Earthquakes, Baby crested ducks, and How cold did you say it was going to be?

8 December 2013

Wow. Another month gone by and I haven't blogged ... again. I guess I had a good excuse this time though. November is Nanowrimo after all.

What is Nanowrimo you ask? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with our farm or farming in any way. It's a month in which authors all over the world spend a month writing 50,000 words on one novel ... or attempting to write 50,000 words on a novel. I didn't make it. After a week of computer melt down and the Thanksgiving holiday, I finally just gave up near the end and ended up with a grand total of 31,125 words. For those of you who don't write novels in your spare time, that's about a third of a novel ... unedited ...

I was pretty happy with that. I have a goal of 2,000 words a day so I should have made it without an issue but writing is kind of like everything else in life, if you don't do it daily, it's harder to start back up again. I hate that feeling.

So, anyway, down on the farm ...
We've been having earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. Shake, rattle, and roll right here in the middle of the great plains of the US. I've lived here a good chunk of my life and we never had earthquakes until the last few years since they began deep well fracking in the oil fields. Now the quakes seem to happen quite regularly, and even though they are centered about 80 miles away, we still get shaken up by them.

The animals hate them. Our goats, especially, act like the world is falling down around them. It's wild. And the ducks quack and quack and quack.

Speaking of ducks, we hatched a bator full of ducks sometime during the last month. I think they're about a month old now. We set 21 eggs and had 13 hatch. One of the 13 gave us a clue as to why the other ones didn't hatch though. One of our babies is crested. It has a beautiful little crown right on top of his head.

The crested gene is a funny one though. It's called a blind dominant gene. In other words, the crested gene is dominant and should therefore appear in any animal who has one copy of the gene, however, it doesn't work that say. Only about 25% of ducks with the gene show the crest. So, we can have, and do have, ducks that carry the crested gene that aren't crested at all. We didn't know any of our ducks had this gene.

But the other side to this gene is bad. If a baby gets two copies of the crested gene, it will not hatch. So, the 8 eggs that formed beautifully and were alive and moving until hatch day but never hatched, could well have had this fatal gene.

I'm happy to say though, this little guy is alive and kicking and cute a bug. Who couldn't love that little face? (We named it King, by the way, because it's crest looks like a crown.) It will not be eaten for obvious reasons.

The fact that this little guy survived is nothing too short of a miracle though. Of the 13 we had hatch, 6 more died in the intensely cold weather we've been having. Facts of life of living on a farm and raising animals, sometimes they die ... unexpectedly ... not matter how hard you try to save them ... without cause ... without reason ... without warning.

And every time it happens, I cry.

It's especially hard when we've raised the animals, incubated their eggs, cheered on the hatchlings, done everything we could possibly do to push the odds in their favor, and they die anyway. But I guess that's one of those life lessons no one wants to learn.

Of course we do raise our animals for food at some point along the line. It doesn't matter to us though. They are still our pets and treated well and have the best life they can have right up until it's time for them to go to freezer camp. At least we know how they were raised and that they had a good life unlike what comes from the grocery store.

Right now, we are in the midst of a deep freeze. It was 7 degrees yesterday. 7 degrees. The animal waterers froze faster than we could fill them. I guarantee it gave me a new appreciation for farmers in Alaska and other very cold places where 7 is a high temp some days. How on earth do they keep water from freezing for their animals?

And as always in winter, when freezing temps arrive, comes the fun of sloshing hot water out to thaw frozen pails. Invariably, no matter how many times we do this, someone at some point sloshes hot water down their boot, virtually scalding themselves, then throws off the boot exposing their wet leg and socks to the sub freezing temps. Nothing like being burned twice by opposite extremes in a manner a minutes. Lol.

Not many pics this time, I know. Sorry about that. If my greenhouse makes it through these crazy temps, I'll have more next time around. I do still have lettuce thriving in my greatly reduced greenhouse space.

Fun on the Farm - Halloween Night

31 October 2013

This isn't strictly about the farm, so I guess I'm doing what's called "hijacking" my own blog to post other stuff. But that's okay, because it's my blog and I get to make the rules.

Tonight was probably the most fun I have had without leaving home in a long time.

And what was so fun about tonight, you ask?

