Bunnies, Eggs and More

 

We discovered last week that Lily had a new litter of babies that are cute and furry in time for Easter!  I didn't notice them in the nest at first and thought she wasn't bred after all, and they were pretty big before I could see them.  Lily is such a neurotic animal I didn't want to upset her more than necessary, so I didn't poke around or anything.

The pictures don't really do them justice for how incredibly cute they are.  There are six of them this time (six!!!).  Their eyes have just opened and they have been moving around the nest box.  There is one bold one in the first picture who was peeking at me.

As we primarily celebrate the pagan side of Easter, there was much egg-dyeing on Saturday.  We've been saving our little white pullet eggs for weeks.  We did the natural dyes again this year.  We used blueberries and red cabbage for the blue this year, and a good thing it was, because the red cabbage was a failure for some reason.  I can't remember how I got it to work so well last year, and I didn't have time to look it up again.  We used beets and turmeric again for red and yellow.

They were particularly pretty when we added some crayon designs before putting them in the dye.  I couldn't find our lovely beeswax crayons, so we used the regular ones.

We had so much fun trying different color combinations.  The natural dyes don't mix the same way that the regular food colors do.

The turmeric was such an intense color.  It stained my pot that I used to cook it in.  The next morning, after giving the pot several good scrubbings, I warmed up some milk for breakfast that turned out to be yellow!  The blueberries were also very potent.

They turned out so lovely again this year!
I love the soft springy colors you get with the natural dyes.



On Easter morning I woke up early and set out plates for everyone of home made treats.  The photo isn't very good (I'm still trying to figure out my new camera and my house is very poorly lit).  My friend and I had gotten together on Wednesday to make marshmallows  that I cut into bunny shapes with a cookie cutter.  We made the Nourishing Traditions macaroons, and later I baked the Czechoslovakian Easter bread my grandmother always made for us for holidays.  I made the walnut and the poppy seed version.
There was also a cloth basket of strawberries and a hand-sewn felt chick.  To be extra silly, I scattered raisins on the table, and told the kids they were rabbit droppings from the Easter Bunny.  They laughed and started eating them.

We did the traditional egg hunt later that morning.
We found all but one!
It is lurking in the yard somewhere still.


                                         

Starting the Summer Garden

We started the summer garden this weekend!  It's later than most people put their gardens in around here, but a week earlier than last year, when we still had a light frost a week after planting the tomatoes.  We seem to be in an odd micro-climate that gets much colder than other places.  The winter temperatures are closer to that of Monticello, near Georgia, than anywhere close by.

We put in 236 tomato plants, 25 tomatillos and ground cherries and 93 peppers and eggplants, and a bunch of different kinds of basil.  I didn't mean for there to be quite so many.  Last year we only had a single double row of all of those combined.  I only actually started five of each variety, but because the seeds were so old, I started two in each pot, just to be sure we would get one.  Most of them sprouted, and I didn't pinch off the extra ones like you're supposed to, because they looked so little and hopeful.  I had planted them on opposite sides, so it was easy to separate them when I transplanted them.  Most of them look like they are doing well.  A few of them didn't like being separated, but they were the runty little ones, anyway.

I've had a tricky time fitting everything into my garden plan as well as rotating things to places they haven't been for three years.  These were the best spots for the Solanaceous plants.  Next weekend we put in the cucurbits--the melons, watermelons, squash, pumpkins and cucumbers.  I know it doesn't look like much yet, but it's a start!

Growing Things

In between starting the summer garden this weekend, Ethan got some pretty pictures of things starting to grow.  This was a wild persimmon leafing out.

The blackberries are just starting to bloom.

The sheep's sorrel makes some of the fields pink.

The pawpaws are blooming.  I think they are beetle pollinated.  I see beetles all over the flowers.  They look so dressed-up in the greening fields, like fairies going to a ball.

