It’s been 19 months since we’ve had a litter of bouncing Buhund puppies! It’s hard to believe that Cherokee’s last litter of 8 healthy and beautiful Norwegian Buhund puppies is almost 2 years old already!!! With that said, it’s time for another litter……or 2!!! I am very excited to announce that we are expecting 2 litters of Buhund puppies in just a couple short weeks! Cherokee (Zodiac’s Remember The Cherokee) and been bred again to (Zodiac’s Magni Catoson) and is due around March 22, just 3 weeks from today!

Cherokee’s puppy bump

Cato (Zodiac’s Magni Catoson)

Our black female Vision Acres Storm aka “Stormie” has also been bred to a beautiful black male, Trollheimen Wisdom Of The World aka “Odin” and is due around March 16th, just 2 weeks away!

rare black female Norwegian Buhund “Storm”

Odin (stud)

Odin

This will be Stormie’s first litter and we couldn’t be more excited to see what these 2 beauties produce!

We are currently accepting reservations and deposits for BOTH litters! To reserve your puppy today from either litter, please email us at  [email protected] when reserving your puppy, please specify which bitch you would like your puppy from, Cherokee or Stormie. Also, please specify male or female and color, wheaten or black. We also need to know if you are interested in a pet quality puppy or a show quality puppy.

Stay tuned for updates…….

Ever wonder how you can get your chickens access to fresh, healthy green matter in the dead of winter when everything is dormant, frozen or snow covered without the added expense of buying it from the grocery store in the produce aisle?

Sprouting is a wonderful and nutritious way to get a lot with just a little and it goes a long way too.  One of my favorites and the easiest things to sprout is wheat.  In about 5-7 days you’ll have fresh greens they will love!  1 quart jar gives plenty of fresh greens to my 12 chickens and 1 ducks for 1 day.

Here’s how:

~Start with a large mason jar with ring, fill bottom with about a half inch of raw wheat, fill the rest of the jar with cold water.  Put cheese cloth over the opening of the jar and secure with ring.  Let sit in a cool dark place, in a kitchen cabinet works well, or like me, I leave mine behind our coffee pot on the counter, be sure to keep it out of direct sunlight.

~After 24 hours drain water, rinse, drain again and let sit.  Rinse and drain every 12 hours after that. This step is very important! Without at least 2 rinses in a 24 hour period, mold will start to grow and you do not want that!!

~On the second day you will start to notice tiny little white fibers emerging from the wheat.  These are roots and they grow quick!

Wheat Sprouts after 2 days.

~On the fourth day, the roots will be much longer and the “grass” will start to emerge.

Wheat sprouts day 4

~Day 6 your wheat sprouts will now have grown into wheat grass, full of nutrients!

Many other seeds can be sprouted as well as legumes.  I have found that black beans do not sprout well, but still have plenty of nutritional benefits.

Wheat grass day 6

Making homemade soap is something I have been wanting to do for a while now, so for Christmas my wonderful hubby gave me a soap making kit packed full of all the essentials to start me on my way.

soap making supplies

Little did I know how much I would love making soap!! It is now my new addiction! I find myself “ooh-ing and ahh-ing” over all the creations that I see other people post on social media such as facebook, instagram and pinterest with all the crazy colors and techniques……I can’t wait to add to my soap making arsenal! Once I am well seasoned, I want to experiment with a more natural approach by making my own lye using wood ash from our woodstove and tallow (rendered animal fat). I also would love to add dried herbs and essential oils. The possibilities seem endless and what better way to bathe then with all natural organic soap that I made myself without all the harmful chemicals that are found in traditional store bought soap. It’s just one more step in our journey to live a more self sufficient lifestyle!

My first batch of homemade soap

The first batch I made was just a basic simple recipe I found in “The Soapmaker’s Companion” A Comprehensive Guide With Recipes, Techniques, and Know-How by: Susan Miller Cavitch

The basic ingredients used were:

Lye, distilled water, Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Palm Oil and an energy blend fragrance. Let me just tell you how amazing my laundry room smelled as my soap cured!!! Stay tuned for more fun posts in my soap making adventure!!

