Something Pretty Fishy Going On!

Here is that long-promised  aquaponics update. Things are happening fast now.

Here is how the pond (built in the old silo foundation) looks this spring. Last November Rog built this  greenhouse surround and we wrapped it in plastic to help conserve the heat and add heat with the greenhouse effect. It was a really cold winter, however, and  the water froze very deep - we were delightfully surprised when it melted and we discovered the hundred or two goldfish (and  a bunch of leopard frogs) had survived. A few weeks ago I unwrapped the plastic from the sides.

We have embarked upon an aquaponics partnership. For the past several years, Chris Luckenbill has been studying  aquaponics with an eye toward launching a business.  He has been unable to find land yet, but found us and our dabbling with aquaponics.  He inquired about partnering with us and renting space in our high tunnel to do a year-long project.  This is a win-win opportunity -- Chris can gain a year's worth of hands-on experience for relatively little investment and work out the kinks in the system, and we can learn from him.  We are too busy with other projects to devote enough time to really build the aquaponics system this year, so we are thrilled to have someone run with it. After a couple months of researching alternatives, discussing options, drawing plans, Chris  and his father Jim started installing the system last weekend. On Saturday, Chris picked up the fish stock - 100 pounds of fish, 43 tilapia and 27 channel catfish. He hauled them in his pickup in 55 gallon drums with an aerator running.

After combining water from the pond and the barrels in several batches to ease the transition,  Chris caught the fish and put into  buckets to release into the pond. Most of the channel catfish are albino, which is apparently the fish-farming standard.  I prefer the natural dark-colored ones, but the albino fish will be much easier to see in the dark pond.

It was  a regular bucket brigade  - Chris's dad Jim and Rog  carried the fish to the pond.

A dark gray catfish enters its new home.

A pink tilapia leaps into the pond.

The pond is aerated with this system that Chris built. It causes a  circular current that the fish tend to face into.

Admiring the new livestock.

The new fish stayed pretty much  in the lower level of the pond when we first added them, but the goldfish  swam at the top. They may have been a bit freaked out by their new, huge pondmates.

A tilapia surfaces.

Reflecting on the aquaponics system.

Zinnie moves in for a scratch from Chris.

Chris and Jim are now constructing the vegetable-growing  portion of the system, which will have vertical towers in the high tunnel. I will post another progress report as soon as it is set up.

You can read more details about the technical aspects of this project on Chris's  "Fresh With Edge" website and blog.

Color! And a Scary Zaniac Afternoon

The new color for our house has been decided, and it is...Teal! A bit deeper and darker than this teal we stained the bench. The teal and crazy yellow fence combo makes me smile. And both magenta geraniums and Orange the Cat look good with it, too.

Yesterday we had a rare sunny day, so Israel began painting the south side for us. He spent most of the day washing the walls, scraping the old paint, and priming the bare spots. He was able to get a start actually applying color in the afternoon so we can get a sense whether we like it or not. I LOVE the color. This shot was taken on a dreary rainy morning (this morning) - it may be a bit lighter in the sun.

We will keep the trim  cream and the screen door bright spring green. Don't want to be too boring!

http://www.andrealbowers.com/brain-gut-connection-part-3/ hanging baskets will show up much better!

Now when it is winter and dark and dreary and gray outside, there will be some vibrant color in the landscape.  Maybe we need a peacock to coordinate our  flock with our house...

Last  year,  a friend gave me the painted lamp that had hung in the bedroom of her recently purchased house. I put it on a pedestal with a solar light inside and it was a pretty entrance to the house but that lamp was never intended for outdoors and over the winter the paint fell off.  It is now a terrarium fairy garden- planted with hens and chicks and a little figure reclaimed from the farm store.It's rather magical lit up at night!

I  got a start over the weekend on painting the arbor entrance to the bee and butterfly garden. Zinnie helped me with chores and photography this morning. The only remarkable thing about that is that yesterday she got run over by a car. She was sleeping under it and the driver did not notice and backed over her! I came out of the house just in time to hear her yelping in terror and emerging from between the front wheels of the backing car.  I am not sure who had the  greatest adrenalin was surge - me, Zinnie or the driver.

Amazingly, she had no broken bones or bleeding injuries! Her front leg was hurt but she was putting a bit of weight on it, so that was a good sign. I took her to the vet to make sure she was ok, and she is bruised a bit, but thankfully no internal injuries - she is one lucky dog! After a day of laying low and contemplating her mortality, Zinnie seems to be back to her usual zany self, limping just a bit, pestering the other pooches, assisting me with chores, and trying oh-so-hard to refrain from herding the chickens. I am so relieved- I am extremely fond of that critter!

