Adventures in Farming

Snow Day

2009-01-27T12:57:00.003-05:00

The kids are away and I end up with a snow day. I guess that is just how it works out sometimes. Got up, went out and took care of the animals this morning at 4:30 am. We already had about an inch of snow but still planned on going in to work, that is until I went back inside and turned on the news. All the schools are closed in the DC metropolitan area and they are calling for a nasty mix of snow/rain/ice etc. Email the people I was to meet with today to tell them I am not coming in and climb back into bed. Wake up at a very reasonable 8 am, and start my day again. Shoveled out the driveway and was beginning to think I made the wrong decision since we only have between an 1 ½ and 2 inches of snow, only to find out the all the surrounding counties have implemented snow emergency plans -- meaning no one on the roads without snow tires or chains. Guess I made the correct decision.

Here are some pictures -- decided to go black and white since it is overcast and the colors didn't show up well anyway.

Bella hanging out in her stall.

Inside one of the high tunnels before I cleaned off the snow.

Maya having some water. She is doing well but unfortunately only two of the piglets made it. I don't think Maya had enough conditioning to support them all so she culled down the numbers.

The barnyard gang hanging out on a snowy day.

Winter Piglets

2009-01-25T10:03:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post so Danielle and the kids, who are on a road trip, and anyone else who is interested can see the new piglets.

So far we have 3 boys and a girl. Unfortunately, two other pigs didn't make it. One pig must have wandered off and succumbed to the cold while the other was stillborn.

We would not have planned for a liter at this time of the year but Big Boy jumping the fence changed things.

Cold Morning Chores

2009-01-21T08:09:00.006-05:00

Due to the combination of the Martin Luther King Holiday and Inauguration Day I had an extra long weekend. Actually I was off on Friday as well due to my 9/80 schedule so it was a relaxing 5 days around the farm. I try to do all the farm chores when I am off work since Danielle does them during the week, especially during the winter months since I leave the house before sun up and don't get home until 5 PM.

We have been experiencing quite a cold snap lately which made the morning chores particularly brisk. I am not complaining, since I realize many other parts of the country are below zero in actual temperature and -30° F or more with wind chill, but 5° F for Maryland is damn cold.

When it is this cold Buddy grabs his morning breakfast, in this case a meaty bone from the previous nights pork roast, and retires to the relative warmth of his straw filled dog house.

I tend to give all the animals larger portions of feed to help them stay warm. Danielle also put new straw in all of their shelters at the start of the cold snap.

One of the biggest problems is keeping water available to everyone. We have an electric de-icer in Bella's water trough adjacent to the barn. We have not however found a good way to keep the other animals waters from freezing solid. This leads to twice a day hauling of water from the barn to the animal paddocks, luckily only 50 yards or so. The ice then is broken out of their buckets and the fresh water poured in. The pigs manage to drink or spill all of their water before it freezes so in their case it is just a matter of retreiving their trough from wherever they dragged it to and filling it.

Here is an obligatory self portrait of me all bundled up for the morning chores. In addition to my pajamas from the night before I have on a turtle neck, waffle insulated hoodie, hat and insulated coveralls. While I managed to stay relatively warm it was still great to come in by the warm wood stove when I was finished.

Hope everyone is staying warm.

Holiday ReCap

2009-01-06T07:28:00.009-05:00

The Holiday Season was hectic as usual (in a good way) as one can surmise from my lack of posting. The kids really seemed excited by this years bounty, which was heavy on Lego's. We never seem to be able to get enough of those.

Christmas day was beautiful and we all went for a walk in the pastures to enjoy the sunny weather.

Our Tom Turkey was also strutting his stuff in the afternoon sun.

We were lucky enough to have beautiful weather again on New Year's Day and went for a short hike on the Appalachian Trail up towards Annapolis Rocks with some friends who were in visiting. Seeing all the boulders got the kids (and adults) excited to start climbing again.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy Holiday Season!

Fun on the Potomac

2008-10-21T07:05:00.006-04:00

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

2008-09-04T15:07:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-20T09:00:00.005-04:00

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

2008-08-11T14:09:00.013-04:00

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

2008-07-21T07:27:00.008-04:00

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

2008-06-27T08:01:00.003-04:00

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!

2008-06-09T07:50:00.009-04:00

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

2008-05-28T09:07:00.006-04:00

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

2008-05-14T14:59:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-21T08:30:00.005-04:00

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

2008-04-02T11:24:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-25T07:49:00.005-04:00

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

2008-03-22T08:21:00.004-04:00

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

2008-03-10T09:00:00.004-04:00

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.

Spring Rains

2008-03-06T08:48:00.004-05:00

After work last night I took the kids to check out what happens when the Spring rains come. This is one of our fishing spots along the Conococheague Creek. The nominal creek bank is 20 to 30 ft from where the wood posts are. Here is what it looks like in the summer.

When the creek is running normal this waterfall is about 5 feet high. Yesterday there was not much difference in the height on either side.

We watched a number of large tree trunks go over the waterfall before heading back to the house. While this is less than a quarter mile from our house we are a good 100 ft or so higher in elevation, which made the kids feel comfortable that we would not be flooded out.

Archive Meme

2008-02-09T11:04:00.000-05:00

I was doing my best to ignore the Archive Meme that Jenny tagged me for, but since I am sick as a dog and spending the entire day sitting on my ass next to the wood burning stove now seemed like as good a time as any. The directions for the meme are at the bottom of the post. I omitted the part about tagging 5 other people since I am anti-social by nature.

Family : The best way to celebrate any occasion, in my opinion anyway, is to get the family together and eat and drink to excess. This post talks about our Holiday Feast a couple of days after Christmas.
Friends : This would more appropriately be labeled neighbors, but even if they are not close friends good neighbors are great to have. I have been able to borrow a plow from a neighbor down the road for the last two years, and have been the happy recipient of two old trailers from my next door neighbor which I transformed into a utility farm trailer and a mobile chicken coop.
Me : One of my passions is cooking food over an open fire. We tend to grill year round even in the snow and rain. Here is the rotisserie Danielle got me for Father's Day last year. Its funny (given my anti-social admission above) that one of my favorite things is to BBQ up a pork shoulder for a bunch of people, like when we have our Memorial Day BBQ for friends and CSA members. To steal a line from Clerks "I hate people, but I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic."
Something I Love : This one is easy and hard at the same time. Easy since the thing I love most is my wife and family, hard since I don't tend to post sappy blogs. These posts about birthdays (Julia's, and Dainielle's)will have to do.
Bloggers Choice : As the name of my blog implies the adventures we get into trying to farm, which are largely the result of us having no prior experience, are the most memorable things that happen on the farm. Here are two posts about learning to castrate pigs and getting them to the butcher, which demonstrate this point

Archive Meme Instructions: Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you've written. ... but there is a catch: Link 1 must be about family. Link 2 must be about friends. Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are... what you're all about. Link 4 must be about something you love. Link 5 can be anything you choose. I think this is a great way to circulate some of the great older posts everyone had written, return to a few great places in our memories and also learn a little something about ourselves and each other that we may not know.

Turning Japanese --- I really think so

2008-02-02T17:14:00.000-05:00

I was in Japan last week for a workshop related to my day job. It is amazing to see how the Japanese use space to its utmost. Parking lots had triple-decker elevator parking devices. One car was stored up in the air, one was at ground level and a third was held underground. The entire unit went up and down on hydraulics like the lift at a garage. (Sorry I failed to get a picture of this.)

The other noticeable area that they utilized space optimally is in agriculture. Almost any space between houses, warehouses, stores, basically anywhere there was some flat ground, held a garden. Since it is the middle of winter most of these gardens were pretty bare, but the hoop houses were plentiful and the cabages and onions that were still growing looked gorgeous, in perfectly straight rows with nary a weed in sight. The fields that were farrow had beautiful rich black soil just waiting for the weather to warm enough for spring planting.

I also saw vast expanses of rice paddies. They were all drained for the winter but you could see the canal system and pumps that allowed them to be flooded. I apologize for the glare in the pictures, the sun was shining off the windows of a train.
Tokyo is amazing. It is more Manhattan then Manhattan. Large portions of the city are as billboarded and lit up as times square.

But there are still signs of the past such as this Kabuki Theater,

Buddhist Temple

and most notably the Imperial Palace.

Snow Day

2008-01-23T13:34:00.000-05:00

I was on kid duty Friday so Danielle could go to a farming conference. It happened to work out well since we received a couple inches of snow Thursday, not enough to cause Danielle any problems getting to the conference, but enough for the kids and I to have some fun.

Emily and Julia bundled up to help me with the morning chores.

And here is what the barn yard looked like when we walked out.

The girls were checking out some bunny tracks in the upper corner of the field, but the Turkeys thought they were playing with them.

Here is Sisyphus and his sister trying to roll his snow boulder up to the barn.

Goat Curry

2008-01-14T08:42:00.000-05:00

Since winter has set in I decided to spice things up by trying some new recipes. As I blogged about here I butchered our Nigerian Dwarf Goat wether earlier this fall. At the time we grilled up some of the tenderloin and enjoyed it, but since then the goat meat has just been sitting in the deep freeze. Not just wanting to do beef recipes with goat I went to the largest cookbook in existence, the web. Typing goat stew into Google brought me to a Caribbean Goat Stew recipe that sounded interesting. I followed the recipe fairly faithfully except for omitting the tomatoes since we obviously do not have any fresh ones. I could have pulled some frozen ones out of the freezer but I was being lazy. The resulting stew was great (if I do say so myself) but what was even better was that everyone ate it. Now my kids are very adventurous eaters, but I would not have been surprised if they had passed on this meal. The curry gave it a nice kick, but did not make it too spicy for the kids. The funny thing is that everyone liked the meat, it was the potatoes and carrots that were not as well received. They came out as I would have expected and as I have had in other Indian Curries, but Danielle thought it would be better with vegetables cooked separately with a different flavoring. Truth be told she is not much for stew, or mushy vegetables. I knew that she really did like the goat though when she mentioned making the curried meat but with a different side dish later this week.

