Busy Day

A grueling day, but I got a lot done. I bought a new lawnmower. My wife likes the front and backyard mowed, and while I don't mind a tangled jungle, in order to maintain peace and harmony in the household I must mow. Apparently she likes to be able to see the children when they're playing in the backyard, not just rustling grass where a kid MIGHT be.

I didn't bow to peer pressure and get a riding mower though. I bought a self-propelled walk-behind mower. I'm not ready to get THAT lazy. It took about the same amount of time to mow the front lawn as it always did before, but yet I wasn't as tired at the end of it.

I split my beehives this evening, turning two into four. I can probably get away with one or two more splits before the year is out, giving me maybe six to go into the winter with. That'll be a good number, I think. I need to go tomorrow into town and pick up some more wooden pallets.

My tiller still isn't fixed. The wrong part came in. Bleh. I need to reduce the number of mechanical devices in my life. Seems like I'm always fixing one, carrying one someplace to get fixed, or waiting on a part that I need to fix one.

Like a squirrel ...

I'm preparing for winter. I've got hay stored up, almost a full winter's worth. I've just placed a feed order that ought to carry me through half the winter, if not more. It's a little early for that, but I suspect the price is going to double in the next month. The garden is almost completely planted. Fortess Ernie is almost complete.

See It All Sunday

Since I can't ever seem to get a Walk With Me Wednesday post anymore, today we'll have "See It All Sunday".

A couple of weeks ago the boys and I planted some seeds in a seed starter. They were very happy to be doing this, but unfortunately I went out of town and forgot to tell Kat to water the seed starter and everything died. Still, they had enjoyment and learning from planting those seeds.



Some of the boys prefer to sit in the shade and read.



We plowed up about 10,000 square foot of garden this year, in addition to the space we did last year. So altogether that's about 15,000 square foot. Here's the part of it we got planted early in the season before my tiller broke. From left to right you've got potatoes, tomatoes, onions, tomatoes, and then more onions (and a healthy sampling of weeds). There's a 100' row for each of them.



I'm putting straw down around the tomato plants to smother out weeds and provide for water retention and better soil maintenance. I should probably put it around the potato plants as well, but they seem to hold their own against the weeds better, and suffer less from lack of water. Underneath the straw I ran a soaker hose, so I can just plug it in and it soaks the plants thoroughly from underneath. All this is part of my efforts to prevent the tomato blight from hitting again this year.



This is the rest of the market garden. You can see some tomato and pepper plants I've put in, but the rest is seed in the ground waiting to come up. I have high hopes. There's a lot of potatoes out there.



The older garden bed is doing well.



The carrot patch needs weeding, but is thriving anyway.



Here you can see a thriving patch of kohlrabi. It's so easy to grow, I planted an entire 100' row of it. We just tried it last year, as part of our expanding vegetable vocabulary, and really liked it. Somewhere between a turnip and cabbage, I think.



The strawberry patch is being invaded by grass from the outside. I need to mow. I've got two of these beds converted to strawberries. I raised cucumbers and tomato plants in there last year, and you can see a couple of volunteers poking up through the strawberry plants. I need to transplant those out somewhere else.



In this corner I tilled in some Alaskan peas. I don't really plan on eating the peas, though I may take a few for sampling, but rather intend to use the peas as a nitrogen-fixing legume to increase the fertility of that little spot.



Ok, I need to post more about this section of the "experimental" garden. Maybe a more detailed post later on, but here's how it works. Last year I put down paper sacks and cardboard on top of sod. Then I covered the whole thing with straw. This year I've got some grass poking up through, and some weeds, but I've put down more cardboard and I'm also using some window panes there. If you leave the window down on the grass in the sun for about 3 days, it gets so hot under there that it essentially cooks all the sod and weed seeds. Then you remove it and plant down into the remaining goo. An easy no-till method! It's working out pretty well, though I did have some potatoes from last year volunteer up through the straw. I kept them. :)



7 rows of potatoes out in the old garden. Seems to be doing pretty well. Many of the potato plants even have pretty little blooms on them. Did you know that Marie Antoinette wore potato blossoms in her hair to try and get the French peasantry to adopt potatoes? I think she gets a bad rap, because from my research it looks like she (and the rest of the French monarchy of the time) were really trying to stave off starvation in France by introducing new farming methods and potatoes.