January 7, 2015 marked the first birthday of our farm! It is a 2100+ square foot home with 4 bedrooms and 2 full bathrooms with basement on 10 acres. Please allow me to take you on a trip down memory lane, showcasing all that we’ve done in our first year on the farm.

This is what it looked like when we bought it

January 7, 2014 we officially closed and took possession of the farm. It was a crazy day with below zero temps (-4* actual high) and well below zero wind chills. There was close to 2 feet of snow on the ground and 2 days prior to closing, we had a blizzard that dumped 12 inches at our city home and 14 here at the farm! The farm is a 45 minute drive north of our city home in good roads! With a recent blizzard and below zero temps, needless to say, road salt was ineffective and our drive was very treacherous! Upon arriving, we had to have our 300 (estimate) foot driveway cleared of the mountain of snow and our new propane tank delivered.  This pretty much sums up day 1 on our new farm!

Tearing out and re-building of main walls and master bedroom subfloor

The days following January 7th were spent moving which meant that every trip (no exaggerating) was in bad weather conditions and bad roads. My personal last trip was the worst! I had our 2 kids and 4 dogs loaded in my minivan. It was 10pm when I pulled away from our city home for the last time. I made the normally 45 minute drive in ice and snow covered roads and white out conditions. The white out was so bad that people were pulling off to the shoulder because no one could tell if they were actually on the road!! I trucked on. It took an hour and a half but we made it safe and sound! We also spent these days ripping out nasty old flooring and carpet, washing and cleaning everything from floor to ceiling, tearing down walls, painting and making longggg to-do lists.

old basement windows

new toilet and tile floor in toilet room of master bathroom

new basement windows

Finally on January 26, 2014 we handed over the keys to our city home which I have lived in my entire life (my grandparents were the original owners) and said goodbye. Now the fun really begins! Our new home needed soooo much work, so we got right to it….

Before I begin listing what we’ve accomplished in our first year here, I would like to let everyone know that most of the work that’s been done, we’ve done ourselves!!! It’s taking wayyy longer to get it all done this way, but as I said, we’re doing it ourselves as funds are available (no credit cards here)! My husband is truly AMAZING!! I would say the biggest job to date was tearing out all the old carpet and replacing with maple hardwood flooring. This is a job that my wonderful and talented husband has been doing himself! 1 year later, there is only 1 more room to go!

new maple hardwood flooring

Painting is another big job and another job that is still incomplete, but coming along nonetheless.

We have also turned and completely rebuilt our basement stairs, front deck stairs, tore out a wall that divided our dining room and living room to create a big spacious room, completely gutted and remodeled the main bathroom, installed new toilet and tile in the master bathroom “toilet room” (a toilet room in my definition, is just that, a small room with door for only the toilet), re-plumbed half the house, installed new tile flooring in the laundry room, installed new laundry tub, installed all new basement windows, rebuilt main walls, hung some new drywall, updated some electrical, new roof, new vinyl siding, new gutters, new entry doors and storm doors, new woodstove, new woodstove surround, built new rabbit hutch, dug up a garden plot, and planted 2 cherry trees (first of many trees we will plant in our orchard).

Old main bathroom before gutting and total remodel. So ugly and gross!

new front deck stairs

new basement stairs

As you can see we’ve come a long way since last January! We absolutely LOVE our farm and our community! We look forward to seeing what this next year brings to the farm. HAPPY HOMESTEADING HAPPY FARMING!!

new wood burning stove and tile surround

New siding and freshly painted shutters

old wall… GONE! New wall going in.

June 12th marked 1 month since Stormie came home! 1 month already!? It’s hard to believe isn’t it!

After 8 weeks and 1 day on the run and 1 month back home, she continues to do well. She is definitely different but yet the same. She still loves attention and is the “attention hog” and a big baby! Thunderstorms once scared her, but now they terrify her! She used to just bark at loud claps of thunder but now she shakes like a leaf in the wind.

She lived threw many storms while on the run for those 8 long weeks, and just about every kind of storm our area sees. Thunderstorms, snow storms, high winds, hail etc.. and if you remember, it was a stormy day that finally brought our Stormie home! She just gave herself up to a complete stranger and we believe she did so because that day in particular was a bad storm day around here and she had just had enough of being alone, scared, wet and cold!