Well, it all started because my daughter has this fixation with vampires and dying her amazing red hair black. Normally I am not the kind of parent that allows my kids to dye their hair and pierce their body and wear "whatever" they see fit in a state of teenage rebellion. But tonight, is an exception. Halloween is all about dressing up and pretending to be something else.

So, we bought the fangs and the face paint and the hair paint. And she borrowed a dress from my mom so she could be a vampire maid.

No, I really have no idea where that came from. She's 16. Where do any ideas of 16 year olds come from?

And this was the outcome!

In the daylight it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself, even if the black hair paint didn't cover the red completely. But once it got dark out, that's when the real fun began and we scared the bejeebies out of a bunch of little kids and their parents.

Since my porch light needs to be rewired (something I lack the skills to do myself and the funds to have hired done) we decided that Morgan would sit out on the deck with the pumpkins lit and two of the torches burning and she could hand out candy from there. It was great and both the people next door and the people across the street had on their lights so the kids were scooting past our house anyway.

Morgan sat perfectly still with the bowl in her lap as countless kids came by, and as soon as they would get in front of her, she would ask them if they wanted some candy. Screams pierced the neighborhood as one after the other grabbed for the bowl. They told us they didn't think she was real or that it looked really creepy. At one point two little boys about 9 or 10 stood in the middle of the street daring each other to go first and walk up to our deck. We even had parents get out of their cars and come up to talk because they thought it was such a hoot.

Then the boy from the corner house came by ... after running off from us three or four times because he was too scared to come over. But once he did and then stopped to talk to us, he decided he was going to start stalking kids at his house. He hid behind a bush and when they got close he followed them quietly in the dark and then he would just suddenly touch them.

More screams echoed through the block.

And that's what Halloween should be!! Fright night done right!! I haven't enjoyed something this much in ages.

Most of our life is filled with everyday mundane chores of getting on with life. Gardening, farming, taking care of all the animals, working outside jobs to make ends meet - it's all time consuming, labor intensive, mind numbingly dull stuff. Day after day after day. And no matter how much we love our gardens or our animals, some days we just have to kick off our shoes, throw out the rules, do chores early, and have a little fun.

And this was fun!

Next year Morgan's talking about dressing up like a mummy and laying against the hay bale with the candy bowl cradled in her arm and groaning at people as they come up. We'll see ...

And now for the garden ... and a little more goats

20 October 2013

Well, I proved to myself that I could blog every day on another site so I should be able to keep up with a little more prolific blogging here - not that the garden and critters need a blog everyday, but it seems routine is my friend.

So, I discussed the goats yesterday and Vincent's antics. Today he was in fine form as we took them out on their leads. First thing he managed to do was climb underneath my lawn chair. Yes, completely underneath. Head, tail, and everything in between.

No, full grown goats don't really fit under lawn chairs, thus the antics to remove him.

On the gardening front, most things are winding down. We had a brief freeze the other night but it didn't bother anything. The tomatoes are still going and so are the peppers and eggplant. Most of the garden has been converted at this point into fall/winter garden mode.

Broccoli, savoy cabbages, and brussel sprouts are starting to become distinct plants rather than spindly seedlings. The peas are growing great although they didn't germinate well so the rows are kind of straggly looking. The lettuce, spinach, and collard greens had to all be replanted due to the escape of a chicken while I was away last week.

I was not thrilled by the rogue activity but am hopeful that my new seeding will have time to grow before the heavy frosts and freezes show up.

What I am thrilled about, although somewhat puzzled by too, is that my artichokes and Mexican Sour Gherkins are finally growing. Hmm. I planted both in the spring in various places. Neither have been eaten or scavenged during the growing season. However, neither of them has grown at all.

The artichokes seemed to have completely died off and we were about to give up hope of ever being able to grow them this far north. But about three weeks ago after a rainy spell, two plants came up in the straw bales and another came up in a pot out front.

The Mexican Sour Gherkins were planted in the Thomas Jefferson bed, which was a flop with the exception of producing white patty pan squash. The gherkins held their ground but never produced and all but one plant died off in the heat of August. I decided to transplant it then and have kept it watered well. And today, I have 6 itty-bitty teeny-weeny cucumbers set on the vines.

It's almost amusing, all this time and all this work, and all the prolific amounts of other produce we managed to harvest, but here I am excited about 6 of the most miniscule cukes I've ever seen in my life.

Why?

