Welcome to
Amazing Graze Farm
The Land of Milk and Honey
Welcome to our little farm. We began in a very slow way. Neither of us were born or raised on a farm. In fact, if you had told us 12 years ago, that we would live on a farm and raise all the animals that we do, we would have laughed at you. Not that many years ago, God placed a desire in our heart to lead a more simple and quiet life. Now, I am not sure how simple our life is... My son says that whoever wrote the song with the line "Life on the farm is kind of laid back..." never lived on a farm. There is ALWAYS something going on here. God began to convict us in different areas of our life. I want to premise this by saying this is how God led us. This might not be the path for everyone, and we do not stand in judgement of anyone who walks a different path. We started downsizing with a garage sale. Then we had more garage sales. We were finding it easier and easier to get by with fewer things. Many of the people who knew us, thought we were nuts. We heard lots of comments. Some of them hurt and others were encouraging. We just kept listening to the Lord and trying to do what He was telling us. We did not expect others to change as we did. Many people feel judged simply because we live differently. That is not what we want them to feel. This is OUR journey. Everyone needs to go to the Lord to see where He will lead them. As we learned more and more about what they do to our food, we made changes. We started using whole grains and grinding our own wheat for flour. Then we started to garden and get animals to raise more of our own food. As we grew in what we did, we had many people who were unable to grow or raise their own food ask us to sell some of what we had to them. So we did. We could not keep enough eggs or other items on hand to meet the demand. We could not expand on that property either. Then God moved us to a little farm in Ohio. Then two years later He led us to an even larger farm with a larger pasture which we desperately need. We have lots of different animals.
We have cows for milk and beef. We have a jersey cow named Buttercup. Her picture is on our first picture page. She is about 12 yrs. old. She has given us many calves. Some of them were half beef. They went into our freezer or were sold as beef. We bred her to a jersey hoping for a heifer to raise up as her replacement. The first time around it was a little bull calf, which we gave to friends. She finally gave us a little heifer that we had been praying for. We named her Honey because she was a beautiful honey color. Then she turned very dark (her sire was dark), so we have changed her name to Molasses!! We bred both her and Buttercup and they both gave us a little heifer (girl calf). They were both destined for the freezer though as they were half beef. We named them Sucanat and Sorghum. Sorghum should have been Blackstrap as she turned very dark. They nursed off their mamas until they went to the butcher. That is the best beef we ever tasted in our life. We also raise Jersey steers that we get from a friend's farm. We give them names like Sir Loin of Beef, Porter House, Chuck Roast (or Chuck for short), Delmonico (or Del for short), Rump and Roast. We have no problem selling our meat as people want good healthy meats that they don't have to be afraid of. We sell out every year. If you are interested in ordering information please email us. We will have some available in October of 2008. It gets spoken for pretty quickly though. They are awfully cute, but we keep telling ourselves this is "HAMBURGER"!! It was hard leaving Buttermilk (the first calf) at the butchers, but she sure tasted good!! We have a page that tells about our beef and pork. All of our beef is grass raised on a pasture that was certified organic when we moved here. We have not kept up the certification, but have also done nothing to change it.
We have laying chickens for eggs. We have roosters in with our hens. There are Golden Buffs some Araucanas, Light Brahmas and Rhode Island Reds. Our layers are pasture raised. We raise broilers (meat chickens) on pasture also, but only in the summer months. We raise them for us as well as for our customers. Many positive comments were given about our poultry. We also pasture raise turkeys for Thanksgiving. There is more information about our pastured raised poultry on our poultry page.
We have Australian Shepherd dogs for protection and herding. The name of the first one we got is Southern Star and she is a red tri. We just call her Star. She was our son's best buddy. She is truly the best dog we have ever seen. She is more like part of the family. We got a male who was a red merle. His name was Johnny Rebel (Reb or Rebel for short) We found a new home for him. We have been praying for 3 years that Star would have puppies and she gave us six beautiful pups. Then she gave us a eight more pups. We kept one from the first bunch. Here is a picture of Southern Belle, which is the pup we kept. We also purchased a pup from a farm in Virginia. We named her Dixie Darlin'. She was on target to be as good as Star or better. For unknown reasons on her 10 month birthday, she was playing one minute and dropped dead the next. We don't know if it was her heart or not. We really miss her.
We added bees a while back. We had 2 hives going. They were doing really well and we got around 10 gallons of honey that year. There were some empty hives on this property. When we went out to check on the bees, we found that we had 5 hives full. We gave a couple away and then we had some swarm. We were then down to 1 hive of bees. Whatever killed off all the honeybees got our last hive full. I am not sure when or if we will add bees again. You can read all about our bees and see pictures on our bee page.