I find I get great enjoyment out of my kids eating food that I raised and prepared myself. My dad used to tell me something similar when I was a kid but I did not appreciate it until I had kids of my own. I guess that is always the case.

Julia's Birthday

2008-01-04T07:45:00.000-05:00

My lovely daughter Julia turns 9 today. To celebrate here are some pictures of her over the last year.

Driving the tractor on a warm winter day (January 07).

Tilling up the garden (March).

Helping me construct the mobile chicken coop (April).

Swinging in the crab apple tree (April).

Riding on the water wagon (May).

Hanging out with her cousin (June).

Fishing (July).

Hiking the C&O Canal (August).

Collecting eggs (September).

Kyoshi Warrior (October).

High atop a load of straw (November).

Farm chores on a cold winter morning (December).

For anyone with a slow internet connection I am sorry for all the pictures, but Julia does a lot in a year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Julia!!!
Love Papa

Holiday Feast

2008-01-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

A couple days after Christmas my mother, father, sister and nephew drove down from New Jersey to celebrate the holidays. I took the opportunity to try out, so to speak, one of my new presents. Danielle got me The River Cottage Meat Book for Christmas this year.

This book is a wonderful combination of political/social commentary on food production, cooking theory, recipes as well as gorgeous pictures and humorous anecdotes. It is truly a coffee table book with a message, and being a new farmer/foodie I am all ears. I was already planning to make prime rib since we had some in the deep freeze from last years side of beef, and figured this would be a great occassion to try out my first recipe from the book. I cooked up two prime rib roasts since neither seemed big enough for the 5 adults and 4 children who would be eating dinner.

Fairly simple recipe for the beef, rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, cook for 30 minutes under high heat to brown the outside then slow cook until done. Hugh, the author of the book, stresses that all roasted meat needs to rest for a minimum of 30 minutes for best results. Actually, the way he talks about it, you are committing a mortal sin if you don't let the meat rest. So while the meat was resting we took some of the drippings and made some Yorkshire Pudding (also from a recipe in the book).

I had never had Yorkshire Pudding so was not really sure as what to expect. There really is not much in Yorkshire Pudding, the recipe called for just flour, milk, water, salt and eggs. It did call for 4 eggs plus 2 more egg yolks which makes it quite decedent. The pudding puffed up nicely as you can see above, and the meat was thankful for the rest.

We also had mashed potatoes, gravy, and a green salad from our garden to round out the meal. Below is some of the dinner party.

My daughters were dressed up as fairies, and my son was too hot from playing with his cousin to wear a shirt, we have a very relaxed dress code at Chez Kushmerick. My nephew and sister are also in the picture, arguably much more appropriately dressed. Long story short the dinner and company was excellent and too many bottles of wine were consumed, exactly how I like to spend the holidays. The Yorkshire Pudding was a huge success, and based on the way it disappeared I foresee making it again soon.

Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday full of good food and friends.

Early Xmas Present

2007-12-23T17:26:00.000-05:00

We were gifted with a beautiful rainbow a couple days before Christmas.

Ice Storm

2007-12-16T11:52:00.001-05:00

We got an ice storm Saturday night/Sunday morning. We got off light compared to the midwest but everything did get a thick glaze of ice.

Julia came out to help me tend the animals, and had a lot of fun knocking the ice off the fences and gates.

All the animals weathered the storm fine. Luckily the pigs and sheep respect the electric netting since the thick glaze of ice would have prevented it from shocking them.

A large branch from a neighbors evergreen came down due to the ice landing on our fence. After cutting it free with the chainsaw, the fence rebounded, although I may need to add a t-post at the spot to take out the slight bow that is left.

The asparagus stalks were finished off by the ice. They were ready to be cut down anyway, but they do make quite a tangled mess.

High Tunnel Construction Part 2

2007-12-14T08:21:00.000-05:00

Snapped a few pictures of the finished hoop house when I got home from work last evening.
Danielle purchased the 6 mil plastic in a roll 100 ft long and 40 ft wide. The plastic is held in place along the sides by simply burying it in a shallow trench. We cut 24 ft of the plastic so that we had 2 ft on each side to bury in the ground.
The ends are framed out with 2 x 4s with a 4 ft wide door on one end and a window at the other.
We need the window so that we can get cross ventilation on warm days so that we don't bake the plants. You can see some of the seedlings in the picture above.

T-posts are driven into the ground and attached to the end frames to add support. It is not really clear but we also strung all the hoops together with rope to tie the entire structure together. Probably the most difficult part was figuring out how to attach the plastic at the ends. We ended up just stapling it in place, which was easy enough, but I had wanted to avoid it so that we could more easily remove and reuse the plastic. Well we see how it holds up and we may end up leaving this in place all year since we are expanding our market garden, thanks to all the rooting the pigs are doing -- but that is another post. As far as holding up to the weather the hoop house so far has proven up to the task. It was something of a trial by fire, since the day after we finished it we had a nasty wind storm with 50 mph wind gusts followed by 5-6 inches of snow. Besides having to knock the accumulated snow off the top of the tunnel all was well.

I need to put a remote thermometer in the hoop house to get an idea of how well it is doing at insulating the plants. As you can see in the pictures from inside the tunnel it has already started to create its own weather system thanks to water vapor condensation.

High Tunnel Construction

2007-12-11T09:01:00.002-05:00

Here are some photos from our high tunnel construction project. I am sure Danielle, will explain the rationale and such on her blog later, but since I am known as Manuel on the farm I will just give you an idea of the construction. It is a simple design, 4 ft long rebar driven into the ground with 1 ½ inch pvc conduit slipped over it to form the hoops. The hoops themselves are 20 ft long and 14 ft across at the ground which makes the tunnel just under 6 ft high in the middle. The overall length of the house is 34 feet.

One of the great things about this type of building is that you can vary the dimensions to fit your space/needs. We wanted to get the most plantable area so we went with a slightly wider footprint, 14 ft for the 20 ft long hoops, most designs suggested a 12 ft span. Adding the extra 2 ft in width dropped the middle some, but since Danielle and the kids will be doing most of the work inside it makes little difference.

We were only able to get the conduit locally in 10 ft lengths, but they did come with bell ends so we were able to glue them together without a separate coupler. The kids helped me do the conduit gluing, and measuring out and pounding in of the rebar. Emily and I bent the hoops into position and slipped them over the rebar.

I will post pictures of the framed out ends, as well as the finished product when I get a chance.

First Snow

2007-12-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

Well we are having our first snow of the season, and it reckons to be a real one. We have at least an inch already and it isn't even noon yet. Overall they are calling for up to four to six inches. Went out deer hunting this morning but nothing seems to be moving with the snow falling. Maybe I will get lucky this afternoon if it lets up.

The pigs now have access to part of the market garden and seem to
be enjoying cleaning up the leftover corn stalks and other vegetable matter.

The Navajo-Churro sheep don't mind the snow at all with their nice thick wool coats.

This will likely be the only snow many of these geese see, as we need to butcher them soon for Xmas.

Silly Geese

2007-11-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

Our Chinese Geese are growing well. We plan to harvest all but three (one gander and two female geese) the week before Christmas. While my wife will not miss them getting into the market garden -- they did a job on the radishes -- I will miss the funny way they flock about the pastures. They get all excited and have an almost deafening squawk when it is feeding time, but easily get spooked and run off flapping their wings. They are unable to fly more than a few feet but they make quite a spectacle of themselves trying.

Reducing Numbers on the Farm

2007-11-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

Haven't posted much recently due to all the work around the farm. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving we reduced our poultry numbers significantly. First we took forty nine broilers and six of our Royal Palm turkeys in for processing on Monday November 12th. We recently purchased a second freezer in which to store said birds. The fifteen Narragansett turkeys we were selling were scheduled to go in Thursday night November 15th.

When I got home from work on Thursday and saw my daughter in the house she informed me that the turkeys were up by the barn. Since I knew Danielle had planned on having them loaded up into the dog kennels which we use to transport them I thought everything was set. After asking Julia if they were all loaded up she said "not exactly". It turns out that Danielle and the kids had been chasing our free range turkeys around our and our neighbors pastures for much of the day. She had only managed to catch two or three, but had localized a bunch with poultry netting up by the barn. Five had jumped the fences onto neighbors properties and were so skiddish from being chased all day that we were unable to get them back where they belonged. That night we were able to coax the rest of them into two of the stalls in our barn. Hopping to still get all of the turkeys to the processor for our 5:30 AM appointment Danielle and I woke up at 4AM on Friday to try to catch the wayward birds and get them loaded onto the pickup truck. We had no luck that morning with the five that had flown the coop so we decided to just take up the nine Narragansett and two Royal Palms we had been able to capture.

Over the weekend we were able to get all the birds back on our property, and confined in the barn stalls. Friends of ours who had arrived Friday night, got to see what a working farm is like, as Danielle and I plucked and processed four turkeys on Saturday. I remember their older son (~6 years old) asking me "is it dead" as I carried a recently deceased bird in from the barn to be plucked and eviscerated. Finally Tuesday night, two days before Thanksgiving I got around to butchering the last two turkeys, one of which was a rather large tom which would be our Thanksgiving bird.

All in all everything worked out fine. We were able to fill all our orders, have a couple birds in the freezer available for sale for Christmas, as well as a few smaller 8-10 pound birds for us to eat throughout the winter. The fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, along with the rave reviews of those that purchased the birds makes it all worthwhile.

