Miserable Drizzle

It has been raining,raining, raining the past two weeks. I swear, I have dumped several inches of water out of this big green wheelbarrow at least once a day. Yes, we needed the rain, but enough already!
The cold, wet, dark fall mornings make it hard to get out of bed and go out to do the chores. But then when I see what the animals have to contend with, my nurturing nature kicks in. How can I complain when I get to go back inside after chores, take a hot shower and change into warm, dry clothes? The soggy turkeys and sopped cows have to just endure the cold drizzle. They seem a bit crabbby about it, too.
This morning, the bedraggled turkeys and the (smarter) chickens were hanging out in the north wing of the barn, out of the wet.
Meanwhile, the oblivious geese and ducks were happily swimming in the ponds and splashing in the puddles. Poor soggy Chuck, the chicken with the identity crisis, accompanied them looking rather miserable.

As I write this, I can hear robins chirruping! They must be northern robins migrating through for winter, but it's nice to pretend just for a minute that they are robins heralding spring in the April showers...

Pigs in Heaven

Rog and I are taking care of Sara's pigs while she is off visiting friends for a few days. On Sunday, between rainshowers, we went for a walk in the woods and paid the pigs a visit. They blissfully appreciated being petted and scratched, then they started crazily racing around the woods, barking and crashing through the brush. It is a bit unnerving to have two 300-lb. pigs barreling straight toward you at breakneck speed with only a little 2-wire fence between you and them. But the pigs have the utmost respect for the wire fence and screeched to a stop before touching it.
The pigs have industriously working, rooting and tilling the ground. This area of upturned earth was thick underbrush a couple weeks ago.
The pigs have very expressive tails. They can straighten or curl them at will, and when especially happy, they wag them in a twirling motion!

Farming:Year One - We Made It!

September marked our first year on the farm, and what an amazing year it has been. Time to look back and take stock of our successes, failures, and assess what we have learned so far. We've learned a LOT, so this will be a long post.

Our dream is to create a small,sustainable farm using permaculture principles. These are our goals:
1. Protect the farm’s heritage, soil, wildlife, character, beauty
2. Produce as much of our own food as possible
3. Grow a diversity of plant and animals, preferably heritage breeds
4. Raise our animals humanely
5. Avoid use of chemicals, antibiotics, tilling, mechanization
6. Use natural biological relationships
7. Grow food for our neighbors and community - sell locally
8. Work together as a family
9. Learn every day
10. Enjoy every moment

I have to sort of catch my breath when I re-read these goals and realize how far we have come and how well we have adhered to them!

Greatest Successes in Year One:
1. Daughters moving home - This wasn't really part of our original plan when we bought this farm, but the fact that our smart, strong, industrious, idealistic (not to mention talented and beautiful!) daughters were lured by the farm adventure has made all the difference. And to think I expected to start slowly, with a manageable garden and a few egg-laying hens...
2. Farmers market - Selling every Saturday at the Farmers Market made us feel like real farmers, despite our small scale and inexperience. We couldn't expect to compete with the other veggie farmers with years of experience, but the Market gave us a means to sell our garden produce and eggs in value-added products. We developed a niche and gained quite a following for Sara and Cadence's awesome pastries and Rog's wood-fired sourdough bread. The other vendors were encouraging and supportive and we got to know and love many of them.
3. Animals - Thanks to Cadence's initiative, we raised 200 meat chickens, 9 turkeys, 3 geese and 3 cows.
Sara took on the 2 little pigs, already approaching 300 lb. I brought in the bees(now 10,000?) for honey as well as pollination. The 30 laying hens were always part of the plan to make us feel like a real farm. We already had the 2 old cats and the 2 Aussie dogs (who haven't stopped grinning since we moved here) and the gold cat followed us home and took over. Our intrepid daughters led us into the deep end with livestock, but they have also willingly taken responsibility for many of the hardest parts -- butchering chickens, cleaning barns, shoveling manure, building fences. We learned that it cost significantly more than our best estimates to raise animals --we will be lucky if we break even - but the true profit is not monetary. (Admittedly, we can say that without wincing because we have outside jobs to support us.)

4. Tomatoes - Our tomato crop started out with a disaster: the greenhouse flipped over in a windstorm and dumped all our seedlings out in a mixed-up mess. Cadence rescued them and stuck them all in the ground, and ALL 98 seedlings grew, no, thrived. We seem to have had beginner's luck, and escaped blight. To date we have harvested 835 lbs. of 6 varieties of heritage tomatoes - and expect to exceed1000 lb. So far, we have canned 40 quarts of tomatoes and sauce, frozen another 40 quarts, made 10 quarts of salsa, and dried a couple of baskets' worth. We have eaten myriad tomtoes, sold many of our most perfect, huge heritage tomatoes, foisted some upon friends and family, and fed the trimmings and imperfect ones to the eager chickens and turkeys.