The four grapes I planted last year are doing very well. All survived the winter and most of them are shooting up skyward.



I can't seem to keep the chickens from tearing down my compost pile.



The goats are growing too. If you look to the far left, you can see the bulging udders on Haley. She's becoming a pretty good milker! I get between 10-14 ounces per day out of her, and once or twice even a full quart. Though she ought to be yielding a full gallon, I feel most of her problems have been due to our milking neglect and the fact that she's been lactating now for almost a full year. It's time to dry her off and get her pregnant again for another try next year.



Chickens are doing well too! Here's one of our two remaining Blue Andalusians. However there's a surprise ... we hatched out TWO of their chicks this year, so this one is a mama. She's not raising her own baby though; she's a liberated chicken and too busy with her own career.

Before the rains ...

I've got maybe 5 beds left that I can squeeze into the market garden. Today I used up two of them with sunflowers, kohlrabi, and broccoli. A LOT of kohlrabi. If it all yields then we'll be in business.

I've also bought a whole bunch of carrot seed, so I'll be seeding another bed heavily with carrots to see how that turns out. I'm also planning to start a big batch of manure tea in the next week or so and feed some of my tomato plants that are doing poorly. I let the sad little things sit rootbound for too long while my tiller was on the fritz. Tim down at the repair shop worked some magic today and I think it's going to work out fine. Hillbilly engineering saves the day.

I got the two beds seeded and done just as the rain started. It soaked the ground quite thoroughly, so all those new seeds got a hefty watering in.

I'm trying not to feel bad about all that I haven't gotten done. My plans are much bigger than my free time and I can't ever get it all done. I need to be satisfied just with where I'm at now.

Kat and the Food Chain

We're discussing the garden and this coming year's pantry. I'm talking about the sheer volume of kohlrabi that I'm planting and how it's vitamin rich but calorie poor.

Me: "It doesn't have a lot of protein or carbs, but it's high in vitamins so we could add it to soups, or boil it with potatoes. Or even better, cut it up and stir fry it with some of the goat meat we'll have in the freezer."

Kat makes a face.

Me: "What's wrong?"

Kat: "I just don't know about having so much meat that I've never tasted before or even know if I'm going to like."

Me: "It'll be good."

Kat: "I don't know. I mean, I've seen Puck (our goat). I've seen him out there pooping or trying to hump his brother. I've even seen him urinate for 5 minutes straight."

I'm laughing here very hard.

Kat: "One should not have such close familiarity with one's food chain."

Career Limiting Moves

Some days I find it difficult to maintain my serenity. It's weird trying to balance both sides of your personality within your employment. I guess the best we can do is be ourselves and let the chips fall where they may.

Bee Update

I suited up to go check the bees this evening. The little buggers are doing fine, but they aren't really producing like I thought they should have been. I don't know when the honey flow starts with all seriousness, but in the German hive I've got drawn comb on 50% of the frames, and they've only just started in the Italian hive. There's honey in the cells in the German hive, so we have indeed started producing, but it's behind schedule, I'm thinking.

I have one more finished super and 3 more that need assembled frames. Putting together frames is rather time consuming and so I'm always behind on that. I put the finished super on the German hive, and I'm hoping they can fill that sucker up with some honey.

I need to do some splits, as I have finished assembling and painting four more brood boxes. Of course they all need frames assembled. I need a small army of tinker gnomes to assemble those stupid frames for me. I'm just worried about doing the splits since I don't know how late I can do those without hurting the existing populations too badly.

Hay and Straw

$4 per bale for first-cut hay, which is the best you're going to get. Last year the price went up to $8 for third-cut, which is absolutely horrible nutritionally speaking. So this year I'm planning ahead and stockpiling.

I had 50 bales brought over today, and the two teenage boys who delivered it (they work for a neighboring farm) were kind enough to stack it all in the barn for a little extra beer money. I anticipate using roughly 3 bales per week, for 5 months of the winter. That's 60 bales to get me from November to the end of March. (bales per week multiplied by number of weeks per month times number of month ... or 3 X 4 X 5. And it's all first cut stuff, so I believe it has the highest nutritional content around. That's what will be good for my pregnant ladies come winter.