Because gardeners get excited about things like that. Cucumbers that most people have never seen or heard of and most people would have given up on by now or pulled as a weed, that will produce enough for a snack for one, are my pride and joy this year.

Thomas Jefferson grew this cucumber in his garden, 200+ years ago. That's just amazing to me.

For all of our food savvy tv shows and magazines and our hugely varied diets, our meals are still basically the same things people have been eating for hundreds of years.

And I grew it in my backyard.

Goats? Oh, yes, goats.

19 October 2013

Artemisia, our sweet little girl

Vincent, our naughty little boy

This year at the county fair some friends of ours were helping in the petting zoo. They had brought two of their young goats to be petted on and one of them kept eating my shirt through the fence. As I stooped to pet him, we were informed that they were for sell.

My husband looked at me with a sparkle in his eye. "Goats are magical creatures" that glint said. "Goats will solve all our problems" it hinted. I knew I was beat right then and there. I knew come the end of the week we would be bringing home goats. So I said, "It's up to you, dear. But you're taking care of them." What else could I do.

I wanted goats. My children and I are allergic to cow's milk and when I lived overseas I came to love goat's cheese, so I've always wanted a goat for milk and cheese. I had researched the ones I wanted, too. Nigerian dwarf goats - little ones that give lots of milk, that start out the size of cats and stay smaller than a black lab, that don't eat a million pounds of food in one day.

But did we get Nigerian Dwarf goats?

Noooooooooooo.

We got Boer goats, big ones that are grown for meat. Big ones that eat a fifty pound sack of feed in a week as well as good grass hay and alfalfa too. Big ones that can knock me over even though they aren't full grown.

Sigh.

I named them after artists. It seemed amusing at the time. Vincent van Goat was just too good to pass up, so of course the little girl had to have an artists name as well. She is Artemisia Gentleschi, a 16th century painter from Italy. Artemisia fit her name from the start. She is very gentle and shy, every bit a little lady even if she is a goat.

Vincent, well, he's certainly grown into his name. The list of his escapades, you ask? Read on my friends, read on.
1) He figured out how to open the door between the chicken house and the garage, get into the feed bins, and help himself to a smorgasbord of chicken feed, rabbit feed, and goat feed.
2) He learned to unlock the hook and eye latch on the gate to the yard with his lips so he can wander through the garden and eat at will.
3) He managed to bump the rabbit feeder enough that it pulled away from the cage and then he opened the lid and poured out the contents. He really likes rabbit feed.

We've only had them for a month now, so I figure with enough time he'll figure out even more things. Lol. If he'd only figure out how to stand up to our bantam rooster that runs him off from the food bin and chases him out of the house, he'd have it made.

Produce totals, rainy July, and making hominy

Some of the summer's harvest

Time flies when summer comes along. I was noticing today that the last time I blogged on here was in April. Geepers! I knew we had been so busy we were meeting ourselves coming and going but I didn't quite realize that we'd been that busy.

Growing a garden, raising birds, and generally keeping up with life is a time consuming task. After the last two years of drought and horrendous heat that killed our garden pretty much before it had a chance to start, we were determined this year to put measures into place to get a good harvest. We planted early, we used a greenhouse, we set up water saving devices, and we've just been seriously devoted to keeping it going. Of course, this year has been COMPLETELY different weather wise. Sigh. We had a dry warm winter with hardly any precipitation we allowed our greenhouse vegies to grow pretty well but then spring came and instead of getting warm and staying warm, it got warm for a few days and then we'd have a freeze ... then it got warm for a few days and then we'd have a freeze. This continued all the way through April and into May so instead of planting out all of the started vegies we grew early, we moved them into and out of the greenhouse every single day, morning and night until all of the freezes subsided.

That was nutso but also explains where a lot of our time went.

Surprisingly, I sat down today and did produce totals for the month of July and we harvested over 300 eggs and more than 32 pounds of vegies. At this point I'm getting a bucket load of these beauties every single day.

I have to laugh at myself over these. Last year I planted 4 eggplant bushes and I got exactly one eggplant from them. So this year I decided that I would plant two different varieties and plant 8 of them and this year they are producing so many eggplant I really have no idea what to do with them all. We make an awesome eggplant parmesan and an eggplants/tomato/basil sauce for pasta plus we make a pizza with them too. But even with all of three dishes at our disposal, I'm still dehydrating most of them to use this winter. I've tried to give them away but it seems like no one wants eggplant. My mom actually took some home with her but I have a feeling that I will be the one going down there and cooking them for her. Lol.

