@Dawn's Meta For example may be at the store and notice chicken thighs are on sale if buy minimum 5 pounds. Pieces with a high meat to bone ratio - economical meat source. Do not buy meat with brine added, limits turkey buying to around Thanksgiving when a larger variety is available at the store. Might remove a couple chicken pieces for my meal, freeze the rest. When time is available thaw, rinse, season so it smells good while cooking (a different kind of room freshener) and bake in oven or into soup pot to simmer until falls off the bone. Save enough cooked meat to use within 4 days. Package in plastic containers and freeze the excess to thaw later feeding directly to cats or add to other ingredients for the dogs. Freeze stock for soups or cook dog grains. May repeat boiling of bones up to 3 times to extract minerals before tossing.

Vegetables and fruits use same techniques. Buy bulk when on sale and use the same preservation techniques recommended for harvest. For example cool or root cellar type storage for cabbage, winter squash, sweet potatoes, apples and potatoes. Freeze excess fresh vegetables like summer squash after cutting in slices, diced rhubarb and plums. Will buy frozen vegetable to pour out of a bag.

Grains are easiest to store dry and cook as needed. If time is tight only 20 minutes for white rice, 15 minutes boil and 5 minute set. It takes me longer to thaw a grain mixture even using a microwave than cooking it on the stove. Meat mixed with grains left at the wrong temperature has a high risk of growing bad bacteria and molds. Grain can be cooked in the morning while I am fixing and cleaning up for breakfast, then safely be left on the counter with the lid on until evening feeding. Another option - the crock pot.

Pretty efficient, less disruptive than those quick runs to the store because not enough commercial food to feed. Simplifies inventory control.

Your right about the poop - no smell even when left to decompose in the grass run or if not removed daily from the cat box.

Some recipes I've seen use Turkey quarters. Deboning isn't fun but they say they can make big batches then freeze.

We are on meat kibble for the kittehs and a mix of non gluten, high % meat for Teddy am and raw Chicken bone in for dinner. He gets bored though. He thinks we eat better than he does. Hah.

I've read that if the food is right for kittehs, their poop doesn't smell. Teddy is ok if we keep raw meat and bone in the mix.

@magiamma I feed the cat chunks of meat when possible. The chewing and tearing benefits the gums and provides some roughage to digest. Limit finely chopped and ground to those with active issues who avoid the larger pieces. The outside cats will occasionally chew pieces of grass and kept a small pot in the house when outside access not possible.

The cat require a lot of meat. One cat eats as much as 4 dogs with the current feeding routine in use. I find great irony in the number of militant vegetarians, environmentalists and fake meat supporters who have cats as pets.

Great topic and important.

Cats are obligate carnivores and cannot process grains. It is akin to feeding them cardboard. In the wild they do eat birds, rats, etc., which means they ingest hair, feathers, bones, nails. Roughage? Certainly my cat generally only leaves the tail and maybe a foot or an organ. Yum.

Here are a couple of good links on feeding from my vet who is also an animal acupuncturist and nutritionist. Good stuff.

https://catinfo.org/

https://secure.balanceit.com/recipegenerator_ver4/index.php?rotator=EZ

Also there is Bright Haven in Sebastopol. They adopt cats over 18-19 and feed them a raw food diet. At least that is what they used to do. I went to a seminar there about raw food diets given by a visiting vet.

https://www.brighthaven.org/

This dog is still there.

So, y'all have a good one and take good care.

@mhagle in your area. If it works no reason to change. We all have different circumstances and the info sharing will help us adjust to climate changes. I am going to start my first seeds of the season indoors this week.

I was able to successfully grow potatoes using the Ruth Stout method last year. Simply covering with a flake of hay is low profile and does not entice the livestock to push fences. The few old bay hales I had decomposing to use for a trial planting this winter were too close to the fence. Sheep pushed the panels, poked noses through the open spaces in welded wire fence and ate large portions, chickens finished the job. I am going to give up on hay bales for now - to much time reinforcing fences. I will utilize the time saved protecting trees the trees. Nothing wants to eat the cow manure compost beds except fungi, insects and plants extracting nutrition in my no dig beds.