I picked up 20 bales of straw too, from the same guy. It's good quality straw, though it was baled a little loosely. Very few seeds and grains in it. I'm using it for animal bedding and the garden beds. I'll probably need another 20 bales before winter.

The garden so far

(Estimated number of plants based on row length)

500 russet-style potatoes
120 tomato plants (Roma and Champion)
600 onions (white and red)
210 fingerling potatoes
200 carrots

I've still got space for about three dozen more tomato and pepper plants in the experimental garden, and 3 of the 100' rows remaining which I'll seed with broccoli and carrots.

This is my most ambitious garden ever. I'll take some pictures soon and start showing it off.

Meanwhile ...

Although the hatch has consumed the lion's share of my attention ... I've been doing a lot of other things lately. We've planted 5 100' rows of potatoes, that's 500 potato plants for those of you keeping track. I've also planted the rest of my rootbound tomato plants and some unhappy looking bell pepper plants. I have a lot of seeds left to get in the ground now that it is drying up, and the weeds have enjoyed the rain so I've got a lot of weeding to do. Pictures soon!

Hatch 08.01 Scoresheet

of 20 eggs, 11 hatched for a hatch rate of 55%. Two of the eggs appear to be full blooded Aracauna (40% chance), the rest are hybrids that stuck mostly to the appearance of one parent. One of the chicks looks exactly like its Blue Andalusian mother although there was no Blue Andalusian rooster.

Interesting notes about this hatch:

1. Took almost 48 hours from the time the first egg broke to the time the last chick emerged.

2. Hatch started roughly one day later than expected. Temperature fluctuations were at a minimum, but this may indicate that the thermometer I'm using is slightly colder than the reading it displays.

3. The lower percentage of successful eggs may have been due to (a) poor selection of initial eggs, (b) no candling, and (c) they ran out of water for 2-3 days during their first week and again for 2 days during their 2nd week.

4. All of the eggs that did not hatch did not contain embryos at any stage of development. Possibly they had not been fertilized, or bacterial contamination arrested the development of the embryonic chicken.Hatch 08.02 has been started and contains 42 eggs, pre-selected with abnormalities in size, shape, and coloration discarded beforehand.

This hatch is expected on July 2nd, the same day that my Cackle Hatchery order arrives so that all can fit into the brooder box at the same time.

Hatch 08.02

Tonight we started the next hatch, 08.02 in the series of hatches we plan to do this year. We're trying for 3 hatches, possibly going for a bonus hatch of 4 if the next 2 hatches don't yield like we want. This clutch of eggs has a large number of Aracauna and Blue Andalusian eggs, fertilized by an Aracauna rooster (or possibly by the other roosters too, if any of the hens have any of their sperm stored). A hen can store sperm for up to a month for viable use. This hatch will come out of the incubator on or around July 2nd, exactly the date our order from Cackle Hatchery should be arriving ... so we'll be mixing and matching. That means the 11 previously hatched chicks will need to go out of the brooder box at 3 weeks, a tad early for my taste, but a workable age.

In this hatch there are 42 eggs, culled out for dirty ones and abnormalities in texture, shape, or size.

Hatch 08.1 Completed

50% success rate with 20 eggs. A very poor showing. No weird occurrences, just some eggs that didn't hatch out. The ones I suspected wouldn't, didn't. The 10 baby chicks are doing fine in the brooder, 5 having survived the night out there so far and started drinking. The other 5 are going out there as soon as they dry.

I let the water run dry in the incubator TWICE, once the first week and again the second week. I never candled the eggs (most were brown) and culled out the unlikelies. Temperature was pretty consistent, but one degree low if the hovabator thermometer can be trusted. They were due to hatch on the 21st and some started cheeping around then, with small cracks appearing that night. The first chick emerged sometime overnight and arrived a good 4-6 hours before the next one. Last night there were 5 chipped eggs still to go and this morning I've got 5 more chicks flopping around in there.

