Another One!

When we went out yesterday afternoon to do the chores, Chestnut had just had her baby!
It's another boy.  She was cleaning him off and mooing to him.

I can tell she's going to be a really good mama.  She knew just what to do.  He was already starting to hop around playfully.  The other calves were there, too, and spent a lot of time running around with their tails up and playing with the dog.  Geranium made a fuss about this at first (she hates the dog), but they all ignored her and kept playing.

Here's Geranium's calf having a nursing break.  We have decided to name her Flora after the Flora danica buttery milk culture.

Here's Matilda and baby, when he wasn't running about crazily.  I love the funny way they lift their tails when they're running and playing.

And my baby was there, too!  Lots of babies this year!

New Calves

A few days ago Matilda had her calf!  It's a boy.
I wish the electric fence hadn't been in the way for the pictures, but when I tried to go through the gate up there, Matilda started pushing it with her horns.  She was just eager to be milked, but I had the baby with me and I didn't want her to accidentally hurt us.

He kept wandering off at first, thanks to the no-good dog who leads babies astray, but he seems to be settling in.  Rosie named him Explorer, because he kept disappearing, much to the distress of everyone, and surprisingly more so for us than for his mother.  Matilda's been being milked again, and she's so happy about that.  For months now she's been resentful of Mairie going to be milked, and would run away from me and turn her nose up when I tried to scratch her neck and be friendly.

He looks just like a Devon, only he's got a larger frame like Matilda.

Just a short while later, Geranium had her calf!  It's a girl.  Everyone except Ethan has wanted to name her Buttercup, which I know is a very cliched name for a cow, but it's way better than Ethan's suggestion of "Dippy."  And she is contributing to my plan for making tons of raw cultured butter.

Geranium is such a good mother.  She had her baby in a pile of old hay, just when Ethan got there for milking.  The calf was all snuggled up and warm in the hay.  Meathead has seemed slightly jealous.  He was picking on the calf a little by nudging her aggressively with his nose, but Geranium bumped him away.  The baby didn't seem to even realize or care.

The calf was nursing while Geranium was eating hay--so cute!

Chestnut is going to calve very soon, too.  Her udder is huge.  I'm afraid it looks like Isla wasn't bred at all.  I am worried she is infertile.  We had her AI'd several times and finally got the bull, but she was due last week and her udder hasn't swelled at all.  The lady we bought Honey (Isla's mama) from had kept the heifer who was born before Isla, and she later told me that heifer was also not able to conceive.  I was hoping all the kelp and good grass would overcome any possibilities like that for Isla.  I don't know what we'll do with her if it turns out she is infertile.

Disgruntled with Countryside Organics

I am so disappointed with Countryside Organics, who we order our organic grains, kelp and other feed supplements from.  They are the closest organic feed mill to us in Florida, and they are in Virginia.

  I used to really think they were great, even though they've sold us feed crawling with weevils for exorbitant prices (like 50 cents a pound) in the past, and messed up many orders by mixing things up and giving us things we didn't want, like whole barley, instead of corn, I was glad they had organic feed, kelp, etc.  They had always seemed so nice on the phone.

A couple of weeks ago they called to let us know that back in August they "forgot" somehow to charge us $220, and so they are retroactively charging us now!
Back in August we had budgeted money for it and didn't notice at all that they had neglected $220.

So basically Countryside Organics = The Grinch Who Stole Christmas this year.

I wanted to send them a check with a note saying,

Here's the money we were going to use to buy our children presents for Christmas.  Thanks a lot for the extremely poor service you have provided.

But Ethan wisely talked me out of it.  After all, as the C.O. employee who called to badger us about their bill reminded me, we hardly order anything compared to their big distributors.  The guy was far from polite when I told him about all the other mistakes they've made for us and was really annoyed to hear any customer feedback.

We are small farmers, and they don't care.  They have no competitors in the Southeast, and they really couldn't care less.

I wish someone else would start an organic feed mill closer to Florida!
I would totally do it if I had a million dollars and a Florida registered veterinarian.

Anyway, venting aside, I've been wanting to write a post with thoughts/ideas about what we feed our animals.  Less stuff from Countryside Organics, that's for sure!!!
Next post, perhaps--

Yarn Along

I generally try to strictly talk about the farm here--really this is mostly for family and far-away friends to keep up with our doings than for anyone to read, but for so long I've wanted to join in on the Wednesday Yarn Along.  Reading and knitting is just what I love!

Somehow, something always happens--I'm busy or I forget, or I don't have a project/book at the moment, but today the baby was even napping enough for a picture!

I'm working on a Camilla Babe for baby Clo, with the recommended  Quince & co yarn in Apricot.  It's very pretty and I love the fan pattern, but for a little bit the decrease round didn't make sense.  I think I've gotten it figured out now.

I'm reading a Diana Wynn Jones book we actually got to read to the kids at the library, but I got sucked into reading it last night.  It's the 3rd book in the series, and I've never read the first two, but I'm still really enjoying it.

This was the first cake Mirin's ever made--it was a meringue made with our eggs and cream with raspberries (from the store--alas!  I wish we could grow raspberries!).

