Eggs!

I found two eggs in the bushes … products of our new adult Cinnamon Queens. I don’t know if this was all that was laid, or if I couldn’t find any others. Obviously I need to get some nest boxes built soon, or it’s an Easter Egg hunt every morning.

Chickens!

I thought I'd post some pictures of our newer chickens. These are Cinnamon Queens and I picked them up full-grown because they were someone else's nuisance birds. They may or may not become stewpot chickens, depending upon their behavior over the next week or two.


The head of the chicken labor union demands an audience with executive management regarding worker conditions.


Executive management explains "Plan B" to the labor union.

The Furry Terrorists

Yesterday Don told me that raccoons took his favorite 3 year old rooster. The rooster was from his original flock when they first started farming and was an excellent guardian. Apparently, when the raccoons came calling, that rooster took one for the team and went down fighting. Not that it did him much good against a pack of raccoons, but I’m sure it was a heroic effort to save his ladies, and at least that part of it worked. None of the others were harmed, but the rooster was drug out into the yard where his head was ripped off and then the malicious raccoons defecated in a circle all around him and left the corpse otherwise untouched.

Our new four Cinnamon Queens may not be a permanent addition to our farm. I don’t think we were prepared to suddenly have adult birds with adult size poop and dropping eggs everywhere. They’re beautiful and I like having some larger chickens around, but they need to keep a low, easy-to-maintain profile over the next few weeks unless they want to end up in a stewpot. Not having raised these guys from chicks, I don’t have any emotional attachment to them at all. As far as I’m concerned right now, they’re just dinner keeping itself fresh in the yard. Should they become too much of a nuisance, or harass our little survivors unnecessarily, then into the pot they go.

The little survivors are becoming pets, I can see it already. They eat from my children’s hands, suffer lightly to be picked up and carried, and stay close to us, even peeking in the back window when it’s dinnertime to see what we’re doing. Now they just need names and some little chicken collars.

A Grim Evening

I’ve been putting the chickens up later and later each night. When it starts getting dark they go up into the coop on their own, no need to chase them, and then you just go and shut the door. The past couple of nights it’s been dark when I got out there to shut the door. Tonight that poor husbandry caught up to me. Something, we suspect a family of raccoons, got in and killed almost every single one. I’ve got 27 confirmed dead, 1 was found out in the pasture hiding in the tall grass, and up to 11 missing. There’s very little mess. Whatever it was killed them pretty efficiently, and relatively bloodlessly and then just left them lying there. We found two that had been partially buried in the sand. The others were right near the entrance to the coop. Some were still warm, indicating that the slaughter probably went on for quite some time. While looking for any hiding strays, I found a tree full of raccoons, some of them juveniles, at the edge of the pasture. They may have been innocent bystanders, since it was a berry tree they were hiding in, but I somehow doubt it.

The maliciousness of the act is horrifying to me, almost as much as my own negligence which played such a primary part in this. I’ve never heard of wild animals killing for sport, but that’s what it looks like happened. None that I’ve found were eaten. The one we found looks like a hen, and she is absolutely terrified. Now she’s in that great big coop all alone, which makes me feel awful for her. I don’t know that she’ll last. She looks uninjured, but one bird on her own … the outlook is not good. I’m praying that if others survived they come wandering up in the daylight. If nothing else, we may find some more bodies in the morning when we can see without a flashlight. The horror of it aside, this is quite a setback for the farm. I was really enjoying the presence of the chickens and it was a pleasure to see them ranging around in the yard. Now I just can’t get the horror of finding all those dead bodies out of my mind. I have no idea what I’m going to tell the kids in the morning.

I gotta learn this NOW?

How come nobody ever told me that spaghetti squash was so good? It doesn’t even taste like squash! It’s OUTSTANDING with a red sauce.

Want to contact me?

Kat set me up a new email address, which I am about to surreptitiously hide from all of the spambot crawlers out there on the web …

The address is ernie-use the “at” sign-tanglewoodhill-dot-com. I look forward to hearing from you!

Aeeieeee! Get 'em off! Get 'em off!

I’m not having a good farm day, it seems. The only thing worse than angry bees crawling all over your bee suit is angry bees inside your bee suit. What started as your protection against them turns into their protection against you as you play “hunt the bug” in your own pants. A bee is perfectly willing to sacrifice her little life for her colony, but her ability to hunt out the most delicate part of your anatomy before administering the suicidal blow is a uniquely feminine trait.