Now we begin with the brooder losses, but I'm hoping I can get at least 5 of these guys out with the flock as replacements. Great colorations on these hybrid "mutts". Since they come from decent parentage I have high hopes. So far over the past 3 days I've got 34 eggs I've selected. Tonight I'll make it an even 40 and put them back in the box for another hatch.

I'm excited!

Hatch Update

So 5 chicks have hatched out and been moved from the incubator to the brooder. There’s maybe 5 more that have chips and beaks sticking out where the baby bird is still fighting its way out. This is going pretty well! If all those 5 come out, we will have had a 50% success rate our very first time!

Bustin' Out!

The eggs in the incubator are making pecking sounds and you can hear chirping! Occasionally you would even catch a glimpse of one of them rocking. As of right now one of the Blue Andalusian eggs has a tiny hole in the side pecked out and a little black beak is sticking out. This is so exciting!

How NAFTA Screwed Mexico

Are you one of those people who are good at putting together seemingly disconnected events? I am. See if you can connect the dots with me and come up with the same conclusion.

NAFTA was passed (1992), eliminating trade barriers and sending many of our jobs to Mexico. This benefited some Mexicans, but later we saw an influx of cheap corn from America flowing into Mexico and undercutting the price of Mexican corn. Mexican corn farmers went under and the tortilla manufacturing business shifted to American corn. Now many American companies with manufacturing in Mexico are pulling up the stakes and taking those jobs to India and China in their relentless pursuit of cheaper labor. Ironically, Mexicans have become too expensive. Now with fewer manufacturing jobs and far fewer farms, there’s just not a lot of jobs left in Mexico for Mexicans. Is it any wonder why illegal immigration has increased so much since NAFTA was passed? Mexicans now are unemployed and with no means to feed themselves, literally, since corn (their major food source) has now been diverted to ethanol and what remains is priced out of reach of the average peasant.

Basically, no matter who you are or where, you cannot trust corporations or capitalism. It is going to screw you over. Don’t trust what the corporations and their news media lapdogs are telling you, and don’t trust what your government tells you. In the end, you will be broke, unemployed, and without tortillas.

Salmonella in Tomatoes

The recent issue where salmonella showed up in tomatoes at McDonald’s just underlies how shaky our food supply is. However the American public has a very short memory. Not too long ago it was ecoli bacterium in spinach. The salmonella bacteria is mostly associated with reptiles and their close cousins … poultry. A tomato growing in a field has a very, very slim chance of ever introducing salmonella to the consumer unless they are putting raw chicken manure on it or handling it in an unclean fashion in the processing or cooking phase. Commercial agriculture at a large-scale introduces many problems and at its heart I believe it is unsustainable.

This can only help the local producer who practices long-term, sustainable, chemical-free agriculture. However the media needs to ask the right questions, and consumers need to ask the right questions. Then perhaps these large agribusinesses and their masters like McDonald’s will fall in line.

Flintstones Vitamins

A television commercial advertising Flintstones vitamins just announced they are even healthier because they now have some chemical found in breast milk.

Nice.

Struggling with this rationalization

I don’t believe in shopping at Wal-Mart, mostly because of the whole globalization issue that I believe is destroying local communities. So I have tried to shop only at local stores. However, when I go to those local stores … I find ONLY the same goods that I find at Wal-Mart. If I want cat food, I can’t buy cat food created locally … I get cat food created somewhere overseas. So is my local shopping effort naught but a meaningless gesture? I am still only marginally helping my local community, and in fact I may be doing more harm than good because instead of taking these Chinese goods to one big megastore, trucks must use more gasoline and clog our roads further by hauling them to a lot of individual stores. Still Chinese goods. Nothing local.

When you talk to many of the owners of these local stores, they hate Wal-Mart too, but when they tell you their plans you discover that they hate Wal-Mart as a competitor, not as a social ill. They would happily supplant Wal-Mart if they could, becoming a new globalization monster. Not a one of them I have found is willing to “pay it forward” and buy locally made goods or raw materials.

Who exactly am I helping here?

How did he know?