I went to the farm last Sunday with the baby in tow (her first ever trip to the farm!).  I can't say she enjoyed the car ride at all--actually she hated it, but she slept through most of me throwing rye grass and clover seeds along the first line.  (I almost finished the whole line, but have been very stiff and sore all week--we are looking to find someone with a spreader/seeder to do the rest of the seeding and fertilizing.  It's just too much this year!).

The garden has truly been transformed.  The cows did an amazing job eating and knocking just about everything down.  I was surprised to see how autumn-ish it looks out there.  The leaves are falling and changing and the autumn flowers are all blooming.  The grass has that unhealthy brown tinge it gets when it starts getting too cool for it.  A lot changed in only four weeks.

I was sitting in the hammock with the baby when Ethan went to collect Mairie for milking.  Before he left he said he had maybe 45 minutes to an hour left for milking--depending on how slowly Mairie went into the milking shed.  I noticed there were quite a lot more strands to the "brain cage" now than there used to be.
A few minutes later I heard him saying, "Come on, Mairie!" from above the orchard.  Baby Clo and I walked to the milking paddock to chase the ducks away (that hasn't changed a bit!) and to help I called her and knocked on the side of a bucket.  Thirty seconds later Mairie came charging into the milking paddock and got right in the milking shed.  When Ethan finally caught up, panting, he said very ruefully that she never, ever moves that fast usually.  He said she heard me call her and just picked up her heels and ran.  He was just a little bit insulted.  I ended up milking her that evening while Ethan held the baby.   Mairie turned out to be deathly afraid of the baby, so they wandered around until Mairie was unclipped again.  It was so nice to be milking again.  There is something so comfortingly rhythmical about milking and the way it must be done at the same time every day.  It made me feel back in sorts.

The first few days this week I felt so happy.  I think I've been really missing being out and doing the chores, without realizing it.  It's nice to stay home and rest, but there are so many things I missed--walking a long way over the ground and not asphalt, the sweet fresh smells, my animals, seeing the small changes every day in nature, the beautiful sunsets, and being able to look so far away with my eyes--in town we have so many trees in our neighborhood, I feel like my eyes haven't gotten to look far away enough.

It was nice to be back.

Peppers, persimmons etc.

I haven't written a post for so long--at first it was because there wasn't much to write about other than adventures with Mairie forgetting where the milking paddock was located.

(No baby cows yet--it turns out that I counted wrong when I was figuring out their due dates.  They are actually due in October and November--oops!)

But most recently, our new baby was born nearly four weeks ago, so we're both relieved that the cows won't need to be milked so soon.  Needless to say, I haven't been to the farm for awhile.  Ethan's been doing the chores tout seul all these weeks.  All I've gotten are rumors about how things are going.

I am going to try to go out tomorrow for the first time to seed some rye and clover along the grazing lines.  It will be nice to be out there again.

Supposedly, the cows have been in the garden and the jungle of weeds has been finally conquered.  Ethan pulled the last of the peppers out of there before they were devoured (I can't believe they ate the hot peppers, too!).

That made it possible to dig some sweet potatoes--so for the first time ever we have enjoyed home-grown sweet potatoes!

Last year the sweet potatoes had a tragic end--all 100 little slips--from a gopher tortise who would get into the garden (he had built his hole right through the fence), despite all kinds of barricades I built up for him.

We have also been enjoying persimmons from the tree in our yard.  The trick, we have found, is to pick them slightly green and ripen them in a bowl of rice.  We learned it in Diamond Village from a friend.  It keeps the animals from getting them first.  They are the astringent persimmons, so they have to be glowingly orange to be edible.

Another garden victory was that although we got only a very small amount of dent corn from the garden this year--unfortunately a lot of it was moldy from all the rain--I actually made use of it.  I shelled it and ground it in our corn mill and made some pinkish corn bread.  We still have a few more blue and purple cobs--they are all the same kind of butcher corn, but it comes in many different colors.

I hope we can grow a bunch more next year.  I still feel bad that all of last year's dent corn got devoured  by weevils before I got around to doing anything with it.

It was a pretty color when ground, too.

News

I've had an aversion lately to being on a computer, but everything is going well.  Once the summer garden becomes towering weeds, there's just not too much day to day interesting things to write about.

But the baby goats, as you can see, are growing.  We are still trying Molly's herbal wormer for them, and it seems to be working well.  I have been dreaming up a longer, more in-depth post about the goats, because there are some interesting things about them I want to discuss--but that will be another day.