I went out to put the second super on the hive, a bit late, sure, but it still needs to be done. Better late than never, that’s our farm motto. (I hope it sounds better in latin.) If you’re wanting to get bees and you’re reading this for inspiration, keep in mind that I violated numerous beekeeping rules, some of my own making, in this process. I’ll try and enumerate them here. First, and I think I stressed this last time, make sure you are prepared and in possession of all of your tools before you open the hive. My hives are set up about a quarter mile from the house, up a hill, through a goat pasture and two gates, and then through some dense grass. So I made two trips up there to cart all my equipment. Next time, I’m using a backpack, I think, for all the loose materials. Hive tool, propane torch, sawdust, smoker, flint striker, gloves, camera, etc. Then I took the suit and the super out there. Once everything was parked, I lit the smoker and gave them some smoke. A little smoke. Not enough. Because the damn thing went out almost as soon as I opened the hive. They got really angry and I think even “special” smoke wouldn’t have done any good. So that’s rule number two, keep your smoker lit and give them plenty of smoke. Foolishly being aware that they had not had enough smoke, I proceeded to open the top. These bees were very agitated from the beginning. That’s because I violated rule number three, which is don’t mess with your hives on overcast days before a rainstorm. In my defense, it was a clear blue sky when I started this process. Then almost as soon as I got back there the clouds moved in and it got dark. The bees were swarming all over the top of the hive when I pulled the lid off. Very angry bees. I could see down in between the frames about 10,000 little bee faces looking angrily up at me. I wish I could have gotten a better picture to show you, but my smoker was out and my camera chose THAT moment to have its batteries go out. That and fumbling with the little buttons with gloved, honey-sticky fingers was too much. I used the hive tool and pulled out one of the frames, jamming my fingers inadvertently into the cells at the edges. That’s not prime real estate for baby bees when you have a clumsy beekeeper who is too nosy for his own good. The dripping honey (and presumably the tortured cries of baby bees) drove the bees into a killing frenzy and that’s when the stinging started. I’m no wuss, folks, but bees that land on your hand, crawl up your wrist and get inside your suit are too smart to be monkeyed with. After being stung on the wrist and arm a couple of times, I noticed then that I’d left the queen excluder back in the garage, thus violating rule number one as enumerated earlier. So I had to run down the hill, through the goat pasture, through the gates, and across the yard in order to find the steel frame of the excluder. Foolishly, I had left the frame pulled out, which REALLY upset the bees by the time I’d walked back up the hill, through the goat pasture, through the gates, rounded up the stray goats who had escaped when I didn’t shut the gates, and then up the hill to the orchard. I thought maybe a little more smoke was in order so I tried to get my smoker relit for another couple of puffs. The first puff or two the bees got some smoke. The others just got some smoke-flavored air blown in their faces, which made them even less happy, if this could be imagined. That was when I noticed that the massive amount of sweat from running back and forth across 3/4^th of a mile (if you’re keeping track so far) was making my bee suit stick to my body. For the record, nobody sells a bee-proof suit. They are all very careful to point this out in the catalogs and literature. However, a flimsy bee suit becomes even less protection when it is plastered against bare skin. The bees notice this, not being little bee dummies, and chose those wet spots to attack. Think about this the next time you’re out in the heat working up a good sweat … would YOU want bees attacking those places? At this point, I’d violated rule number four, which is make no sudden or aggressive movements around your bees which might further agitate them. And rule number five as well, do not waste time while the hive is open. So in great haste I replaced the frame, lined up the excluder, put the super on and then replaced all the lids. At this point the lids were crawling with bees and I’d forgotten my bee brush back in the garage (damn you, rule number one) so I couldn’t clear the area before sealing the joints, resulting in some squished bees. That seems to REALLY agitate the rest of the colony. At this point I had bees clinging to my body, stinging me through my suit, and bees inside my suit and even one in my shoe being chased around by my toes before finally being squished to death as she stung me between the toes. That’s not where you like to be stung. Well, one of about a dozen places which I could now enumerate in great detail for you, should you be so unwise as to ask.

Oh, and what did I see inside the hive? Queen cells. They are getting ready to swarm, which may account for some of their bad mood. I’m going to lose half my bees and weaken the colony significantly. Not a very good bee day, all things considered.

Kick the Bucket

Milking did not go well this morning. First, the goat was problematic with a bad attitude. The other goats were nuisances as well. I managed to get a lot more milk than I had previously and my arm wasn’t tired like before (probably owing to a more comfortable position during milking) but I’m still having trouble milking that right teat. I don’t know if it’s just harder to reach or more awkward or what, but about the time I get to it then she’s finished with her food and getting impatient. That was when I knocked over the milk bucket during our struggles and lost everything I’d collected. I’m sure my neighbors appreciated shouted obscenities at 7am.

