Fun on the Potomac

We had some great weather this past weekend so the kids and I went down to the Potomac river to do some fishing. The kids like the idea of fishing, and are always amped and convinced that they will catch a fish, but 15 minutes or so into the process and they get bored.



It works out well since where we go is adjacent to the C&O Canal so there is a lot for them to explore. They climbed under and on top of the old aqueduct and generally enjoyed exploring the river in the warm sunshine.



Emily found a nice size crawdad. We brought it home and put it into our small decorative pond, unfortunately it did not make it. I think it was on its last legs so to speak which is why she was able to catch it so easily.

Of course river fun always leads to going in deeper

and deeper.

Which leads to wet clothes and water filled boots.

5 Tons of Hay

We got 10 round bales of hay delivered this past weekend. Probably more than we need for the winter but this way we will not have to try to find some when it is least available.

The kids had fun jumping from bale to bale until we got them all put up on pallets under tarps.

Butchering Pigs

Another skill I have been learning since moving to the farm is butchering of our livestock. While we take our full size hogs to a local USDA certified butcher to process I have been culling some of our pigs as sucklings and weaners, since we have more pork out in the field than we need if we allowed them all to go to market weight.

I previously butchered two of our piglets, in both cases by bringing them in from pasture to a small pen besides the barn before dispatching them. I only needed to carry the first one a couple hundred feet, from one side of the barn to the other, and since he only weighed 32 lbs this was not much of a problem. The second was after we had already moved them out onto the back pasture, and it was a tiring and humorous (after the fact) struggle to drag that 75 lbs pig up to the barn.

Since our pigs are significantly bigger now I needed a different plan. The best way would probably have been to setup an electrified run between the pigs and the barn, sort the pig we wanted into the run then coax him up to the pen. I decided not to do this since the pigs are currently a couple hundred yards from the barn and running that much fencing just to move one pig seemed ridiculous.

I decided that I would just drop him in place when I fed the pigs their breakfast. This may sound crass but it turns out that this is how a lot of small scale farmers do things and as I will tell you below his fellow pigs did not seem to care in the least. I selected out our smallest male pig and before feeding them while they were greeting me at the hog panel marked his head with a sharpie. This way when they were going crazy running from food bowl to food bowl to make sure they weren't missing out on something better I would not mistakenly kill the wrong pig. The cull went surprisingly well. I just tossed their food bowls in as normal, grabbed my .22 rifle and walked up to the unlucky pig and with one shot between the eyes he was down. The other pigs did not get spooked by the gun shot nor seemed upset by their fallen comrade. I then grabbed the pig by his hind legs and dragged him out of the pig pen and into the small trailer behind our tractor and took him back to the house. He was hard to get into the trailer and I estimate that he weighed well over 100 lbs.

Here is the pig hanging while I scrape the hair off.

The gambrel and hoist I picked up last deer season made it easy to get the pig hung at a convenient working height. I gutted and quartered the pig that day and put it in the fridge to chill and age.

Here is a front quarter ready to go in the fridge.

Yesterday I began the actual butchering process. To date I have been pulling the tenderloin and cutting off the hams and shoulders into convenient sizes, but have not done much in the way of real butchering. By that I mean cutting the meat into "cuts" that resemble what one would see in a grocery store. I downloaded some cut sheets from a cool website on barbecuing, so that I had something to work from. I ended up using a hacksaw to cut off the baby back ribs and to make some pork chops from one of the front quarters. This is a case were having the proper tools would be a huge help. I know that real butchers have a band saw to make these cuts and to say I was envious would be an understatement. The hack saw did an adequate job, I used it on Sunday to split the carcass in two, but it was difficult to hold the carcas and cut at the same time. It probably would have been easier if I had partially frozen the carcas to stiffen it some. After cutting the chops from the one quarter I just decided to make a bone in loin roast from the other. When all was said and done we had two fresh hams, two shoulders a couple racks of ribs as well as loin roasts and a bunch of chops in the freezer. Of course two thick chops did not make it to the freezer as they were needed for quality control purposes and were grilled up last night.