Eggplant and onion pizza with homemade ranch dressing ... yummo

And just to keep in line with the weird weather our state is known for the world over, instead of having 100 plus degree weather like normal for July, it has been cool and rainy. Yes, rainy ... in Oklahoma ... in the middle of summer. I am not complaining because the temperatures have been very modest as well. We've had a few days of upper 90's but most of the month has been in the 80's. I could take more of this month behaving this way. Minus the mosquitos, of course.

So, with all this produce we've been accumulating we have been canning and preserving everything we aren't using right away. This has lead us to some experimentation. Some have been complete successes, like our sauerkraut (which I don't eat, ha), dried basil, and dehydrated potatoes. Others have been a headache ... and backache, foot ache, stomach ache, etc ... Hominy is one of those such projects that I wouldn't recommend trying. It not only took forever to make, I don't think our canning efforts worked very well either, so we probably won't ever get to eat any of it. We only did a small batch luckily, so we didn't waste a bunch of food but I can guarantee we will never be making hominy again.

Boiling the hominy

Using up those eggs

Our little girl silkie we named Hoshi No Hikari

Some of the baby buns enjoying the grass and the sunshine

One of our many many melons - although we aren't sure what kind they are. That's what we get for planting six varieties all in one big raised bed. The vines just grew everywhere. Love the melons though.

Our extremely odd red potatoes that were sprouting while still growing attached to the mother plant.

A butternut squash growing along nicely

More eggplant ... anyone need some??

Straw bale gardening, fodder for the poultry, and gardening with Thomas Jefferson

Well, we have embarked on yet another gardening adventure ... or is it two more gardening adventures ... or is it three?? hmmmm Whatever the count, we are moving forward with our usual blind leading the blind way. Nothing is too difficult to achieve. Is it?

Gardening adventure #1 - straw bale growing. This is essentially exactly like it's name suggests, growing things in a straw bale. Sounds simple, right? We thought so plus it was an inexpensive way to use the vast expanse of concrete that was our driveway as a gardening area without the work of tearing up thick concrete and building new raised beds. So, off we went and bought ourselves some straw bales. They are cheap here. $5 each. (Sometimes it pays to live in farm country.) Then we did some research and some more research and some more research ... and decided it maybe wasn't quite as simple as we thought but it was still simple enough to try.

We set the bales up in the driveway, grain ends up baling wire wrapped around the sides. At first we put three in a long line and began the week long process of getting them ready to plant. For three days, we watered the bales. Yep, you heard me right. We watered the straw bales. And yes, I felt completely ridiculous doing so. Our driveway is visible to at least six neighbors without them even leaving their properties so I guess it's a good thing that they all think we're nutso anyway. Then for five days we fertilized AND watered the bales, as if watering the bales wasn't goofy looking enough.

Finally, we used the sawsall and cut v shaped trenches in the top of each bale about six inches wide and deep, filled them with some garden soil, and plopped in some of those overgrown squash plants along with a trellis. And true to Oklahoma weather, two days later we got freezing temps. So, then we wrapped everything in plastic sheeting and added some hot water bottles and believe it or not, several freezing nights, a freak snow storm, and a day of sleet later, the squash are still growing strong. I'm impressed even if you aren't. Lol.

Gardening adventure #2 - growing fodder for the birds. This was a no brainer decision. We've been spending way too much money to feed all those critters who've moved into our hearts and minds and had to find a new way to feed to lower our costs OR get rid of some of the critters. Getting rid of critters, needless to say, was not going to happen so ... We found fodder. Basically fodder is grains that are allowed to sprout and grow for six days and then fed out. Supposedly it has a higher nutrition value and is more easily digested than other forms of feed. I don't know about all that scientific stuff. I'm the black sheep artist in a family of scientists, after all. But I do know that my animals LOVE it. They swarm me to get their share. We started small just to see what was involved by just sprouting in bowls in the kitchen but have now moved to growing in large plastic trays and buckets.

Our logistics involve around 350 lbs of animal and we feed out at a 4% rate. So we start with 3 lbs of grain (we mix oats, wheat, sunflower seeds, and a mixed plot spike) and end up with around 12 - 14 lbs of feed. It makes a huge relief in our feed bill.

