captain jack and ianto say good bye to ginger and pepper

The boys as I call them are growing like weeds. They have been on a raw diet for quite a while. It suits them. Chicken has been their staple. They ate all of our "flatties"* during broiler raising season. We lost quite a few of this time around. They began their journey heat stressed and were overly susceptible to it from then on.

This gate is one of their boundaries they are not supposed to cross. They are pretty good about following that rule.
This is Ianto about half grown. He reminds me of Henry. I still miss Henry.

Ianto is my favorite, I admit it. I can't help it. Here they are waiting for dinner.

Once Ianto is full grown he'll stand like that but only on the top bar.

Ginger and Pepper are going to the slaughter house tomorrow.

I know I professed last time that I would never do that again. Luckily I'm allowed to change my mind. The job that they did on smoking the meat and making sausage was so great that they have won me over for at least another time.

We will save every little scrap of bone and usual waste from both pigs to freeze for the dogs. They eat less on this diet and are much healthier. Tabitha really appreciates the fact that their waste is small and turns ashen white and benign within a day or so. Our large dung beetle population makes short work of three large dogs feces this way too.

So, goodbye to Ginger and Pepper but hello to them all winter long.


They are such friendly creatures we love them on so many levels.


I don't think that I will ever put pigs in the garden again.

Their smell is a little too close to the house. But, the main reason is they only tore up certain areas of the garden a little too deeply while left other areas completely untouched. Huge craters in the garden are not what I was hoping for.

I still have a little more tear down of the butcher area. The big-top worked perfectly this time.


I am trying to complete some compost for when my parents arrive with Kassi's Daylily starts. Two of these bins were full of nitrogen rich waste bedding and cow manure.

This is how far it has composted.

It is about a third of it's original volume. I have turned it twice in the past few weeks in attempt to get high compost temperatures. The feed stock was full of weed seeds and I wanted to be sure to kill of them. My moisture content was a little high and I lost some nutrients.

Composting is easy and difficult at the same time. Predictable results are the elusive factor. Last season my compost, although complete, contained far too many weed seeds. I hope for much better this time around.



*flatties are what we call chickens that have died and are laying there extremely flat when we come to check on them.

not enough time

just a quickie to document garden progress.

as of last night we planted thirty nine tomato plants, three rows.

this will be new soil to tomatoes. this area is where i sowed winter wheat. each row got two and a half wheel barrow loads of compost tilled into it. each plant hole was dug extra deep to the subsoil and back filled with straight compost.

this compost still has a small amount of oak leaves not completely disintegrated. in this state they should help make my soil slightly more acidic during the next few months.

i hope our tomatoes like this treatment. we also added about a tablespoon and a half to each hole of calphos, a fertrell product.

i have more compost this year than ever. it has slow cooked all winter so there are some hay seeds that have survived the composting process. i figure that i had six yards of completed compost as of this spring. there is another yard or so of compost that is almost ready. our new method of putting the cow in the stable each night and forking the manure each day is making quite a bit of raw materials. i might accelerate my queued amount for the fall garden and use it as compost tea. we have been putting compost tea on our berry patch and it seems to really make a difference.

i also have almost a yard of chicken manure compost. this will make fantastic compost tea too. i need to turn that into another bin and clean out the coop. i love having animals that we feed naturally. it is a comforting source of manure for our composting needs.

the tomato lineup is as follows: the first row, closest to the garden shed, is german stripe. the next row is jersey giant. the last row we planted was a mixed bag containing four cherokee purple on the south end. this will be the "salsa row" tomatoes of every persuasion. it is going to be a fun year. already we worry about the blight, bugs and hail.

we still have to plant the row and a half of marzano tomatoes. a cooking tomato that is renowned for it's full flavor, meaty flesh, smooth skin and few seeds. some of the italian cooking shows on pbs carry on about it's perfection. we are planting fewer tomato plants this year with wider spacing in hopes of better ventilation, more access to nutrients and easier access through the garden.