How did Claude Debussy know what listeners would feel when they heard his music? How did he know what those discordant chords buried almost subliminally in flowing harmony would evoke in me? Do you think he could have possibly envisioned that a listener would linger in his car until Nocturnes had completed? I can’t play music. I can’t create music. I can’t even sing in tune. However when I think of the great genius of Debussy’s works, and then I think of the great talent of the orchestras that bring them to me, transforming them from indecipherable marks on a page to beautiful music … then I really do feel optimistic about mankind. When the song is over, however, and I must leave the car and walk into a building to face other people and the world at large, I can’t help but feel that western civilization passed its prime when we lost Debussy.

I'm SO glad I'm not single

I’m thankful for my wife for about a million reasons … but here’s one more.

I’m sitting in a bar having a drink and this weird-looking woman sits down next to me. She orders some fruity drink then turns sideways and says, “I love your hair. Are you an artist?” I laughed and said, “No, I’m a beekeeper.” (I don’t tell strangers all the things I do.) The smile more or less melted off of her face and her eyes glazed over. Then without further adieu she swiveled her barstool back around to the guy on the other side of her and said, “Hello! What do you do?”

As totally bizarre as that encounter was … I got the feeling I didn’t make the cut. Oh well. Kathy loves her beekeeper husband.

Go, Dennis!

I turned on C-SPAN and I can see that Rep. Dennis Kucinich is trying to bring impeachment charges against the president for violating his constitutional oath and deliberately deceiving the American public, as well as possibly violating U.S. law. That Dennis is a scrapper and he’s clearly not afraid of a fight. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone steps up to support this motion. While there are lots of democrats in the house that would love to see Bush get impeached right before the election, I don’t think any of them will stand up beside Dennis, who is known as somewhat of a crazy. Plus they don’t really want to open the door for charges of not supporting constitutional oaths, now do they?

What I'm counting ...

You're not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch, but I can't help myself. I have 20 eggs in the incubator and this Friday is the expected hatch date. When hatching chickens, that last 3-5 days is the absolute most critical. The temperature has been moderately consistent throughout this batch, but I've been lax about the humidity. I've let it run dry twice now. I have no idea how long it's taking to run dry, but I need to be better about that the next run. Supposedly it's only really critical during that last 3-5 days, but the books say "low humidity is ok" not "no humidity". So I'm a little afraid that instead of incubating these eggs I've just slowly roasted them over a period of 21 days.

If this doesn't work at all, or if I have a critically low hatch rate, then there's nothing for it but to try again as soon as possible. I'm collecting eggs now from my favorite birds and I'll continue collecting all week to pop them in the incubator as quickly as possible after this batch comes out.

Wish me luck!

What makes me angry these days ...

I used to get really angry when I saw people living in a non-sustainable and irresponsible manner in the cities. My neighbors when we lived in the 'burbs would drive me absolutely insane with their frivolous antics. Now that I'm out of that environment I really don't seem to care about what's going on back there. It's not close to my lifestyle and while I think it's silly, there's no real anger there anymore.

What does make me angry is poor animal husbandry. People who keep an obviously sick or inferior animal and keep breeding them are infuriating. People who don't care for their animals well are infuriating.

While it's my garden that seems to get the most attention, the chickens and goats are high on my list of importance. They provide regular, steady food nearly year round. I have a responsibility to not only keep them in good shape and healthy, but also to breed for the overall improvement of the species, even if I'm just raising mixed breeds. Future homesteaders aren't going to care if I breed a poor milking, one-teat goat because "she's so friendly". They're only going to know that somewhere in the line of goats, some idiot didn't follow responsible animal husbandry and now there's a whole lot of one-teat goats running around. Same with chickens, although they breed a lot faster than goats. I need better foragers and better layers, not "pretty" birds. One of my Rhode Island Reds is as ugly as a turd with her patchwork feathers, but she's in the coop every single day squeezing out a large egg. That's $20+ dollars a season this lady brings me, or if I eat those eggs myself then she's giving me roughly 100 calories per day or 24,000 calories per laying year (240 days, give or take a month depending on the weather). Don't you think she deserves to pass on those good-layer genes to the next generation of hens?

If you're going to do anything, you have an obligation to do it well and in accordance with future generations.