Possibilities

Yesterday I laid out all my summer garden seeds (well, most of them).  I had to stand on the couch to fit them in the picture.  Some of these are flowers and basil varieties, and a lot of them are cowpeas or dry beans that I'm intending to plant in long rows here and there as borders, and so won't take up much space.  Ethan hates how many varieties we have, but I think it's interesting.  He says it gives him heart palpitations.

 We have the nicest collection of melon varieties this year!  The melons were so fabulous last year.  It was such  a delight to eat so many sweet, delicious homegrown melons.  I really hope we get at least that many melons this year.  I'm trying a new kind of watermelon--Gold Baby.  It turns yellow when it's ripe, which would be helpful.  We wasted a few watermelons last year thinking they were ripe and they weren't.  It's so fun to plan gardens, but it never ends up being planted the same way as in my plans.  It doesn't really matter, as long as we get a lot of melons and ground cherries.

More tangibly, I re-potted my tomatoes.  They are already twice this big, as this was from last week.  I think we are going to start putting the garden in at the end of this week.  Ethan has promised to help me with the garden this year, but I have my doubts.  Last year he actually tilled the garden, so there might be hope.  This year he promised to plant the corn and the peppers, but I already had to start the peppers for him so we would get any at all this year.

I recently re-potted them, too.  They seem to be happy.  Last year I tried leaving them in pots in the garden and they nearly all died, so we only got a few really hot peppers, the sweet peppers having withered early in the summer.  I love how much possibility there is in just one seed.

Fertility

This past weekend we put the recommended minerals and fertilizer from Midwestern Bio-Ag on the grazing lines.  We don't have any fancy equipment, so it's just me tossing them on, but I've gotten really good at spreading the lime, sul-po-mag and fertilizer on evenly and not having any leftover or anywhere unfertilized on each line.  My arm feels like it's going to fall off now, but two lines are done, one nearly done and only one more to go.  I didn't realize how good I'd gotten at it until Ethan tried to help me one evening and I put two bags on before he had even finished one.

This was the sul-po-mag.  It's like Epsom salts with potassium.  This was the soil corrective, along with the pell-lime, because it's very acidic soil--5.8 on the soil test.  The consultant at Midwestern Bio-Ag said that even putting just lime on should make a huge difference.  We won't put any more on for three years until we retest to see if it made any difference and if we need more.  I tried to specifically target the cactus and blackberries when I had any lime left over, because they like acidic soil.  According to Gary Zimmer's book Advancing Biological Farming, different minerals become more available depending on how basic or acidic the soil is.  He says that the reason blueberries need acidic soil is because manganese is so much more absorbable at a low pH, and blueberries need a lot of manganese.  Therefore, it is possible to grow blueberries in a soil with a higher pH if there is plenty of manganese.  Not really a problem here, but I thought it was interesting.  A lot of the minerals that are better absorbed in acidic conditions are the ones that there was a lot of in our soil, interestingly, like iron.

Anyway, we're also putting on the 20-5-5 fertilizer they recommended.  The label also says it has lots of trace minerals that we just don't have here, like copper sulfate, zinc and boron.  They were shocked when we told them we don't put any nitrogen or anything on at all, but I think they didn't quite realize that the grazing lines only existed at all last summer.  We do run chickens over it, but it's not making a very permanent difference, although I'm sure the oyster shell they eat does help with calcium.

Anyway, there are so many things I can hardly wait to see how they turn out.  Are the cows bred?  Will we have baby goats??  Will the Freedom Rangers be tasty?  Will the garden survive?  Will the grass improve?
It's so hard to wait for things to grow.

Why Things Aren't Getting Done As Fast As They Should Be

So, the week before last Ethan had stopped by Goodwill to get some new farm pants, when he spied a bag of tennis balls for sale and bought them.  This has led to many brutal games of Tennis Ball Tag with Mirin (instead of doing chores/building barn/etc).

To defend himself, Mirin has created Monty Python-style armor out of junk he found laying around the farm.  Here is a colander taped to a broken chicken feeder for a helmet, with a broken galvanized poultry waterer for body armor, and a trash can lid shield.  He wanted me to post a picture up.