our intentions are to make more reduced tomato sauce during canning. that is what we really use the most. having a jar of reduced tomatoes means a quick meal.

wish us luck...

the girls

the chickens are really laying. we have been getting three dozen eggs every day for a few days. yesterday i forked out their coop. during the last cold spell they hardly left the warmth of the indoors. our chickens don't like the snow. things were getting very piled up and smelly. i have a compost bin just outside their door. it was almost a quarter full before i started. in the end, i managed to nearly fill it entirely. my compost bins are made from four freight pallets. and usually hold about a yard and a half of compost. so i moved about a yard of manure yesterday.


i had let it go for a little too long. theoretically it should get removed with fifty percent bedding. this would make for a reasonable mix ratio of manure to brown matter. this stuff was concentrated straight chicken droppings. it will take some extra work to get this to a usable product. chicken manure is high powered stuff anyway and should always be used with caution.


i will encourage this to compost until this coming fall. my plan is to use this in my experiment toward making some tierra pietra. i'll need a substantial amount of charcoal to make the quantity i'm interested in. we'll initiate cooking over a wood fired grill this coming spring. throughout the summer i'll collect the dowsed charcoal from our quelched cooking fires. my goal is to make two yards of tierra pietra and see how it performs.


the upper newly exposed garden and yard will appreciate amending with this rich soil. we hope to start permanent herb beds in that area. there will be some exciting changes around here this spring.


i also finished wiring the chicken coop. the storage half needed a light since we check the nest boxes after dark when we close them up for the night. eventually the chicken responsibilities will fall onto the kids. kids appreciate well lit environments after dark--especially my kids.


our first garden

tabitha and i are going to share some farm photos with a group of people this weekend. we have been poring through tons of old photos in an effort to exhibit something comprehensive. it has been very nostalgic and have been feeling very accomplished. the raw effort and will that we have regularly exhausted to attempt to carve out our little place is very apparent in retrospect.

seeing the changes in our little farmstead. it started with an old house that was nearly fallen in. the yard was a bramble of scrub trees, poison ivy, sumac, oak saplings and mimosas. our intended garden patch was an impossible patch of small trees and rock.


sunset

you can literally watch bamboo grow

first, let me apologize for the blurry photos. someone, toly, seems to have gotten his little dirty hands on the camera again.


we are trying to grow a huge hedge in front of our house from the road. bamboo is our answer. yes it is invasive but we feel that our privacy is important enough to deal with the ramifications. besides cows eat bamboo. it is native to missouri. finally, uses for bamboo cane is nearly unlimited.


one of the most stunning things i did this week was to install the new front door.

here is the rubble created from the install


we have been gardening in earnest. the potatoes are looking nice.

so are the greens and onions.

yummy beets are really doing well.

this is the tomato bed to be planted yet.

here we have planted beans and tomatillos. bush beans and pole beans.

i mowed the yard to have mulch for the two rows of tomatoes we have planted.

here they are, our hope embodied in a row of amish paste tomatoes.

this is the mixed row, yellow pear, green zebra, cherokee purple, um... we'll i forgot the rest but will consult my expert on these matters.

here is kassi's flower bed. she is so proud of it.

here we are brewing compost tea to amend the the strawberries.

this is my new truck tool box. i love it.


crazy kids, we grow them here too.

two at a time is strictly against the rules. i see no one cares. i choose to pick my battles.


the new chicks are happy and will be going into a tractor very soon.


i also finished the back steel of the coop. finally it is completely enclosed.

those two giant telephone poles are the corner post for the coop pen.

their run should be plenty of room for them.


jocelyn is happily grazing in the electric fenced paddock.

henry sits by the gate waiting for her to return. he knows that it is out-of-bounds for him. but i am sure that he'd ignore that rule to protect her if the need arose.

happy dogs make for well behaved dogs. he has plenty of work to do and takes his jobs very seriously.