I (Marci) would eventually like to get a mule to use in work and also to ride. I have always loved and wanted a mule, but who knows if we will ever get one!! My Grandpa had and loved mules and several of my uncles love mules. I can just see me sitting on that mule. If it was a Jack, he would have an old straw hat or John Deere hat on. If she were a Jenny, she would have a lovely straw bonnet with flowers on it and holes cut for her ears. Now you realize why we will probably never have one. *SMILE*
We have sheep for wool since I spin. The current ones are named Sunshine, Charity, and Grace the 2nd. We had a sheep named Grace. Grace gave us twin lambs, a ram and a ewe. The little ram lamb has a gray beard, so Joshua named him Moses. The little ewe lamb didn't have a name. A friend's little boy thought that was awful, so we let him name her. He named her Mary. Mary had to be bottle raised as one of our goats licked her all over after being born, and the mama sheep rejected her. She was VERY people friendly and stuck so close, that I called her velcro. I would take walks down to the mailbox and the little lamb would run right with me and the dogs. Every other step, I had to watch as she tried to attach herself to my leg!! Mary has been sold. Then the next year Grace gave us twin ram lambs. Again she rejected one and Jacob was bottle fed. He was also a people lover. Here is a picture of Jacob.
We also raise pigs for the meat. They get names like Ham Bone, Pork Chop, Bacon or Sausage!! We try to raise several piggies at least once a year. We also have lamb meat for sale. We are really trying to do things as natural as we can. Here are some Natural Worming ideas if you are interested.
Well, we also have another animal. You have to understand the background here. I was raised to not like cats. In fact, my family hates cats. So, I have never been fond of them. I would never hurt one, but I did not (and do NOT) want one. We have mice in our barn. So, we had to get a cat (A BARN CAT!!!). Ginny, stop laughing!!!!!! We named her Ginny after my dear friend who will never let me hear the end of us having a cat. She even told me her CAT was laughing hysterically at the thought of us having one. Oh well..... =) Ginny kept the farm and lots of other people supplied with kittens. She was a good mother and had really healthy kittens. One of the kittens had quite an adventure. Ginny ( my friend, not the cat) took two out of that batch. One of the kittens was named Clara. Clara took several long rides on Ginny's truck and they found her as she crawled out of the wheel well. She has since disappeared and they are wondering where she is living now, since she probably took a ride with them somewhere and got off without being seen. Well, Ginny got run over this last year. We have several of her youngin' running around though. Joshua picked a male to keep since it looked the most like Ginny. He named him Gino.
We were finally getting settled into our new homestead and moved again. We hoped it the last move for a LONG time. However, we are looking to probably move again sometime in the next year or two. We have gardened each summer. We have a large garden area. There are all sorts of berries, grape vines and even an asparagus bed. We have a peach tree and 4 apple trees. The peach tree has never given us much to speak of. If it doesn't do something this year, we will pull it out and replace it. There are bunches and bunches of daffodils and other bulbs planted as well. There were almost constant flowers as when something got done, something else came up. There were lots of daffodils, a few tulips and a few hyacinth. Then came the iris blooming. There was a forsythia bush and we were told there was a lilac, but if there was, we never saw it. We planted two of them a couple of years ago. We have lilies, missouri primrose, gladiolas, phlox, and many other flowers. We always have several beautiful sunflowers from recycled seeds. The birds help us out there. I hope to get up more pictures of the property. The barns are all white, but they are ready for another coat of paint. We are trying to decide what color we should paint them. White gets grungy so quickly, although it looks so clean and crisp. White would look even better if the roof was a red or a green. Red fades rather quickly, so we may go with blue again. After all, we are BLUbaughs!! We do have a garden page up with lots of pictures of our produce.
We would love to hear from you all if you have any advice or ideas that we could put into practice. We would also love to have you sign our guest book and list your homepage for us to go and visit.....especially if you are a homesteader.
Both of our cows are in milk right now. Molasses has two calves nursing off of her, so we do not milk her. We are milking Buttercup once a day. When we get too much milk, we are still able to keep up with it all. We make butter, yogurt, sour cream, ricotta cheese, farmer cheese, mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, parmesan cheese and colby cheese. I also make a cheese that is similar to ricotta for the dog. Check out our Cheesemaking Page for some ideas. We also feed milk to our beef calves, pigs, dogs and cats. God has been so good to us. He continues to work in our lives. He has truly continued to pour out blessings upon us. The bounty from our garden fills our freezer and the jars on our shelves. We prayed for more pasture among other things and He brought this to us. We prayed for a miracle in selling our house. It sold one week after placing it in the paper. God is good.... All the time!!! We have a large customer base for our healthy meats. Our herb garden has not done so hot here, but we are going to try again this year. We have friends who came to live in our apartment for a year to see if they liked it up here. They were our friends in Florida. They liked Ohio so have bought a house nearby and we get to see them. We just had more friends from Florida move up here into the area. We have gotten together with family some and have enjoyed lots of visitors. Our allergies are almost gone. We are enjoying good health. We give all the praise and glory to God, who is the giver of all good things!!!!
