this spring.

Start with one hive and end with 2 hives. We will also be picking up 3 additional hive mid April. Jordan was able to negotiate when he sold his tractor for the purchase to include 3 nucs.

So potentially, we could end up with 5 hives this summer. But depending on how hard the hives work we could almost make even more hives. It just depends on hard they work and fill frames and boxes.

We have 2 boxes with honey. So I’m hoping to another inspection, this time with Jordan. So he can lift the heavy boxes. So we can get an accurate count of how many frames on honey we currently have. Then whatever extra we can harvest this spring.

02/22/2026

Bacon is finished! This was the last thing we needed to do to finish the pig processing. We seasoned and cured the meat with two different seasonings: all natural and brown sugar seasoning. The brown sugar seasoning we initially purchased to go on a ham. But we thought about it and came to the conclusion that we would prefer to have breakfast sausage rather than a ham. One bad thing about putting brown sugar on bacon is that when the bacon is cooked the sugar carmelizes and make the meat black when it is fried.

It’s so exciting to see our freezer filling up with meat for us to consume.

Thank you Lord, for providing us with this food.

02/21/2026

02/21/2026

Jordan’s coworker was processing a pig and let us have some pigs intestine. So we can make casing for brats and pepperoni.

We had a hard time finding any information online about how to process them. Only one video of someone talking about it. But not showing the process on how to do it.

So we figured out afterwards, that with the time and smaller than anticipated amount that we harvested. It would be more beneficial to just spend the extra money purchasing casing. But we will still plan to use the casings.

02/21/2026

Pig intestines aka casings

02/20/2026

Look at these cuties!

Such adorable little lambs. It’s my favorite part of having sheep.

02/06/2026

More lambs born today!

We noticed that she was trying to push this morning. But a wether kept finding her and harassing her, pushing her around. So we got her separated to her own pen. I threw down some hay and gave her some water and alfalfa. Then we went in to water some plants came back out. I told one of my girls, she laying down and it looks like she is pushing. Run over and see if a baby is coming out. She yelled at me, a baby is coming out. It’s born!
So much color! Makes me excited. I told Jordan, it’s too bad these guys can’t be registered.

The brown and white was is a boy, the girls called him Crabby. Jordan called him “The Cuteness” because he squeezed himself right through the panels to follow us out.

The black, brown and white one is a girl and the girls called her Bailey.

We did help momma feed the babies. She is paying attention to them, licking them and then pushes them away. But she doesn’t let them near her bag to nurse. I’m not sure why she is acting this way. We made sure that they nursed at least twice today. I also gave them some drench (extra vitamins and minerals) for during the night.

I’m hoping that she is nursing them. But that she just gets nervous about nursing them when we are close by and watching.

We are anticipating selling her after she weans these babies. She isn’t going to be a good breeding ewe if she is having problems wanting to nurse and accept babies.

02/03/2026

We finished up putting the brats in the casings. Then we smoked and trialed some of the apple and Philly cheesesteak brats. The totals on the bratwurst was Jalapeño popper 26, Philly cheesesteak 26, Apple 25, and Midwest 18. So a total of 95 brats packaged and frozen. But we estimate around a 100 brats with all that was trialed and sampled. Not a bad amount, should last us a while.

Finished up rendering the lard. It’s crazy how little we received compared to our first pigs, which was a mix of Juliana and kune kune. Breed matters there is a difference between lard and meat pigs.

We were gifted some lard from a coworker of Jordan’s from a couple years ago. So I rendered that and our lard. I only got 4 jars from the pig we processed. The total amount of lard was 17 jars.