In the background you can see his leaf-bag hut he made.  It's wooden pallets nailed together, with a piece of plywood nailed to the top, feed bags stapled on one side and bags of leaves on the others.  The front has a massive chase top Ethan brought home years ago (I'm not exactly sure why) when he worked at the woodstove.  It was made slightly wrong, and had to be disposed of, and honestly it really hasn't come in handy around here in all these years until the kids started using it as the Junk Hut's "porch."
It's actually pretty cozy inside, and the pallets make little shelves.  It's ten times nicer than any of the things we saw built at the Finca Mycol "Earth Skills" gathering we were at two years ago.  The only downside is that we will have to take it apart in a couple of weeks when we need the leaf bags for the garden.

A New Cow

This is Mairie, our new cow.  She has proven to be as un-photogenic as the rest of our animals, so she already fits in.  This is a better picture of her:

Our friend, Karen Sherwood of Ochwilla Hill Farm, whose husband Ed so recently passed away, is needing to decrease her milking herd as soon as possible.  She raises Mini-Jerseys, but has a few larger ones that are only part mini, so we offered to buy one of her larger ones.  Karen said Mairie was a good milker, but is shy and doesn't do well with strangers, and she had to be sold because now different people are going to be taking over the milking responsibilities and she isn't going to be very cooperative.  She is only about as tall as Isla.  She was one of the largest cows there, but will be the smallest in our herd.

She looked like a good cow, although she is about as thin as Matilda, making me realize again that Matilda really isn't all that thin.  I've been comparing her to the sleek fat Jerseys I saw a couple of years ago on a Pennsylvania farm tour, but they have so much better soil there, it's not really a fair comparison.

It was really interesting going to Ochwilla Hill Farm to get Mairie, because I hadn't been there since Rose was a baby, and since we had our farm.  I found myself noticing completely different things this time.  The first time, I mostly noticed how things were laid out.  This time, the first thing I noticed was the soil.  Out there near Melrose is one of those ancient now-land-locked beaches from when Florida was underwater and it's all just drifts of white sugar sand.  Their pasture was growing out of what looked like a sand box.  My hat's off to them, I don't know how they've managed their herd so nicely with that kind of sand.  On our way back, I was looking at the sand on our driveway, which always looks so white and sandy to me, and realizing that it was actually grey sand, and feeling thankful.

Another thing that was really strange was how tiny her cows looked.  When we had stayed there years ago to milk the cows for them while they were out of town, the cows seemed so big.  The smallest ones seemed small, but the larger ones looked enormous and intimidating.  This time they all looked so miniature.  The tallest ones are only as tall as Isla.  I guess our herd is gigantic, and it's changed our perspective a lot!

The first day we milked Mairie we both had to catch her and lead her into the milking stand, and she was so afraid she was trembling.  She calmed down, though, and yesterday she went in to the milking stand all by herself, with only some coaxing and alfalfa.  I think she'll be a good cow.  She seems nice enough, just perhaps a little high-strung.  We really didn't need another cow this year, but this way we'll get milk when Matilda's dried off for calving and Mairie will have another good home.

Greening

 Everything has gotten so green lately.  I've wanted to post pictures of it before, but whenever the sun was just right I was busy feeding the rabbits or something, and by the time I went to get Matilda the sun had set and it was too dark.  The black cherry trees have leafed out and are all blooming now.  The line in the foreground was where we desperately had to put the cows after Richard was gone.  They were only there for a few days, but everything green is gone.  It was only a small area, so hopefully it didn't do too much damage.

These are the higher up grazing lines that we've only just last year had the cows and goats in.  Mostly the goats, because the blackberries scratched Matilda's udder and made it uncomfortable to be milked, and the cows don't eat the browse like the goats do.  They still look much wilder than the first grazing lines.

