New product - guinea fowl

For the first time ever, we have organs, feet and necks from guinea fowl available for purchase in the online store. Son we will have the whole birds available also.

These are the birds we are using for biological pest control in our animal feed gardens. The flock is retired in the winter and a new flock hatched next spring. (Otherwise the birds would eat the whole winter garden!). So that means they are almost exclusively bug fed all year as their natural diet, and totally free ranging as they stand guard protecting the garden from bugs.

The feet and heads make excellent medicinal stock, loaded with collagen, cartilage, minerals and all sorts of medicinal nutrients. Just put in a small stock pot with water, maybe add some onion, realsalt, cap of vinegar and a few black peppercorns then simmer for several hours.

The organs can be cooked as any organ meat, added to a variety of dishes for extra nutrients in almost anything.

To try these, better hurray, supplies are limited! (But more are coming as the weather improves).

Converting ODT to EPUB or MOBI using Calibre

This post will likely seem off topic for the typical readers of our blog. It is concerning the process of publishing eBooks. Now that we are deep into the throws of the publishing world, these details are a big part of daily life!

Background: The books I am writing are being written in Libre Office on Ubuntu, saved as .ODT files. The conversion to PDF is simple, as Libre office has a "export to pdf" function that works amazingly well and all features of Libre seem supported in the resulting near perfect PDF file.  PDF is fine for self publishing and distributing off a website such as this, but none of the major eBook retailers support PDF. 

The reason is simple... PDF is a really cool and flexible set design format. It allows creativity to place objects and text around the page as in written works. EBook reader, however, do not accept PDF.  They prefer a format that allows restructuring on the fly to fit a variety of screen sizes and shapes and resolutions. this presents a problem for PDF becasue  the exact thing that PDF is best for, fixed structure, is something not allows in the ebook reader world. These readers work more like a web browser, dynamically flowing text to match as things are scaled up and down on various platforms. 

So, The next step in our process was converting to EPUB and MOBI (for Barns &Noble and Kindle respectfully).  WOW, what an experience this was! I chose to use the converter software called Calibre becasue has the highest recommendations and most control. Calibre will acept many formats and spit out many other formats, mostly right. What it cant do is deal with a fixed structure format in a flowable world.  This caused many hours of searching the help pages, the internet, and finally trial and error.  There just isn't much information available because of the vast number of possibilities of input format to output format. 

I wanted to document what I learned specifically about converting ODT to EPUB using Calibre on Ubuntu. (I dont thin the OS matters at all, but worth mentioning). Here is the list of issues to deal with that are not well documented:

A. Graphics and captions

Libre Writer allows frames to hold the captions of graphics in a nicely formattable way.  NOT COMPATIBLE WITH CALIBRE! The frames themselves do not get interpreted properly and mess up the page.  The only option seems to be:

1.  remove captions and paste graphics only (anchored to paragraph text)
2. Place the cations into the graphics themselves

B. Table of Contents

Libre Writer does a fabulous job of building and maintaining a table of contents automagically. Unfortunately this is wholly incompatible with Calibre.  Instead, use the Calibre "create table of contents" feature based on headers in the document, and remove the embedded table of content entirely. This is ok, as it actually makes no sense to leave it. EBOOKS have no page numbers, because the pages are fluid as the text flows to fit. The Calibre created TOC is not based on page numbers, but clicks to go there. That works well.  Unfortunately this does mean keeping two copies of a finished doc, one with TOC for PDF, and one without TOC for EPUB

C. Track Changes

Calibre has this interesting quirk, anything it doesn't understand is just thrown into the front of the ebook, sort of like its saying "I don't know about his part, so look here first. Changes pending under the Libre "track changes" feature are one of those that it doesn't understand. Be sure to accept or reject all changes within the document before conversion to EPUB. 

D. Page Breaks

Calibre will add page breaks where it or you wants to. This si controllable in the conversion settings. You can choose which level of headings create breaks, H1, H2, N3, etc.  The default is to break after both H1 and H2. This is easily adjustable if its not what you want.

E. Embedded fonts

If you care about the final look and formatting, embed the fonts used. Dont depend on the font being available on the reader device. Substitute fonts are never perfectly alike and causes weird changes.  This is easily settable in the conversion setting of Calibre

F. Tables

this is perhaps the most difficult one! Tables are a way of force formatting text on a page. Again, totally incompatible with the goal of eBook readers.  There are options on this:

1. Do not use tables, organize in some text only fashion that makes sense
2. Use tables and let Calibre "flatten them", which pretty makes the table unreadable
3. Use Tables and let Calibre leave them tables, which makes them mostly unreadable since they fall off the edge of the reader screen into oblivion
4. Build the table in a graphic program, save as an image, and paste it into the document

Number four is the only one that truly works and preserves the layout of the table. It is a pain though since it means more objects to manage to build a book when changes are necessary. 