Another Farm Update

Things have gotten away from me again, so this will be another whirlwind update of what I have been doing on and around the farm.

Summer is always a hectic time around the farm, crops to plant, weed and harvest; animals to feed, water and move; etc. Every once in a while my real job also gets in the way. Late July I had to go out to Keystone Colorado to give a talk at a nanotechnology conference. Now that does not sound like a bad thing considering how beautiful Colorado is and all, but with CSA deliveries, Emily's birthday (more on that latter) and generally not wanting to be away from the kids for too long of a time, what could be an enjoyable trip turns into flying out Wednesday to talk on Thursday and flying back home Friday morning.


On the way back to the airport on Friday I took the scenic route over Loveland Pass and got these photos of the sun coming up over the continental divide.

Unfortunately, my original 10:20 am flight home from Denver is canceled and I am re-booked on a 7:30 pm flight. As you might imagine the prospects of hanging around the airport all day and getting in to Dulles airport after midnight are less than appealing. Luckily I am able to connect with the ticketing agent for the 12:10 pm flight and he pushes me up to the top of the waiting list. I physically got the last seat on that flight, last row window seat. This means that I get into Dulles at a much more manageable 6:30 pm and I am back at the farm sometime around 8 pm. The kids are happy since we get to do dinner together and I am happy to unwind.

This was particularly important since my oldest, Emily turned 11 in July and we had a pool party/BBQ for her the following day. Danielle roasted up a farm raised turkey from last year and I BBQed up a huge pork shoulder from one of our hogs. There were also deep fried potato chips from our Red Nordland potatoes made to order and great rolls brought down from New Jersey by my parents. All of the pork and at least half of the turkey went, and I think everyone would still be there eating the potato chips if I was willing to keep frying them.


Doesn't she look all grown up with her new haircut!
Happy Birthday Emily.









Bella (our Jersey cow) is doing well and has seemed to settle in to the routine here on the farm. I am still getting used to how much grass she eats and figuring out how and when to move her to new pasture. She is fairly easy to move in that she respects a single strand of electrified polywire at nose height, but the dance of rotating her with the sheep and the laying hens can get complex. We try to follow Bella with the hens so that they can scratch apart her cow patties and destroy the pathogen cycle. This works ok, but we have not figured out a good way to get her to the upper part of our large pasture and still have a convenient method of watering her. Considering how much water a cow drinks in a day having a close by water source is a must.

My other continual chore is constructing shelters for the animals. In the picture above you can see some poultry shelters fabricated from cattle panels and tarps as well as the store bought canopy Bella uses for shade. A commenter asked how sturdy the canopy is since her cows tend to rub against anything and everything. At the time I mentioned that it was holding up fine. Well two months later and Bella has broken the canopy and I am now in the planning stages for a permanent run in shelter. At first it will just provide shade but I will eventually put three sides on it to provide some shelter in the winter months.

The kids and I went to our first minor league baseball game. They were so excited to go, they even made a homemade t-shirt to support the Hagerstown Suns our local team. Once the hotdogs and ice cream were eaten and the other team got up 7 to nothing with little more than a hit by the home team the kids thought otherwise and decided they had had enough. This was the in the fourth inning mind you. The highlight of the night was that while walking through the parking lot back to our car a father and son who had been collecting the foul balls gave one to the kids to take home.

As I mentioned in a previous post our potatoes have done excellent this year. On top of the 470 lbs of Red Nordlands I harvested 82 lbs of Russian Banana Fingerlings. Corn, my other large crop has not fared as well. The plants themselves have grown tall and strong, however the ears are not getting fully pollinated. Another problem is that someone else is helping themselves to the corn. Lots of ears were pulled off the corn stalks and were lying on the ground after being eaten. The guilty party was trapped this past Sunday. We are in the process of preserving his pelt so that Julia can make something out of it. Originally she was going to make a coon-skin cap for Sam but I am not sure that is still the plan. While we are on the varmint front I was able to get another of the groundhogs who have been raiding our gardens. There is at least one more that I have seen -- shot at and missed in fact. Hopefully the trap or the .223 will take care of him soon enough.