Heritage Turkeys

2007-11-07T12:04:00.000-05:00

We are getting ready to take our heritage Narragansett and Royal Palm turkeys to the processors next week in preparation for Thanksgiving. The New York Times has a short article on why it is important to keep these and other heritage breeds around.

The upper picture is our Narragansett Tom, the lower is our hen with her poults right after they hatched last May.

Load of Straw

2007-11-03T18:25:00.000-04:00

With the dry summer hay and straw is scarce in these parts. Danielle has been calling around without much luck trying to find some straw for bedding once we move the animals back to the barn. Thursday she calls me at work to tell me that I am picking up 30 bales after work. She had talked to the farmer on the phone and got directions to his place. Therein lies the first problem. If you have ever received directions from someone who has lived their entire life in the same town you know that they do not necessarily give the best directions. I guess that is not completely fair. They do not give directions that an outsider can follow, since they tend to use landmarks and names for places and roads that are not the norm (i.e. not on Google Maps).

I am supposed to meet the farmer between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, which means in pitch black, due to the season and the fact that it is a new moon. I drive around for a half hour trying to find his place, turn out he does not actually live on the street he told my wife, and am unable to get him on the phone since it is busy. After going up and down a bunch of country roads I finally find his drive and pull into his place which has no outside lights on. The nice guy comes out and states matter-of-factly, "must of been hard finding this place in the dark".

He directs me to pull around to the back of his barn and we begin to load up the truck. I have a tough time keeping up stacking the bales as he tosses them in the back of my truck. He has no lights on the outside of his barn so I do my best to strap it all down in the little bit of light that is coming from inside the barn. Not happy with the security of my load, I drive a mile or so and pull into a McDonalds, park under a light pole in their parking lot and rearrange the load. Then it is a slow drive with blinkers on back to my place.

The kids ckome out of the house and are all excited to see the truck all loaded up and want to be on top of the straw mountain.

Then Danielle and the kids help me unload it all into our loft.

All and all it worked out fine, we now have straw for the winter, and I learned not to pickup straw from an unknown farm at night.

Fillet du Chevon

2007-10-19T20:31:00.000-04:00

Or for those of us who don't speak French, Goat Tenderloin.

This past weekend I butchered a ~2 year old Nigerian Dwarf goat wether. We had kept him around the farm to provide company for our doe, but since she now has her own kid he was not needed anymore. I had never butchered a large animal. I have processed my fair share of chickens, turkeys, ducks and even the random rabbit, but a goat, even a dwarf goat seemed a big step. But with the help of the book of Country Wisdom & Know-How and some net searches I figured I would give it a go.

The weather on Saturday cooperated, being slightly cool. Julia and Sam were interested in seeing the process so they climbed up into the hay loft, watched and took some photos, while I dispatched the goat with a .22 behind his ear. The hardest part of the process was getting the goat hung at a level to work on. I wasn't prepared for how heavy he was and I didn't have a block and tackle handy.

After getting the goat hung up the skinning and gutting process went fairly smoothly, although slowly. When I was mostly done I took him out to the clothes line so that I could finish in the sun.

I then washed and quartered the carcass and put it in our garage fridge to age. I went to Seattle on business Monday-Wednesday. I stayed home from work on Thursday to catch up with my family and started the process of butchering up the carcass. I got three bags of cubed stew meat and some soup bones from hind section. I carved out tenderloins, or back straps, from the ribs/chops. The bellies were saved for the dogs.

I still have a lot more to butcher but was interested in trying out the meat, so I decided to grill up some of the tenderloins. Danielle took this opportunity to pull together a zero mile meal for the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge.

Danielle describes the meal in detail, all I will say is that the goat tenderloin was great. Not quite as tender as good beef tenderloin, but the flavor was excellent. There was a slight undertone of goat but there was not a strong gamey taste. We were somewhat concerned since this goat was considerably older than the age at which they are conventionally butchered, usually around eight months. I am happy to say though that there was not any taint to the meat, although I was careful to closely trim all the fat, which is where the strong flavor supposedly is concentrated.

Another Birthday

2007-10-10T14:12:00.000-04:00

This past weekend it was my turn to celebrate getting another year older. I had a most enjoyable weekend, highlighted by some fabulous food. You may notice that regardless of the occasion we celebrate with food. I had at least two birthday dinners, one Sunday and one yesterday on my actual birthday. On Sunday Danielle made homemade sundried tomato fettuccini topped with alfredo sauce. I put together and fried up some crabcakes which she served over a bed of sauted greens. All this with some homemade chiabata bread and a glass (or two or ...) of red wine made for a wonderful gastronomical experience.

Last night we made a much more "normal" meal. Rotisserie (farm raised) chicken with grilled olive tomatoes over the remaining sundried tomato fettuccini, sauted string beans and foccacia bread. As Danielle pointed out in a recent post, this is why we farm, and also why we gain weight in the winter.

We had a lot of great food but the highlight of my birthday celebration has to be the birthday video-card that my kids sent me.

Happy Brithday

2007-09-27T12:34:00.000-04:00

This past weekend was Danielle's birthday. No I am not going to tell you how old she is, you do not get to be married for 12 years without learning some things. Much if not all of our celebrations (birthdays, holidays, etc.) are organized around food and this one is no different. Eggs Benedict is Danielle's favorite breakfast. In fact she would probably be happy to eat it for any meal of the day. This time it was special since we were able to make the entire meal from our own farm produce. The bacon was from our first round of pigs, the eggs were fresh from the hens and the potatoes were grown this spring. Even the herbs and berries were grown on the farm. The only things not produced locally was the English muffins, the butter in the sauce and the salt and pepper.

The weather was gorgeous and we enjoyed Danielle's birthday brunch out on the patio, although the mimosas destroyed my productivity for the rest of the day.

Happy Birthday Honey!

Labor Day Farm Feast

2007-09-04T12:19:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you put together farm raised baby back ribs

with corn and beans right out of the garden?

A delicious Labor Day meal.

The whole family enjoyed the feast,

although the kids were disappointed that the nice large watermelon we picked was still not ripe.

Maybe the watermelons will be ready by October!

Another Varmint Down

2007-08-29T08:31:00.000-04:00

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my jobs around the farm is de-predation. Last night I was picking corn from the market garden, some for our dinner and some for the CSA members. Walking back to the house I noticed a groundhog munching on some grass, just on the other side of one of our fences. I quickly hustled into the house and grabbed my .22 rifle. The dogs were out in the barnyard, separated from the groundhog by the field fence and obviously unaware of his presence. After telling the dogs to sit and stay, so as not to spook the groundhog, I started creeping over to see if he was still out. At first I didn't see him since he was on the other side of a burn pile and by the time I located him, he spotted me and made a quick retreat to the hedgerow. Determined not to give up, and knowing that groundhogs are curious and often come back out to see whats going on I setup at the fence line to wait. After ten minutes or so I was about to give up, when I realized he was sitting just at the edge of the hedgerow in some tall grass. I slowly took aim and squeezed the trigger. After walking up and around the fence line I found the groundhog dead having made it only half way back into his hole.

Early in the season we had a problem with a groundhog tunneling into our kitchen garden. I shot "at" one but did not recover the body. The tunneling into our garden stopped so I assumed I had gotten him but he had managed to get back to his burrow. This groundhog was shot in the same spot, but whether it is the same one or another that took over the empty burrow I have no way of knowing. What I do know for sure though is that he will not be digging holes in our garden or eating any of our vegetables.

CSA Deliveries

2007-08-22T13:10:00.000-04:00

As part of our CSA, on Wednesdays I deliver some shares to members at work. Normally I bring in two shares, but today due to some surplus and other arrangements there were four. Danielle, who does the vast majority of all CSA related work -- I am in charge of corn and potatoes -- picks the shares Wednesday morning before I go to work so that everything is as fresh as possible. This morning when my alarm goes off at 5:45 AM I look out the bedroom window to see a headlamp in the garden. The shortening days mean that Danielle is often out in the dark picking produce so that I can beat the traffic. The fact that there were four shares to pick and the drizzling rain did not make this endeavor any easier on her. The produce looked so good all laid out on the kitchen table right before she packed it into the coolers.

Danielle puts a tremendous amount of work into the CSA and our farm in general, all so that we can eat the healthiest most sustainable food possible. I try to make sure that I acknowledge all her hard work and thank her for all the great food we get to eat, but since I am sure I don't do it enough I thought I would say it again here.

I love you honey!

Market Garden -- Update #3

2007-08-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

Here is what the market garden looked like last night. We were lucky enough to get over an inch of rain last Thursday on top of the half inch or so we received over the last two weeks. Thanks to the rain things are finally starting to green up a little. We are still in drought conditions but at least the plants are growing some and the pastures are starting to recover. The rain also has the weeds growing again, so we need to get on top of them before they start to take over.

The first two plantings of corn had good yields, however the corn worm pressure is increasing so we will have to try to stave them off to save the last couple of plantings. We are leaving the stalks in place until they dry out, then we will harvest them and put them up in the barn for winter feed. I have hand dug most of the Yukon Gold potatoes and while they still taste great their yield has been abysmal. I need to get the tractor in with the potato plow to get the rest this weekend.

For comparison here are the photos from July 21^st

July 3^rd

and June 19^th

Gone Fishin

2007-07-30T11:24:00.000-04:00

Bored kids and a hot summer day are the perfect ingredients for a fishing trip. We drove down to the Conococheague Creek which is less than a mile from our farm and fished for a while.

The kids eventually got tired of fishing so we went to the Potomac River so that the kids could cool off a little.

To get to the river we pass through the C&O Canal National Historical Park in Williamsport, so we took a little side trip along the canal path.

While walking back to the car we spotted these damselflies mating.

All and all an enjoyable afternoon adventure.

