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.  

Thanksgiving

There's so much to be thankful for...
Happy Thanksgiving!

Maggot Morning

I don't have any pictures to share for this post, and trust me, that's a good thing.

So, if you recall, a few posts ago I was pickling turnip greens for the animals in my grandfather's ancient ceramic crock.  It was the first time I've used it, and I definitely did something wrong (very wrong).

Several days ago we woke up and the house smelled a little funky.  I thought it was maybe the compost needed taken out.  My friend called and wanted to visit in half an hour, so I was desperately trying to cook breakfast, feed and water guinea pigs, over-fed cat and the new baby chicks; clean my neglected house and deal with the laundry crisis when I noticed it looked like we had spilled rice on the floor.

Except we've been out of rice, and it  was moving.

Yes, it was Maggot Morning.

And not only that but our recent ants-inside-the-house problem had escalated to the point that the ants were in the process of devouring the maggots as they crawled in unison towards the dining room window.  I'm still not sure if this was the best part about the situation or the worst part.  On one hand, our house had become a thriving ecosystem with a food web and anything that was helping to get rid of the maggots was great, but on the other hand, we were just flooded with unwelcome invertebrates.

I am an entomologist's daughter, but this was too much.

While sweeping up maggots and crying (not too much, really), I noticed more and more were coming out of the crock.  Darn it!  I covered the thing with a towel and secured it down to keep this from happening!  I lifted the towel and discovered something worse than maggots.
Anyway, long gross story.  The crock is clean.  The maggots AND ants are gone, the pickling experiment has been buried.  I think I needed a better weight, and maybe finer grained salt.
AND...my friend called while I was scrubbing the floor to say she wouldn't come after all.
Whew!!

The Littlest Milkmaid

Rose always likes to help me with the milking.  Sometimes she actually helps to milk, but usually she stands by my side and rubs Matilda's round belly, and laughs when we get whacked by Matilda's tail.

She always insists that I save a little for her in the milking pail to drink warm and fresh and very sweet.

Fresh milk is the best!

The big news around here is that we now have guinea pigs.  We didn't want guinea pigs.  In fact the last thing we need is another animal, but alas.

Ages ago, our friend and neighbor Ron got a breeding pair of guinea pigs, despite his wife's misgivings about the whole thing.  He wanted them to trim the grass in the back yard.  A few months later and he now has more than 30 guinea pigs, most of them expecting, and no more grass.  He's been trying to give some to us for ages, and I've always deflected it with, "Oh, I'll have to talk to Ethan about it."

Last week he showed up with two guinea pigs.  Mirin was so excited.  I kept saying, "Well, I just hope they'll survive," hoping that would deter him, but Gail, his wife, countered that by saying, "Oh no, don't worry, these are 100% guaranteed.  If any die we will replace them indefinitely."
That gives you an idea of the guinea pig problem down the street.

They are cute.  Even Ethan, who was not really happy to see the guinea pigs at first, was carrying them around in his shirt pocket and trying out names for them.
As far as we can tell, they're both girls, I just hope we're right about that.  Otherwise they might start giving the neighborhood squirrels and rats some competition.

First Turnips

 The turnips I had planted back in September are now ready to pull.  This year I read about planting turnips and discovered they need a shocking amount of space between the plants, like 6-12."
All this time I had thought my turnips were pathetically tiny because the soil was so poor, but it was probably because I just planted them in a big blob and didn't bother to thin them.  I was very surprised to find big turnips in my garden this year.

 The Scarlet Ohno Revival turnips I had gotten seeds for from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange were pink inside.  They remind me of choggia beets.

Since we have quite so many greens right now, I decided to ferment the turnip greens for the animals.  I got out this amazing crock I inherited from my grandfather, who used it to make kraut.  It's probably almost a hundred years old, and I've never used it before.  It sat in our garage with tools in it for more than a decade. I had no idea what it was, but now I shudder to think that I might of cracked it in my careless ignorance.  Rose was happy to help salt and mash the greens to make a brine.  I used the sea 90 livestock salt.

Mirin even started to help, and things were getting pretty crowded at the end.

I put a plate on top to weigh the greens down.  We'll see how it turns out!!

The Spirit Train

For a long time now I have been wanting to photograph the place we get molasses for the animals.  The atmosphere has such a magical, abandoned and supernatural feeling to it.

You have to drive for a long way down 441 from Gainesville.  There is an ugly parking lot beside the feed store, which looks out on a ruin.  An old railroad track that ends abruptly a few feet away runs in front of a rusting relic of forgotten times.  In the background you can see the stairs that now lead to nowhere.  It strongly reminds me of scenes from Henry's Quest, a post-apocalyptic children's adventure story by Graham Oakley.

