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.

Bunnies

The baby bunnies are out and about!  (the funky things in the foreground are a nibbled oak twig and a dismantled salt wheel)

They are just about as cute as they will ever be.  They were getting crowded, so I took out their nest box.

Now instead of piling up in the nest box when I arrive to feed them, they all pile up in a corner--which doesn't look quite as comfortable.  (The one in the far corner had his nose stuck through the wire).

They are so unbelievably adorable it's all I can do to keep from neglecting my other chores to catch and snuggle them everyday (which they hate, unfortunately).  Luckily, they all look exactly the same and they are not as cute when they get older.

Horses and Chariots

For some reason Mirin has been completely taken with the idea of building a chariot.  He found the modified bike wheels from the old horrible "Chickshaw" coop that has fallen into disuse and disrepair, and has been trying out different ways of attaching them to something he can ride on.  Because Rosie is the little sister, she is always the "horse."
Instead of finishing the roof of the barn, Ethan decided to help them out the other day, and came up with this extremely cumbersome version of the farm "chariot" with pieces from his junk pile.

Rosie was hitched up and it was tried out.

Mairie was watching:

"Dear God, what kind of a farm was I sold to?  What is wrong with these people??"

Oops!
Although it doesn't look like it in the pictures, the chariot game is primarily for the amusement of the "Horse."

This Moment--Evidence

{this moment} - A Friday ritual.  A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week.
--Amanda Soule

Joining the Herds

Last week when we arrived we were greeted by Matilda, Isla, Geranium and Chestnut loafing around the feed bins and looking extremely pleased with themselves.  Isla made sure her lovely nose got in the picture.  We quickly shooed them in the pen with Mairie, which is next to the milking paddock where milking rations get served and therefore is the most exciting place to be, just to get them behind a fence again while we assessed the damage.

 The garden gate was open, although most things looked untouched at the time, I later discovered quite a few little plants that were trampled to death by suspiciously cow-shaped feet.  The oats and barley left to soak with cider vinegar had been broken into and were gone, they had devoured the small bit of rolled barley left and enormous cow pies littered the area we usually hang out around.

The result was that we introduced Mairie to the rest of the herd earlier than we had thought we would, since we had gotten there later than usual and didn't have time to walk out the whole fence line to find where they had escaped (we later found that it was because when Ethan moved the hay ring the night before he had left it tilted up and someone--probably Matilda--had rolled it over the strand of fencing and they all just stepped over it to get out).

It was nice, because Meathead got to be reunited with Geranium again now that he's weaned, but Mairie was not really pleased to be one of the smallest cows now (she was one of the largest at her previous home).  Matilda and Geranium wasted no time in establishing their superiority, and even Isla was pushing her around.  She didn't even try to vie for dominance with Chestnut, and I can't really blame her.

They only were together one day until we set up a new line for them and put them all out.  We even had enough fencing wire and posts to set up a non-electrified guide lane so we just walked them all up and avoided any more scenes like when we brought Richard back.  Unfortunately Mairie didn't really get the moving concept and stayed in the milking paddock with the brain trust--Butch and Meathead.
(Meathead still fails to follow the herd at all times.  I'm afraid he might be retarded.  Geranium had a really stressful pregnancy with him, being moved to three different farms, and it seems to have taken a toll).

We moved the boys up the next day, and they were shockingly well behaved.  Mairie wasn't trained to electric fencing at her previous farm, and although we had a hot line on the top of the paddock, she's not tall enough to notice it, so she just scoffed at the electric wire and walked through it.  We quickly caught her again and put her back in the old eaten-down paddock with some hay.  Then we moved Butch and Meathead up, who never looked back.  She has been regretting it ever since, so we set up some fencing in her paddock so we can move her out soon.  Every day when we get there she stands and stares at us reproachfully.

Rabbit With 40 Cloves of Garlic

Yesterday Ethan and Mr. Mcgregor (the .22) got a wild rabbit that has been making eyes at the garden.  My favorite thing to do with garden-fed rabbit is "rabbit with forty cloves of garlic" from Shannon Hayes' book The Grassfed Gourmet.
We have beans, cow peas and corn to plant this week, as well as some catch-up cucumbers, melons and pumpkins that were slower to sprout, so hopefully by the end of the week I can show off both pictures of our lovely, fully planted and non-weedy garden that is green and thriving (not yet a reality), and a lovely rabbit dish!

The Raw Milk Debate

I watched the raw milk Harvard debate yesterday.  It was shocking how unpleasantly rude, yet how unsubstantial Mr. Fred Pritzker's presentation was.  The raw milk proponents did a good job and actually had data and studies that could be cross-referenced as far as the health benefits of raw milk vs. pasteurized milk, but the response was the typical "Raw milk will kill you and everything you love because the government says so," line.
Yesterday, while I was milking Matilda, I was thinking about the debate.  I haven't been sick from food poisoning in 8 years.  I've been drinking raw milk for nearly 8 years now.  The last time I got food poisoning was months before I ever had a glass of raw milk in my life.  I had gone to a restaurant and eaten a sandwich and some potato salad, and my goodness I was sick!  But I have never, ever been sick from raw milk.  Kind of interesting, considering how "dangerous" raw milk is supposed to be.  My whole family has been drinking raw milk for years--my mother, my brother, my father, my husband and my children--and none of us has ever been sick from it.
 The opposition's main debate tactic was trying to cultivate fear.  It's too bad that infectious diseases are so easy to scare people with.  I personally find it really chilling to learn how many permanent injuries and deaths are caused by vaccines or by properly prescribed medicine, although no one ever mentions that much--for obvious reasons. One great moment is at the end of the debate when the opposition is asked to comment on the data presented by the raw milk people, and they just kind of stutter and don't know what to say.  One of the comments posted made a really good point:

When will the public health agents stop saying that drinking raw milk is like playing "Russian Roulette?"  The odds of dying from Russian Roulette is 1 in 6.  That means 1.5 million Americans would by dying each year from raw milk (based on 1/6 of 9 million raw milk drinkers nationwide).  How do these people even get through grade school?"

The guinea pigs had babies today!

Roses

My roses are blooming for the first time.  This is a big deal because every year at the Dudley Farm cane boil I buy a couple of heirloom roses.  Since we fenced the garden I've had this vision of coral honeysuckle climbing on the fence with fig trees, herbs, roses, bulbs and various butterfly-attracting flowering plants planted in front.  Sadly, Ethan and his friend who camped out at the farm for a few months while in between jobs have mocked my little garden beds terribly.  It didn't help that Ethan trenched in front of it with a trencher a couple years ago, before we discovered above-ground piping, and the goats have been just terrible for it.

But if I have learned anything with farming, it is persistence.  And not being afraid to look at what you've done, admit mistakes and do something different next time.  I only have four roses right now, although many have been planted.  I think May is responsible for eating at least three to death, and Nougat gorged herself on at least two.  They have tons of blackberries and other thorny browse to eat, but for some reason they prefer the roses.  Some day, when we move Mirin's refugee shelter out from in front, I'll take a picture of the front of the garden, because it is almost what I have always wanted it to look like.  The coral honeysuckle was spared from the goats this spring, and has started to really climb and bloom a lot.  The figs are small, but the bulbs got planted, there is a very healthy sage bush that has lived there since we began the garden, the aloe is still there and the pentas and verbena are blooming.  Oh yes, and the roses.

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.