First Time Milking

Gah, that’s harder work than I expected it to be. I don’t have a milking stand, so it’s squirt, squirt, push the goat back into position, squirt squirt. Takes a minute to get going but once you do then it comes pretty freely. With a goat, the pail fills up pretty slowly. She ran out of food to keep her occupied and my shoulder and arm got exhausted before I was done but we got 6.5 ounces of clean milk from her this morning.

It doesn’t taste too radically different from regular milk. Maybe a little huskier flavor, it’s hard to describe. It tasted quite excellent, I think.

Tanglewood Hill

We've finally decided on a name for the farm ... it'll be both our fun name and our business name ...

... Tanglewood Hill Farm!

Guess what I found ...

An enormous patch of blackberry bushes, loaded with fruit, growing in the woods near my house where (probably) nobody else a) knows about them, b) is willing to go tromping across a creek, through some briars, up a hill, and then through a giant patch of poison oak. Those chumps. They don’t know what they’re missing. Some of the berries are already turning ripe and the rest are red, indicating they ought to be ready in a week or two. I’ve been seeing purple splatters all over the place from the birds, so I figured it was time to go looking for berries. I think I’ll be able to get a couple of quarts out of that patch, surreptitiously at dawn since it’s a forest preserve and I’m not allowed. Shhh ….

Why you can't transfer ownership of a cat ...

My neighbors have two cats that they really don’t want. They rescued them both from abandonment. One is a kitten and the other is a little older, with missing ears (probably due to frostbite this past winter). They travel a bit, being a retired couple, and asked if we could use them. Every farm needs cats to run loose, otherwise the rodent population becomes a severe problem, what with the livestock feed and all. So I said yes. Yesterday Jared and I walked down the road to visit the cats and try to bring them home. It wasn’t happening. Both are quite wild, and the kitten particularly so. We opted to try again this morning when they were being fed and our neighbors would be away. No problem. Except the cats weren’t having it. The little one (with the ignominious name of “Itsy Bitsy”) took a great exception to being handled and opened up a 3 inch gash on my hand. I think “Dragon”, which the boys wanted to name her, was more appropriate. After drawing a few ounces of blood, she took off into the bushes and wasn’t seen again. The older cat, named “Nubs” for its ears, proved somewhat more amenable to being handled. I caught her and we carried her back to the house, squirming and meowing the entire way.

Upon setting her down on the back deck in front of a bowl of milk, some cat food, and a slice of garlic bologna, she sniffed at the fare and then wandered the deck a minute to see how the new environment fared. She saw the chickens and pounced on one, not doing it any real harm (although the poor thing squawked like it’d been killed) and when I yelled, Nubs released the chicken and headed for the windrow that separates the two farms. She never looked back and we stood there watching as the feline disappeared in the trees without even so much as a look back. The boys stood there blinking in disbelief with sad little eyes. So while we need cats, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get these cats.

Everyone Should Know Someone Like This

Drew is probably the smartest guy I know. I deal in a high-tech world of computers and software, but that’s really just technical stuff and even the “rocket scientist” types who design high-end systems don’t really compare. Drew spends his time pondering the deeper concepts of education and the way the brain works. His religious and social insights are staggering to me and I always come away feeling slightly dazed.

Why is this level of intelligence not more valued in society? What’s wrong with our culture that we disdain the big brains that could actually drive human civilization further and make this a better world? Instead we elect representatives from our society who are the weakest links among us all. We reward greed and graft in our politicians and corporate executives. We simply ignore those who diligently work within themselves to better their own minds, but those are the brightest sparks among us. The rest of us are more or less just keeping the lights on as far as humanity goes, but these brilliant folks are the ones who make the advancements. (Not the new toaster ovens that will toast both sides simultaneously, but real advancements in philosophical thought.)

Coyote Urine

Does it really repel deer? It kind of repels me, so I assume it might work.

Peak Gold?

I’ve been recently enlightened to another natural resource that’s rapidly being depleted. I don’t consider it as important as oil because we haven’t particularly based our society around it in the same way as fossil fuel, but gold plays an important part nonetheless. It’s used not just for jewelry, but goes into computers, cellphones, batteries, and everything that makes our ridiculous technical society hum. At one time, miners could sift gold out of sand by the side of a mountain stream. Now 4 acres of strip mine and 20 tones of crushed rock are required to get enough gold just to make an average wedding band.

