Thursday, March 28, 2013

Seeds for 2013


...or seed candidates, anyway. We'll have to see how many of these badboys make the final cut, since, regrettably, we do not have infinite garden space.

Tomatoes - Paw Paw, Speckled Roman Paste, Silvery Fir Tree, Black Cherry

Tomatillos - Toma Verde

Melons - Minnesota Midget Melon

Flowers - Calendula, Rocket Larkspur, Borage, Hungarian Blue Bread Poppies

Herbs - German Chamomile, Mammoth Dill, Bouquet Dill, Thai Holy Basil, Slow Bolt Cilantro

Carrots - Nantes Scarlet (guess who picked that one!), Royal Chantenay, Atomic Red, Red-Cored Chantenay, Little Fingers

Peas - Mammoth Melting, Lincoln,

Radish - Cherry Belle, French Breakfast

Beets - Cylindra, organic sugar

Cucumbers- Delikatesse, Homemade Pickles, Lemon

Fennel - Sweet Florence

Beans - Golden Wax improved, Kentucky Wonder, Cannellini

Corn - Yukon Chief

Summer Squash - Early White Bush Scallop, Cocozelle (zucchini), Early Prolific Straightneck

Winter Squash/Pumpkins - Small Sugar Pumpkin, Cinderella, Burgess Buttercup, Williams Naked Seeded, Hokkaido Stella Blue

Sunflowers - Giant Greystripe, Miriam Edible

Salad Greens - Arugula (rocket), Cimmaron, Buttercrunch, Merveille de Quatre Saisons, Rouge d'hiver, Red Romaine

Hardy Greens - Russian Red Kale, Chinese Kale, Pak Choi


These are all of the seed packets that I could dig up, yet this seems like not quite enough to be my whole stash. Hmmmm.....

In addition to all of these, it is pretty much guaranteed that I will pick up a few starts from the Farmer's Market, once it's open. I guess I can't control myself. :\



Friday, March 22, 2013

Today's Take - 3/22/13

We had a hard frost overnight. Just when you think Winter is really gone...BAM!

*Eggs - 6
*Foraged - a handful each of stinging nettles and dandelions

Monday, March 18, 2013

Today's Take & Critter Update

Well, it appears that we may have two goat mamas left to kid instead of just one. Brother...

Scarlet & her bud, Thea, were checking out the baby goats and new piggies, when they saw Blue sitting all by her little self in the middle of the pasture. They went by to say hi and said that they swear they saw kicking in her ever-rotund belly. My knee is well enough now that I can take an occasional hike up to goatlandia, and so off I went to check out my Bluey girl. I wish I'd taken a picture! Her girth alone might not have been enough to convince me that she was pregnant, but a gander at her lady-region has me feeling pretty confident that she's extremely pregnant.


Our permanently portly, Princess Blue

She didn't have any discharge happening, but, as happens with most extremely pregnant animals, it looked like her bum-bum was going to explode. :\ We definitely didn't plan for her to ever kid again, but if all of this is just fat, well, then I'm really worried about her, because then the bulging-bum-thing would require a visit to Dr Natalee to see what on earth is happening inside of Blue.

Chardy is also nice and fat, and pretty well bagged up, but no discharge yet, so, going by her history, she has at least another 24-48 hours to go yet.

The piggies have settled in well. In less than 24 hours they managed to root up all of the grass that had been growing in their pen. They also inhaled the slops I made for them, which featured such culinary delights as Kid Milk Replacer, freezer-burned apple slices and onion bagels. Yummmm!

The Guinea hens have settled in well too. They are in their own closed section of the coop for now, until they know for sure that this is home. Some websites suggested that I leave them in for up to 6 weeks before letting them out to free range. Boy, that seems like a lot to me, but then again I'd hate to see them up and fly off on their first time out. We'll leave them in for a few more days at least. No eggs yet from the Guineas either. I sure hope that we get a few before Easter. How cool would that be? ;)

Today's take-

*Eggs - 6

Piggies, Birds and Disbud-a-palooza

This was a very full weekend for the residents of Boggy Hollow. First of all, two of us turned a year older, which, hot on the heels of a knee replacement surgery does not tend to make one feel Spring Chicken-y, generally speaking.

In addition to the clicks on the odometer, we managed to cram a whole lot of farm stuff into those 48 hours.

Firstly, Bill finished building a pig pen and pig house on the site of our first (completely flopped) garden, in the bottomland. Plants didn't grow well there, but we're hoping that piggies will.

Secondly, we bought ourselves some piggies. We got two gilts and a barrow, also known as two girls and a castrated male, 6 1/2 weeks old and already weighing 30-odd pounds apiece. They are mutts, essentially, being primarily Berkshire/Duroc crosses, with a little Yorkshire somewhere in the mix way back. They're fairly mellow little things, who managed to root up the grass in their newly built yard in a single evening.


Against the advice of some, Scarlet has decided to name this motley lot Baykin, Porkchop (Choppy) and Prosciutto (Shootie). I personally have no doubt that any inadvertent sentimentality for these gals & guy will go out the window just as fast as the first whiff of frying bacon (or Baykin) finds its way to my kids' snoots.
These will not be the first animals that we have harvested for food on this farm, but these will be the first that we will have raised for expressly that purpose. I certainly hope that knowing that going in will make it that much easier to harvest and eat these lil' oinkers. For the record, the pigs cost us $95/each. 95x3= $285

As if our dances with pork weren't enough for one weekend, we also were gifted a pair of strikingly pretty/odd Guinea hens. These gals are useful in guarding and alerting our chickens to the presence of the nasty coyote who killed Cotton and who keeps dropping by. I'm not sure if they'd defend our flock or just raise the alarm about a predator in the vicinity, but either way, these gals are a very welcome addition to our rag-tag flock.


Per Wikipedia, Guinea fowl are voracious consumers of fleas, ticks, lice and other insect pests, and will keep your coop and garden relatively bad bug-free. That's a pretty sweet deal, no? I have to admit that I'm also quite in love with their super-cool polka dot plumage. I think that Bill could tie some really cool flies with those feathers!

And as if that weren't enough to fill up a weekend, we also enlisted some help getting our 9 baby goats vaccinated, disbudded, and (where applicable) castrated. The gal who came out to do the deed was kind enough to show Billy the ropes, so that maybe next time we can do the disbudding and banding all by ourselves. For the record, the gal charged $15 per kid for the disbudding/vaccination (with our meds)/castration. x9= $135

Just to clarify, because I feel kinda like I need to justify our descision to disbud, we personally do not care at all whether our goats have horns, but since we're looking to sell these kids to folks, possibly within Olympia city limits, where horned goats aren't allowed, we thought it prudent to go ahead and have the babies dehorned. We also went ahead and castrated all of the bucklings, since one uncontainable buck is plenty for this little farm, thankyouverymuch.

So, that was our weekend. Even with having had goats and a whole mess of chickens for years now, something about bringing pigs and exotic birds into the fold makes this farming-thing suddenly seem super legit. I am going to do my level-best to keep good, accurate records about how much this pig adventure costs us, and how much meat we end up with for our trouble. I'm really, really hoping that between excess goat milk, bakery outlet scores and garden/kitchen scraps, that we'll be able to feed these pigs up, on the cheap. Come harvest time, which we guesstimate will be in August or September, I'll have to crunch the numbers and see how much this experiment cost us. More importantly though, will be whether or not this pork tastes ho-hum or crazy delicious.

Only time will tell!

Today's take:

Eggs - 8