Severe Drought

2007-07-26T09:41:00.000-04:00

It's official, as of Tuesday we are in severe drought conditions. We are located in Washington County which bridges between Pennsylvania and West Virginia to connect the two western counties to the rest of Maryland.

It is bad across much of the South East with Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee fairing the worst. You can see the drought conditions for the entire country at the US Drought Monitoring website.

Market Garden -- Update #2

2007-07-24T15:02:00.000-04:00

Here is how the market garden looked on Saturday. You will notice that the corn is continuing to come in and the sunflowers are also coming up. Unfortunately the Red Nordland potatoes are no where to be found and if you look at the surrounding pasture you can see what a toll the drought is taking on everything.

For comparison here are the photos from July 3^rd

and June 19^th

Best I can remember we haven't had a decent rain since Memorial Day.

First Corn!!!

2007-07-16T08:26:00.000-04:00

Nothing like the first sweet corn to make you remember why we are doing all this. Lack of rain has really been depressing and making this entire endeavor more difficult than last year, but the taste of the first corn fresh from our garden makes it all seem worthwhile.

Last night I grilled up some New York strip steaks from Legacy Manor Farm, and some fresh zucchini from our garden and had a delicious local dinner.

Farm Panorama

2007-07-11T13:17:00.000-04:00

Above is a panorama of our fields/pastures. Our house is just visible behind and to the left of our barn. Our property runs behind several properties and is nominally in the shape of a L. The barn off in the distance is our neighbors. Our turkeys are in the foreground, the mobile layer coop is near the middle and the pig and goat pens are near the right side beyond the market garden.

We had some friends visit us over the long 4th of July holiday. Tom is a painter and has been doing a series of landscapes "to celebrate the beauty, history and reality of life...". While he and his family were visiting he started doing a landscape of our pastures from this perspective. The painting came out so well that I stole the composition for the above photo. We already told him that we want to buy the painting from him after he uses it in an upcoming exhibition.

Praying Mantis and Praying for Rain

2007-07-09T10:30:00.000-04:00

Julia and I were going out to dig some potatoes when we noticed this Praying Mantis on one of our Hostas. I am having fun with the macro function of my digital camera and have been trying to find new things to take close up pictures of.

Unfortunately, the Praying Mantis was the highlight of the outing. I wanted to dig some Yukon Gold potatoes to distribute to our CSA members. We ended up harvesting more than a row of potato plants and did not completely fill up two 2 quart baskets. Last year this same amount of potato plants would have provided us with a trailer full of potatoes, but each plant only had one or two tubers on it.

The severe lack of rain has really taken a toll on our crop production and has been making it difficult to provide enough produce for our CSA members. As my wife and I were discussing over dinner last night, we have our pride and honor wrapped up it meeting our CSA commitments (although part of the CSA model is shared risk) but our financial situation is not affected by the venture. I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have your entire livelihood held hostage by the whims of the weather.

Market Garden -- Update #1

2007-07-03T09:45:00.000-04:00

Here is the first of my promised market garden updates. The corn is doing surprisingly well given the little rain. The first planting has tasseled out and the other three plantings are all going strong. We have our first beans in with our corn and will likely need to start harvesting them this week. We have already harvested some zucchini and there are numerous yellow squash coming along. The yukon gold and fingerling potatoes are continuing to do well, but I am still waiting for the red nordlands that I re-planted to pop. I am hopeful that they will soon, otherwise we will have a diminished potato harvest this year. On Sunday I dug two more of the floundering rows from the upper plot. While the potatoes are still tasty, their yield leaves much to be desired.

De-Predation

2007-07-01T16:28:00.000-04:00

One of my jobs on the farm is keeping predators from harming our livestock and crops. I have a fairly broad definition of predator -- cotton tail rabbit eating our strawberry plants is a predator -- and generally don't mind the job. To date I have taken care of a number of rabbits, one skunk, and one groundhog (or whistle pig). Must mention that I am not positive about the groundhog since he got away, but I am pretty sure I got him with the .22 rifle.

Last night I was feeding the peeps -- 20 some chickens and 8 Chinese geese -- that are brooding in a stall in the barn. The geese had been getting out of the small plastic pool that we were keeping them in so I decided to pull it out to let them run about the stall just like the chickens. Well, I pull the pool away from the wall and I am greeted by a rather large black snake. As I find out later, he was in the middle of making a meal out of one of our Delaware peeps, and based on our count already had helped himself to another sometime earlier. To most people this wouldn't be a big deal, as I mentioned I am in charge of killing on the farm, but I am irrationally afraid of snakes. Just thinking about them gives me the heebie jeebies, but I was mad and this snake was eating my chickens, so I grabbed a shovel and dispatched the snake. I went inside to get the kids before I tossed the snake in the hedgerow since they get mad at me if I don't let them see the carnage. The first thing my 7 year old son says is, "Dad you conquered your fear, I am so proud of you!" To say there was something of a role reversal is an understatement. Sam took this picture of me with the snake on the end of the shovel.

Market Garden

2007-06-19T08:41:00.000-04:00

Here is a picture of our market garden taken on Sunday (click on image for an expanded view). My wife and I (read my wife) are doing a CSA this year, and while a lot of the produce is planted up in our kitchen garden this large plot will provide much of the late season goodies. As you can see (or not see as the case may be) not all that I have listed is up yet, however as of Monday night all of it is at least in the ground.

Everything on the right hand side is Danielle's. My only contribution is plowing and tilling of the ground.

I planted four rounds of corn approximately each two weeks apart. The first corn should be ready in early July if the crazy weather hasn't effected it too much. Danielle is enamored with the native American method of co-planting corn, beans and squash the so called three sisters. The traditional way to do this is put all three seeds into a mound. She modified this by intermixing rows of the three crops. The brilliance of this planting system is that the beans fix nitrogen into the soil --which corn needs loads of-- the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb, and the squash foliage shades the corn roots and crowds out weeds. This is our first year of trying this symbiotic planting so we will have to see how it works.

My other main crop is potatoes. We have three varieties planted in this plot. The Yukon Golds at the top were planted first and are thriving. I have hilled them up repeatedly and they are starting to flower. The Fingerlings were planted somewhat later but are coming up strong and have good looking foliage. The Red Nordlands are actually the result of a failed early crop in an upper field. Both the Yukons and Nordlands were grown from seed potatoes from last years harvest. I planted the Nordlands somewhat early and our cold wet early spring and hot dry late spring was not kind to them. The plants did come up but between the less than stellar weather conditions and the increased potato bug pressure --planted potatoes in the same plot two years in a row-- they were already dieing back. I thus took a gamble, harvested what I could and replanted the potatoes in the market garden. I just got them in the ground this weekend, much later than I would like to plant potatoes but I figured it was worth a shot.

I hope to take this same picture every couple weeks to really appreciate how the garden changes throughout the season.

Watering Pigs

2007-06-18T08:32:00.001-04:00

We need to water a lot of things on the farm, but the pigs are the most fun by far. Our three Tamworth's spend most of the day sleeping in their shelter out of the hot sun, but two or three times a day we go out and spray them down with rain water collected off our barn. When they hear us turn on the pump they come out for a drink and a refreshing cool shower.

The pigs are really happy now that they are all together. Maya was lonely (or so I suppose) being by herself out on pasture. The boys (Grunt and Runt -- same names as our last two males) were real skittish in the barn but settled in quickly after they were moved onto pasture. The three never seemed to have any major problems getting adjusted but the boys were silly for a while. They would pester Maya and nip at her ears. She would put up with this for some time then growl and bite at them when she had had enough. Maya never did any damage to the boys, but they would get submissive and their tails would droop down. A minute or two later you could see their tails curl back up and they would come back and start pestering her again. It was all very amusing.

Pools Up

2007-06-10T08:22:00.000-04:00

It is officially summer on the farm. We set the pool up yesterday morning and got a delivery of 2000 gallons of water in the afternoon. I was in the pool when we were filling it to help get out the wrinkles, but the water was too cold for anyone except a child. Sam in fact slept in his swimsuit so he would be ready to go as soon as the water was delivered.

Lots Going on at the Farm

2007-06-05T09:42:00.000-04:00

We have been quite busy here on the farm. A brief recap of some of what has been going on.

Latte our Nigerian Dwarf goat gave birth to her first kid Dragon. Latte has been a wonderful mother taking good care of her little boy. Danielle has been milking her in the morning for the last week or so, and the two of them (Danielle and Latte) are just starting to get it all worked out. We now have our own milk in the frig.

The geese, ducks, broilers, poults and pullets are all growing like gang busters. They seem to like being out on pasture although it is tough at times keeping them stocked with water.

Our crops have had a rougher time of things. We were cold in the early spring and then jumped right to August type weather -- hot and dry. We fashioned a mobile water station from some freecycled barrels and a 12V pump. We collect any and all rain we get and have been watering the crops with it to make it through the dry patches.

We have recently received some much needed precipitation, and our efforts have seemed to pay off since the corn, beans and squash are doing well.

The kitchen garden is thriving, we have loads of fresh strawberries, peas, and all types of lettuces. Danielle has been busy making and canning strawberry preserves and getting the CSA up and running.

360 degree view from the center of the kitchen garden!
Click on image for larger view.

Did I mention that my wife picked up three Navajo-Churro sheep this weekend,

or that our Narragansett hen hatched out a brood of poults.

Like I said, lots going on at the farm.

Early Father's Day Gift

2007-06-04T12:09:00.000-04:00

Danielle is horrible about keeping secrets, and thus when my Father's day present arrived last week she showed it to me right away. She bought me the grill for Father's day 4 or 5 years ago, so it only seemed fitting to get the matching rotisserie. You can't see it in this picture but there is a small electric motor that mounts on the right side of the spit and an adjustable counterbalance that goes on the left side. We defrosted a free range chicken and I have to say the it came out even better than my beer can chicken. Since it is always rotating the bird essentially self bastes. We had a salad with greens out of our garden as well as some homemade bread to accompany the chicken. We are already looking forward to doing one of our heritage turkeys and maybe even a suckling pig on the spit.

