Today's Take & Seeds Started Indoors - 4/27/13

The first three flats of veggies that I started on the seedling heat mats (tomatoes/tomatillos, peas and lettuces/kale) have graduated off of the mats and are now under the grow lights without any supplemental heat.

In their place on the mats I just started one flat each of German Chamomile, Calendula and Minnesota Midget Melons (cantaloupes). The melons are a big experiment. We've never had much luck with the traditionally Southern, sun-loving crops like melons and peppers, but decided to gamble a whole three bucks on this short-season variety. They're supposed to take just 70 days from seed to fruit, and I figure that if folks in Minnesota can get these badboys to grow, I stand a decent enough chance at having at least a few make it.

As for the flowers - those are primarily for tea and soapmaking. I hope that they both make it, but I'm especially excited about the Calendula. Orange is my absolute favorite color for flowers. I challenge you to look out on a patch of verdant, colorful veggies, surrounded by sunny orange flowers and not feel happy. Can't be done. ;)

On a completely separate note, today was the day that we said goodbye to sweet misses Hop & Hope, Chardonnay's two "big girls".

Liberty & Hope, February 2012

Hop & Barley, February 2011

The girls went together, to a wonderful little family in a home on some acreage. They will provide companionship, entertainment, weed eating services and delicious fresh milk, hopefully for many years to come. 

The gals' leaving us means that we have just two more kids who will be moving on before too much longer, leaving us with our new, lean and mean herd - Blue, Chardonnay, one of Chardy's doelings who is not yet named, Sidney, Sophie and Buckley. We were hoping to sell Buckley, but we've had no interest yet. Maybe in the Fall?

This Spring has been a real doozy, full of goat-centric drama, so as much as we'll miss the sweet faces of our babies that have moved on, we are also pretty relieved to have scaled the herd (and the feed costs) back to a manageable number.

As if all that weren't enough excitement for a single day on the farm, today is also the day that we finally picked up our honeybees!

We now have two hives of Italian honeybees in our waaaaay back forty. Upon installing the bees in their hives, Bill discovered that one of the queens (you get one per colony) had died. Not good. 

We were fortunate that the folks who sold us our bees are good, honest people who stand behind the critters they sell, and had no qualms at all about giving us a replacement queen, which Bill picked up this evening and will install in the morning. The reason that the queen died is unclear, but it isn't a super uncommon occurrence, so we're not going to sweat it. 

So - minus two goats, plus 40,000 (give or take) honeybees and plus three flats sewn of future fruits and flowers. That, my friends, is one heck of a productive day in these parts. Time for farmer Chelle to kick back with a well-earned (in my humble opinion) bowl of ice cream and a Netflix. ;)

Critter Update - 4/20/13

Today four baby goats went to new homes! Both of Sophie's kids, Sidney's boy and Hope/Liberty's (I can't keep them straight) girl. The folks who took the goaties brought us a few chicks too. We now have six Light Brahma/Americauna chicks being fostered by our silver-laced cochin, Lacy.

Since kid-fest '13 began, we've sold 1 doe in milk and six babies so far. Hop & Liberty are on hold for another family, pending Hop's little guy's successful weaning, and one little wether and one little doeling are earmarked for one of the hub's co-workers, who will be trading us turkeys for the two kids.

Since Sid & Soph are still well in-milk, we'll start our much-anticipated milking tonight. Chardonnay, who was the last to deliver, is still nursing her twins for another few weeks, but will eventually also be a milker for us this year.

I can't wait to make cheese, soap and cajeta again with our milk, and I'm sure the pigs are looking forward to having a belly full of milk-soaked bread and pastries each evening for dinner too.

Besides the joy that is the influx of milk made available to us by weaning off and selling a few babies, I also  very much appreciate the reduced feed and hay bill, and the lessened impact on our pasture. At our fertility/baby boom peak, we had 20+ goats on this little piece of property, which is waaaaay more than it could sustain. We're grateful to the babies for bringing their Mamas into milk for us, but we don't plan on keeping more than one this year. It'll be one of Chardy's babies, who are so identical that I can't tell one from the other. Pictures forthcoming!