5. Bread baking - Cadence and Sara have baked scrumptious breads for years, but I never dreamed that Rog would become an artisan bread baker! He has devoted much reading and experimenting to perfect his wood-fired sourdough bread-baking technique; it has resulted in his breads now having a great following of enthusiasts we fondly refer to as "bread nerds."
5. Blog I started this blog as a chronicle of our adventures mainly for family members and friends. I am astonished how many people read it--it is not unusual to be introduced to somebody for the first time and they remark that they read my blog! I am now realizing that there are a lot of people out there with the same dream of someday having a little sustainable farm (Hold onto that dream! It's worth it!) I have also "met" so many wonderful farm- and garden- bloggers through my blog - what an invaluable network.

Tangible Lessons Learned:
1. Cows eat trees- They especially like the young fruit trees you just planted in your orchard.

2. Chickens, ducks and geese eat gardens - Not picky, but they especially like tomatoes, melons, emerging sweet corn and beans, blueberry bushes, serviceberry bushes, raspberry bushes, gooseberry bushes, roses, and all expensive perennials.
3. Owls eat chickens - And are wasteful, preferring just the heads. They will also attack ducks and turkeys. Dogs may keep coyotes, rabbits, raccoons and deer away, but not owls.
4. Trees are costly. - Big trees are WAY costly. Removing old, hollow leaning silver maples before a wind topples them onto your chicken coop can easily cost $1200. On the bright side, if a tree does smash your chicken coop your homeowners insureance will cover it. But it won't cover prevention.

5. Fences are critical -and always need repair. - Fences have been our biggest ongoing expense and chore. The fences we built this year include:
-Chain link fence to keep dogs in yard.
-Underground wireless fence to keep dogs in yard.
-Above-ground fence with electric wire at bottom to keep dogs in yard. (None of the dog fences worked. Our OCD rabbit-chasing pooches find it worth a shock to chase a rabbit))
-Moveable solar-powered electric fence for rotational grazing of cattle (worked!).
-4-foot green wire fencing around trees to keep cattle from destroying fruit trees (didn't work- they pushed it down).
-Electric fencing to keep cattle from destroying fruit trees (worked!).
-Wire fencing to keep poultry from eating garden (sort of worked).
-Wire fencing to keep Dexter cows from going under pasture fence (didn't work).
-More electric fencing to keep Dexter cows in (finally worked after many escapes and repairs).
-Electric fencing for pastured pigs, in ever-increasing sized pastures (worked great! Pigs are apparently more averse to having their moist little snouts shocked than dogs or cows are).
-Fenced moveable "tractors" for chickens (worked well until we let them go entirely free and be owl bait).
-Picket fence around patio to keep poultry from roosting on patio furniture (wokred, but now we have to go way out to the gate to let dogs in or out.)

6. A good beater pickup is invaluable (Hauling compost, wood, bricks, pigs, cows, windows, hay, corn, trees, furniture, freezers, chickens to porcessor...)
7. Chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys have delightful personalities. Chickens are individuals -- some aloof, some friendly, some sweet and goofy, some pompous or status-seeking. Turkeys are surprisingly gentle and curious and follow you everywhre. Ducks seem to be sort of scatter-brained (at least our runner ducks do.)
Geese do not deserve their reputation of being mean--raised with lots of handling they are very friendly and sociable and funny.
8. Hard work doesn’t seem like work when you love it. We are loving it!

Wordless Wednesday

Silly Sisters (and Mom)

My sisters and mom left this morning after the 3rd annual WWWW (Wild W Women Weekend)get-together which I got to host at Squash Blossom Farm. They enthusiastically dove in to help with feeding critters, shopping for a freezer, harvesting tomatoes and preserving them. Here are Liz (from Tucson), Rita (from Billings) my mom, Carol (from Bemidji) and me with 147 lb. of tomatoes we had just harvested that evening, some of which went into the 10 quarts of salsa we canned.

The weekend wasn't totally chores. We squeezed in a bit of antique-ing and shopping, a hike around the property, a little feasting, wine and ice cream, and a lot of laughing. Thanks for the fun weekend and all your hard work, Rit, Bunny & Mom!

TOMATO TALLY: We are up to 809 lb. tomatoes harvested so far. Lots more lovely, big green ones on the vine - we could break 1000 lb.! Frost is forecast for tonight, though.

Owly

Saturday was a perfect day for RE-fest - a festival of Green Living and Clean Energy in Austin last Saturday--which I helped organize and for which I was a presenter. After my workshop, I was able to catch part of the Audobon raptor presentation - and they happened to be talking about great horned owls --the dreaded predator of our farm. I gleaned some fascinating facts about great horned owls.