Well that about sums up what I have been doing, except that somewhere during all this I managed to get shingles. For those of you that don't know, shingles is the chicken pox virus playing hide and seek in your spinal cord. As it turns out the virus never goes away but just lies dormant until it decides to come out along a nerve and create a skin rash and a large amount of pain. It is not fun but it seems that I have a rather mild case so that is good.

Even though at times it can be crazy, life on the farm is fun!

UPDATE:

Finally got the elusive third groundhog. She won't be eating any more pumpkins!

Long Weekend of Farm Chores

I have switched to a 9-80 schedule at work, which means I work nine hour days but get every other Friday off. This works out well in that it cuts my driving by 10% and gives me more time to spend with the family. It also means that I have more time to tackle the ever growing honey-do list. This past weekend was hot and dry but there was too much to do around the farm to just relax by the pool. Here is a list of the jobs accomplished.

• Moved the sheep and laying hens to new pasture.
• Refilled piglet water station and water wagon barrels.
• Took trash and recyclables to dump.
• Vacuumed pool.
  
• Picked up and stacked in barn loft 30 bails of straw.

• Helped harvest oats.
• Dug post holes for dog kennel fence.
• Built lumber loft in barn.
  
• Harvested and stored in larder 320 lbs of Red Nordland potatoes.
• Shot ground hog in grain test plot.

Obviously the potato harvest was the most strenuous of the tasks. The kids helped out but lost interest in the hot sun, even though I was paying them $2 for every row of potatoes the picked up. Need to get a photo of the lumber loft. It was a small job with a big payoff since it let me get all the scrap lumber up out of the way. This allowed us to move Danielle's potting bench into the corner that was the scrap wood repository, so now I can pull the tractor or truck straight through the barn. I severely over built the loft so that in the future I can put some floor boards down and it can be used to store hay and straw as well as lumber.

Sunday afternoon I was out in the market garden while Danielle was trellising up tomatoes. On the way in we picked some squash and she complained how something was nibbling on the squash and eating the tops of her bean plants. I had seen a groundhog a couple weeks ago in the potato plot but was unable to get him at the time. I setup in the shade of the barn ~100 yards from the market garden to see if I could put a stop to the problem. I was multitasking, flipping ribs on the grill every half hour or so. Upon returning from flipping the ribs I spotted a groundhog in the grain test plot. He saw me as well and scurried off into the cover of some bushes. Ten minutes or so later curiosity or hunger got the best of him and he came back out into the garden. He won't be eating anymore of our veggies, but it is unclear if it is the one that was doing damage in the market garden since they are roughly 50 yards apart. Only time will tell.

Finished off the weekend with a delicious Sunday dinner of the BBQed ribs, country home fries made with potatoes, onion and green pepper from our garden as well as raw green beans. It was a tiring but satisfying weekend.

Monday after work additions

• Cemented in dog kennel posts.
• Built bean trellis.
• Reattached roof flashing ripped off by thunderstorm.
  

Humerous Sign

Here is a favorite road sign of mine.


It is located at a merge point for an on-ramp to US 81 South. I find it funny since I always imagine that the top sign came first, then someone decided that the information was not presented plainly enough and added the lower one.

Too Hot to Farm!

We have been having something of a hot snap here the last couple of weeks, with temperatures reaching into the mid 90's with the humidity trying to match it. The work doesn't stop around the farm when it is hot.

Barn thermometer.


Bella is smart enough to get out of the sun.


Unlike the crazy farmers.
Here Julia is planting another round of sweet corn.

I hooked up an automatic waterer for the piglets.



But they still enjoy taking a bath to cool off.

My new farm hat and lots of water have been a must.



The reward for all this hot work -- a fresh ham
on the BBQ with some deviled eggs and sauted spinach.

