Backyard Wildlife

No pictures for this post. Perhaps we need a night-vision camera set up outside. Last night the howling of coyotes woke us up. The howling was not unusual, but the proximity to the house was out of the ordinary. We peered through the window in time to see a coyote, startled by the reflection, bound off across the yard just feet from the house. The kittens hadn't come in for the evening yet, and I feared the worst. This morning, peering out the window again, this time to see any sign of the kittens, we spied three deer grazing in the exact same spot of the yard. They were 2 and 1 points and were sampling the flowers and trees under the cover of a heavy fog. When they meandered back down the hill to the thicket they call home, the kittens could finally come out of their overnight hiding spot. This balance between farm and wildlife will be a delicate one.

Fall Preparation

There is something satisfying about breaking new soil for a garden. I am not sure if it is creating order out of the chaos of weeds, the anticipation of discovering what kind of success one might have growing plants, or it might be part of the fun of planning before the hardships of implementing the grand scheme. I have heard that one of the reasons a farmer plows a field is for the satisfaction of creating straight furrows. I have not been able to do that, but I find the challenge causing me to be persistent.
We broke the sod and flipped the soil over four weeks ago. This week we shaped some raised beds with the plow, rake and shovel. We are going to plant garlic in four beds this fall. The others will be ready for early spring planting; they should be drier than the surrounding field and we will be able to work them sooner. We have visions of strawberries on a couple beds and radishes along with leafy greens on another.
After shaping the beds, we spread lime and compost on the surface before covering it with a weed barrier. We planted garlic through a weed barrier last year and it worked out great. We cut an "X" every six inches and planted each clove through the cut. We had to assist a few garlic leaves through the hole, but a lot of the work stopped there and we did not have to weed. The initial investment of time was considerable; we had to make 600 cuts through heavy material, but we lifted the material during harvest and now can reuse it this fall and hopefully a few more seasons.

Little Mousers

An entry on an animal other than chickens! Our other girls, the kittens, are 5 months old now and our parenting plan for them is to become expert outdoor mousers. But, seeing as we live in coyote and hawk territory and close to the road, they still get to come inside at night. So far they have brought us three baby mice right up to the door. The first mouse was still alive and ran right inside. That caused a little chaos, but it was quickly caught by deft hands and disposed of outside, much to the kittens' dismay. Good thing Vince's welding gloves were close at hand. The second mouse was pronouced dead at the scene without a scratch on it, and the third was left as a gift for us to find right under the door when we arrived home yesterday evening. Their names are Coughball (yes, that's right) and Smudge. They go everywhere together and their mischievious ways make them the big entertainment of the farm lately.

nest boxes

Our 24 chicks turned out to be 21 hens and 3 roosters. We are going to keep one or two roosters so that we can raise our own chicks in the spring. The 23 hens now have a place to lay eggs. These are community style nest boxes that should give the girls plenty of nest space. Anna is excited to have a lid on the nest boxes so that we can retrieve eggs from the outside of the coop.

The hens that are laying right now are constantly "flying the coop" and we are finding eggs in the grass along the fence line instead of in the nest boxes. Maybe they are looking for a safer place to lay eggs where we will not steal them. I need to do some reading to find out what a good solution would be.

Fruit

Our fruit trees are finally laden with fruit! When we moved in April, we could only guess which types of fruit trees we had aquired. When a new septic was put in just prior to our move, many of the roots were damaged and we weren't sure the trees would make it. We were even warned by our friend Joe, "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear." (They appeared in bad shape.) But...after picking the cherries in the spring, we were looking forward to more fruit. About 3 weeks ago, we drastically pruned the branches of the cherry trees and trimmed the water shoots off of the others. The trees have not been maintained in a long time and so have grown unruly and too large. Despite all of these hardships, our little "orchard" is producing well; we have plenty of Italian Prunes, and Asian Pears and Apples are set, but not quite ready yet.

A farm: one building at a time

We are truly "building" a farm here. We purchased the land without any out-buildings, barns or sheds and quickly ran into a storage problem. After the hoop houses in the spring, the storage project this summer was a small shed. Vince purchased it off of craigslist, tore it down, and with two friends, put the full walls, trusses and floor on a trailer with ends hanging out over the road, and drove it down the street to our house. Putting it back up required making it our own, including new door cut-outs, siding, a new metal roof, extended eaves and artistic pieces to hide unsightly mistakes. All construction was done in between other jobs and farm chores. After much help from our fathers and their construction "expertise," it is finally in a close-to-completed state but is already filled to capacity. Visions of a barn, equipment shed, market stand and garage dance in our heads, but the cost of materials slows down construction considerably. So for now, our curing garlic shares a space with the bikes while chicken feed hides among tools, lawnmowers, and other odds and ends that belong in a storage shed.

deer rub

Our neighbor is in the process of restoring a ditch that ran through the base of the hill. He was walking through the adjacent properties to survey the old ditch and found some markings on an alder at the property line. He told me that there was a bear in the area. Anna and I were excited so we went down last night to inspect the tree that had been clawed. I was a little disappointed to find this deer rub. Despite my dismay, the chickens were relieved to hear the news.
The top picture is a close-up where you can see the hair left on the tree from the deer's head. Maybe he is marking territory or perhaps alleviating a severe itch.

