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.

Fertility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Cow

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greening

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

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

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

New Piggies

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

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

Spring Flowers

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

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

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

The Crazy Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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