Nothing Like a Fresh Coat of Paint

2007-05-24T08:42:00.000-04:00

I previously mentioned our barn renovations, and last week my parents came down to celebrate Sam's birthday as well as help us paint the barn. Sam and my Dad's birthday are a day apart so we ended up putting my Father to work on his birthday. Didn't really seem fair but he has always helped us paint our houses or do other major renovations. Here he is up on the ladder painting the trim. We finished painting the entire barn and attached chicken coop red, but still have some of the trim to finish up. The paint has added new life to the barn, hopefully it will be good for another 10 years or so.

Thanks Dad!

Moving Animals onto Pasture

2007-05-14T08:21:00.000-04:00

We are busy moving all the livestock away from the barn and out onto pasture. The idea is to let the animals feed on the grass, fertilize the fields and allow the barn yard to rest. The mobile chicken coop was a large part of this but we also moved Mia, our tamworth gilt and our water fowl out this weekend.

I made Mia a simple A-frame structure on skids, siding it with some vinyl siding that was up in our hay loft when we bought the place. We hoped to use just a couple strands of electric tape, but Mia is too much of a "people pig" and would charge through to get back to her people. For now we added a second perimeter of electric netting to keep her in. Hopefully, once she gets used to her new setup, and she gets some company, we have two male weanlings coming in the next week, we will be able to go back to the tape. We have her setup in a small area in hopes that she will root up all the grass. Then we will move her to a new area and repeat.

The ducks and geese are sharing a run. I made them a "tractor" from an old moving crate, chicken wire and an old tarp. Unfortunately they had no desire to go into it at night. They just grouped up and went to sleep out in the grass. I checked on them this morning before going to work and they were happily eating and going about their business. We will use the tractor for the broilers and pullets once they are ready to be put out on pasture, hopefully sometime this week. We also took the cap off my truck and put it out as a run in shelter so the birds can get out of the sun when needed.

So now all we need to do is get the goats, turkey poults, broilers and pullets out on pasture and I will be able to reseed the barn yard.

Mobile Chicken Coop

2007-05-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was converting an old trailer into a mobile chicken coop. We got the trailer from my neighbor and after stripping off some things we didn't need it formed a strong platform to build the coop. I did a simple lean to design with a large nesting box on one end and roosts in the middle. The bottom is diamond metal mesh so hopefully most of the chicken droppings will fall through. The bottom is secured with hardware cloth to keep out any predators and to allow a lot of ventilation. I used metal roofing and a single plastic panel to afford the chickens some natural light. There are large doors at both ends and a small chicken door which is left open during the day.

I set the mobile coop in the barn yard Saturday afternoon and locked all the chickens out of their old coop. Danielle and I came back out Saturday night and transfered all the chickens into their new home.

Sunday morning we moved the coop out onto our pasture and setup a perimeter of electric netting. The chickens happily came out to explore their new digs and seemed pleased to have some fresh grass to feast on. I am happy to say that when we went out Sunday evening to close them up all but one of the chickens had found their way into the coop. They also had no problem finding the nesting box and provided us with 19 fresh eggs.

What smells???

2007-04-30T08:22:00.000-04:00

That's what Danielle was saying when Buddy ran back to us during an after dinner walk in our pastures. I had seen a skunk earlier in the day when I was disking our upper plot and figured he would move on after all the noise from the tractor. That was not the case and Buddy managed to find the skunk and get sprayed in the face in record time. When he ran back to us he plowed his head into the ground and started rolling around in the wet grass to try to get the smell off. We quickly rounded up the dogs -- not wanting Boo to suffer the same fate as Buddy -- and I ran back to the house and got my rifle. An impromptu skunk hunt commenced with the kids and I tracking and Danielle taking pictures.

Lucky for us skunks never seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere and thus we were able to find and dispatch the skunk without too much trouble. I was willing to let the skunk go about its business earlier in the day but we could not tolerate one taking up residence in our pasture, spraying our dogs, and preying on our chickens.

They are mean looking critters with sharp little teeth. Their aroma shall we call it is quite pungent. Since I work in chemical research I knew right away that the skunks spray was primarily thiol based. As it turns out there are three main classes of chemical compounds in a skunks spray thiols, thioacetates and alkaloids with the thiols being the most odoriferous of the three.Sam brought a shovel up from the barn and we buried the skunk out in the hedgerow where I shot it.

With that taken cared of it was now time to try to detoxify Buddy. We went with the old standby of using tomatoes. We did not have any tomato juice handy so we used a can of crushed tomatoes from the pantry. Buddy was actually fairly stoic through the process of me rubbing the tomatoes all over him then rinsing and shampooing him with normal pet shampoo. He has spent the last two nights in his kennel in the garage but is mostly fumigated now so we will probably allow him to sleep in the house tonight.

Busy Weekend on the Farm

2007-04-23T08:03:00.000-04:00

It finally warmed up this weekend so we tried to make the most of it and pretty much worked dawn to dusk.

I replaced the rotten sheathing on the barn.

Started turning an old trailer into a mobile chicken coop.

The kids took turns helping me out, but also took advantage of the warm weather to have a water gun fight.

Some other things accomplished that do not have associated pictures.

Hand forked the new berry patch
Tilled up a portion of our new plot for onions
Planted Bi-Color corn

All in all it was a great weekend, but one of the weekends that I am kind of happy to have end so I can go back to work and rest.

Ribs!

2007-04-16T08:54:00.000-04:00

The picture above says it all. Danielle picked up the pork from the butchers on Wednesday and we have been eating it almost constantly. The kids tried some pork chops the night she brought everything home and liked them so much that Sam requested to have more on Friday night. This weekend my parents were down so I barbecued up a couple racks of ribs and we made some more chops. It was quite the feast. Emily my oldest has already requested that I barbecue up a pork shoulder for her birthday, the kids really love the pulled pork. Danielle is salt curing the bacons and hams and my only disappointment is that I will have to wait up to 6 months for the ham. I must say that all this good eating is making me forget how much trouble we had getting the pigs to the butcher.

Fields Plowed

2007-04-12T09:02:00.000-04:00

The last two evenings after work I have plowed up two plots for crops. The larger, where the pigs were paddocked, will be planted with corn, beans, melons, pumpkins etc. The smaller plot is up at the top of our property where the potatoes and first round of corn are planted. I plowed up a wedge shaped area next to the original plot which we will use for transplanted berry plants. We hope to some day have a pick your own berry operation with strawberries, blackberries and raspberries. We already have all of these varieties in the kitchen garden and will be transplanting the suckers and daughter plants as they spread.

When Pigs Fly

2007-04-10T10:23:00.000-04:00

Runt and Grunt, our Tamworth pigs have done a good job of rooting up and fertilizing our field over the last couple of months. They both put on a lot of weight and thus were ready to go to the butchers. The plan was to load them into the back of my pickup the night before their appointment (Easter Sunday) and drive them up the next morning. I built a ramp out of two 1/2 inch thick sheets of plywood with furring strips spaced every foot or so for traction. Danielle and I tried to coax them in with the slop bucket and after many failed attempts managed to get Grunt -- the bigger of the two -- into the back of the truck where he happily went about eating his dinner. We tried unsuccessfully to get Runt to join him then realizing that one was better than none decided to just take up Grunt and let Runt feed out for another couple of weeks. After we closed up the back of the truck and turned it on Grunt started to take exception to his location. He broke the latch that holds the cap window down and then proceeded to flop up onto the tailgate, teeter there for a moment and ungracefully flip out the back. He was quite the site in my rear view mirror. Luckily he was unhurt and was more than happy to return to his paddock.

My wife wakes me up the next morning to inform me that all before 6:30 AM she has called a livestock hauler that the butchers recommended and that he would be coming that morning for the pigs. The hauler shows up to our place at 9:15 AM. It takes the three of us at least a half hour to wrestle the pigs into his truck -- I am stiff and sore as I type this. And the biggest kicker is after calling the hauler at the last minute and him having to help us fight to get our free range pigs into the truck, all he wants to charge us is $15. I have to force him to accept $25 for his troubles and feel that I got off cheap.

So all in all the pigs make it up to the butchers and we should be able to pick up our fresh pork on Wednesday, and now I have a story to go with the expression When Pigs Fly.

Garden Tilling and Corn In

2007-04-05T07:59:00.000-04:00

Spring is definitely moving on although we are still getting some cold snaps, and may even get some snow flurries later this week. We picked up a walk behind tiller this weekend and turned over the kitchen garden. Danielle had a bunch of seedlings in a makeshift cold frame which we needed to get into the ground. I am pleased with the way the garden soil is developing. It was much easier to work this year and all the organic matter from our composted kitchen scraps and chicken bedding that we worked in has really helped to break up the clay. Maybe in a couple more years we will be able to skip the tilling altogether.

After work on Tuesday (April 3^rd) Sam and I carted the tiller to the upper field, prepped the soil and put in some rows of corn. We had some White and Bi-Color super sweet left over from last year. Not sure how successful the germination will be on this seed but figured it was not going to do us any good sitting in the barn. If we do get some to grow from this planting it will be a nice early crop of corn. We are going to plant new seed down where the pigs have plowed and fertilized for us after they are shipped off to the butchers next week.

Potatoes In

2007-03-28T18:47:00.000-04:00

Over the last two days I put in our first round of potatoes. The seed stock are leftovers from last years crops. We have some fingerlings on order but for now I got in three rows of Red Nordlands and two rows of Yukon Golds. I still have more of each in the cellar, we plan on planting a couple different rounds to maximize our yield and storage ability. Last year we only did the one early planting and got an excellent crop, but over the last month or so the Yukon Golds were getting mighty soft. We had stopped eating the Nordlands in the early winter. The Nordlands will be harvested early as new potatoes, but we will let the Yukon's fully mature. After a long winter it felt good working the soil again and getting our first crop in.