[video:https://youtu.be/X_FAm5zuJd8?list=PL4_ydSwpPtJh6NmXcRCYjmG52nh5N5xFk&t=411]

I have contemplated making my own pet food. Because we have so many rescue pets, I have historically bought the cheapest dry food. 10 cats and 5 dogs. The dogs also get a large quantity of leftover people food. I looked at your naughty food list and the only exception is occasional small bits of trimmed off fat. The dogs have never had any food-related health issues.

The cats are a different story. Last year we switched to only wet food for the house cats. This is after three of them developed urinary tract issues, costing us about a thousand dollars in vet fees. No problems after switching.

I might go this home-cooked route. At the moment I don't think I have the time or energy to do it.

I'm enjoying reading your blogs. Glad you came back!

My gardening report . . . I am only growing in round bales this year. I will eventually plant fruit trees in my remaining raised beds. Definitely not planting anything directly in the soil. Five years ago I planted in bales for the first time. The best success I have ever had. The second year was still OK. The third year, it declined considerably. The fourth year produced almost nothing. I bought these bales in September and spent the fall conditioning them. At the end of January, I planted onions, potatoes, and some seed tapes of cold weather crops. For our winter storm, I covered them with a couple of layers of insulated cloth. Wrapped with duct tape and also pinned down with spikes, the wind did not blow them off. Covered onions, potatoes, and sweet peas. Because the bales are hot inside, I think that is why most everything survived. Lost a few onions is all. At this date I have planted everything except my tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse. Most things are up. Onions, potatoes, cuccuzza, sweet peas, parsnips, carrots, beets, radishes, spinach, swiss chard, cantelope, watermelon, Armenian cucumbers, butternut squash, okra, malabar spinach, cabbage, brocolli. Seeds that are not up are eggplant and leeks (inspired by the dairy by EL), and my herbs that I only planted this week. We'll see how it goes!

Lesson learned . . . bales are only good for two years!

All the best to everyone here!

@Granma feed. Have seen more tragic consequences with pets on commercial food, including my own. Anyone I know who feeds homemade takes extra care to monitor for problems, with commercial many of us simply trust the product and do not monitor. After a while I started to calculate the time for sick care and work hours to pay for veterinary services as a time cost for having a pet. It varies for everyone and lifestyle at each stage of our lives. No universal answer.

Only feed raw food if I am involved in every stage of production to control contamination.

Is the photo your dog? Perhaps some corgi in there? If so, I find herding dogs to be especially opinionated.

But very time consuming. I had read years ago that there are nutrients dogs need that humans don't. Have not tried making due to concern about providing dog with necessary nutrients.

I do try to buy high quality dog food for both kibble and canned. And vary the canned. My dog does not like grain free foods, in either kibble or canned, so far with any of the ones tried. I feed a mix of both with some vegetable or fruit stirred in or on top. She has definite ideas about how her vegetables are presented, loves spinach and squashes, but won't eat if stirred in to food. It must be by itself or on top of her other food.

There have been so many recalls of raw foods for dogs that I avoid them.

There is a web site that lists ingredients of dog foods and rates them. It is called dog food advisor. For full access to the site, there is a fee. But a lot of information is available free. And you can sign up to be alerted to recalls. That is also free.

@janis b Initially when commercial pet food became available it was a higher quality product than food made in the average home. Lots of changes in agriculture and commercial manufacturing since then. The longest living cat in my care ate dry food for 23 years and 4 more years on a meat diet. She asked for the beef I was feeding the black cat, I thought she probably only has another a month longer to live her condition had gotten so poor - so why not - if a nutrient was missing it would not be a problem.

dried food during the day and commercially packaged raw, cubed meat at dinnertime. Their cat lived to 21.

@on the cusp The emotional connection can run deep into the heart. Glad they are close by for you. Love the names, imagining a unique personality to match each one.

my horses, oh, yes I did. Specially prepared hay nuggets, blah blah. They were digestively fit, but blindness and a tumor on their thyroid did them in.
I loved them so. Denny Debonair, and Hamilton. They are buried in my back pasture, will always be with me.

@randtntx

so much for doing this. I did not have a chance to look at this yesterday but will today.