What happens when we run out of gold? I have no idea. Probably the price just skyrockets and everyone’s wedding bands get melted down to make more Paris Hilton™ cellphones with plastic glue-on sparklies. Still, we could look at any shortage of this magnitude and wake up to the fact that we have almost completely eaten the world.

My Representative

I received a letter in the mail from my U.S. Representative welcoming me to the neighborhood and giving me info on how to contact him. I immediately did so and then went and looked at his record. I can instantly see that there are many stupid things and ideas which he must be dissuaded from. He’s hacking at the leaves and way off track on some rather serious issues. But don’t worry, Don Manzullo … I’m here to help set you straight.

Squealing Like a Little Girl

Kathy surprised me yesterday with a copy of “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”. If you’ve never read anything by him, and you are at all concerned with the world you live in, nature, agriculture, or the food you eat, then it’s something you must immediately go out and do. Many of his essays are out on the web for you to find. It’s amazing how familiar his concepts are, because they’ve shaped all of the ideals we’re trying to live by and have been absorbed through other authors and thinkers today.

Luckily it’s raining outside so I don’t have to drag the Misery Wheel (high wheel plow) back out of the garage and finish the garden. I have free license to sit up under a shelter and listen to the rain while I read my new book. Good thing too because I’m one big ache from head to toe today.

Old Fashioned Back Ache

My neighbor has an old fashioned Kentucky High Wheel Plow, for whatever reason. He’s the “sit on the riding mower and drink a beer while you mow 1/4^th of an acre” kind of guy. Anyhow, I mentioned to him I was looking to buy a wheel hoe and he offered to loan me this wheel plow instead. Not having used one before, but having a keen interest in non-gasoline driven agricultural implements, I took him up on the offer. It has a couple of different attachments, from rakes to a little plow head. I tried them all, but what seems to cut weeds the best is the plow attachment. Though it’s a little narrow for my wide rows, it cuts up the sod nicely and turns weeds under. It’s difficult to maneuver around the plants (a few pea plants may have sacrificed themselves to the cause) but I think it’s something I could get the hang of. I think I’m going to start looking around for one of these.

The only drawback I see towards it is the sheer muscle power required to move the damn thing. My back and arms ache, and my legs in various places as well. I can do about two rows before I need to go collapse under a shade tree, and we’ve got 18 rows that need doing so you can tell I’m not making vast progress here. I can see why farmers in yesteryears were considering such hardy people, and I can see why so many of us are going to die when the oil runs out and we can’t pull out the riding lawnmower or the rototiller.

Yellow Gold

Today was the day I finally put a super on one of the beehives. I’ve got to assemble a lot more frames and paint the rest of the super bodies, but I wanted to get them on there as I go. I decided to put it on the German hive (the little black ones) since they’re the ones that have been acting so bizarrely lately. And in doing so, I learned some lessons that will serve me well when I next go to work with my bees.

First, make sure you have all your tools before you ever pop the top on a hive. I have carelessly lost my hive tool (the chisel thing you used to pry apart stuck frames and bodies) and decided that I’d just peek inside there anyway, since it was such a necessity to get the super on today. Unfortunately in these ancients hives I’ve bought, there’s probably ten years of propolis sticking the frames inside the bodies and the bodies to each other. So I didn’t get to pull any of their frames  and peek down inside. I did see lots of bees poking their little bee heads up though, so I know there’s some good going on down there. It also looks like there’s a handful of queen cells (the big peanut looking things) so I think the strange activity is this hive getting ready to swarm. It sucks that I’m going to lose some of my bees, but that’s the natural order of things.

Second, make sure your smoker is well lit. I had a devil of a time getting mine going, and then it wouldn’t stay lit. I finally got some smoke in the hive, but I probably ingested more than the bees did while trying to get it going. All in all, I think they probably didn’t get enough smoke and the fact that they didn’t bother me much or sting me was due more to my not really pulling the frames apart and poking around inside. I did accidentally squash a few though so they were certainly mad.

Third, I need gloves. I have a pair of thin gloves I wear when I’m in the suit, but they aren’t made for this purpose and the sleeves of the suit don’t properly close, so I get bees inside the suit with me if I’m not careful, and it’s difficult to work quickly and smoothly when you’re worried about bees in your clothes.