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

Kids?

Today I finally managed to work myself up to making the trek to the goat yard, so that I could eyeball the lassies for myself and see if I could figure out who was pregnant.

Bill thinks that they all look a little too thin, which tends to happen after a cold Winter eating past-its-prime hay. To my eye, they look in fine flesh, especially blue who is built like a barrel.

My best guess (because it is only a guess) about who's pregnant - Chardy looks pregnant, but not "ready to go", Hop is *maybe* pregnant, and Sidney looks pregnant, though not bagged up, but I did see a little discharge on her lady bits, so I don't know whether she's pregnant and getting close (though not yet bagged) or just fat and in heat.

Time will tell! Between 8 does, I can only hope that we end up with at least one milker!

Stay tuned...

Cheese n' Stuff

Miss Sidney has been keeping us in the milk, big time lately. That, and life is getting closer and closer to normal with each passing week, post car accident, which means that it's time to find my groove again.

I busted out my handy-dandy copy of Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll, and found a few recipes that I'm keen to try.

Always at the top of our list is feta. I'm a huge Mediterranean food nut, which means that we go through epic amounts of feta. I also want to try some paneer or queso blanco, the non-melty variety of cheese that texturally works a lot like tofu. I'd like to try it in a stir fry or maybe in an egg roll. And then, the hands-down most popular incarnation of my goat milk - cajeta. I'll be interested to try a batch with Sid's milk, as it seems to have a higher butterfat content than Chardonnay & Fritzen's did, and according to a few folks who have tried it, tastes more "grassy". I'm not sure how that'll translate to caramel, but I volunteer as test subject! ;)

Livy & I are also studying up on making goats milk soap. We are trying to find our necessary supplies on the cheap at thrift stores and whatnot, and will be cutting and drying some lavender and rose petals soon that will eventually end up in our soaps. With raw milk, it's use it or lose it, hence the grand plans.

Boy it feels good to be getting back to "normal"! ;)

Our First Livestock Harvest

We decided some time ago that we were going to harvest Spike. It wasn't an easy choice. We did not get into goats for the meat, but for the milk, fertilizer, shrub-trimming and companion aspects of livestock ownership. That being said, Spike wasn't really helpful in any of those areas except for the pooping. He was ornery, mean to the little goats, constantly escaping and destroying his pen, his house, bins and cans of various critter foods, etc. He was a sneaky little tornado of smash. And so, it was decided that we would harvest Spike, rather than pass him and his many issues on to a new owner. It wasn't a decision undertaken lightly. We've been seriously contemplating it for the better part of 6 months now.

After Spike's last escape, during which he went on a tear smashing feed cans, binging on and spoiling the girls' grain (and in the process giving himself a wicked case of the trots) and just generally destroying everything that held still, we decided with absolute certainty that the time had come. The arrangements were made with the kill guy and the butcher, and today was the day.

Fortunately, the man who dispatched and field dressed Spike was an absolute pro and did a mercifully quick and clean job of it, which is a great comfort to me, knowing that Spike did not suffer unduly and was treated with skill and dignity to the very last.

Unfortunately, the job had to be done early in the morning, and near the front of our property, lest our other goats see/smell the goings-on and become unsettled.

This meant that everything took place within view of the road, and may have been witnessed by some unsuspecting passersby.

Having been in this very same situation myself as a child, I can't help but feel badly for anyone having to see that first thing in the morning.

In spite of us having formed something of a callus when it comes to the less pleasant aspects of farming, like culling, harvesting and euthanizing our animals, chalking it up to being part of the reality of growing-your-own, it is still hard when that moment comes that you must make the final call about whether an animal lives or dies. We never take it lightly, and we never feel good about it, but we recognize that as stewards of livestock, whatever their intended function may be, end-of-life decisions are part of the package.

And so we said goodbye to Spike today. We pray that his spirit is free and at peace, that what remains of him here on earth will nourish the families that it feeds, and that my children will take from this experience an appreciation for the circle of life and the sacrifices made along the way.

Sometimes navigating this simple life feels extraordinarily complicated.