We gave the cows an entire grazing line, which they have been very much enjoying.  Matilda has started to fatten up noticeably.  She was thin after she got scours during the winter (we're pretty sure it was a virus she'd had from before we got her.  She also had a cough and runny nose and was the only one to get sick).  I'm glad to see her get some meat on her bones.  Every time I've been to other farms and seen other Jersey cows I'd realize she really wasn't that thin, but she was so much thinner than our other cows I couldn't help but worry.  Can you even see the cows out there?  Geranium was to the left of the big pine tree, and Belle, who has been hanging out with the cows lately, is just next to the little plum tree.  The hay bale is on the far end, so they always look like little specks when I get out there.  It's been a little challenging to get Matilda down for milking every day, but once they see me Geranium and Isla come running, and that usually gets Matilda, too

New Piggies

Ethan got new pigs this weekend.  They are the ugliest pigs I've ever seen.  They look like Bavmorda's death dogs from the movie Willow.  Or like someone's cruel science experiment to combine pigs, dogs and rats.  They have long noses, small feet, narrow faces and evil-looking eyes.  They look exactly like the Florida wild pigs, which they probably are.  They have extremely long hair, about 2-3 inches long that sticks straight up along their back when they are upset.
At first I couldn't believe Ethan had bought them, they were so incredibly ugly.  Mirin, who had gone along but spent most of the time while the pigs were being rounded up playing with another kid there, started complaining about them as soon as they were out.  He was saying, "I don't want to eat those pigs, they're too ugly."
Every time I see them, they get a little less weird-looking.  I suppose they should be good, hardy pigs, coming from wild stock.  They were in stark contrast to our Glouster Old Spots, who looked like little pink sausages next to them.  They have been separated for now, so Star and Black ear are free-ranging for the first time in the paddock where the goats just have been.

It was nerve wracking to put them out, because we have so much invested in them, but they are extremely tame and well bucket-trained, and the electric was on along the hog panel fence the old pig area, so they were use to zappy fences.  We had recently gotten a new issue of the Stockman Grass Farmer that had an article on pasturing pigs.  Ethan said he couldn't even look at the article that night, he was too worried they would bust through the fence and escape.

Spring Flowers

The narcissus bulbs I planted in January are blooming.  They are so lovely.  I wish we could have gotten more.  The amaryllis were really pretty, too, while they lasted.  We enjoyed them for a few days, and then May got out.

She doesn't care about electric fences at all, not even at 8,000 volts.  So when she ran out of the tastiest morsels in the new paddock, she escaped.  And now the amaryllis look like this:

Who knew they were so edible?  I thought lilies were poisonous.  The narcissus have proved to be much less palatable, so they are still okay.

The Crazy Day

I really wish I had some pictures to put up, because yesterday was a crazy day.  But we were too busy.  It's really too bad, because it would be so exciting to post pictures of Richard the Bull kicking up dirt, shaking his horns, charging and being a total jerk while we tried unsuccessfully to guide him into the trailer.  Or a picture of Matilda with all four feet off the ground, pronging as she charged wildly down the wrong grazing line.  Yes, it was that kind of a crazy day.  

We also had to take the baby chickies out.  They were getting crowded and the deep bedding had reached the point in which the waterer didn't fit anymore.  They grew so fast!  Of course it rained yesterday, and the weather changed, but we gave them some extra shelter, so hopefully they'll be fine.

The biggest thing we had to do yesterday was get Richard home.  He was so expensive to keep, eating an entire round bale himself each week.  Otherwise, he was extremely well-behaved until it came time to be put in the trailer.  He doesn't have a halter or anything to make it easy to catch and lead him.  Eventually, after much hassle and life-endangerment, we got him in.  It was such a relief to drop him off and drive away.  We are going to stick with AI next year.  I hope I'll be better at telling when the cows are in heat by then.

The next exciting thing was moving the cows out to the grazing lines.  We didn't have enough electric wire to put up a line to guide them all in, so we figured we would just lead them with a bucket.  While we were dealing with Richard, we had put Matilda, Isla and Geranium in the milking paddock, which is really too small for them, but we thought it would be quicker than it was.  They spent the whole time goring each other with their horns and fighting over who would eat all the leftover peanut hay.  Chestnut-case got out and ran half way around the 40 acres.