Overwhelmed ... or "Now I Know Why the Caged Tomato Sings"

Man, I am feeling entirely overwhelmed tonight. I put out cages around the rest of my tomato plants. They had that weird bent look to them where some of them got knocked flat by the storm, then spent today growing straight up from their prone position. It looks like I have an odd variety of 90 degree angle plants out there. The sod and weeds have just about reclaimed the garden. I’m doing rather well in the raised beds, which are much easier to work in, but the ground level garden is completely overwhelming to me. I pull out the lamb’s quarter and vetch and other weird things growing out there, but the sod has filled in between the rows and is now blanketing the soil. I know it’s not going to be pristine, but it needs some serious work. I bought a stirrup hoe and I’m hoping after the soil dries out a little I’ll be able to fix those weeds … and for good!

The deer have half-eaten the apple tree down by the road. I put up some six foot welded wire in a circle around it tonight. That ought to keep the little bastards out, but it will sure make picking off the bugs a lot more difficult. I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good solution for the rest of the orchard, which has resisted deer predation for the most part but has been plagued by Japanese beetles. I need to find a non-chemical method of dealing with those. 17 beetles went to a nasty chicken death tonight, tossed into the coop as a bedtime snack. Some of the leaves have been decimated by the critters.

One of our chickens has apparently returned, or I miscounted the other day. We’re holding at 35. That means we’ve lost two since we put them out on pasture. Not sure if a hawk or one of that family of foxes managed to make off with them. I’m keeping an eye out. I’m also going to get a gun permit (damn you, Illinois, for forcing me into that) and pick up a nice varmint rifle and stake out some turf. I may take down a deer as well, if they don’t stay out of the orchard. Venison will fit nicely in the fridge.

New Phone

Yesterday I left my old phone out in the rain. Zap! Today I have a new one that is working well. Motorola Q is a good phone, even if it does come from China.

All Money is Debt ... with apologies to Adam Smith, Alan Greenspan, and The Daily Reckoning

I do not pretend to understand the mortgage industry. I was applying for a VA Loan, leveraging the strength of my service as a veteran to overcome my poor credit from my days as a bad borrower. One mortgage company after another rejected me, either flatly refusing to give me a home loan, or wanting to do so at extortionist prices. Finally I found one that would work with me on my terms, and off we went. They were fast, efficient, and our loan officer was immensely capable. Shortly thereafter our loan closed, we bought our home, and pretty much the day we moved in there was a letter in the mailbox from our new mortgage holder indicating that our mortgage had been sold to them and here was how it was going to be. Ironically, it’s one of the mortgage companies that flatly refused to service my loan in the beginning. Why am I not an attractive lender to initiate a loan, but yet I’m attractive immediately upon closing on a loan with someone else … or attractive enough to be bought? Even further irony, this is the same mortgage company that tried to foreclose on us illegally in 2001 after I lost my job.

It’s a common misconception that banks loan out the money they are holding from depositors. In the United States they are allowed to loan out a number based off of their holdings … in other words, for every $1 they are holding in assets (our money) they can loan out $9. And then they charge interest on the full $9. So when I get my mortgage statement in the mail and it says how much interest I’m paying, I flinch a little. They are collecting an enormous amount of funds from me, gathered in the form of wages, simply for being a bank. The amazing amount of interest they are being paid is based on imaginary funds.

But let’s go a little further … inflation is hovering around three percent, according to the government’s figures in 2006. Fixed interest loans are not adjusted for inflation, so over the 30 years of my mortgage (heaven forbid I should go that long), the bank will lose most of the interest. The joke is not on them, however, because the high price I paid for this house and five acres in a rural setting will be money owed for long after the coming economic crash when property beyond walking distance of a job will be essentially worthless. So back to the inflation, the interest is being whittled away by rising inflation. What causes inflation? Once upon a time, a nation’s wealth had to be backed in gold. This was why our dollar was worth, well, a dollar, and a Mexican peso was worth somewhere around three cents. Later, our economy was unhitched from the gold standard and products became the mainstay backing our currency. In other words, wealth was what a nation could produce from its natural resources. Now it’s a completely different standard. Our currency is only worth something, not being backed by gold or products, because other nations find it useful. Remember, we don’t really make anything here anymore, and certainly not anything in a large-scale, sustainable fashion.