She went back to the vets on her 1 month anniversary of being back home for another check up and another dose of lyme disease vaccine. She’s doing great!

We continue to spoil her and give thanks for her homecoming! We are blessed indeed!

On June 1, 2014 we welcomed a sweet little brown alpaca cria to the farm! After several girls, Momma Buffy delivered a healthy boy weighing in at 18.6 lbs.

He does not have a name yet and is up for sale! If interested, please email us at [email protected]

He will be ready to go to his new home with you December 1, 2014

Our sweet Stormie has been home for 1 week now and is doing great overall! After 8 weeks and 1 day of running in the wild, we took her to the vet for a thorough exam to make sure she was in good health. God only knows what she had been eating! Her weight was perfect for being on the run for that long and no parasites were detected! She does however, have fleas and 1 tick was found on her resulting in a positive blood test for lyme disease. The good news is, the count came in very low which means she will not need any treatment to cure her of the disease. She will go back in 4 weeks for another test and a follow up lyme disease booster. She has had a nice bath and has started a monthly flea and tick treatment with frontline.

So now that she is finally home, we get to go out and take down about 1200 flyers! Those took us 8 weeks to put up, so I’m sure it will take that long to get them back down again. We have a good start already! Just look at them all in the picture below. That’s only about 100 of them! Taking them down is not an easy task. When most of them went up, there was a lot of snow on the ground which created mounds around the base of the telephone poles and trees. So now that Spring had sprung and the snow has melted, some are almost impossible to get to because they are either quite high up on the trees and poles or there are now beautiful plants and flowers growing around them! Boy how things have changed in just 8 weeks! Not to mention the creepy crawlers who have taken up residence behind some of them!

We would again like to thank everyone who helped us in any way with getting our girl home and for those who have also helped in getting all those flyers taken down. Words can not describe the gratefulness we feel to each and every one of you!

Hello Hello to all you fine folks! Ok so, I had every intention in making a daily entry to take you along with us on our journey from city life to country living, but that didn’t happen, my apologies! What happened was, we no longer have easy access to the internet and our wi-fi in our city house was shut off a week early. Then of course there was the, what seemed to be, endless moving which of course took up every last spare second I had! So I am going to do my best to take you on that journey in 1 entry! So, go grab a beverage of choice, sit back and entry the ride!

January 7, 2014 we took possession of our new home. The temperature that day was a high of -4F degrees! Our 400 foot driveway was completely impassable with about 3 feet of snow. We had to wait in the road in our van for the plow guy to plow us out. Then when he was just about finished, the propane guy had to drop our new propane tank and get the heat turned on. We celebrated by going out to lunch while the house warmed above freezing! 2200 square feet on a basement is a lot of house to warm up when the outside temp is THAT cold! It didn’t take hours, it took days! The basement serves as a refrigerator under the house, it’s crazy!

Now that it is ours, we have ALOT of work to do before we can move in officially in 2 weeks! Can we do it? NOOOOOO but…….