Look what I found.

2007-03-04T08:53:00.000-05:00

Those would have been the words Buddy -- our 1 1/2 year old border collie/terrier mix -- was saying when he exited the hedge row with his latest find. I took the dogs out for an early morning walk through our back pastures. I like getting out to survey the land and think about where we will plant things and what other projects I need to do. The dogs, the aforementioned Buddy, and Boo -- a 4 year old springer spaniel mix -- love to run and explore the hedge row around our field. This morning Buddy pops out of the hedge row with a large white object in his mouth. I initially thought it was a piece of styrofoam or other trash. He was a little hesitant to give up his prize but did come over and leave it for me when directed. Turns out Buddy found the top portion of an animal skull. After bringing it inside the kids had fun speculating what type of animal it was until Google revealed its true identity. The skull is from a White Tail deer and since there are no horn buds (not sure if that is the correct terminology) I assume it was a female deer. We need to start a nature shelf so that we have some place to display all the things we find around the farm.

Snowy Morning

2007-02-13T20:31:00.000-05:00

Got off to a slow start this morning. Snow started around 5am so I took my time getting ready for work to let everything settle on the roads. Since I was still at home when the sun was up I let out and fed the animals before I left. Normally Danielle takes care of the animals in the morning, but it was peaceful to feed the animals in the falling snow.

Winter Finally Here

2007-01-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

Well winter has finally arrived, and none too soon. After watching "An Inconvenient Truth" with the kids last week Sam was convinced that we would never have snow again. It was real windy and started snowing hard Thursday afternoon. The kids headed out the door just as soon as they saw that the snow was sticking. The kids did their best to get some sledding in, even though we barely had a dusting.

The snow did not seem to bother the goats any, they just went about their business as normal, but the pigs were happy to curl up inside their shelter and wait for the squall to blow over. Not more than an hour after these pictures were taken all the snow had melted and Sam was back waiting for winter.

New Year -- New Fences

2007-01-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

The addition of our pigs highlighted the need for some new paddocks. Although we have 5.25 acres only about half an acre was fenced in with goat fencing. I had previously tried to contain the goats with electric tape but their desire to be up by the barn and us was much greater than the deterrence factor of an electric shock. Having three goats, two pigs and thirty some chickens all on half an acre was definitely taking a toll on the pasture. Besides the over grazing, the rooting of the pigs and their enormous manure production was just too much for the area to handle. So the mild weather around the new year provided a good opportunity to fence in the upper pasture. Enclosing this field effectively doubled the area for the animals as well as enabling the goats to browse the hedge row.

I purchased two rolls of fencing for the upper pasture, but since I was able to tie into an existing line of field fencing in the hedge row I only used one. The other roll was used to fence in a long border with our neighbors properties. The kids helped me remove the electric tape and post connectors as well as driving the tractor with all the needed tools.

Finally, we used the recovered electric tape and some step in posts and a few hog panels to make a paddock for the pigs. The pigs are not nearly as agile as the goats and after getting shocked a few times the first day have been content to be in their quarter acre slice of heaven. Now their rooting and manure is being put to good use, prepping the area of pasture for spring plantings.

They sleep in a simple A-frame structure fabricated from a tarp and some scrap pallets. Another pallet A-frame provides shelter for our rent a stud goat buck Skeeter in the upper pasture.

Another thing I never thought I would do

2006-12-28T13:26:00.000-05:00

We added two Tamworth pigs to our small hobby farm a few weeks ago. My son and I in particular were excited to raise some pigs since we are as he likes to put it "bacon buddies". I must say the pigs are quite cute and we all enjoy having them around. We all get a laugh out of watching them run around since they can not bend in the middle and thus have a particularly amusing running style. Don't worry I am not getting too attached to them and I will have no problem sending them off to the butcher when they have fattened up.

Now for those of you who think the title of this post refers to the mere owning of pigs you are very much mistaken. See we purchased two weanling male pigs that were approximately ten to twenty pounds each. No problems so far except that the person we purchased them from had yet to castrate them. My wife brought the pigs home a few days before we went on vacation. A week down in Disney followed by a week of my wife and kids at her mother's place in Alabama. Did I mention that we all caught a nasty cold down at Disney which I am just finally starting to get over. What all this means is that by the time we are ready and able to castrate the pigs they weigh in at about 60 lbs for the big guy and maybe 40 lbs for the runt. I will spare you the details of the castration, except to say it is surgery that I am performing on the pigs while my wife is trying to hold them still. Normally watching my petite wife try to wrestle a pig would be funny, but when I am trying not to cut her or myself with the scalpel, nor cause any undue harm to the pigs during the procedure it is quite stressful.

I am happy to say that the pigs seem to be healing nicely, and my wife and I now know that we can do some things we never would have thought about.

Farm Truck

2006-12-10T14:24:00.000-05:00

Besides a tractor a good old truck is probably the most indispensable tool to have on a farm. I had been looking for a truck for sometime and finally was able to find one last week that fit the bill. It is a 1986 Chevrolet Silverado diesel with over 200K miles on it. We now have something besides the wifes mini-van to cart hay, goats, pigs etc. around in.

Thanksgiving Turkey

2006-12-02T13:52:00.000-05:00

As my wife is fond of saying, we started Thanksgiving dinner last Easter by setting 18 Narragansett turkey eggs into an incubator. From those 18 eggs we only had three turkeys make it to maturity one of which was white (not the proper coloring for a Naragansett).
We augmented our flock with two birds from Springfield Farm to make sure that we would have a breading pair.

All told we ended up with three Toms one Hen and the aforementioned white. In order to allow the bird to age appropriately and to avoid grossing out some house guests I processed one of the Toms and the white one the weekend before Thanksgiving. After plucking and cleaning our Tom weighed in at ten and a half pounds. The white went into the deep freezer and will be dinner sometime this winter.

On Thanksgiving we also cooked a store bought thirteen pound bird, to ensure leftovers and placate my mother who was somewhat leery of eating our homegrown bird. While our bird was a few pounds smaller it was considerably taller (our turkey is on the left).

All said and done the turkey was delicious and it was great that the potatoes and beans were also grown on our farm.

An Accidental Dinner

2006-11-21T13:56:00.000-05:00

Our chickens like to go into the goat stall during the day to root around through the straw for food as well as to just hunker down out of the weather. Some had gotten in the habit of jumping up on-top of the corner hay feeder. This was not a problem when it was full of hay other than the fact that they tended to spill some of it, but one day the feeder was empty and one of our Delaware's managed to fall down into the feeder and get herself stuck. Not sure how long she was like this but upon removing her it was clear she could not walk. Danielle hoped that she was just in shock so she isolated her and gave her some food and a electrolyte solution.

After a couple of days it was clear that she was not going to recover so I culled her. Not really wanting to take the time to pluck all her feathers I instead just skinned her. It was apparent when butchering her that she had broken her one leg and had a significant amount of internal injuries. It ended up that I was only able to salvage the two hind quarters and one breast. After letting the meat age for a few days in the refrigerator I made what turned out to be a delightful dinner -- if I do say so myself. I first browned the chicken on the stove top with some butter and onions. Then added some chicken stock to deglaze the pan and baked it with some fresh rosemary from the garden. Served over some farmstyle home fries made with our own red potatoes it was quite a treat.

We have since removed the corner feeders from all of our stalls, but this definitely seems like an example of making lemonade from lemons.

Our First Rifle(s)

2006-11-10T07:03:00.000-05:00

Make no mistake this was a big transition for self proclaimed liberal easterners, the acquisition of our first firearm. Growing up in densely populated Northern New Jersey I never handled or fired a gun when I was a child. There really was just never the opportunity or reason to do so. Since moving to a farm in Western Maryland things have changed substantially. As just one example a few months after we moved in one of our dogs chased/cornered a groundhog into the goat stall of the barn. Now groundhogs are a real pest around here since they do a job on the fields with their tunneling, as well as their habit of digging into gardens and eating all of the good fruits and veggies. We realized that we wanted to dispatch it, but needed to ask our neighbor to come over with a rifle to take care of him.

So when my Dad mentioned that he had an old single-shot .22 rifle that he won in a poker game during college (whole other story there that we will not go into) I jumped at the chance to have it, "for the farm" as my dad put it. My folks still live in the same house I grew up in and thus the rifle had been sitting unused in the attic for more than 40 years.

When I brought the rifle into the house, we had a family discussion, ostensibly to talk about the responsibilities associated with having a firearm. We were talking and the kids were listening and interjecting and at one point I was somewhat sloppy in my choice of words and said something along the lines of "Since we now have a weapon in the house..." My 6 year old quickly interjected to correct me stating that we already have weapons "we have all these sharp knives ...". The obvious albeit sometimes overlooked fact that many of the tools we have around the house and farm can be used as weapons, and the fact that my children recognized this made me more comfortable that they understood what the rifle signified.

Since that was out of the way obviously the next thing was to see how well the rifle shot. After cleaning the barrel the kids and I went out to the back pasture where we would have a safe backstop, set up a makeshift target and tried out the rifle. While the rifle seemed to operate fine my shooting prowess needed a significant amount of work. The kids all tried it out, but since this is an adult sized rifle they were not able to hold it with proper form. Not wanting them to be discouraged or learn bad form I did what any unschooling homesteader would do, went out and bought them a youth-sized single shot rifle. So now in the space of a week or two we go from zero to two rifles in the house. The model I bought the kids is actually a matched pair, meaning it has a .22 rifle barrel and a 20 gauge shotgun barrel that are interchangeable so depending on how you want to count things maybe 2 rifles and a shotgun.