So there’s a squeeze coming. Our currency isn’t backed by anything and much of it is being shipped overseas. Per the Federal Reserve’s statistics, more American dollars are in circulation in China and India than in the entire United States. That’s money being carried around in people’s pockets … not just money in Chinese banks. The squeeze comes when the foreign banking institutions which are propping up the U.S. dollar by loaning us money to buy their products decided to call in their debts. We can’t pay it. We don’t have the gold or natural resources (oil) to pay off this debt. Like an old, aristocratic family whose money is spent on extravagant living, we are now financially destitute with our only remaining asset being the land of our forefathers. Yet most of the land in the United States is held by private persons … so when the Chinese want it, there is no real way for our government to take it (and still remain the land of the free).

Enter the banking industry. Through a complex scheme of hedge funds, overseas money markets, and banking laws, the institutions which loan us money to buy our homes are irrevocably tied to the Chinese. Don’t believe me? You’re not following the stock market very closely then. Watch the shivers and falls on Wall Street whenever China yanks on our leash. The American banking institutions are quick to pull their investments out of American markets and deposit them in Asian ones, whenever profit seems more likely there. At some point, the dollars will stay in those foreign markets, and you’ll see pensions, 401k funds, and stock grants wither away like grapes on a dead vine. So when the squeeze comes, and the banking industry needs something to pay back the Chinese, you’ll see a record number of home foreclosures. They’ll start enforcing rules and fine print in contracts that they’ve never enforced before in order to force Ma and Pa off the family farm. If that’s not moving things along fast enough, they’ll use their immense lobbying power to leverage politicians (who are certainly not in a position to be foreclosed on) to change the banking laws in the United States. Even my V.A. backed loan isn’t safe, should I suffer a financial setback or job loss. If you have anything the bank owns when the squeeze comes, then expect to pay it off or lose it.
Last Friday, the Mortgage Banking Association reported that, “The percentage of U.S. mortgages entering foreclosure is the highest in more than 50 years” … Ladies and gentlemen, the squeeze is already here.

After the Storm

Sometime in the night, the flimsy latch on the chicken coop door gave way and this morning when I went outside (shortly after 6am, I add triumphantly)  the chickens were milling (wetly) around the yard. Though I haven’t done a headcount, which is decidedly difficult with this many, it looks like they’re all there. In the mud that borders the entire east side of the coop there are no tracks, so the storm may have kept predators at bay. I need to revise my door-fastening strategy here.

One of the apple trees I planted near the road, as sort of an ambassador to passerby. Well, the deer have found it and this morning about half of the leaves from the top have been eaten. On the trees in the back orchard I can see no signs of predation, but Japanese beetles have moved in. I could collect about a half quart of them every day to feed the chickens.

Our old landlord has owed us our security deposit for some time, which I’ve been counting on to do some repairs around here. Unfortunately, I’m being taught yet another lesson that people aren’t always honest. She has decided that $2400 isn’t enough to cover the cost of cleaning the carpets and painting the walls and has taken all of that and presented me with a bill for $450. She’s in violation of about seven statutes of Illinois renter’s law, but I have yet to figure out how to enforce that. I’ll be on the lookout for a good lawyer today. I’m 35 years old and suddenly about to be involved in a civil case? Nutty.

Stupid Chickens

It’s raining, and I can’t seem to corral all the chickens and get them back into their coop. Should I even worry about it, or do they have sense enough to get in out of the rain? (More sense than I, apparently, because I was just out there chasing them.)

Chicken MIA

I’m missing three chickens, by my estimation. While feeding them this morning I could only count 34 when there should be 37. Either I’ve got 3 hiding somewhere that didn’t come running for food, or some varmint has been helping itself to a free range chicken dinner. It would have to be very fast food, because we haven’t seen anything lurking around. Maybe a critter came up, snatched a bird, and made away with it. I guess I need to trim that grass around there so it makes it harder to hide.

Ernie's Little Cock

The chickens are out in the pasture, and after a difficult time they have decided that it's not so bad. Plenty of bugs and grass to eat! They are literally free-range, as I just open up the coop and let them go where they want. They won't usually wander too far from the coop, even as adults.

In this picture, you can see one of the males who is starting to look decidedly rooster-like (although little and gawky) and is developing a red comb. Some are coming along better than others, but this little guy is probably the most curious. He roams right up to you in order to see what you're doing.

Blessed Rain

A storm has moved in and it’s pouring down rain. I’ve never been so happy to see rain before. Oh, not just because the garden and orchard needs it, but because it means I won’t need to haul water half a mile uphill. It also means I don’t need to worry about mowing the rest of the lawn today, or finishing up painting and assembling the beehives. I can take a much-needed break and get some rest and relaxation for the rest of the afternoon. Yeesh. I’m broken down today.