spring-like winters day

toly in his new totoro sweater and kassi are ready to go to the store with me. we had a great time. toly, kassi and myself are an unusual supplies party. i feared it was more than i could handle and actually get the numerous things on my list. they were great. toly was especially well mannered. i got the admiring-the-cute-kids-look during our entire adventure.

toly is much improved since the removal of milk from our diet.

tabitha had a tragic visit with and extremely lame doctor regarding toly. she blogged about it a few days back. stream still puffs from my ears when i think about it. he told her that we were just bad parents and toly needs to be on ritalin. that prescription alone is contradictory enough to discount him. make up your mind are we just bad parents or does toly need to be medicated? then he went on to tell her that toly needed to be in daycare because they won't be afraid to reprimand him.

ok, i think that ritalin is satan. i'd sooner have my son circumcised than get on that stuff. many of you who know me know how passionate about circumcision and keeping things as nature intended. alright i won't do either. but i just want everyone to know where i stand. ritalin is cocaine for the brain and it has no business in my two-year-old's blood stream. i could rant about the stuff for several boring posts and still not change alleged-modern-medicine's mind.

deep breath...

i'm in my happy place...

deep breath...

rome, tristan and mommy stayed home.

tabitha and tristan spent a little time playing final fantasy IV. tristan is learning the strategy and getting lots of reading comprehension practice. he already beat the harry potter game we got him for chistmas and is back on final fantasy. it should take him a while yet. the depth of that game is intense and shouldn't be attempted by any adult unless you are on vacation or recovering from major surgery.

i am very proud of the-girls. they have been laying like crazy--always more than five eggs per day. we have been without "real" eggs for so long that we are eating them almost as fast as they can lay them.

this is their feeder set-up. it is double protected from the cows. kids have been known to leave pasture gates open to the yard. the chicken feeder is like a big box of candy to a cow.

i have extension cords strung everywhere the chicken coop light, the stock tank heater, and the pig waterer.

the chickens love their new light and are showing me how much they love it by giving us so many eggs. i usually have their light on for an extra hour each evening. it makes them settle into their coop more easily too.

i forked two huge pick-up loads of manure into compost bins from the lower hopper-style feeder.

i also added the better part of a truckload to the pig pen.

it keeps them busy and from rooting under the walls of their pen. they also will have this manure and hay pulverized into more easily compostable material in just a few days. i'm still sore two days later from forking all that wet manure around.

kirby and zelda sure are looking tasty these days. they are so friendly that you have to take care that they don't knock you down when you enter their pen. they have killed two chickens that interloped into their pen. they were old hens that weren't laying anyway. i don't think it was malicious. they were just playing and cornered the hen where it promptly had a heart attack.


henry is the-show-dog. he is the best dog i have ever owned. his instincts are so strong to do his job that he needs very little training. like any puppy he doesn't know when to quit playing. he'll grow out of that. he is a foreboding presence on our farm, fiercely guarding his boundary with extreme prejudice.

he is aging into the classic pyrenees aloofness. when you call him he gives the-look "hey i'm busy over here." he still comes though.

the cows still look like hell from being sick.

jerseys loose condition so easily and we struggle and struggle to get them back into shape. the two adult cows are leaving thursday. nimue will go to the sale barn and roary to a friend. we can't have milk cows and a two-year-old that can't have milk. maybe once jocelyn is old enough we'll try milking again. we'll keep phoenix, he'll be phoenix burgers in several months. yum.

jocelyn


phoenix

and tabitha of course. i'm so happy she's feeling better. that was a long recovery.

rome really likes it outside too

he is the speed-scooter almost crawling. he has cross crawled a few times but mostly finds it easier to scoot everywhere.

tabitha took down the obama yard sign. i was going to leave it up until next time.


tabitha made sushi last night. the kids love sushi. i love red tuna sashimi. tristan liked it so much that he cleared the remaining rolls from after dinner and stowed them in the fridge for his "snack" tomorrow. any dinner that prompts a six year old to clean up after dinner is stellar.