E. Cover

Several options on what to do with a cover. Calibre can expect an outside file as the cover, but if you do that and also produce PDF, you must maintain two copies again (one with and one without cover embedded).  What I ended up doing is making a full page graphic for the cover, text and all, and putting that on the first page of the document.  then do not tell Calibre to use a graphic nor to use the first page. Just leave all cover settings alone. That produces a PDF and EPUB that look identical with no intervening steps. 

One thing I did do is to set Calibre to scale the cover proportionally... that preserves the look of the cover as it stretches onto different device screens. 

F. Properties

Calibre is supposed to pick up "customer document properties" from Libre Writer, but I have not been able to get this to work. What that means (if I cant solve it) is that each time a new file is converted, you have to enter the properties like author, publisher, etc manually. You do what these to allow for better searching within the ebook retailer. 

That's about it for now...  Nearly at a usable EPUB file !

The Little Blog that Could

As 2016 come to a close, we are amazed at what this little blog has accomplished. Started just to document our struggles in building a farm from scratch coming from corporate america, it was reached many countries and grown in popularity.  Six years into documenting our journey, December 2016 shows us approaching 8000 readers per month. 

While by internet standards, this may seem pretty dismal, to us it is phenomenal! From zero to 8000 in 6 years with virtually no paid advertising, from a tiny family farm in southerm oregon, its amazing.  And on top of that, to see the list of countries that visit our blog regularly, its humbling!

Our prayer is that we remain diligent to use this voice to heal families and farms around the world, and turn this earth a bit more back to the paradise it was meant to be. 

Thank you for following along our journey. Each of you, whether a reader or a customer, is precious to us. YOU matter to us more than we can express. 

New Product! Cascade Organic Beef and Beef Bones!

At long last.. after many many requests, Little Sprouts Farm is offering Organic Beef for sale!

No, we are not raising cattle. We simply do not have the facilities for those large animals.  However, we have become re-sellers for the best beef on the planet... Cascade Organic Beef! You can now order this highest quality beef right on our online store and have it delivered free to your door!

Cascade Organic Beef  is the one beef producer that meets our highest standards. They raise beef the way that we would if we were able to!  The most important points are:

Grass fed and Grass Finished - no grain!
Organic pastures
Fermented Alfalfa fed during winter
Highest Omega 3 of any beef
Closed Herd - no unknown genetics
Humane treatment

One of the most unique aspects if the way COB raises the omega 3 content of the beef... fermenting alfalfa! You see, as grasses or alfalfa dry in hay, the omega 3 content diminishes greatly.  Since grass doesn't grow in the winter, normally cattle live off dry hay all winter. But that dry hay has low to no omega 3 left! COB solved that problem by setting up a large scale hay fermenting process. The cut grass or alfalfa is packed into huge "tubes" over a hundred feet long and 12 feet round. This happens right after cutting while the grass is still reasonably wet and thereby contains high omega 3s. Then it sits for months fermenting in the tubes, preserving the omega 3 but also rising the probiotic content, making the hay more digestible, all sort of benefits. Its like eating sauerkraut instead of raw or dried cabbage!All that nutritional benefit transfers to the meat and bones.

speaking of bones, we will also carry the organic beef bones that you can use for super nutritional bone broth, stews, soups, stocks. Bone Broth is one of the most basic, necessary healing foods for any family. Its incredibly easy to turn a bag of frozen cut bones into super nutritional healing bone broth right at home.

We encourage you to browse the online store... and try some of Cascade's products with this month's order. You wont be disappointed!

New Product! Heirloom Seeds!

We are proud to announce that Little Sprouts is now offering the very heirloom seeds that we use to grow our animal feed, direct to you. These seeds are the varieties we have tested and use on our farm in bulk. But you can order small packets to fit a normal garden area. 

INCLUDING!  The now infamous Gete-Okosomin squash!

One story has it that the seeds were found in an old clay pot, dated to be over 800 years old.  However, there is an alternate story:

The true story may be even more captivating, Lobe said. Although less theatrical, the real story of Gete-Okosomin (which means “big old squash”) reveals rich agricultural knowledge among Turtle Island’s original inhabitants.
“This is not an abstract archaeological thing,” he said. “It’s a way to connect back to the first people and acknowledge their agricultural heritage.”
Further digging into the story reveals that the seeds came from elderly gardeners on the Miami Nation of Indiana, who gifted them in 1995 to David Wrone, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin. The seeds had not lain dormant for centuries, Wrone said, but the Miami people had grown them for as long as 5,000 years.
The Miami were careful stewards of the seed, taking care to hand-pollinate them and maintain their purity. Wrone planted the seeds and grew several squash weighing 30 pounds or more.

This alternate story is according to  https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/history/genealogy/the-shocking-true-story-of-that-giant-squash/

Either way, these are amazingly awesome heirloom squash representing centuries old agriculture.  And now you can have them in your back yard, courtesy of Little Sprouts!

Browse through our online store now and put together your garden list for 2017. Supplies are somewhat limited, so don't delay!

https://csa.farmigo.com/store/littlesproutsfarm