The rain has been such a blessing this year.  The grass has grown amazingly, particularly where we spread the lime and fertilizer.  I can see a line where the fertilizer was spread and where it wasn't.  The grass is so much thicker and grows back so much faster and is very green.  The cows love it.  Another good thing about it--we've hardly had to buy hay this year, and that was mostly for when Ethan went out of town and I felt like it was too much to do all the chores myself and move the cows around.  We had them parked for a few days on the worst pastures with the hay, so it will help to improve them at the same time.  We are hoping to  lime and fertilize more lines next year.  This is the first year that we are grazing all the grazeable area, which we feel is a huge accomplishment.  This fall we are hoping to seed rye and clover and make use of the remaining fertilizer.  We have such an advantage in some ways here in the south for being able to grow green stuff almost all year.  I keep wanting to plant winter forages, but it's never worked.  Last year I bought an inexpensive deer seed mix and broadcasted it along the lines, but it was mostly a waste of time and money.  Hardly anything sprouted.  I think it needed to be drilled.  We are looking to get rye and clover, which has grown well in the garden when simply broadcasted.

We did have a few hoof problems with the goats this very wet summer--I don't think it dried out for at least a month and a half.  I initially freaked out when Nougat was limping but her hoof didn't appear to have hoof rot.  I called a vet, who didn't seem to know very much and who said it sounded like listeriosis.  I looked it up, and it sounded nothing like it to me.  It was going to cost about as much as buying a new goat to have the vet come out, so I asked our friend who also keeps goats and she suggested squirting peroxide on it.  She said the vets around here really don't know much about goats.  I did that, as well as soaking it with epsom salts and goldenseal, and she's been fine.  Thank goodness we didn't waste money on the vet and have some crazy, unnecessarily draconian drug treatment to deal with.

No turkeys this year, and we are going to cull the oldest layers when they stop laying in the winter.  We are cutting back on the layer chickens in hopes of raising more meat chickens.  The ducks are still menacing us.

We decided to name the other female rabbit "White Fang."  She is just as vicious as Lily, possibly more so.  It was all I could do to keep her from mauling my hands while I was trying to adjust her feeder the other day.  There was a major break-out last week in which three of our rabbits escaped.  We got one of them back--he was not fun to catch--and the other two have likely already been eaten by hawks or the dog.  It was unfortunate, as they were nearly ready to harvest.

Matilda, Geranium, Isla and Chestnut are all due to calve in September and October, so that should be exciting.  Ethan says his hands hurt just thinking of milking that many cows.  Due to very poor planning, my newest baby is due in September also--next week in fact.

Matilda has been dried off now for about a month, but she still hasn't forgiven me for milking Mairie too.  Apparently, that was a privilege she felt only she should have.  Mairie still hasn't figured out where the milking shed is.  My friend Karen, who was her previous owner, thought she was neurotic because she didn't have enough magnesium, but I think it's because she's dumb and doesn't know where she is or what to do most of the time.  She really is a nice cow, but we've really trouble with managing her because she never really knows what to do (even if it's the same, every single day), and it makes her anxious.

Another good thing about all the rain--we've had so many edible mushrooms growing.  We've also discovered Chanterelles, both the red and yellow kind, which are so good.  We're even drying some.  It's exciting to add another edible mushroom to the list of ones we know and feel comfortable with.

I thought I would just peep in for a moment--honestly nothing exciting enough to write about has been happening.  Mostly it's been raining when we are at the farm, making it difficult to bring the camera out.  The rain is wonderful, and all the pastures are growing enormously well.  The ones we fertilized this year are doing amazingly well.  You can see the line of where the fertilizer/soil correctives stopped.  We are making plans to lime and correct more of the grazing area.  We are so pleased that this is the first year we have grazed all the grassy land on the 40 acres.  We need to put in a few more semi-permanent lines to make moving the cows much, much easier, but that's it.

The rain has been making the mushrooms grow!  We are collecting Lactarius mushrooms as much as we can.  They are everywhere this year!  They are such a treat.  Mirin has gotten very interested in mushrooms again.  Last year was so dry, we hardly had any, but we've been finding so many this summer.  Check out the ginormous edible mushrooms my kids found with my dad.  We ate some last night and they were extremely tasty.

One interesting thing:  Ethan noticed that Mairie--our extremely spatially challenged cow ("Pet Rock"), was eating the Lactarius piperatus mushrooms like crazy.  We think maybe this is what's wrong with her.  She still has not figured out how to get to the milking paddock.  It drives us crazy.  So much of the fencing wire is taken up with what Ethan calls "Mairie's Brain Cage," a long, long unelectrified stretch of fence that  goes all the way from where ever she is to the milking paddock.  Even then, it's still a struggle for her.  Oh, and she's always either drooling or she has grass or hay sticking out of her mouth.  I told my friend we bought her from about Mairie's "issues," and she didn't think there was anything wrong with it.  We guess maybe all mini-Jerseys are that dumb?  Ethan's been calling her a "small yapper-type cow."

Otherwise, there's just the story about Nougat's foot, but I'll have to put that in a different post.

Lacto-fermented Sarsaparilla

My dad dug up a lot of smilax tubers in the yard recently.  He gave them to me thinking I might be able to do something with them, and so we made some sarsaparilla soda (it's not ready quite yet).

First of all, they are incredible.  I love the strange way they look once they have been washed off and trimmed.  I've tried making it before, and the first mistake I'd made was trying to grate the tubers.  Don't try it.  They are so tough, it is impossible, you can't really even cut them with an extremely sharp knife.  Perhaps with a hatchet.  At an herbal conference I heard someone say the Native Americans used to boil them until they were soft, mash them and dry them as a survival food.  So this time I snipped off the roots and put all the tubers in a pot, covered them with water and cooked them for two days.  After two days, they were still as hard as a rock.