Once we got Richard in the trailer, we let them out and tried to get them excited about the bucket, which they didn't care about in the least.  Instead of following the bucket, they ran bucking and kicking around and around while we tried to catch them.  Ethan caught Geranium, who was by far the best-behaved (yes, that kind of a day), and started leading her up.  Isla started to follow and got distracted.  Matilda evaded me until I finally caught up with her around the feed area, where she was trying to savage the steam rolled barley container.  I caught her halter, but had to weigh her head down with all my weight while she went charging after Geranium, trying to rip away and gore my side with her horns the whole way.  Isla came up from behind us, not wanting to be left behind, and as she passed Matilda and me (kicking up her heels as she went) Matilda switched into stampede mode and I had to let go or be dragged through cactus and small oak trees.

Ethan got Geranium in easily enough, and we both shooed Isla in after, but Matilda went charging along the wrong grazing line to the far end of the property where she was just a little speck.  I was worried she was going to step in a gopher tortise hole an break a leg or something.  She's just too big to move like that (I'll bet she's stiff and sore today, too).  She made an about face and came running back at top speed, but I headed her off and we got her in.  We almost didn't care enough about Chestnut to go catch her, but I got a stick (not to hit her with, as tempting as that might be, to lengthen my arms for shooing), and headed her off over by the calves' paddock.  She went running back, shaking her horns, towards Mirin, who had ignored my dire warnings to stay in the back of the truck, had run up to "help."  From a distance I saw him stop, turn around and run away as fast as he could.  We did get Chestnut back in eventually, and Mirin later told me, "I almost fainted when Chestnut was charging at me!  I could feel her hoof beats thundering on the ground."

On the way to take Richard back we finished reading The Hound of Ulster, in which Cuchulain and his charioteer alone are holding off Queen Maeve's army at the North Gap so they can't steal the Brown Bull of Ulster.  I would have let Connact come and take the Brown Bull if they'd wanted too, only they'd have to get him in the trailer themselves.

Spring

After the long, slow rains of Sunday and Monday all the greening cherry and plum trees were almost blindingly verdant.  I can see the summer grasses just starting to grow.  They were knocked back a bit by the frost a couple weeks ago.  And the cactus has begun to stand up, making us realize just how much there is out there, since it shows up so well against the soft brown grasses of last year.

We are excited to see how things grow this year and how the grazing lines will change things.  This is the first spring since we started grazing the lines.  We just put in an order with Midwestern Bio-Ag for minerals and  fertilizer.  Last summer we had gotten a soil test done, and we are only just now getting ready to improve the first two grazing lines.  This is something we've wanted to do since we first started.

  Hopefully it won't be too early for it to start making a difference this spring, as Ward's just ran out of hay last week, and they will be out until next season when it is cut again.  We were driving out to High Springs to the Midweast Feed store to get bales, but they told us they're a week away from being out, and the next bales are going to be $80-$90 each.  That's double what they were.  The heat and drought in Texas means that all the hay is going to them.

  We're trying to get rid of Richard the bull as fast as possible (this weekend?).  He eats so much hay, it's just incredible.  They've gone through hay twice as fast with him around.  I had thought AI was expensive, but it would be like nothing compared to keeping the bull for 6 weeks, and paying for his services.  Our neighbor has some square bales we can buy for slightly less expensive than the store, but it's still going to be more than before.  We moved the goats to the wooded lot where Fred was last year.  There is a lot of underbrush that they'll love to clear out, so they should be happy for awhile.  The calves don't eat much, it's just a matter of feeding the four girls.

Grow grass, grow!

