Sometimes horses need a spa day too. We recently treated Sassy with a hoof soak for white line disease. This is a bacterial infection in the white line part of the hoof. It is not serious unless the hoof cracks so severely it renders the horse lame. To treat Sassy we used Clean It, a powder that is added to water, put in a bag, then you stick your horse’s hoof in the bag. It has to stay there for 45 minutes. Then you dump the water and do another 45 minutes in the bag for the vapor stage. It releases hypochlorous acid, which is the same substance white blood cells release to fight infections. Sassy is back to “normal”, which I use lightly because our farm is anything but normal! 🤪
We buy a roll of hay every other week not so much because the cows eat it all but because King Peter likes a nice fluffy bed that doubles as a look-out station. Of course he and Tod end up urinating and defecating on the hay which makes it less than ideal for the cows. We are working on putting up yet more fencing so the boys don’t have access to the cow hay but for now Pete is living large.
We have several refrigerators and freezers (as do most farmers), and for a while, the goat milk and eggs were in the same one. Recently however, I have turned the temperature down several degrees so it is barely above freezing so as to rapidly chill the milk and keep it very cold in order to extend its shelf life. However, as maintaining our fridge temperature is not a perfect science, we have had several moments of discovering frozen food and liquids in the fridge - never the milk - but for instance, celery juice. Then we discovered a frozen egg. I have since separated the eggs into a new refrigerator so they are no longer with the milk. We had fun peeling the frozen egg and examining it! Our dog, Zinnia, was very happy to help taste test. There is no life like the farm dog life! I did do a search and learned that it is safe to eat an egg that has frozen after thawing it, though not recommended if the egg has cracked.
Everyone who has chickens knows the struggle toward maintaining enough egg cartons, always asking friends to save theirs and bring them by. I was just thinking how I’d need some more when I drove by unknown trash on the side of the road. It looked like it might be egg cartons so I pulled over and sure enough - yes! 🙌 It was worth all the stares I got. Has this happened to you? What is something you needed and fortuitously found?