On January 26th we said our final good-byes to our city home at 10 pm that night we handed the keys over to the new owners. For the almost 2 full weeks leading up to this day, we rented, count them, about (6)16 foot moving trucks !! On top of I don’t even know how many loads in our van! Yes, we have a lot of stuff! Almost every trip from the old house to the new, which is a 45 minute drive in good conditions, was in snow and ice covered roads at a slow speed which doubled the drive time! It was absolutely INSANE! Those are stories we will be telling for years to come! One of the best (in my opinion) is how we managed to move all 38 chickens and their coops and runs! The chickens have 2 huge coops that weigh around 400-500 pounds each! They were not only buried in about 16 inches of snow but in ice as well! We had to hook up the hose to the laundry tub and turn on the hot water to actually thaw and pry them out! Each coop took about an hour and a half, but this was the easy part! Their runs were another story, or I should say the big run was a story in itself. We use a large chain link dog kennel as a chicken run. This is something that took me a weekend to assemble to begin with. Here’s the deal, the chickens needed to be out of their temporary cages and back into their coops and run by the end of the day! So, that meant that somehow we had to move the run in one piece! Down the highway, in the snow, in an hour long trip! I started thawing it and prying it out of the snow and ice, little by little at 8:30 in the morning! At 3:00 in the afternoon, it was free! It took 4 people to pry it out and lift it up and carry it to the truck. Only 2 BIG problems! #1. it wouldn’t fit thru the gate between the deck and the garage, so 4 of us had to lift it up 8 feet into the air, up and over the deck to the driveway. Chain link fencing weighs a ton! Problem #2 we had an 8 foot wide truck which we thought would be enough for the run that is 7 feet wide, but oh no! So, thankfully my Dad had a trailer we could borrow, one that just barely was big enough to handle it! That was luck my friends. It took a lot for the guys to get it tied down enough to make the long trip. It was 11pm before the chickens were back in their coops and run again at the new house! Telling you about it is one thing, actually seeing this mayhem in progress was a whole other story! Believe it or not the snow and ice, as much of a problem it was, actually worked in our favor once everything was thawed out of it. It made moving everything which was extremely heavy, easier because all we had to do was put a couple 2x4s under it and “ski” it along.

Ok so now, we’re all moved in YAY! The house is anything but move in ready so we are “camping” for now. Every room is under renovations and every floor is being replaced and every wall painted. This is chaotic and stressful but fun nonetheless. It is so beautiful here! Once we get the inside more photogenic, I will post pictures for ya’ll to see. Until then, we remain “under construction.”

The Dogs: they are adjusting to having a temporary much smaller yard to play in but are happy, so they’re good. In the Spring when the ground thaws we will put in a permanent yard for them much bigger then they’ve ever had! We have bred our black girl “Storm” and hope to learn soon that we are expecting another litter of sweet Buhund puppies! So if you’re interested in reserving one, email us at [email protected] if puppies are in the near future, they will be born in early April and ready to come home with you in June.

Stay tuned for more Ranch updates and a closer, more personal look of Rose Shadow Ranch’s new home in Holly Michigan!

January 7, 2014 the day to close, the day that will make the farm officially ours is finally here! It’s the coldest day of the year thus far, with a high temp. of -4 degrees and the coldest day we’ve seen in our area in several years! It was a cold day but also a pretty one with the sun shining. The low for the day was -14 and the wind chills were in the -30 to -40 degree range! Just 2 days prior, we had a big snow storm which dumped a foot of fresh snow on us! We picked a fine day to buy a new house wouldn’t you say so!

So we get all the papers signed and off we go! The plan for the day was to drive up to the house to meet the propane company who is scheduled to come drop off and fill a new tank so we can have heat until we get our wood burning stove installed. Then we were going to drive back down to Royal Oak to pick up a moving truck and empty our storage unit to move up to the new house. Well……things didn’t quite go as planned!

After leaving the closing, on our way up to the farm, our drive was less than favorable! The highway was a mess from the big snow 2 days ago and that mixed with negative degree temperatures means ineffective salt which means miles of black ice! We saw 1 accident after another and even a roll over! It was a scary drive but we made it! While driving, my husband thought he would touch base with the plow guy to make sure the driveway was clear for the propane truck. My husband had drove out to the farm the night before for our final walk thru to find the driveway was snowed in with snow drifts that were up to his thighs and he’s 6’1!! There was no way the propane was getting delivered in that! Well, the plow guy forgot all about our last minute deal to clear the driveway which is about 200 feet long! It all worked out thankfully!

By the time he was done the propane was there! That leads us to another problem. The old propane tank is in the backyard, with snow so deep, they couldn’t get the truck back there so they had to temporarily set the new tank in the front yard right next to the driveway until Spring. As luck would have it, we actually like it better here so we may make it it’s permanent position.

Once they got the heat on, it was time for us to go grab some late lunch while the house warmed up above freezing so we could get something done! We cancelled the moving truck because of the roads so we were not able to do much this first day.

After lunch, it was back to the farm. We started to cut out the old nasty carpet and disinfect the place. Day #1 is complete! Tomorrow is a whole new day!