Spring Broilers

Last year we only did two batches of broilers.  They were both called "Black Broilers" at the hatchery.  Ethan got excited about them, because we had been doing batches of the Cornish X Rocks, which we didn't like for several reasons, the chief ones being that if the food and water wasn't far enough apart they would eat themselves to death and have heart attacks and the way they would get so large and immobile that they ended up lounging on the cactus and blackberries and get really gross cactus-spine pimples that ruined the carcass.

The first batch of "Black Broilers" turned out great.  They grew well and were extremely vigorous, to the point of being hard to catch.  Unfortunately, the next batch we got (from the same hatchery--I won't say any names) were just awful.  We gave them the same food and the same care and it was about the same conditions, but it was like they had sold us a batch of reject black sex-linked laying hens.  There were maybe six roosters who got to be a decent size, but the rest stayed like laying hens.  We even grew them out for an extra month, hoping to get something out of them, but alas.  A good 1/4 of them were only the size of pigeons--literally, I have to cook three of them to feed our family.  But the most disturbing thing was that when we processed them we found one of them was deformed and had been born with no wing on one side.  It wasn't like it got ripped off or anything.  The skin was perfectly smooth, it just didn't have a breast or wing on one side.  When I wrote to the hatchery and told them about the deformed bird they sold us, they sent back this completely inadequate reply:

We appreciate the information and will keep this information for our records.  All breeds can grow differently from year to year depending on external conditions.  We appreciate your business and look forward to your future orders.  Thanks again for the information.

It's really too bad, but there will be no future orders!
We did get some really nice batches of laying birds from them.  Our Araucanas and Barred Rocks are great chickens and they came from that same hatchery.  However, the last batch of laying hens we got from there we lost a bunch when they first arrived, and they just don't seem as good as the other birds.  I wonder what changed.

Anyway, I'm really excited about this new batch of broilers.  My uncle in Maryland suggested we try the Freedom Rangers.  He had already grown several batches with great results.  They seem to be what we were hoping for with the black broilers--a good meat bird that is also suited to an outdoor, small-scale production model.

An interesting story:  when Ethan picked up the chicks at the post office, they had two batches of chicks for pick up that day, so he had to give them our address so they could tell the right one.  The other batch was from the same hatchery that had sold us the bad batch of "Black Broilers."  Ethan said our chicks from the Freedom Ranger  hatchery were peeping like mad, but the other batch sounded very weak.  The woman at the post office told him, "I don't know what's wrong with these other chicks.  They don't seem to be doing as well.  They didn't even have any air holes in the box when they got here."

So far they are growing well and thriving.

Ed Sherwood

While this is old news at this point for the community, our friend Ed Sherwood was killed suddenly in a head-on car crash 15 days ago.  This is a huge tragedy, not only for his family, but also for the community.

I started getting milk from Karen and Ed's farm eight years ago.  They were the ones who told us about ACRES and got us started on farming the way we are.  Right after we were married, we farm-sat for them for a weekend and got to milk the cows.  They have been so helpful and inspiring to us.  Generally, when I have a problem with the goats or cows I first look it up in Pat Coleby, then I'll Google it, and then I call Karen and Ed.  The only reason I don't call them first is because I don't want to bother them for something that would be easily looked up.  Just a few months ago, Ed came out and showed us how to castrate Meat-head, something that we really needed to see done to do it right.  The gift of this skill will be useful the whole time we are involved in farming.

Their farm and their cows are beautiful.  So many babies and families in the community have been nourished by their hard work.  At his service this past Saturday, I was honored with the privilege to read a poem by Wendell Berry.  It speaks to me so much of Ed and of the farm and the life that he and Karen built, that I am repeating it here, in honor of Ed Sherwood:

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into the ground and sprout

to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death

yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down

in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.

His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has he swallowed

That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth

Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water

Descending in the dark?