June at Last!

Happy June! Good riddance to May 2013!  It is usually my favorite month, but this year May has been so overabundant with rain it has caused a lot of headaches and delays--and even more problems for other, more serious farmers than we. This morning we had a few hours of sunshine (clouds have now moved in and more rain is in the forecast) so I celebrated by giving Gourdita a fresh new look.

Just need to get some flowers planted there for Gourdita to water. As you can see, the record rain in May has made everything very lush and verdant green.

But it has also made it almost impossible to do any planting. Here is our main garden, where Cadence optimistically transplanted  the tomato starts (mulched with straw) and peppers and potatoes a couple weeks ago - it rained heavily right after she planted and they have been  in standing water ever since.

The poor cows had been wallowing in mud in the sacrifice area and  mooing longingly at the yummy pasture across the fence. I am  down to only a few bales of hay and our neighbor told me the going rate is now up to $12 per small bale for nice hay! When  it dried off a bit I let the cows up in this pasture for a few days, but as you can see by the edge where they walk along the fence, they were really chewing it up with the ground so soft, so I had to close them out before they destroyed it.

Closing them out meant shutting this gate at the bottom of the hill. When I  ventured out to shut the gate I sank in mud up to my knees, past the tops of my muck boots.  As I tried to extricate myself I fell over and my arms were in mud up past my elbows. Nobody was home, and I did worry for a few minutes I might be stuck there all day, but ultimately I crawled out, covered in mud head to toe (and by mud, I mean a blend of slippery clay slurry fortified with cow manure.) I didn't take a self-portrait because I didn't want to even touch my camera.

Impossible to haul compost out of the cow yard or organic waste to the compost piles - the wheelbarrows cannot navigate the mud.

Great transplanting weather, though! Cadence dug out  a hundred or so weed-choked strawberry plants from the garden and I replanted them as a border bed in my  new bee/butterfly perennial garden. Perhaps with them being closer to the house we will get to the ripe berries before the  birds and rabbits do.

The picket fence around the bee and butterfly garden is lined with chicken wire to keep out the poultry.  Not the most beautiful, but it should be hidden as the plants grow taller.

Looking out of the perennial garden as another storm  passes... wasn't fast enough fetching the camera to catch the rainbow.

Our weekend music has been cancelled the past two weeks because of rain, and business at the farm store has been very slow, but that has given me time to set up new merchandise displays,  clean up the flower garden and plant the granary window box.

The best thing about this long rainy May is that we found morel mushrooms in our woods! We have searched every spring but only ever found one single morel. Here is  harvest from one suppertime walk, with a few spears of asparagus from the garden...

that we transformed into a yummy quiche with farm eggs and garden scallions.

We have also been enjoying rhubarb cake and sauce.

And  thankfully, the greens in the greenhouse are  doing well - without the high tunnel we never would have been able to supply the CSA boxes this week, our first week of the season.

In other news, Israel is learning to ride a bike (he never had one growing up in Mexico) thanks to our friend Stephanie handing down the perfectly-sized bicycle to him.

And the little lamb I pulled (!!!) while farm-sitting at Don and Betsy's is doing very well!

A Teeny Bit Sheepish

Our beloved neighbors, Betsy and Don, are away tonight for Don's son's graduation. It is a tricky time to be away, because a whole bunch of lambs are due to be born any moment. They hired Cadence to  farm-sit while they are gone and she and I got a crash course in lambing.
It is predicted to be a rainy, stormy, muddy night, so of course it is highly likely that a bunch of lambs will elect to be born tonight. I went over to help with the evening chores and we were met by this darling lamb outside the fence (he was born a month ago, a result of the ram jumping over the fence before his scheduled rendezvous date.) It's ok of he gets through the fence- he won't stray far from his mom.

Aha! We spied a new lamb, apparently born just minutes before we arrived, still wet. We were relieved to see it up on its feet, looking strong and healthy.

Cadence decided we should do all the other chores first then try to get the lamb and ewe into the barn. The other sheep were hungry and we wouldn't have to contend with their demands if they were distracted by eating.

Cadence and Israel fed the sheep, donkeys, horses, chickens, and dogs while I prepared bottles for the lambs.

