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.

Pomegranates

These are the pomegranates I started from seed (yes, from seed) way back in January!!
I just re-potted them, and they are starting to look like something finally!
Apparently starting pomegranates from seed is sort of hit-or-miss as far as how good the fruit will taste, but my dad had a great pomegranate he had started from seed planted in their yard until it was killed by a fungus.  They were super easy, and I've got a bunch of them, so who cares if only a few of them are edible?  I'm sure someone around here will like them, even if it is only the pigs, and I can't wait to have loads of fruit trees growing everywhere.  I think this coming spring I'm going to attempt tons of fig cuttings, and maybe more pomegranates.

(I just had to show some scrap of growing success after the previous depressing post about the winter garden)

The fall/winter garden

This is a photo of the abysmal fall/winter garden taken in September.  It looks slightly better now.  See how there's nothing actually growing in it??  That's continuing to be a bit of a problem.

I started off this season feeling lost.  I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do, except start brassicas to plant on September 1st.  I think I was still burned out from the summer season.

It was an extremely hot and dry summer, and none of the brassica starts really took off.  In fact, they mostly withered and died.  They would sprout right away, and then languish and dwindle, despite being watered properly (not too much, not too little), given a little boost of kelp emulsion after they were turning yellow, moved into the shade, moved into the sun and generally babied.  They just weren't happy.

I soaked and then direct-seeded the peas, thinking it would be just like the string bean success of the summer, but alas, no.  In the photo you can see the long row of peas only because of all the notermelons I used to weigh down the weed guard paper and keep it from blowing away.  They mostly rotted or were eaten by ants.  Freakishly, only one part of the row grew, although I can detect nothing different about that particular spot.

I think it was just too brutally hot for them.  Anyway, things are looking slightly better now.  Most of the fall pumpkins I had planted in August were attacked by creepy little flying aphids that made them wither up.  Oh, and squash bugs.  Strangely, nothing could be seen of the stem borer moths that were so common in the spring.   They were an easy pest to deal with if I was diligent about stalking up and down the rows of squash daily, picking off the little brown eggs.

The little flying aphids, however, were not easy.  They would fly smugly away in a little cloud when I swooped down on them with soapy water.  Eventually I abandoned the pumpkins to slowly die, which most of them did.  It does look like we might get a few, if the weather doesn't get much colder.  All I want is one pumpkin for Thanksgiving dinner.  If we get just one, it will all be worth it.

The other failures included direct-seeding all the Asian greens and only having eight rows of mustard come up (short rows, luckily.  Even so, we and the cows are getting tired of it already), and a very desperate struggle with the weedguard paper.  They make it look so easy on their website, but it's like wrestling an alligator.  An alligator who gives you paper cuts.  For some possibly supernatural reason it always becomes windy when I decide to work with it in the garden.  I could be thinning the turnips and there won't be a breath of wind until I get the weedguard paper out, and then it just won't stop.  Maybe it offends the wind gods or something.

Actually, half the battle with the fall/winter garden was troubleshooting the weedguard paper.  The other half was failing to keep anything except mustard and weeds alive.  (not to mention the situation with Alachua County Feed and Seed talking me into buying a "cover crop" for my garden that has now become a hideous and inextinguishable nuisance.  I still don't know what the plant is called, but at least it fixes nitrogen, although  with the cassia and the crotalaria, I'm not sure we really needed another nitrogen-fixing pest.)

So, next fall/winter season, if I am still gardening and haven't given up in despair, here are the following notes to myself:
-Start Asian greens first, in pots (which is what I eventually did this year), and transplant September 1st.

--Start peas in pots and transplant September 1st (yes, there are peas growing out there right now, and only because I bought more seeds and started them in pots, which will probably sound ridiculous to people who are used to gardening in much more fertile places.  Interestingly, they are the same height as the unfortunate peas who survived the first direct-seeding, although planted a month later)

--THEN start cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale, etc.

--The best way to deal with the weedguard is to cut it to the length of the bed, soak it with water, lay it out and cover it with old hay or mulch to weigh it down, and then it can be planted through.  This saves the trouble of trying to find where all the little starts were planted under the paper or struggling to mulch around the starts.

Anyway, I hope to post a better picture soon.

It's kind of gruesome, but this is Mirin and Rose's notermelon baby they made.  (It was actually cute in real life, but in the picture it looks like a zombie).  The kids started with a notermelon that Mirin had hollowed out to make one of his drinking gourds for me (very refreshing to drink from one when you are planting the fall garden in the hot late summer sun).  They found a little one and carved the face with a butter knife they found in the milking basket, and stuck it all together with wet sand.  The yellow cap is a funnel that was lying around.
Since we just didn't manage to grow our own Halloween pumpkins this year, we are planning to have notermelon luminaries lining the driveway.  Not that anyone comes trick-or-treating in our neighborhood any way, but we're hoping the sheer number of notermelon jack 'o lanterns and the dug-out-of-the-compost-real-pig-skull candle holder will discourage pumpkin smashers this year.

Fred E. Pig

This is Fred Pig.  He was the runty one of the last batch of pigs.  Being slightly smaller than everyone, he got pushed out of the way by his seven companions and was still way too small to eat last spring when it was cool enough to slaughter.  We kept him for us and let him grow all summer, and with none of his other companions around to push him away, he has grown enormous.  He's just huge.

He's a good pig.  He's happy and healthy.  When we come out to do the chores he runs alongside in his paddock by the driveway.  A few days after it rains he becomes a black pig.  He's got a wallow in the woods somewhere.  As it dries up he gets pinker and pinker.  We'll come out and he'll have only a pink butt, where he didn't quite fit in all the way, or just his sides will be muddy.  I love watching him leap over logs and squeeze through the trees, making  the "woof-woof" sound that pigs make when they're excited (strangely, I've never heard a pig say oink).  He's amazing agile for an animal his size.

It's been so nice to have a pig on the farm this whole time.  Usually we would have gotten new piglets by now, but we really need to make some changes and improvements to our pig set-up.  Fred and his friends were in a large wooded paddock the whole time, and they did a great job of clearing out the overly-dense underbrush.  It used to be so thick you couldn't see the large trees, but now you can see them clearly (and they look kind of relieved.  It's not good for large trees to have so much underbrush beneath them).  I'd like to give the land a rest.  I wonder what will grow there next year in the space left from all the little laurel oaks.  I wonder if we'll get some new wildflowers, like after a burn.

We need to finish the rest of the pig paddocks before we get another pig, but I so hope someday to have a sow and have our own little piglets.  Having babies on the farm is just so much fun.  There's so much to look forward to every day, to see how they've grown.  (The baby rabbits are hopping out of the nest box now, they are so cute!).

 Mirin got a real bow and anrrows for his birthday this year. 

 He's been so excited about it.  Ethan used to teach archery as a summer camp counselor before we got married, so he's been teaching him.  Out at the Farm, Mirin sets up a firing line and a wild watermelon (we call them Notermelons, because they are not watermelons--they are bland like cucumbers and very seedy--we feed them to the animals).  He's actually a pretty good shot (better than I am).  He's very careful about how the arrows are handled and about finding them all when he's done.  Luckily he only has six and they are brightly colored, because the grass is at it's longest right now.

Strangely, having a real bow has set off an even more obsessive phase of making bows and arrows out of sticks and all kinds of things.  I don't have a picture of it, but two days ago he found a hacksaw and cut and trimmed a long piece of oakleaf hydrangea and made a long bow that shoots shockingly well for being strung with cotton twine.  He also fashioned arrows out of palm fronds.  He also had a little crossbow he made with a rocket balloon.