The ditch restoration has been a pleasant surprise. There is an area of wet ground at the base of the hill on our property and it must stay wet down there all through the winter. Apparently there is an old ditch that has fallen in due to lack of maintenance over the years. The neighbor is retired and he has the ear of some old timers in the area. One of these people is on the ditch commission. In his extra time and influential way, he has convinced the powers that be to restore the old ditch and they are to dig it back out next year. This should allow me to access the bottom portion of the property year round and make it feasible to raise some livestock in the back of the property.

onion harvest

We started onions from seed in February and we lifted onions this week, a little over seven months total. We are happy with the size of the onions; they seem a little larger than the onions we have planted in past gardens from sets (immature onion bulbs). After half of the tops died back, we bent over all of the onion tops and lifted the bulbs a week later. We have been having dry sunny days, something like 20 days without rain, good onion curing weather. Here is a picture of some onions drying in the hoop house which offers protection from morning dew. Later in the week we will hang the onions in the shed to allow them to finish curing. If we do a good job curing they should store all winter, if not we always have the leeks to harvest.

Preserving: Now what do we do with all of this stuff?

Added to the list of "things learned" is preserving. We are trying various ways to preserve some of the produce that is either surplus or too big to sell. We blanched and froze broccoli and cauliflower until our freezer was stuffed. We pickled garlic and beans, made blackberry and rasberry jam, and juiced carrots. All of this jarring is being done in an ancient pressure cooker that was given to us. Thus the pickling as opposed to canning because we have been warned multiple times about the seal and have heard too many horror stories of canning-gone-wrong to try to use the pressure cooker part. So, our pressure cooker with the art-deco gauge has served us well as a boiling-water canner. I think we have finally got the timing down a little better now, can pull the jars out of the water without burning ourselves, and only spatter a little berry juice on the walls. After all, as one experienced canner told us, "you don't just can, you learn to can." And for that, we are grateful for recipies with step-by-step instructions and the Ball Blue Book of Preserving. Now, if only we had a place to store all of these jars...

Burn Pile

When we bought this place we found a huge slash pile on the hillside. Our neighbors have told us short stories of what has occurred on this property in the past and what I have gathered is that the last person to work the land here was trying to grow ginseng. By putting together all of the different stories and clues found around the property, that person was a small Laotian man who, with his family, was growing ginseng under the canopy of eucalyptus (I do not know anything about ginseng so I guess I will have to read about it soon). As he planted all of these trees, one at a time, he would lug two 5 gallon buckets of mulch to place around each tree. The neighbors would become weary just from watching this tiny man who, because of his slight stature could not carry the buckets high enough to clear the rough ground. Yet he still managed to move two dump truck loads of woodchips 5 gallons at a time. Now with a grove of fast growing eucalyptus the Farmer could plant ginseng in the shade of these aromatic trees. I assume that the climate here is not appropriate for growing ginseng and his crop failed. Before the property went up for sale, this farmer cut down all of the eucalyptus trees and removed some of the stumps and piled them in one huge slash pile. This was about two acres of trees 12 inches or more in diameter and it looks as if he did most of the clearing with an axe and hand saw.
As we started burning this pile in the spring we uncovered a basketball rim, bicycle, garage door parts, tin roofing, the hood of a Buick and the kitchen sink. We would burn small bits at a time for fear of catching the whole valley on fire (Apparently Anna's ancestors were kicked out of Sweden for catching their town on fire doing a similar chore and we did not want the same thing to happen to us). Our neighbors would watch us burn the pile creating smoke each Saturday and Sunday morning. We wondered how much this troublesome smoke bothered them for we had not yet met any of them and wanted to have good relationships with our neighbors. We finally met the neighbors and found out that they were not at all bothered by the smoke and encouraged us to light of the whole pile at once. Anna's father reminded us of their ancestors so we took the prudent approach and continued to burn small piles until the burn ban started in June. This summer I was able to plow all around the slash pile which created a nice buffer from the dry vegetation in the valley.

The burn ban was recently lifted and our neighbor Andy was excited for us. He was so excited that he brought over his small tractor and with both of our machines we pushed the pile down the hill into the middle of a plowed area. The truth be told, Andy and his tractor did most of the work, he is really good on a tractor from his years of dairy farming up the valley. In the plowed field we could safely burn the pile without catching grass on fire or roasting our laying hens in the nearby coop.
The above pictures are of Andy and I working the burn pile.

Banding Chickens

This morning we banded the new flock of chickens. The older flock seems to escape often and as the young ones(11 wks old)start developing and look similar, we want to be able to tell them apart. This will be more important in the winter when we hope to let them free-roam a little more. They squeaked and squawked as we caught them coming out of the coop in the morning. We twisted a yellow plastic band around their leg, checked their vent and wings for bugs and irregularities, and away they went, clucking indignantly. We were sorely disappointed when, having finished banding all 24 of them, we looked around and found two bands already on the ground and off of the largest chickens' legs. We will have to see how well these bands hold, and may have to find a better style.

Late Tomato, fruit or vegetable?

At the end of last February we started tomato plants in our friend, Joe's greenhouse and we are finally seeing some color. In my previous smaller gardens I would purchase starts that were more mature than the ones I grew this year. Between the small size of the transplants, the cool summer and our late start this spring, I think I am about 2 weeks later than I should be. I will take notes and adjust.