Great horned owls have a wingspan up to 5 feet and can take a prey that is 17 lbs! (They can take a Canada goose or a great blue heron, for instance.) I learned that owls do not have eyeballs- they have tubular eyes that are fixed in their heads. Their eyes are on the front of their face, so they have binocular vision, as we do, but cannot move their eyes like we can. It doesn't matter that they cannot move their eyes because they are able to turn their heads nearly around to the back by virtue of their 14 neck vertebrae (we have just 7 neck vertebrae). Owl vision is so acute thay can see in virtually total darkness -darker than nature gets, except for perhaps in the deepest recesses of a cave.

A boy from the audience was invited on stage to demonstrate how acute his hearing is. After blindfolding him, the presenter clapped her hands in a random pattern: to the left left, right, above, below, behind, in front. The boy did well identifying the source of the clap when it was to the side, but was not able to discern when it was from above or below. That is because human ears are symmetrically placed on either side of our heads; owls' ears are asymmetrically placed, one above and forward, one below and a bit back. This allows him to identify the direction of the sound and, by tilting his head until the sound is even in both ears, hone in on it precisely. In additon, his flat face acts sort of like a satellite dish, funneling sound toward the ears. Why would an owl need such acute hearing when he already has such amazing vision? For one thing, in winter he can hunt rodents that are underneath the snow purely by sound.

The third feature that makes an owl such a formidable hunter is his ability to fly silently. Two more kids were invited up on stage: the first spun a rope around in a circle sort of like a lariat and it made that whirring, whipping sound. The second child also whipped a rope around in a circle, but her rope had little yarn tassels tied at inetervals along the rope, imitating the uneven feathers of the owl's wings. Her rope was virtually silent! Although the silence is undoubtedly helpful for sneakingup on prey, the real benefit is so that it allows the owl to hear the prey- the sound of his feathers is not drowning out the sounds of the prey(The presenter noted that in Japan, they have duplicated this sound-reduction strategy to moderate the sound of high-speed trains!)

After learning all this I was pretty discouraged about our dilemma with the great-horned owl feasting on our chickens and only eating the heads. During the questioon time I asked whether it would be a good idea to leave the body of the decapitated chicken lying there --might the owl come back and finish him off rather than killing another bird? The naturalists said No, and the fact that the owls are only eating the heads of my chickens is an indication that they are VERY well fed. (Yup, I know they are well-fed - we have lost 25 chickens ot the owl in the past 5 or 6 weeks!)

Yesterday we took 50 more chickens to the poultry processor (that's another story...) We still have a few chickens left, but now I am very worried that the ducks and Chuck Dickens (the chicken who thinks he's a duck) are the most likely targets of the owl because the darn geese keep them wandering around the farm all night. So, the past three nights we have been herding the the goose/duck/Chuck Dickens flock into the garage and shutting them in safely until morning.

I suspect Chuck is secretly overjoyed to finally get a good night's sleep!

Another Tomato Strategy

The tomato deluge continues. As of last night we surpassed 400 lbs of tomatoes harvested. These 13 heirlooms I picked yesterday totalled 17 pounds--the largest was 2 lb,. 3 oz.
Last week when we had our largest, most perfect heirlooms at the Farmers Market, a professional tomato grower kindly advised us in that heirloom tomatoes should always be placed stem side down because they ripen from the bottom and as they ripen the blossom end cannot support the top. Who knew?
Here are the varieties we are growing, all started from seed except for the stray grape and the yellow plum: (from top left) Purple Cherokee, Gold Medal, Brandywine, Early Girl(?), Black From Tula, Celebrity, Moby Grape, Isis candy, Sungold, Tigerella, Yellow Plum.
The cherry tomatoes are so prolific and so delectable, but you can really only eat a pint or two per person per day! So,now I have been drying them in a food dehydrater I bought about 20 years ago at a garage sale. It was old even then but it still works great. It is a simple metal cabinet with four drawer/shelves and a heating element in the bottom. The shelves have holes so the warm air can flow up through. The fruits or veggies are placed cut side down on a piece of screen on the shelf. Produce on the bottom shelf dries faster than the top, so I rotate the shelves during drying.
The drying time varies by the size of the fruit. I really like drying the tigerella tomatoes, which are 2-3-inch diameter. They take about 24 hours to get to the leathery stage. They are also incredibley tasty at this half-dried stage - the flavor is so intense - but they must be stored in the refrigerator unless totally dried.
I store the dried tomatoes in glass jars and add a few to spaghetti or pizza sauce, chili and other tomato dishes. Long ago our friend Maureen introduced us to dried tomatoes at a picnic (a probably the same year I got the food dehydrater)when she made this sandwich, which is still a family favorite:

Tomato Pesto Picnic Sandwich

Slice a loaf of crusty French baguette (or Rog's sourdough baguette) in half the long way. Spread the bottom half with cream cheese and the top half with pesto. On the bottom, layer sliced sundried tomatoes (can soak them in a a little warm water for a few minutes if too chewy), a bit of shredded parmesan, romaine lettuce leaves and a twist of black pepper. Replace the top, slice the loaf into diagonal sandwiches and secure each with a decorative toothpick.

Yum! Sounds like a good supper plan...