The new rifle fits the kids much better and was an instant hit with the girls. Sam however was getting frustrated since he was unable to site the rifle properly. For those of you unfamiliar with shooting a gun, when you use open or iron sites you need to focus on the end site and line it up in the slot of the rear site. To be honest if you are not used to doing this it takes a while to get used to and it helps to close your non-shooting eye. This is a lot to ask of a six year old and I wanted shooting to be something Sam enjoyed not something that made him feel insufficient. It is really tough always being the youngest. This lead to another trip to the sporting goods store and the purchase of a Red Dot scope. This is a non-magnifying rifle scope that superimposes a red dot on the target. All you have to do is look through the scope put the red dot where you want to shoot and squeeze the trigger. With this addition Sam is doing great and it felt great to me when he lit up with the re-newed self-confidence.

Not sure where we are going to go from here, but we have discussed hunting some rabbits since they are in season now, although Julia wanted to jump right to deer. I explained that we needed a much more powerful rifle for that and we would not be going deer hunting for a number of years. She took solace in the fact that if we got any rabbits she could sew their pelts into cool stuff.

Last of the Tomatoes

2006-10-15T12:50:00.000-04:00

We have had our first frosts the last couple nights. We were able to get some row covers over the lettuce and spinach, but there seemed no good way to protect the tomatoes. Here are the last of the San Marzano and Beefsteak tomatoes, in half bushel baskets my Mom was able to acquire for us. We are going to store them down in the cellar with the potatoes in hope that they will slowly ripen and extend our fresh tomato season.

Filling the Hay Loft

2006-10-14T20:37:00.000-04:00

This morning Julia and I took the tractor and trailer up to the corn patch and harvested all of the remaining corn stalks. While this last planting of corn was a complete bust in terms of ear corn it did provide a fair amount of stalks. We cut down the stalks at the ground and bundled them with some twine into 6 large bales.

After driving them back to the barn I threw them up into the loft and Emily helped arrange them. Latter in the day Danielle picked up 24 bales of straw which we also put up in the loft. As you can see we have quite a bit of supplies for the winter (from left to right it is corn, straw, hay). The corn will be used as a treat for the goats as well as feed for the pigs we are getting in a month.

A Fall Morning on the Farm

2006-10-09T08:44:00.000-04:00

Culling, Processing, or as I like to call it a good old Chicken Slaughter

2006-09-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

The chickens had finally fattened up so we decided to take advantage of the long Labor day weekend to slaughter, pick and pack our surplus cockerels. We are keeping one Welsummer and one Dorking rooster, but this left us with nineteen cockerels for meat. Trying to learn something from our earlier test run, we separated the cockerels from the rest of the flock Saturday, putting them in the extra stall in the barn. This allowed us to evaluate all of the cockerels and decide which two birds were the closest to their respective breed standards and thus would be kept on as our roosters.

It also made it much easier for me to grab the birds on the day of the slaughter since they were in a confined space. We normally use the extra stall to store hay for the goats, as well as to store other odds and ends. We covered up the hay with a tarp to keep the cockerels from getting into it, the whole point of separating them out is to clear their crop and stomach of food so that the eviscerating is less messy. This was not completely successful as they managed to still get into the hay and thus in the future we will want to put them in an empty stall.

We did not get started as early as I would have liked on Sunday, mostly due to the fact that I had to run out and pick up a knife to do the killing with. We do not have a boning knife and my pocket knife which I used on the test bird was not the best tool for the job. So after Sam and I ran out to the store and we all had breakfast I pulled killed and started processing the first three birds at around 10am.

Things were going along slow and steady, so slow in fact that my wife took sympathy on me and decided to help out with the picking. We worked out a system where I would kill three chickens at a time then bring them up to the patio where we would scald and pick them. The picked birds would go into the garage fridge to cool, and the process would continue. We did this until we had 9 or 10 birds cooling then we switched to eviscerating and packing. Again Danielle helped out -- I am only pointing this out since it was made clear to me early on that she did not want any part in the processing of the birds. I eviscerated and washed the chickens in the kitchen sink and Danielle did a final picking and cleaning of the birds then packed them into bags. We recently purchased a vacuum sealer (thanks to the kind support of our personal CSA) and she put the birds in these bags but did not seal them so that they could drain for a few days in the fridge before being sealed and transferred to the freezer.

So as not to be too boring you can figure out where it went from here, back out to kill and pluck the rest of the birds and then back inside to eviscerate and pack. When all was said and done including cleaning up the barn, patio and kitchen it was about 8:30 PM. A long day for sure but now we have a freezer full of chickens (well not full since my wife purchased a huge freezer but that is a different story) and we can look forward to pulling them out for dinner throughout the winter.

Warning CARNAGE Below: How we butchered our first Chicken

2006-08-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

Since we purchased straight runs of Dorkings (25) and Welsummers (10) this past spring we were always aware that we would have on the order of 18 cockerels to deal with. We plan on keeping one of each species so that we can breed the chickens in the future instead of always ordering new chicks, but this still leaves us with quite a few chickens to dispose of. My wife specifically got multipurpose birds so that we could cull and eat the cockerels.

Well our new chicken coop that seemed huge when I first built it is starting to get crowded with the nearly 60 chickens which currently call it home. This along with the fact that the cockerels are nearly as big as our two and a half year old hens meant that we needed to start thinking about culling some of the cockerels. Since I have never processed a chicken before and I was going to do this by the book (i.e. no one was around to walk me through it) I decided to start small and just process one chicken. I isolated a Dorking cockerel in the morning and set him up with just water. I know you are supposed to do this overnight but I did not plan that far in advance. As it turned out I ended up butchering a different Dorking (one that got out of the chicken pen and into our yard). He was a real pain to catch so it seemed like as good a chicken as any to cull from our flock.

I built a killing cone from an old gallon milk container by cutting open the bottom and opening up the spout enough for the chickens head to poke through. With an old spackle bucket below to catch the blood I cut the chickens jugular and let it bleed out. I also de-brained it, which according to the books is supposed to make the process of plucking the feathers easier. After the chicken was done bleeding I scalded it for 30 seconds in hot water then the kids and I began plucking the bird. All and all I have to say that dealing with the feathers was the most time consuming part of the entire operation. While it was not hard to pull out the feathers, there just always seemed to be more of them.

Once the bird was as free of feathers as it was going to get it was time to eviscerate the chicken. While this sounds daunting in the books, all you really are doing is cutting off the feet and head and removing the guts. Considering I did not really know what I was doing it all went smoothly. I was amazed by the size of the liver, it was by far the largest organ. I removed all the giblets and offal and disposed of them. In the future I will probably at least save the livers to make pate, but for my first run I just wanted to keep it simple. After washing off the bird and putting it in the fridge to cool I cleaned everything up and had a beer.

After relaxing for a while I fired up the grill and put some red potatoes on to roast. We made beer can chicken and grilled up some Gold Nugget tomatoes as well. Everyone except Sam tried some of the chicken.
It had a lot of flavor but was a bit chewy. Not sure if this is the norm for free range birds or just cockerels. The neatest thing about dinner was that everything we ate came from our farm. The chicken, potatoes and tomatoes were all raised or grown on our farm. Even the rosemary and thyme came out of our kitchen garden. Danielle and I have been talking for some time about how great it would be to have an entire home grown meal, and I must say it was quite a treat.

The cockerel was on the small side so the rest of the flock has received a temporary reprieve, but in a couple weeks I will have to start processing the birds on a larger scale.

First Corn Harvest

2006-08-03T08:13:00.000-04:00

Well I have to admit with all of the problems I was having with the deer that I was considering not growing corn next year. Forget that! Last night we harvested some corn from our first planting and it had to be the best corn I ever tasted. Mind you I am extremely biased but my family seemed to enjoy it also. I originally picked five ears so that everyone could have a taste. That was not nearly sufficient so Julia and I went back out to the field to get some more. While we were out there she decided that we should pick a couple extra ears since she wanted some for lunch today. Julia and I ended up eating three ears each. I have to admit it made me really happy to have the corn go over so big.

Needless to say I will definitely be planting corn again next year.

Last of Potatoes Dug

2006-07-31T21:00:00.000-04:00

Dug the last of the potatoes this weekend. All the foliage from the Yukon Golds had died back, so it seemed like time to dig them up. I dug the first row by hand with a pitch fork, just like I did all three rows of the Red Nordlands. Being that it was incredibly hot this weekend I needed to find a better way if was going to get them all done. Decided to try out the potato plow which I used to plow the trenches that the potatoes were planted in. I was originally concerned that the plow would damage the potatoes, hence the hand digging. I was surprised by how well the plow worked. It popped up most of the potatoes and completely loosened the ground so the rest were easy to uncover with my bare hands. Chalk this one up to being new to farming. From now on I will be plowing up the potatoes except for the times when I just want to grab a couple new potatoes out of the field.

Fun at the Ag Fair

2006-07-28T09:04:00.000-04:00

Here are some pictures from our trip to the Washington County Ag Expo yesterday. The kids enjoyed seeing all the animals as well as the activities, and since it was very hot, the snow cones were also a big hit.

Cleaning Up My Deer Problem

2006-07-25T11:20:00.000-04:00

As mentioned numerous times on this blog, the local deer population really enjoys my corn crop. While I have started to get some corn from my first planting the size of the plants and consequently the size of the corn is quite small due to all the deer damage. Having finally gotten tired of it, and spurred on by the visit last weekend of an interested party (who supplied the Irish Spring) last night I assembled a soap barrier around my corn field. I sliced the soap into pieces, affixed them to bamboo stakes with zip ties and placed them approx. 10-15 feet apart in a perimeter around the corn field. While I am resigned to the fact that this will do little to help the first planting, I am hopeful that the latter corn plantings may do better if the soap reduces the deer grazing.