They turned a deep red color, and the water became a reddish broth with a good flavor, so I poured it off into a 1 gallon glass jar and mixed it with:

1 cup dark raisins
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup rapadura

I ended up separating it into two 1/2 gallon jars, to give it more room to ferment (somehow, this works out, even if it doesn't make sense.)  Then I added the culture--I just use the commercially available powdered kefir culture for sodas like this--it's convenient, I can use it for something experimental without ruining it and I don't have to feed it all the time--although a home made ginger bug would be really good, too.  I use it instead of yeast in brewing to make things be lacto-fermented rather than alcoholic.  Of course, if it goes for too long it will be alcoholic, but then it has the beneficial yeast from the kefir culture.

After mixing in the kefir powder, I leave it on the counter for a few days, to let it ferment.  This was very sweet, and it's warm, so it will probably only need maybe 3-4 days to ferment.  We tasted it before I added the culture, and it actually did taste surprisingly like sarsaparilla soda (uncarbonated, of course).

The Muscovy Menace

We unleashed the Muscovy ducks again.

We had to catch them last year as they were destroying the garden (who knew ducks liked to eat tomato plants?) and swimming/pooping in the water troughs.  Two of the ducks, Aunty Mabel and the Crazy Duck, gave us quite a hard time, although the entire process was an epic effort, known to us as "The Last of the Muscovies."

They've been being tractored around the pastures in the movable coops like the chickens ever since, but it was getting really old to be moving five chicken coops every day.  We did get some eggs from them when they were in the coop, but it wasn't enough to really be worth the extra time, effort and food (when they are out we don't feed them at all, and they actually begin to scorn the ration we offer.  We tried to catch them that way at first and they just laughed at us).

Remembering what a total pain they were the first time, I suggested we buy them their own water trough to foul with dirt, duck droppings, grease and feathers, and park it way away from everything else.  Ethan put in a water line, just for them, and we filled up the new "duck trough" with high hopes and let them out.

After a few days they were back to wandering around the barn and milking area--and even roosting on the milking shed roof.  The duck trough is lonely, empty and forgotten in a far corner of the farm.  They have been menacing us ever since.

There are only six of them--including the odd White Peking duck, who is the last of that long-ago batch of ducklings we had bought, only to discover how incredibly frustrating it is to pluck a duck (it was like eating a down comforter).  His nickname has become "The Rapist," for reasons which would be apparent if you watched him interact with the other ducks for five minutes.  It's just awful to watch.  I squirt him with the hose when ever I get the chance.  I keep hoping he'll get eaten by something, but no.  The chickens only last a week, maximum, but this fat, flightless duck seems invincible.  He even roosts on the ground.  Maybe it's the down.

The first week they were out, I was milking Mairie, who is the most neurotic animal I've ever had to deal with, other than the rabbit Lily, who is related to the Monty Python attack rabbit, when this awful sound of beating wings and claws scrabbling on a metal roof made both of us jump.  I looked around and saw Aunty Mabel's face peeking out at me along the eves of the milking shed.  She gave a saucy "peep" and scrabbled into the middle of the roof.  Then we had to endure the rest of the flock (minus Big Whitey) flying up and crash-landing the same way.  I don't think Mairie has recovered from the shock yet.  I certainly haven't.


While I was doing the chores in the rain last week, there was a brief spell of clear weather after I had moved the chickens, who are at the very furthest line away right now.  I quickly drove back across the farm to milk the goats before it started to rain again, and met the stupid ducks in the part of the road along the power line, sandwiched between two fences so I couldn't go around.  They just sat in the middle of the road and stared until I braked just before running them over, at which point they began very slowly walking down the road.  I crept along behind them at 1/16th MPH.  Honking had absolutely no effect, other than to terrorize Mairie, who was next to the milking paddock, and so it went for the remaining 50 feet of the road.  It was raining again when I finally got out of car.

They also hang out in the barn and steal food from the buckets, poop on the paths, attack the milking area, try to drink the solar panels and generally get in the way.  At least they are roosting on the mulch pile now, and I have managed to keep them out of the water troughs by diligently filling up a washtub for them every day.  The dog helps with this, too.

I wish they were more edible.

Garden Update

This wild mess is actually the garden.  The four (or was it five?) days of rain last week really made everything grow.  It's extremely intimidating to try fighting your way through to get to the vegetables.  (I think next year we are going to try some different weed-control--cardboard?  Mowing?).  It's a jungle.

And the bugs--there are soooo many bugs!  There are swarms--buzzing around, eating the weeds, eating the garden plants, eating each other.  Just walking through is like something out of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.  I feel like I need an insect whistle and a glider to survive (and also a machete).