When we returned our attention to the newborn lamb, we discovered a second lamb! It must have been born while we did the chores. We  followed Betsy's clever strategy of  putting the lamb into a sled (two lambs and two sleds in this case) and dragging them slowly to the barn as the moms followed. Easier said than done, however; my hour-or-so-old lamb kept jumping out of the sled.

Don has built a nursery in the barn with a dozen small pens where the lambs can become securely bonded with their moms - no risk of getting confused with the wrong ewe. Weaker lambs will get extra attention and supplemental bottle feeding. The  blue pvc pipe down the middle is a watering system.

We bottle-fed a couple of lambs whose moms were not adequately nourishing them.

This lamb was born  last night in the rain and when Don found him this morning, he thought he was dead until he saw him wiggle a bit. He was a very large lamb and had been stuck for a while during birth so fluid had built up in his head, which was very swollen. Don said he didn't have a very good chance of surviving, but showed me how to tube-feed him this afternoon. Don had put the lamb under a heat lamp, but he was shivering and if you put your finger inside his mouth, it was cool, not warm like the internal temp should be. Tonight I put my finger in his mouth and his temperature was considerably warmer than this afternoon.  It also looked like the swelling of his head had gone down a bit, but he was still lying motionless beneath the heat lamp, his mom curled around him. I was really nervous about tube-feeding him.  If you accidentally slide the tube into his lungs rather than his stomach, that will kill him. But the tube slid in easily and I fed him a whole bottle of milk while Cadence held him. As we fed him he wagged his tail and then he pooped on her boot, both of which seemed like good signs! I hope this baby is standing tomorrow!

Kind of nerve-wracking, but I like these sheep!
If you want to know more about Don and Betsy's sheep, you can listen to my very first episode Prairie Air, my new radio show on the COBB Radio.com, where I interviewed  Don about sheep-shearing and lambing season.

Garden Progress!

I was beginning to despair that it would never dry up enough to  till and plant! But then Wednesday it seemed  almost dry enough to till the  veggie garden on the uphill slope. I spent about three hours trying to enlarge this plot , tilling through the sod on the edges, with the  little Toro tiller.  But then around supper time a neighbor stopped by with his  big tiller behind his tractor, and in about  15 minutes  tilled a new bed for us (the far one in this photo) and  re-tilled this one, incorporating two  front-end-loader-scoops of composted cow manure (courtesy of our other dear neighbor, Frank, who had come earlier in the day with his big machine to clean up our muddy cow yard!) I am so grateful to our neighbors who took a little tinme to help us out despite being equally behind on their own, much bigger farms! We paid them in eggs and dollars, but probably not adequately. Yesterday morning, Cadence planted the tomatoes, basil, and peppers - and it has rained steadily ever since; happily, we got them in in the tiny window of opportunity.

Cadence transplanted some of the daffodils that were encroaching on the asparagus bed to the east side of the garden shed and they seem to like it there.

We are feasting on the most delectable green and purple asparagus every day!

 The garlic is looking great.

Cherry blossoms! The pears are also in bloom, but the pear, plum and apple trees were girdled by rabbits this winter and won't survive. Heartbreaking.

The yellow fence is now erected around the bee and butterfly perennial garden- my Mother's Day project from Rog!  We still have to  make gates and paint the arbor. And the house!

I planted and mulched all day yesterday, trying to make it look presentable for our farm's  grand opening and art fair this weekend - it's getting there.

A little garden sculpture I got at the Gold Rush antique fair last weekend (I spent as much money as I made, but it was a crummy weekend weather-wise and it wasn't much.) I have loved this figure ever since I saw it years ago in Savannah, GA; it is featured on the cover of  the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

The yellow butterfly magnolia is just about to bloom. It is not as heavily covered in buds as it was last year, before it was so rudely frosted and all the buds turned black, but it will still be pretty.

The serviceberry  bushes are covered in blooms! The blossoms should make the bees happy, and if we can beat the birds to the berries,  it looks like a good crop coming.

Greenhouse crops are doing well.  We have been eating  this fabulous lettuce and spinach!

Red and gold beets in the high tunnel, interplanted with carrots.

Next stop on the garden tour, the silo pond. I removed the greenhouse plastic from the sides this week.

The frog population in the silo pond has now grown to at least seven - I have no idea how they find this pond!

Plants waiting on the patio to be  put into the ground...

More plants in the pickup--please don't tell Rog how many flowers I have purchased this week!