Two Things I'd Like to Complete Before Winter

My dreams of having a large pond were dashed by the lack of a spring in the right location, however I can still put in a large backyard pond (water feature). I found a place online where I can buy a liner in the appropriate size, and all that remains is for me to dig a 15-20' diameter hole out in the spot where I want it. The pond will be about 3' deep in its center with the sides sloping up gently. It will be banked on the downhill side (east). Plenty of rocks and water plants and it'll be a nice, pleasant thing to look at while the ducks paddle about. I might even be able to raise a few fish in it for food, though I'm not yet sure how that would work.

My second project is to move the chicken coop from the back pasture where it's currently located to one closer to the house. This will allow us to more easily confine the chickens (to a half-acre space) and in the winter we won't need to go quite so far carrying water. This one is a much easier project than digging a 15-20' hole.

On CNN: The Slow Movement

"The slow movement is a national campaign that claims Americans' high-velocity lives are destroying their health, families and communities. Supporters call for laws mandating paid vacations and election days off. "Time is the most precious thing we have," the movement's founder says. "

Link: CNN's Slow Movement

I agree with the first part. Much of American culture is in this insane work ethic where they grind and toil all day. They look down on anyone who isn't as burnt out and exhausted as the rest as a slacker or a layabout. It eats away their health and life and gives them nothing in return but a salary. What foolishness.

The second part I have a huge problem with. Calling for lives mandating paid vacation and election days off? Maybe some of these folks haven't caught on, but there's a job shortage already. The employers have the upper hand. We keep on demanding and pushing and the corporations will continue to move all our jobs on over to India and China. We'll have plenty of friggin' time off then, now won't we?

Whatever your movement or cause, you do it great disservice when you call for a law or for government intervention.

Buying a Cow in Kenya

I got an email this morning stating my Kiva loan has defaulted. I had to think about that. About two years ago, after watching a Frontline episode about people creating microloans for the Third World, Kathy and I went out on a whim and set up a microloan for $25 using Kiva.org. We picked a Christian Agrarian woman who was trying to buy a milk cow in Kenya for $600. Then we promptly forgot about it.

Buying a milk cow was something I could relate to. We're looking for one ourselves. However, the cost of $600 seemed somewhat high to me then, and now that I've seen the costs in my own area it really seems high to me. I would think that the milk cow our lady was trying to buy would be a full-grown milker in high production, at that price. Perhaps she doesn't have the ability to risk buying a calf and raising it to a milking age. I know nothing about the prices of livestock in Kenya, so really, who am I to say?

The email stated that due to the collapse of the economic empowerment consortium that had helped this woman get her loan (the founder of it died unexpectedly), and the political and civil unrest in Kenya, that Kiva was unable to track the progress and status of this loan and thus it had defaulted. Perhaps in the void left behind by the collapsing women's consortium, the lady to whom we had loaned $25 was unable to access the internet or the world banking institution in order to repay us. That seems likely.

Kat expressed a wish at the time that you could just donate the money instead of loaning it. I think that would be a great idea. After all, the loss of $25 hasn't affected us in the least and the thought of this woman out there worrying about her inability to pay us back bothers me a lot. I'm sure she's not the milk mogul of Kenya now, and frankly I just hope that her (and her cow) are ok. It seems the loan forged a personal connection between us that I didn't expect. Or perhaps it's now that I'm more fully immersed in agricultural endeavors myself and so I can relate more to her project.

Either way, I wish her well and I think we'll look for our next Kiva project to fund.

MORE ERNIE, SAME GREAT PRICE

I need to try and get back to posting regularly, even if it’s just a snippet of my day. I’ve tried to remove politics from my blog, but found I don’t really have so much to talk about if I take away politics, philosophy, and religion. So maybe I’ll bring those back. Then we can all see how crazy I am.

Today I’m running amuck but heading home very soon. I’ve been in Peoria. The customer called me and asked my opinion about what might be wrong. I analyzed the data and gave them an educated opinion. They agreed that it concurred with their opinion. We all hopped in our respective vehicles and drove to Peoria, tested our hypothesis and proved all of ourselves right, at great cost to someone else. Quite an exercise in futility.

So many farm tasks need doing. The weeds are taking over the garden, and I’ve still got a billion potatoes to plant. I’ll be home soon, so I can get right to it.