However, we are still pulling lots of vegetables out.  Not summer squash or beans this year, unfortunately, but lots of other things.  The rain turned the remaining melons to mush.  I know I could have gone in and harvested them during the rain, but since I was doing all the chores myself those days, no.  It was enough to be rained on while moving chicken coops and milking cows and goats.  There were two left, and there are still healthy-looking melon vines in there, so there's a possibility of more.  The cucumbers look like they're getting a second wind, too.

We didn't get many pumpkins this year, but we did get a few.  There were two Potimarron pumpkins, a Sibley (the long blue one), a Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin, and a Strawberry Crown--and not pictured there were also several Thelma Sander's Sweet Potato pumpkins, an Australian Butter pumpkin and an Amish Pie pumpkin.  I like growing so many different kinds, because I get a good perspective on how well they do during certain conditions.  For example, the Sibley was nice-tasting, but it was very susceptible to insect damage.  Winter Luxury Pie is nice, but it has never really thrived here, not last year or this crazy year.  However, the Potimarrons were good pumpkins and produced well, even with all the neglect.  I will definitely grow them next year.
An yes, I admit that the pumpkins were neglected this year.  I vow to do better next summer.  There is also a strange volunteer white pumpkin, that looks like a white hubbard squash growing out of a compost pile from the chickie brooder.  It's not in the garden, so it hasn't been watered or cared for at all this year, and actually has been stepped on quite a bit by cows because it's growing in the path to the milking shed, and yet it has several nice large pumpkins on it--more than any of the vines in the garden!
I don't like to think about what that says about my gardening skills, but I'm trying to think of how we could replicate that for next year's garden.  More batches of meat chickens?  

The okra has really started to produce well.  It went crazy during the storm and there was a lot of very long, woody okra I cut and tossed out, but still plenty of tender pods, too.

We lost a lot of the large tomatoes in the rain, and even some peppers, but the cherry tomatoes seemed to thrive.  They are all ripening up now, and we still got a lot of peppers.  I really like the Czechoslovakian Black peppers.  They are hot peppers, and have all the flavor of hot peppers, but they become mild enough when cooked to be able to include them in meals that my children will eat.

The cow peas are also ready!  I got twice as many as this along the second row.  We got out our new pea sheller--which did require some searching on Youtube for someone who knew how to make it functional (you have to hook a drill up to the handle--apparently it needs a lot of torque), and we did get enough for a pot of peas with fresh side cooked up for lunch.

As I was saying to Ethan the other day, it might look like an inhospitable jungle, but at least we're still getting a significant amount of food out of it.  Not too bad for swarms of insects, lots of rain and over 90 degree weather.

Washed Pigs

The rain washed most of the usual mud off the piggies, so I took the opportunity to take a few pictures of them.  (We were soooo happy about the nice long rain we got last week, although at the end there it was getting a little boring).

Star and Black-ear have really grown tremendously.  I hadn't seen them in a little while, because they've been moved down the wooded pig line to a fresh paddock which is away from the main area.  Ethan's been feeding them, as it requires carrying a heavy bucket of soaked oats, barley, corn, peas and sour milk all the way up there.

Ethan was out of town last week, and I was feeding them, and as they made a very punctual appearance when they saw the bucket, and I got a few pictures.  They are huge.  It's hard to believe the tiny piglets we brought back last winter are the same big pigs.

The ugly piggies are looking better, too.  This has been a rough year for these pigs.  They were ugly, small and runty when we first got them, and after a few days we lost two of them (the first time we have ever lost a pig, other than from having them escape), from what we discovered was the porcine coricovirus, which the guy we bought them from called "travelling sickness."   It's something nearly all pigs have and isn't a problem unless they are stressed for some reason, like being moved to a new home.  About a week after all that, I realized when they came over to eat that they were crawling with lice, seemingly overnight.  Really, it's been kind of a nightmare with these pigs--we have never had problems with pigs before in the four years we've raised them.

We got some diatomacious earth as soon as possible, which I sprinkled generously around their pen and all over them daily for a couple of weeks.  When the lice seemed to have disappeared, we let them out into the larger paddock along the wooded pig-grazing line, and I haven't seen a single louse on them since.

Although it's been quite the rehabilitative struggle this year, they have filled out a lot since they've been here.  They look so much huskier and healthier than they did when they got here.  They still aren't very pretty, but at least they are looking sleeker and fatter.  The little ones were so skinny and runty when we first got them.  They love being in the big wooded paddock.  Like the pink piggies, we hardly see them except for when they expect their dinner.  Otherwise they are cooling off in their wallow or foraging.


The bad news is that one of the pigs--the brown one in the background--appears to be pregnant.  We only just noticed this last week.

Summer Sloth

Just like last year, as soon as it's gotten really hot and humid, lethargy sets in.  I keep thinking about doing a new post, but it's so hard to get anything done when it's 92 degrees out.  I've gone into summer hibernation.  I'll admit I was kind of driven to even write this.  Mirin is gone all weekend at the Firefly Gathering, learning to make weapons he's really not old enough to be in possession of (it was the grandparents' idea).  Rose was a little too young to go, so while Mirin is having the time of his life, Rose and I are completely sick of each other's company.  I am so thankful I have two children in normal circumstances.  I can now understand/sympathize with the single-child families who send their children to childcare programs as soon as they are walking and talking, even if they don't need childcare.  It really is hard to talk to/entertain someone every waking minute of their lives.  A few minutes on the computer is as much of a break as I could hope for.