Geranium

Well, we tried milking Geranium.  We weaned Meat-head (her July surprise calf) when we moved all the girls in the garden to be with Dennis's bull Richard.  We were excited to milk Geranium, since she's supposed to be from a milking line of Devons, and at the ACRES conference we went to years ago, Sarah Flack had said all sorts of nice things about Devons and high butterfat.  But not so for Geranium.  At the very most she made about 1/2 gallon of milk, with hardly any cream compared to Matilda, which might have still be worth it if it weren't for her personality.
After we bought her she quickly became known as "Geranium Insanium" around here, which has morphed into "Derangium."  She's not really mean, just crazy.  For example, about a week and a half into milking her, I had just petted her neck, scratched her head,  and fed her a treat of peanut hay after milking and I opened the gate so she could go back to her friends, saying kindly, "There you go, Geranium."
And Geranium bugged her eyes out, shook her head and charged through the gate, trying to kick me on the way out.
I recently looked over her papers again and realized that she had been sold from four other farms.  I think I might know why.

And her teats were really strange, almost more like a goat udder than a cow's.  You can't tell from looking at them at all.  So I had had to milk her like I would milk a goat.  And she would kick.  There's a cow-hoof impression on the milking bucket these days.
Her milk, although it wasn't as creamy as the Jersey milk, was very sweet and tasty.  My children preferred it.  We were speculating that perhaps it was because she might be an A2 cow, and Ethan said that for Geranium, A2 means Angry squared.
Not worth the half gallon.

The Cat Warmer

The seedlings for the summer garden seem to have gotten a good start so far.  I feel much more relaxed about the whole thing this year.  I had a rough start as a beginning gardener, what with our very sandy soil, no rabbits or cows for lots of manure and limited knowledge.  I'm embarrassed that it took me two years to figure out that the seedlings need heat and light.

Teasel has made it very clear that the cold frame is actually her personal cat warmer.  And that it needs a cat-door.  She keeps getting stuck between the double layers of plastic on the sides, although maybe she's not really stuck, because she's always mad after I pull her out.  It can be hard to tell with cats.

Planning

Ethan found this little snake sunning himself on our rock pile the other day....

Not too much else going on.  Well, actually, there's a lot of planning for this year going on, just not much to photograph.  The tomatoes and eggplants have sprouted, I'm just starting the peppers now.  We got our seeds from Seed Saver's Exchange and are talking about garden plans.  We're trying to arrange to keep a bull (who knew it was so hard to find a trailer for rent?) for a short time to get the girls bred for this year.  We tried AI on Isla, with no apparent success, which was really disappointing because I had my heart set on Bruno from Holt Creek Jerseys, but we are thinking that for her first calf it will be easier to use an actual bull.  We'll try AI next year.

Also, we are wanting to do another batch of meat chickens, in case anyone would like to pre-order, and we're getting together a list of people that want to get pigs from us next spring.  Since we had the last few good freezes, the last of the grass is brown, the garden is ugly and the landscape is boring.  Last year, this was the time when a bunch of people came out to see the farm and it was so heartbreaking to have to show it to them when everything was dead.  And they were people who have beautiful gardens and keep everything beautifully landscaped.  It was like, here are are ugly molting chickens, here's the field where the garden froze back, here's the compost pile, and look!  You can really see all the blackberries and cactus now because everything else is dead....
Very discouraging.  If they could have come out just a few months later, it would have been so different!   January is always the time I look at the pastures and feel like we're doing something wrong.  But this year we are going to take this time to do some soil correcting.  Next week we're going to throw some lime over the pastures (100lbs per acre).  We are planning to wait a bit until the grass is green and growing to apply the mag-po-sul as recommended, but the lime should help a lot.  And I'm dying to see how the grass will grow this next season since we fed hay along the grazing lines last year and we're finally doing the soil correcting.