Gonzales the Slippery Weasel

Look, Gonzales is a dirtbag who politicized the justice system for the aims of the administration. But c’mon, Democrats. Show some friggin’ balls will you? Who do you think gave him his marching orders? You can’t fire him. No matter what resolutions you pass, the Constitution says you can’t fire him. Only the president can. But you know who you can fire? You can fire the guy who gave him the orders. It would take more balls than Nancy Pelosi has (no pun intended) and if they can’t get enough votes to pass a resolution to wag the finger at Gonzales, then you can bet your ass they can’t get enough votes to impeach a wartime president, but at least it would be a meaningful gesture.

It’s amusing to me that the American public has elected representatives who aren’t smart enough to pick their battles or cunning enough to bring down a political opponent as sloppy and scandal-ridden as Bush.

On the Road Blues

Man, I am in a serious funk. Sometimes I get this weird sense of dislocation, as if I’m suddenly realizing how far I am from home and what it would take to get me back there. It’s accompanied by a “How did I get here?” feeling and usually a wave of angst and depression. Tonight it hits me at 1am standing at the cash register of a Denny’s in Independence, Ohio as I wait for a club sandwich. I’ve got to get up in 5 hours and I’m truly exhausted … the kind of exhaustion that comes from days on end of not sleeping well, not the kind of exhausted I’d be after a hard morning working and then hopping in the car to drive for 8 hours. I don’t get it. This is the kind of exhaustion I usually feel after four or five days on the road, and I’m feeling it now?

I don’t like traveling. I want to stay on the farm. The cicadas had just emerged in the forest maybe a half mile from the house and I could hear them while standing on the front porch. It was a dull roar, definitely organic, in the distance. I don’t recall hearing them so distinctly before. By the time I return home I will probably have missed them, and be waiting 17 years to hear them again. Maybe that’ll be my benchmark … in 17 years I’ll try and make it a point that I’m not going anywhere so I can just sit on the porch and listen to them. They’re quite beautiful, in a weird sort of way.

I see my time away from the farm as pretty much of an imposition, though it’s this job that pays for all that I enjoy. I’d much rather be home mucking out a stall in the barn, pulling weeds in the garden, or just sitting on the back porch with a good book. Ah well. Three more days and I can head home. Hopefully it won’t be too hateful this trip.

Mortality

Lost one more chicken. Reason unknown. Little guy was stiff as a board tonight in the corner. I checked them around noon and didn’t see any dead ones. 9 hours later and we’ve got a goner. Thought we were past that.

After the Storm - Photos!

Well, the thing about a hard rain is that it rarely lasts for long. When it was done I went out and took some photos. Some of these come from before the rain, but I figured I'd throw them in anyway.



Start the day right. Fresh eggs are a hit pretty much anytime, and these don't get much fresher. My chickens are still maybe 4-5 months away from laying, but my friend Don is doing a booming egg business. If you can't get your own, then the next best thing is buying fresh off the farm. Look at how tall and orange the yolks are. That's the way an egg from a healthy chicken looks ... not those watery, pale yellow things that you get in the grocery store. As consumers have gotten more savvy about what constitutes a healthy egg, the CAFO corporations are starting to doctor up their chickens with chemicals to produce a yolk that looks like that. It's not healthy, but it looks like it is. Says a lot about our food economy.



The raised beds don't drain exceptionally well or quick. Rainwater accumulated from the hard, fast storm at one end, but fortunately it's the end I haven't planted anything in yet. I think storms like this are pretty rare, so it won't be a big deal. About twenty minutes later when I circled back around there wasn't any standing water.



The onions are doing well, though they're being surrounded by weeds and sod. The grass is making a firm comeback and I can't keep it weeded fast enough, especially with this rain we've been having lately. Ah well. If the onion just stays a little taller than the grass, we can find it when it's ready for harvesting.



These long, semi-straight branches came from some trees that the goats ate bare out beside the barn. I tied them together and made a tripod for my pole beans to grow up. I put nine bean plants around each leg of the tripod, so hopefully that'll be a lot of beans. This is my first year to ever plant beans, so I'm not entirely sure how that'll work out.



The sunflowers seem to have survived the hail, better than some of the okra and young tomato plants. The okra and tomato had all the leaves knocked off and the stems beaten down, whereas the larger plants didn't seem bothered too much.