Of course things have been happening, completely unrecorded, however.  The baby goats are getting big and fat.  They look about twice as tall as they were when they were born.  May's baby is the fattest.  They run around while I do the milking and jump on top of the old decrepit wagon.  Ethan says they look like they have Pogo sticks attached to their feet.  To me, they look like a cyclone of legs and ears.  

The wagon is the same one I used to lug three buckets of feed and water up to the chickens and goats, back when Rose was a baby strapped to my back and I had to move the 400-lb hell-on-little-wheels coop over the grass and cactus all by myself each day.  I had to remove the wheels before it was moved, or the chickens would get out and be eaten over night, and I carried a crow bar around to hoist the edges up until I was strong enough to lift it with my hands.  If it didn't have wheels on it, it couldn't be moved without a large combustion engine.  Somewhere, there's a crow bar out in the pastures still.  Ethan rarely went out, so it was mostly me and the two little kids sweating among the blackberry thorns and the cactus, pulling the wagon with flat tires (Ethan mistakenly bought the one with inflatable tires).  I'm glad the wagon has a new use now.

 We've been getting the nicest melons lately.  Mirin is the official melon-picker, because he's much better than I am at telling if they are ripe or not.  We even got a Delice de la Table melon this year, although I think my favorites were the Eden's Gem, Charantais and Sakata's Sweet.  We didn't get much out of the Golden Jenny melons, which have been so reliable in past years, but I think that had more to do with a bad location than the melons.

We also got a ton of tomatillos this year, and a few lemon squash.  I did something wrong with the summer squash, and it was all I could do to keep them from curling up and dying before we got a few squash out of them.  I think squash skips years.  We've only had a really good summer squash year every other year.  They have different plagues that come through and kill them.  One year it was powdery mildew, after two weeks of solid rain.  Then we had a good year.  Then it was stem borers and Ethan's incompetence.  I was in California that spring, and he planted them in a place where even the bahia grass struggles to survive.  Last year was a good squash year, and low and behold, this year the dreaded squash bug has reared it's ugly head and dispatched our dreams of buttery squash, squash cooked in milk and baked zucchini.  But at least we've gotten a bunch of sweet and hot peppers, for the first time, so it kind of makes up for it.

Baby Goat Bliss

Here is the picture of May's baby, June Bug, as promised.  May is the goat who just will not stay in a fence. She is almost always out (and eating things like my flowers and banana trees).  We chase her back in whenever we see her out, but she's never in for longer than five minutes.  So of course she wandered way off to have her baby.  We found her and June Bug hiding in an oak thicket, right in the middle of the paddock the cows were supposed to be moved to that day, so we had to move them, which proved to be traumatic on all counts.
May has mostly been staying inside the fence now, and she's actually a much better mother than Nougat.  Maybe this has something to do with only having one kid, but she's always by her baby, smelling her and cleaning her off.  June Bug proved to be very sharp and learned to nurse faster than either of Nougat's babies.  May watches her like a hawk, and when I was sitting with her after the birth to help the baby get it's share of colostrum as soon as possible, she was smelling the breeze and listening to any little sound.  She reminded me of a deer.
Nougat, on the other hand....
Had her babies on an enormous cactus.  I still have cactus spines all over from trying to help them out of it.  I never see her really wash her babies like May does, and the first day I came out she left them very quickly to see if I had a treat for her.  The babies were crying, and one ran over and she kicked it out of the way.  She's usually laying about 20 feet away from them when we get there.  She responds to them when they cry and likes to know where they are, but she's not really careful with them.
It's so interesting watching the animals parenting.  They never, ever act aggressively towards their babies, as humans do with corporal punishment.  And they respond to their crying--something that is unusual in modern human parenting.
If you think of it in terms of people, Nougat is the closest to what is fashionable in modern parenting--the separation, limits, boundaries, sleeping away from your babies.  May is more of an attachment parent, I suppose.  I hope June Bug doesn't end up hopelessly spoiled and over-attached.  The reality is, though, that Nature doesn't bother with philosophical reasoning.  It's obvious that in the wild, May's baby would have a significantly higher chance of survival.

 PS:  I saw our mail lady again (it's been someone else delivering the mail lately), and she told me that the buck we had them all bred to just died a few days ago.  She said he just got thinner and thinner and finally got really sick and died.  She tried wormers and antibiotics, but nothing helped.  It sounded just like what happened to Ellie!  I really wonder if that was what she died from.  Our other goats seem completely fine and healthy, and the babies are doing great, thankfully.

May also kidded!  She only had one kid, and it has white ears too, but the white spot on her head is smaller, only a star.  I keep forgetting to take my camera out to take pictures, so I can't show you (maybe tomorrow), but I do have a few photos of the fruits of the garden that I can go on and on about (I love talking about my garden).  We have gotten some melons already!  I really like the gold baby melons.  They are small but very sweet.  We got our first Eden's Gem melon and I think a Charantais.