After you arrange to get the molasses at the feed store, they call the man who owns the molasses works to meet you across the street where the molasses is stored.
He is striking in appearance, too.  He almost looks like a drizzle of molasses, being very long and lean, and  reminds me curiously of Kamajii, the boiler man from Spirited away.

The molasses works is a monster of metal tanks, pipes and valves.  Yellow sulfur butterflies flutter in circling swarms and dot pools of rotting molasses where they are mud-puddling.

Another abandoned railroad runs weed-choked to one side, going somewhere.  Far down the track (too far to capture in any of the pictures) sits an old train car, stopped in the middle of it's last journey.  Enormous blooming Bidens bushes spill over the tracks.

My children, too, notice that things are more than they seem here.  They always try to walk to the old train, but never are able to get there.

In the car on the way home, we always create fanciful stories of the Spirit Train, which comes to life at midnight and travels on the old, forgotten railroads to fantastic places.

Rabbits

The baby rabbits have really grown, and as far as I can tell they are all females.  They are so cute in real life, but were really hard to photograph.  Either they turned out with evil red eyes:

Or like this:

I did get a few nice pictures of them.   Here's the friendliest one, munching on some barley grass I had sprouted for them as a treat.

And here's Lily with her favorite one.  They're just alike.

They're growing, and soon it will be time to wean them.  Just like with most babies, they grow up so fast.  But at least with rabbits you know there will be lots more.

Stinkhorns

We've been finding the most interesting stinkhorns around.

Ethan said they look like Anime penis monsters, and they really do.  This one below seems like it must be related to the famous Phallus impudicus.

The old summer garden

We keep the garden by halves, so that each season the land gets a rest.
The summer half of the garden has been interesting this year.
Even after the goats and cows trampled and munched their way through it, it became a wild tangle.  Roguish hybrid cucumbers, sunflowers, tomatoes, melons, dent corn and amaranth seeded themselves rampantly.  The dent corn even tasseled and bore little ears.  The zinnias became monstrous.

At it's peak, my children would get lost in the overgrown grass and weeds.

The Roselle is flowering its strange and lovely flowers.

Massive Spanish needles have taken over in places, each a humming and vibrant ecosystem, alive with many different kinds of bees, flies and butterflies and things that eat them.  I saw at least 5 different types of bees nectaring one day, and not a single one like our honey bees.  Just one of these bidens bushes is at least 10 feet across.

It's a jungle out there.

Heading Out

I think we make a ridiculous spectacle heading out to the farm--striding around in clunky mud boots, more clod-hopperish than the trim versions which have somehow found their way into popular fashion, while we stuff our screaming and flailing children in the car among an odd assortment of very full baskets. 

For some odd reason our children have that reaction to going out to the farm.  Once they are there they have a blast building fires and forts, swinging, running, climbing, squirting each other with the hose, making bows and arrows, picking flowers and vegetables, making mud pies and digging holes and they scream just as loudly when we have to go home and go to bed.  It is completely baffling, but that's how it is.

The other day while Ethan was dragging Rosie off of her tricycle before she "ran away" and Mirin out of a tree, I saw the baskets on the driveway and thought they looked amusing.  Milking basket, water jars, extra milking jar and seeds for the garden, the egg basket, knitting and a story to read on the way (The Wolves of Willowby Chase at the moment). 

There's something interesting about all the baskets in a row like luggage, ready for something.  Ready for adventure, I suppose.

Do you mind if this is another garden tour?  

Things are looking so much better now that the cooler weather has blessed us.

(These are the Picotee cosmos blooming in the turnip patch)

There's more than Tatsoi growing out there now, thank goodness!  Even Matilda was getting a little tired of it.  You can vaguely see the yellow flowers of the bolting Extra Dwarf Pak Choy in the distance (I do wish the photo quality was better) and this year I've been realizing that pretty much the only difference between Baker Creek's Bok Pak Choy and Extra Dwarf Pak Choy seems to be that the Extra Dwarf stuff just bolts and becomes inedible much, much sooner.  Ethan is very pleased.  He has always been scornful of the Extra Dwarf Pak Choy.

Although a bit frosted, the pumpkins are still alive and flowering.  Some of them have even set some fruit, although I've been much too busy to poke around and see if they are keeping them.

The peas, the peas!  Despite the best efforts of the ants and what must be now a very tasty pea-sprout fed rabbit(s), they are starting to climb.  Ethan and Mr. McGregor (the .22) have been vigilant, but we've seen no signs of the culprit(s).  A good rabbit dinner(s) might make up for it.  Please forgive the s's in parenthesis, but it's like Will Cuppy says about mice, you can never have just one.

See, it's all looking slightly more cheerful, except maybe the pumpkins.  They might become a bed for lettuce and beets, anyway, we'll have to see.