Shortest Corn in the East!

2006-07-17T21:48:00.000-04:00

No this is not some new dwarf corn variety. This white super sweet planted on May 7^th should be 6 to 7 feet tall, but the deer have done a good job of stunting its growth. While never reaching full height it has started to silk out and form cobs. I guess we will just have to wait and see if we get any edible corn out of this first planting.

The second planting which went in on June 4^th is doing noticeably better. It is already as tall as the first planting while being four weeks behind. My neighbors corn, not more than 100 yds away is tall and almost untouched by the deer. I talked with them this weekend and plan on picking up some Irish Spring soap to hang from posts around the outside of the corn field since it has seemed to work for them. Hopefully this will keep the deer browseing down to a minimum and allow the second and third planting to do better. Next year I will have the electric fence setup which will hopefully alleviate the deer problem.

Kitchen Garden

2006-07-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

We were out looking at the progress of our kitchen garden last night and noticed things were coming along nicely. Our first tomatoes of the season have started to ripen. Danielle started all our tomatoes from seeds inside the house, a first for us, so it is nice to see them doing well. Gold Nuggets, our first to ripen, are about the size of a cherry tomato but are this cool gold color (hence the name) when ripe.

They were delicious right off the vine, and although we picked probably twenty or so, Sam made sure that none of them made it into the house.

Some raspberries were also ripe, although Danielle and I ate them ourselves and didn't share any with the kids.

The lettuce, broccoli, and onions continue to do well. We are hoping to have some pole beans to harvest soon as well as more tomato varieties.

Planted Last of the Corn

2006-07-09T10:16:00.000-04:00

Since we have harvested two rows of red potatoes I had more room in the plot. After tilling up the soil I finished planting out the two sections of super sweet corn as well as a new long strip where the potatoes once were. If things work out this latest batch of corn will be ready in the middle of September. My early corn is doing ok. The deer have taken a toll on it, but the recent rains have really helped a lot. I am hopeful that the corn is large enough now that we will be able to get some ears off of it soon. The first planting that went in on May 7th should be ready in the next two weeks or so, but I think the dry spring and deer have delayed it some.
The bi-color super sweet.

Here you can see the white super sweet, the last row of red potatoes, and the long strip which was just planted with bi-color.

Potato Storage

2006-07-09T08:30:00.000-04:00

The kids and I dug/picked another row of potatoes this morning. This brought about the realization that we had a huge amount of potatoes and no where to store them. I had always planned on putting a potato box down in the storage closet of our basement. It is cool and dark, the closest thing we have to a root cellar. I used some scrap half-inch plywood I had left over from the chicken coop. The box is nominally 48" x 18" x 18", yielding a capacity of approx. 6.75 bushels. I have the box divided in half to provide space for both the red and yukon gold potatoes. As you can see with one row of red's still in the ground the space allotted to them is starting to fill up.

Red Potato Harvest

2006-07-06T07:51:00.000-04:00

For the last week or so we have been picking some of our Nordland Red potatoes. At first I just grabbed a basket full to have for a couple of meals but this past weekend the kids helped me harvest one entire row of the potatoes. We seem to have a good crop (since this is my first time growing potatoes I don't have much to compare it to).

I got a deep fryer for Father's Day and we have been enjoying fresh thick cut potato chips. I need to build a storage box to keep the potatoes in the basement and finish harvesting the other two rows of red potatoes. It will be interesting to see how long the kids find harvesting fun.

The Yukon Golds still have a while to go, I don't think I will be digging them until September at the earliest.

Pullets Moved!

2006-06-21T18:12:00.000-04:00

Finished (well I am sure it will never be truly finished) the new chicken coop yesterday. I put a sheet of plywood over one door and transferred the small sliding door from the barn to the other. The window currently is only covered by chicken wire. So as I stated above it is far from done but it was complete enough so that we could move the pullets into there new space. They had completely outgrown the stall they shared with the turkeys and seemed happy with the move. It was "interesting" moving 48 birds. By the end Danielle and I had devised a somewhat efficient assembly line process. She grabbed 4 - 6 pullets and hung them upside down, carrying them by their feet. She then handed them to me through the window and I put them in the coop. I still need to add a shutter type closure for the window, open up the side of the barn to add a small door ......

As I said it will never be truly finished.

Crop Report

2006-06-11T18:14:00.000-04:00

Sweet Corn:

Potatoes: Still doing well although obvious damage from potato beetles

Pop Corn: ~ 6 inches

Pumpkins:

Coop Roof

2006-06-11T18:04:00.000-04:00

June 11, 2006

Well the coop done got a roof! Installed a corrugated metal roof on the chicken coop with a sky light in the middle made out of polycarbonate panels. Hopefully the tinted panels will let in enough light without cooking the chickens in the summer.

More Coop

2006-06-10T18:27:00.000-04:00

After the wife and kids took off for a week long vacation/camping trip I went out and picked up the plywood for the chicken coop. With the use of the neighbors air-nailer I was able to get all of the wall up! I just need to do the doors and windows. Hopefully tomorrow I will get the corrugated roofing and get that up.

We obviously still need to put some chicken doors in the front.

Potatoes

2006-06-07T21:39:00.000-04:00

When I got home from work today I needed to burn off some steam, so I went out to the potato field to hill up the Yukon Golds. The potatoes plants continue to grow well, but we did find some larval bugs on some of the potato plant leaves. Not sure if they are potato beetles or some other pest but I squashed all the ones I found and will keep an eye out for anymore.

Pulled up one of the Red Norlands to see how they were doing, and to my delight I had a hand full of approx. ping pong ball sized potatoes. I put the plan back in the ground after harvesting to see if it will continue to produce.

More Corn and Coop Work

2006-06-04T21:07:00.000-04:00

The corn I planted roughly a month ago has continued to come in nicely. I planted some more rows today to space out our crop. Hopefully, the deer will share some of it with us.

I also framed out the roof for the chicken coop. Danielle and the kids are going on a trip next weekend so I hope to get the sheathing and the metal roofing and finish up the coop.

Cultivating

2006-05-29T21:56:00.000-04:00

Used the neighbors tiller to cultivate between the potato rows. After loosing up the ground and chopping up the weeds and grasses I hilled the red potato plants which are growing like gang busters. The Yukon's are growing well also but are significantly smaller. They don't need to be hilled for another week or so. Things look much nicer now that all the weeds between the rows are gone, hopefully I will be able to keep it in shape now that the heavy stuff has been taken cared of.

The sweet corn and popcorn continues to come up. I need to put in some more rows in the next week so that our harvest will be spaced out nicely.

Pumpkins Planted and More Coop Work

2006-05-21T21:09:00.000-04:00

Put in two types of pumpkins in a small patch up past the corn and potatoes. The corn is still going strong, all except the popcorn which has yet to break the surface yet.

Framed up the walls for the chicken coop. Need to order the studs for the roof as well as the sheeting.

Corn coming up!

2006-05-18T07:57:00.000-04:00

Last night the kids and I were up in the field doing some weeding when we noticed that the sweet corn was coming up. So far the corn is ~ 1 inch high, but you can clearly see the rows. We will have to wait and see if it makes it or the deer get it. There are numerous deer tracks through out the field, and the night before Emily and I saw a doe in the neighbors field not 50 yards away.

Pop Corn and Chicken Coop

2006-05-13T09:10:00.000-04:00

Sam helped me sow in the hybrid popcorn this morning. I then spent an hour or so weeding and hilling up the potatoes. These are going to be the tastiest potatoes I ever had!

Put in the posts for the new chicken coop. It is going to have a 24' x 12' footprint and be attached to the barn on the end. Need to order the lumber to finish it this week since we have 50 new peeps which need a home to be transferred to in the near future. I am also going do some retro-fitting of the barn at the same time. Most importantly I am going to widen the door out to the pastures so that I can bring the tractor in and out that way. As it is now I need to drive through the lawn to get out to the pastures. I will also replace some rotted sheeting and give it all a fresh coat of paint.

Weeding and Planting Corn

2006-05-07T20:24:00.000-04:00

The potatoes are still coming in, but so are the weeds. So I got out there today and cultivated around the potatoes so they would not have to compete with the weeds.

I also re-worked the ground around the potatoes to prep it for the corn. I pulled the middle buster through a number of times which did a good job of removing the grass clods then ran the disc until the bed was as preped as I could get it. I was able to borrow a planter from my neighbor and put in 4 short rows of super sweet white and super sweet mixed corn on either side of the potatoes.

We are getting a nice gently rain tonight which we desperately need. Hopefully we will get enough to soak in the seeds.

Potatoes Coming Up!

2006-05-04T12:56:00.000-04:00

May 4, 2006

Took the kids for a trailer ride last night and noticed that the potatoes were just starting to poke through the surface. I was happy to see this since it has been extremely dry since I planted them.

Upon further inspection I realize that only the Red Nordlands have come up. The Yukon Golds have yet to break through.

100 lbs. of Potatoes?

2006-04-26T14:44:00.000-04:00

April 16, 2006

This weekend I put in the first of my crops. 50 lbs. of Yukon Gold and 50 lbs. of Red Norland potatoes that my wife ordered from Johhny's Selected Seeds. I picked up a Middle Buster last week at Tractor Supply so it was quick work to lay off some rows for the potatoes with the tractor. The hard part was cutting the seed potatoes into pieces and spacing them out in the rows. After that I pulled some soil back over them with a hoe. All in all I have ~ 700 ft.rows of potatoes. If the weather cooperates and we get enough rain I should be looking at harvesting somewhere around 1000 lbs. of potatoes. Guess who has already been tasked with building a potato bin for the basement?