The tomatillos are still doing well, and we actually got some peppers this year.  The first ones were the Czec black hot peppers, but they were fairly mild.  And it was a relief to get some cucumbers and summer squash.  I was afraid we wouldn't get anything this year.

Strangely, this year we have had less of a succession of harvests.  Last year there was a definite seasonal timing for all of the different vegetables, with the squash and cucumbers being first, then the beans, then tomatoes, then melons and pumpkins, and lastly the okra, a few peppers (it was a bad year) and the eggplant.  This year all at once everything's ready--except the beans, which were a failure for some reason.  I think it's because it has been so hot this year.  We had an exceptionally warm spring.

The weeds are also noticing this.  It's really gotten out of hand.  I can hardly see the garden for the weeds.  Some of the weeds are pretty, like the Spanish needle and the re-seeded zinnias, cosmos and sunflowers, but others are just weedy like the awful nutsedge and sandspurs that came it with a bale of old hay I had used as mulch the first year.  They are mostly growing between the rows, but some things--not to mention the Mayo Indian and Golden Amaranths I planted last year--have been serious pests.  Who would have known that the two tiny packages of amaranth seeds would lead to such an invasion?

The sunflowers, as lovely as they are, are also causing problems.  They are blocking the sprinklers and shading out the melons.  They are so bright and pretty, I haven't had the heart or the energy to cut them down.  It looks like it's going to be a serious job, anyway, like I might have to borrow Ethan's ax.  They are massive.  There is one in the back of the garden whose stem appears to be four inches at chest height.  They are no longer sunflowers--they are sun trees.

New Goats

We did lose Ellie after all.  She was so weak after having the babies, I think it was just too much for her, and she was having a lot of trouble breathing.  We are still thinking it over and trying to figure out what happened.  I think she had pneumonia.  Was this the same coughing illness she had in January and didn't recover from?  The immune system is naturally suppressed towards the end of pregnancy--was that what made her so ill again?  We're not sure.  The babies were born too early, certainly.  It has been very sad.  She was our first goat, first farm animal really, other than chickens, and she was such a dear.

Nougat had twin girls the day before yesterday.  I've been so anxious about them, but they all three seem healthy.  These are Nougat's first babies, but she's been doing really well with them and has accepted them both.  After the whole thing with Chocolate and May, I was worried, especially as when I got there one was already standing and the other was laying down still, and Nougat was very quick to desert them to see if I had a treat for her.

But they both seem to be fine--so far.  I feel like I should add that after how things have been turning out.  They are so cute.  They look a lot like the buck.  They have slightly blue eyes, which Ethan wasn't happy about.  He looks down on people who keep blue-eyed goats, but I pointed out that we were keeping them for their milking abilities, not for how cute they are.
I love that kids are so friendly.  Calves are always so stand-offish until they get older.  Soon after I got there and helped them get their colostrum they were climbing in my lap.

May is also due soon.  Her udder gets larger every day.  This will be her first birth/lactation, too, so I hope everything goes as well with her.  This is the first year we are milking animals who have never been milked before.  Sometimes it all seems like too much--worrying about the babies, loosing dear old Ellie and all the kicking at the milking stand.  But there is also so much to be thankful for.  It's so nice to have baby goats again.  They are already starting to be playful and shake their ears around.  And soon there will be fresh chevre.

Ellie update

Ellie had two stillborn babies this morning.  They were both very small and underdeveloped, so I think they had died awhile ago, although they should have been due about now.  I am wondering if this contributed to her weakness--I know that it can make people ill.  She is very tired but still alive at least.  If I had known she would get so sick, I would never have brought her to the buck.  If she recovers, we won't have her bred again.  She is getting a little old, anyway, for having babies.  Ethan is out there now, cleaning her up and making her comfortable again with some fresh hay and water and green stuff, and I'm going to bring her out some more mullein, vitamin C and nettles later.  I hope that this will give her a chance to fully recover now.

We are very thankful for the rain we are getting right now.  Matlida was a total monster yesterday.  I think she's mad because she thought she was the only one getting milked, and now she's realizing that Mairie gets milked, too.  She was so horrible yesterday, breaking the fences, running around so we couldn't catch her, and periodically goring Mairie and the other cows and having them run through the fence, too.  All I could think about was beef.  I've never seen her act like that before--or any of our other cows be so incredibly malevolent, not even Geranium or Chestnut, who have the excuse of being normally crazy.

This morning when Ethan went to check on Ellie, he saw funny footprints in the sand on the driveway, and thought a bunch of people had ridden horses down it.  Then he saw the cows.  They are all out, they ate all the barley and peanut hay, which we can ill afford at the moment, and I'm sure it's all Matilda's fault.  When we come out later, she's getting stuck in the permanent paddock with a bale of hay until her behavior improves.

Anyway, hopefully Ellie will rest today and be better soon.

Here was Ellie, back when she had Chocolate and May.  She was leaning though the fence to eat Honey's milking ration and the babies were taking the opportunity to nurse.