I'd read a lot about goats getting chilled and dying after a rain, and this worried me somewhat. However, these goats I've got don't seem to be likely to get very wet. At the first few drops, they make a beeline for the shelter of the barn. I suspect that the goat farmers who have goats dying from chills after a rain probably aren't providing shelter for them. Here, Primavera looks out to see if the coast is clear. When they're in the barn they just cluster up and stay warm together, pretty carefree about the state of things outside.



The gate leading up to the orchard is near a covered structure where the previous owner's horses liked to congregate. As a result, it's covered in about eight inches of old horse manure. After a good rain, the ground there turns into a tea-colored swamp as the nitrogren rich runoff seeps away. It doesn't stink, but I'm not too happy about it regardless. I need to get out there and try to rake it up a little, but I doubt it'll happen anytime soon. There's too much else to be done to worry about something that isn't hurting anyone. I keep the goats out of that area when it's damp like that -- I don't want to worry with their feet.



Mushrooms sprout up in the manure after a good rain. Don't know if these are edible or not, but I'm not too interested in eating them.



Red Clover grows in patches around the fields. It's pretty robust and the goats like to eat it, especially the red fuzzy blossoms. Chuck (the beekeeper I bought my bees from) said that bees can't make use of the giant flowers, their proboscis being too short to get any nectar. You see a lot of bumblebees and wasps on them though, so they're still pretty beneficial.



Here's the view up into the orchard area. To the left you can see the beehives and to the right the corner of the pasture and the nine trees (difficult to make out at this distance). There's some briar bushes growing out there, but they aren't in my way and provide shelter for beneficial birds that'll eat many of the orchard pests, so I leave them be.



No idea what this flower is, but it's bloomed in the past couple of days. Very pretty to look out across a field of white Dutch clover blossoms and see a scattering of yellow sticking up here and there, mixed with the red.



Some of the briar bushes have broken out in flower, which the bees seem to appreciate from time to time. It's pretty hard to pry them away from the clover blossoms right now.



Is this chamomile? I can't tell for sure, but it's in bloom and quite beautiful. I'll need to consult the medicinal plant book soon and see if this is or isn't chamomile.



Lately (while the weather has been rough) the bees have been doing this clustering thing at the entrance of their hive. Not sure if that's normal bee behavior or not. Time will tell as I get more used to the bees. Here next week, after a few sunny days, I'll go out and peek inside the brood boxes and see what the queen is up to.



While this may look like an ordinary mudhole, it's not. I believe it's a naturally occurring seep out at the top of the orchard hill. Marshy plants are growing in it, and even when it's dry it's almost always at least moist, and when the water table is high it is a small pool of water maybe a foot and a half across. I'm going to call the Soil Conversation people and find out if I can tap this with a small, hand-pumped well and it would provide water to the back pasture pretty easily (and provide me with an alternate source of water in case of a time when the electrical grid fails us. It's a quarter mile from the house, which would make it pretty much a pain to haul water from there, but that's better than no water at all.



I've been told that back around World War II, there was a lot of hemp grown in this area to make sails, ropes, and uniforms. Some of it was either grown here, or escaped its cultivated fields and volunteered here. Illegal to cultivate now, thanks to DuPont, our government, and the cotton lobby, hemp fabric is now only imported from elsewhere. Before we moved here, I'd never seen it growing naturally and before this week I've never seen it actually produce flowers (the buds at the top of the plant in this photo). Soon the buds should open and we'll be seeing hemp flowers for the first time ever.



The storms haven't passed, but we're in a lull between two big ones. Here we're looking back southwest towards the house and barn and the towering thunderheads building over us.



And on an amusing note, here's Sir Toby trying to practice the love-that-dares-not-speak-its-name on his brother Puck. Both of these guys have been neutered (using the banding method) and are almost officially wethers still under two months of age, but apparently some instincts remain. Toby is the smart one with a real goatish personality, while Puck is fat and stupid. So stupid, he'll let his brother do this without complaint.

The Storm

I had let the goats out into the yard to browse, which they did for about a half hour before an ugly storm moved in. God had more in store for us than a little rain … pea-sized hail falling all across the garden. Hopefully it won’t have damaged too many of the sprouts.

I'm still alive

Today was “containment day”. We put up about 200 feet of welded wire fence to keep the goats in (by the way, did you know you’re supposed to stretch it?) and then built a lid for the chicken brooder before they start flying about the garage. Our fence is saggy and our lid is wobbly and doesn’t fit right. But I haven’t died from my pneumonia and I think I’m actually getting better. Kat has started blogging again, which I dig, and life is going pretty well. I’ve got about a week where I’m doing projects from home, so lots of farm time!