Morning Chores

This past weekend I took the camera out with me for my morning chores.

The piglets are always anxious for their breakfast.

The red potatoes are coming in nicely, and the goats are enjoying their job of keeping down the brush.

The chickens are always on the look-out for something tasty.

Big boy is moving slow before his first cup of coffee.

Pig Roast

Since we have more piglets than we care to feed out I started the process of reducing numbers this past weekend. We are planning on culling the boys through out the summer and just feed out the three girls to market weight. This was the first time I butchered a pig and it all went fairly well. The little guy was 32 lbs live weight which made home butchering possible. I don't imagine a large pig would be all that much more difficult, but not have the necessary equipment to manipulate a ~250 lb pig means that I will leave the real butchering to the experts. I had planned to roast up the entire pig on the BBQ rotisserie but he was too long to fit. Instead we cooked up the front half. The back half is frozen in two portions and I still need to make sausage from the head and neck meat. I really need to pick up a copy of the The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating so that I can find out how to make the best use out of the pigs. I already have a book on Charcuterie but need some information on making natural sausage casings and other lost arts.




As far as seasoning all I did was make some slits in the skin and stuffed them with garlic. The pork effectivley self-basted as it slow roasted over indirect heat. The pork was the most tender I have ever eaten. The tenderloin in particular just melted in your mouth. My parents were down to celebrate Sam's B-Day a little early and all enjoyed the feast.

Farm Work Catch-Up Post

Spring has clearly sprung around here and so have all the farm chores. I am a sporadic blogger at best but like having this as a record so that I can look back to see where we were and to also have an idea of what worked and more importantly what did not.

Over the last few weeks I finished hard fencing the perimeter of our property. Now our entire ~4.75 acres of working land is enclosed by field fencing, with a hot wire running along the top. This lets us make better use of our electric netting since we can situate it against the field fence in a semi-circle and clip into the power at will. More importantly if any of our animals escape their individual paddocks (which the goats are particularly prone to do) they are still confined to our property. A final piece of fencing that needs to be accomplished is surrounding the market garden so that any aforementioned escapees do not gain access. I am going back and forth on what is the best way to accomplish this. Field fencing would be the strongest and most durable solution, but would make plowing and prepping the fields more difficult since the tractor would have restricted access. I am thinking about using some of the electric netting since it could be removed and installed as needed but it would be less of a barrier to the animals and would require that I maintain the fence line so that the charger does not short out due to long wet grass.

Speaking of plowing fields, last weekend I plowed up the newly expanded market garden as well as a new plot that will be planted with a variety of grains. I was able to borrow a plow from my neighbor and modify it to fit my tractor. I always enjoy being able to borrow farm tools, especially ones like a plow that you only need to use for one to two days in any given year. This past week I also ran the disc through both plots a number of times to break up the soil and get it ready for planting.


Finally on to this past weekend. Danielle cut up 50 lbs of seed potatoes this week so priority number one on Saturday was to get these in the ground as we were expecting rain on Sunday. Julia helped me place all the potatoes in the trenches and even covered one entire row. In all we planted 11 rows each 85 feet long. I still have 50 lbs of Yukon golds and 20 lbs of Russian fingerlings to get into the ground. The giant market garden is not looking so large anymore and the free area will continue to shrink as I get the other potatoes in.


Gratefully, the rains came as promised and so far we have received over an inch and a half of much needed precipitation. I know others are barely keeping there heads above water with all the rain this Spring (sorry Woody) but we really needed a good soaking. This will go a long way to help all the new young plants that have started to pop in the last few weeks as well as provide a good watering in for the potatoes and the 50 trees that Danielle planted this weekend. It also provided some time for us to rest aside from rinsing out some recycled water containers with the runoff from our gutters.