Freedom Rangers

Our first batch of Freedom Rangers is nearly ready to harvest!
I have mentioned them before, but these were bred in France to meet the high standards of the Label Rouge Free Range program.  They are a slower-growing breed that is better suited to free-ranging and natural rearing systems.  We've noticed that from the very beginning these birds are much more healthy and vigorous compared to the batches of fast-growing Cornish cross chickens we have raised.

As you can see, our chickens are kept safe from predators (and the darn dog) in the Joel Salatin-style movable shelters.  They are raised on pasture and are moved to fresh grass daily.  We mix our own feed from barley, oats, organic corn and organic field peas (no genetically modified grains or soy), and we add fish meal, flax seed, Thorvin kelp, Fertrell's poultry mineral mix, Redmond salt and the high-mineral Desert Dynamin clay from Agri-dynamics.  The feed is soaked with our high-mineral well water and either raw apple cider vinegar or skimmed soured raw milk from our cows for 24 hours.

The price for these chickens is $5 per pound (this price is based on the feed costs, which are enormous.  We don't even factor in the soured milk, as that is a by-product of our cream and butter consumption.  By mixing our own feed we are able to keep the costs at a minimum and maximize the available nutrition).  It's hard to look at a bird on the hoof and estimate how much it will weigh (thus the 40-lb turkey situation we had one year), but they are supposed to grow to be about 3-5lbs.  Some are larger and some are smaller, so if anyone wanted a smaller bird to make it more affordable, we can arrange for that.

If anyone is interested in trying one of our chickens, please write me an email before next weekend!

Garden Update

It's been awhile since I've posted anything.  It's the usual excuses.  I thought I would finally write about the garden again, but gardens grow fast, and it has already grown in the two weeks since these pictures were taken.  We finally put the corn in, and it is several inches high by now.  That's in the middle bed, right above the big green patch.  The green patch will be sweet corn by and by.  We are trying more organized succession planting with the corn this year.

Most of the tomato plants are thriving.  At the moment they have green tomatoes on them.  Tomatoes always take so long being green.

The peppers are doing wonderfully this year, and are blooming and setting fruit.  The hot peppers seem to be growing faster than the sweet peppers.

Most of the eggplants survived, and the Turkish Orange eggplant is already blooming.  I was surprised--last year the eggplants only started producing in late July.

The tomatillos and ground cherries have set lots of fruit, it's only a matter of waiting for it to be ripe.  My kids couldn't stand it and picked a few bitterish under-ripe ones the other day, but they still enjoyed eating them, even though they didn't taste as good as they would have.  I love that about gardens.  Even if it isn't the best, just having grown it and having it right there makes you appreciate it more.

This year, the weather turned very warm very quickly, and so we are struggling much more with the weeds than in previous years.  Inadvertently, this year's garden has become a blend of last year's organized row garden and the previous year's wild garden.  None of the sunflowers I had planted this year are blooming yet, but last year's have re-seeded.  It's really interesting to see how they cross-pollinated, or didn't.  We left most of the sunflowers when we tilled and planted, so they are big and blooming and making the garden very colorful.  One thing I've noticed about sunflowers (and is the main reason I plant them) is that there is something extremely attractive about them to all sorts of insects.  Just one sunflower plant has an ecosystem of different interacting insects on it.  I've seen wasps, assassin bugs, lady bugs, aphids and the sap-sucking true bugs and ants tending the aphids and all sorts of different kinds of bees.
Not only do they attract the beneficial pollinators and predators, they seem to keep the true bugs that in past years would attack my tomatoes and make nasty black dents in them from wanting to go anywhere else.
Other plants that have re-seeded are the zinnias, the cosmos and the Spanish needle.  The Spanish needle (Bidens alba) is very weedy, but in the richer garden soil it does become highly ornamental, and there's not a second of the day that they aren't just buzzing with an incredible diversity of bees and butterflies.

The bad news is that three weeks ago when there was a minor cold snap, the cucumbers, European melons, squash and pumpkins got frosted.  We were completely surprised--it being probably the only place in the county that got frost damage that night (supposedly it only got to 40F).  Strangely, the sweet potatoes, okra, peppers, eggplant, watermelon and cow peas were all fine.  The melons and pumpkins have recovered, but the cucumbers and summer squash have been significantly delayed.  By my April birthday last year we had tons of summer squash and cucumbers, but this year they have only just started making some female flowers at last.  They are usually the first vegetables we get, so we are still buying vegetables from the store now, and my goodness they are expensive.  It's just amazing how much they mark up things like organic zucchini.  Usually we are desperately trying to give zucchini away.
Anyway, the moral, I think, is that every year is different.  Just when you think you've finally figured something out, the Weather Gods thumb their noses at you.

The Peach

The peach trees have had a hard year this year.  It frosted just as they were opening their flowers.  However, we got one peach.  And this was it.  It wasn't very pretty.

Everyone got very excited, but when we opened it up it was all rotten inside (no surprise--look at all the bug holes).  So it was a disappointment, but perhaps they will make up for it next year.