I had an idea for how to get winter forages to grow on the pastures for next year.  We have a hard time getting winter forages to grow, not having a tractor or equipment to drill winter rye.  Previously it had consisted of me buying seed, scattering it and having nothing to show for it except some very weak rye seedlings here and there that eventually died from cold or drought.  Looking at the chicken tractors, where a patch of oats grows everywhere the feed is spilled, I thought I should just seed behind the chicken coops, because maybe it wasn't fertile enough.  But no.  Finally I've learned that the seeds really need to be buried to germinate well, and the reason they grew behind the chickens was because the chickens had scratched them into the dirt.
Anyway, this year when we got the piglets we had them in the garden for a short time in a little movable pen  made from a hog panel until they outgrew it and we slaughtered Fred, freeing up the permanent fence pig paddock where they can be trained to electric wire.  Everywhere the pigs spent time there is a lush, green patch of oats and wheat growing very happily.  They had rooted it up enough and rooted seeds under so they could grow.  So, my plan is to move the pigs along the lines in small paddocks to give them the opportunity to have the same effect.  Either it will ruin the pastures or everything will end up looking like the little green patches in the garden....

We've been getting the most beautiful eggs lately.  The Araucauna layers have started laying their beautiful green eggs, and we've even gotten a few turkey eggs (the beautiful speckled one at the top).

The new California White layers are still too young to lay, but I am hoping they will be laying well for Easter, because everyone like the white eggs for dyeing.

The only other exciting things around here have been that we put a weaning ring on Butch, our steer from Matilda and put him out a few weeks ago.  He was supposed to be in his own paddock, but he quickly escaped and is in with Matilda and the rest of the herd now.  It was fine for a while, but he figured a way around the weaning ring, so we haven't had any milk.  There's just no way we can catch him right now, either, short of one of those nifty stun-rifle things they use for tagging wildlife.

The problem should be short-lived, because this weekend we are hoping to bring Dennis Stolzfoos's Devon bull from Full Circle Farm here, and we will be keeping him in our only permanent-fence paddock with Matilda, Geranium, Chestnut and Isla and a bale of hay, so Butch's milk-drinking spree is soon to be at an end.
What do most people do for weaning calves?  I'm hoping it will be easier once we have more calves and they can keep each other company, but I could be really, really wrong about that.

Some winter garden musings

Oops.
I didn't try to make this the year of the monster turnip, and yet that's what it's become.  I guess it's better than last year when everything froze before we got more than a few radishes.  They got so large so fast, and once that had begun they were too intimidating to eat.  I tried giving them away, but alas.  This one was all corky inside.

We did get a handful of luscious golden peas before the last cold snap, which killed everything--sigh.  I think I'm just a better summer gardener.  Well, maybe I shouldn't say that yet.

This is merely to remind myself how lovely the Japanese Red Mustard was before it got frozen.  It's still alive and is slowly growing back, but it looks like compost.  I guess I'm feeling pessimistic today.  The tomato seedlings for the summer garden are just starting to sprout, so I don't really have any right to complain.

New Piggies

I've been rather distracted lately with holidays and such.  Last week we butchered Fred, and he turned out to be 280 lbs hanging weight, which means he was probably around 400 or more lbs live weight.  He was huge!  We've gotten about a gallon of leaf lard already (leaf lard is the highest-quality lard from the fat inside the pig), and I have a big batch of headcheese simmering on the stove.  We have so much food right now.  I still have the blood to make blood cake with, Ethan also got a rabbit on Sunday, the Americana pullets have started laying their pretty green eggs, Matilda has been making extra milk and the children have been so excited about pulling up the massive turnips we've been getting out of the garden, so the kitchen has been exceptionally busy.

Anyway, another distraction is our newest addition.  We got two new little piglets last week!
These are pigs to keep.  They are gilts, and we are hoping for them to have lots of piglets.
They are Gloucester Old Spots, which Ethan was not really excited about when I first told him (he doesn't like "cute" animals, and it didn't help that the Craigslist ad had a link to a Countryside and Small Stock Journal aritcle--a publication he disdains).  But he cheered up about it when we met the people and found out they grow their own open-pollinated corn to feed the pigs and let them out to graze and stuff.

Another good thing about them is that they are extremely friendly already.  They are bucket-trained and like being scratched, although they still squeal frightfully if you try to pick them up.  We are still working on names.