Turkey's Out to Pasture

Last Friday and Saturday Danielle was learning how to shear sheep, so my work crew and I were left to our own devices. Our Narragansett turkeys have started laying for the season and we wanted to get them moved out onto pasture before the hens started to set. We did not want to move them after they were setting since this would likely be stressful on the hens and eggs, and based on last year, moving them after the poults hatched out would be a lesson in futility since the poults are wary of us and quite quick. We definitely needed to move them since our barn yard area needs to rest over the summer to recoup from having all the animals on it, as well as the fact that the turkeys got into the neighbors grape vines last year, something that will not be repeated.


The kids helped me put some sides and a back onto a simple shelter we used last summer to provide shade for the geese. We used some scrap wood I had left over from the basement remodel we have been doing. The crew got a ride on the trailer out to the turkeys new pen with the shelter, electric poultry netting and some straw for a nest.


We tied the electric netting into the fence I ran last week, giving them a nice sized area to hang out in.


The hens seem to have found the nest in the corner of the shelter acceptable. We moved out 8 eggs and as of last night I counted 11 in the straw. Not sure if they will share this nest, or if one will lay another clutch once the other sets. I guess as in everything we do on the farm, only time will tell.

Spring Farm Work

Spring brings about a lot of changes and chores around the farm. One of the bigger chores for me was pulling a fence line through the overgrown hedgerow on one side of our property. The previous owners had a fence in there at one time but never maintained it, and every time it became overgrown they would just put in new t-posts. This limited the amount of usable pasture that we had access to and made it difficult to allow the goats to browse the hedgerow since I had no way of containing them on the other side. Starting late winter I began the task of chopping a path through the wild olive, rosa multiflora, Chinese sumac, and honeysuckle that is our hedgerow. The culmination was on Easter Sunday when I was finally able to put in the field fencing.


It is hard to see here but if you click on the image to enlarge it you can see that the fence line goes through the hedgerow just in front of the larger trees on the hill behind the mobile chicken coop. The weather was beautiful on Sunday (warm but not hot and plenty of sun) and Julia came out and helped me put the finishing touches on the fence. She stood at one end of the last pull and told me where to place the t-posts so that the were in a nice straight line. Jules was a great help and when we were policing up all the tools and getting ready to go in she told me that this was the best Easter ever since she got to find an Easter basket, got a new game and DVD and got to spend time with me. Well I had to agree that it was a pretty great Easter after she told me that.

Spring also brings about the start of barbecue season on our farm. For Easter this year I barbecued up a beef brisket for the first time. The whole family is fond of pulled pork so I did more or less the same recipe. First I give it a dry rub consisting of paprika, chili pepper, garlic and salt. Put it on the grill with the coals off to the side and cover with the lid. After 8 hours, periodically turning, mopping with a mixture of oil, white vinegar and tabasco, and adding coals to keep the temperature the meat is done.

Since I was in charge of cooking, and was also doing the fencing we ended up having a carnivores delight dinner. The entire meal consisted of the beef brisket, rolls, BBQ sauce and beer. The kids of course got to choose their own beverage but seemed to really like the meat. I am sure it is not the healthiest way to eat and I would not want to do it all the time, but after a long weekend of fencing gorging myself on beef and beer was pretty great.

Hope everyone had a good start to Spring.

Full Moon Rising

Here is the view of the moon rising from our back porch. Depending on your religious/historical associations you might call this the Paschal moon (which is why Easter is so early this year), or the Worm moon (so named for the appearance of worm cast in spring).

Snug as pigs in straw

Well that might not be the correct saying, but these little guys and gals seem pretty happy.


They are our first litter of Tamworths here on the farm so we are probably obsessing a little over them. You can see that we have two distinct color variations blonde and red. Danielle thinks that all the blondes are females, but I will request that you all refrain from the dumb blonde jokes.


I look in on them when I feed the pigs, since their mama Maya is distracted. Big Boy, the sire is in an adjoining pen and has been foaming at the mouth a number of times when I came near. I guess he is anxious to protect his offspring, which is a good thing, but might make our barrowing of the boys difficult. He calms down when he has food in front of him so we might have to feed both Mama and Papa and see if we can abscond with the boys. Will let you know how that goes.