Gardening adventure #3 - a Thomas Jefferson garden. We both read "A Rich Spot of Earth" by Peter J. Hatch recently, cover to cover with enthralled rapture and it sparked the idea to dedicate one of our raised garden beds to growing just vegetables that were grown by Thomas Jefferson. It's been a fun project to research but there are a lot of books that I'd like to own and read about his gardens, especially the one that includes his diaries and journals. We included in our bed tennis ball lettuce, mexican sour gherkins, costoluto genovese tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, asparagus beans, and white scallop squash which Jefferson called Cymlings. It's all planted now so fingers crossed it all grows and produces. The scallop squash I started about three weeks ago, so they are nice and big now but everything else went in the ground as seeds today. I'll have to post pics as everything fills in.

Probably the most interesting thing about this project has been the research into what we now call "heirloom" seeds. There is a raging debate among gardeners here in the good ol' USA about the use of heirlooms, hybrids, or GMO's. Personally, I think there's a whole lot of hype in the arguments and not much truth being given out. I try to stay out of it because some of the ignorance gets me hot under the collar. But it has made what I've found through research into seeds and gardening and ancient seed varieties so much more interesting. Like - Did you know ...
- all orange carrots are a hybrid that were created in the Netherlands in the 1500's. Before that carrots were purple, white, and occasionally red. Hmm.
- cabbage and all it's variants have been eaten for over 5000 years and have been being hybridized for that long too.
- most of what we consider garden staples today like potatoes, tomatoes, and beans weren't commonly grown until after the 1700's. Before that they were unknown to most of the world and were widely considered poisonous until the mid to late 1800's.

I could go on and on but I guess I'll end this for the night. No pics this time. Nothing real exciting to see except piles of dirt and straw bales. Hopefully next time I post I'll have more visual matter to include. Night all!

Gutters gardens, baby turkeys, and growing squash in the living room

5 March 2013

So, how long has it been since I posted a blog entry? Well, my friends, I guess that's just too long since my husband has been bugging me to post again for a couple of weeks. And now that we aren't in the depth of a cold dark winter, and I have plants growing and babies popping out, I guess I have something to post.

 So, I guess biggest news first. BABY TURKEYS!!! Thanks to our new incubator we got for Christmas, we have been able to hatch babies successfully for the first time and we are so excited. We set 24 eggs initially and replaced 2 of them a few days in when we discovered we had a couple that were cracked. Within 10 days we had 19 babies growing along well and removed the eggs that weren't fertile. Now turkeys are supposed to take 28 days to hatch so we were preparing to unplug the turner and move the eggs to cartons on day 26 along with raising the humidity to help with hatching to about 65%, however, on day 25 we were candling the eggs to see if they were all still alive and we discovered 4 eggs had already internally pipped.

After scrambling around and resetting the incubator with stationary cartons to hold the eggs in an upright position (the best for hatching success) and adding sponges to raise the humidity quickly, we put them in "lockdown" early. Within 24 hours we had our first eggs pipped externally, and 24 hours after that we had babies like the one pictured above. The one looking up at us was #1 and the one laying down was #2. Of course, while most hatched easily and well on their own, we had a couple we had to help out. The biggest ones seem to have trouble turning around in the shells to be able to completely "zip" the top of the shell off so we ended up finishing the zipper for them and let them pop themselves out. All said and done we ended up with 15 live babies from 19 eggs.

They are now two week old working on three weeks old and we've had no losses, which is a huge improvement over our shipped birdies that we've had in the past. So all-in-all it's been a major success. Now, if we could just sell a few and make a little money ... Oh well, all in time. Here's some more baby pics to enjoy.

Pushing off the top of the shell

Drying off

Zippering

two weeks old with feathers

My other project of late has been starting vegies for the garden. I've started tomatoes early numerous times in the past, but this year I expanded my experience and started tomatoes, melons, cucumbers and winter squash as well. Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch ......... I NOW know that starting these things indoors is a great idea only I shouldn't have started them at the same time I started my tomatoes. We have winter squash in pots literally everywhere and some are starting to put on blooms!! So we are scrambling now to get them planted outdoors ... somewhere, anywhere, that we can artificially keep warm until we quit having snow and cold. A friend of mine suggested that we just build trellises in our living room and let the squash grow at will with the added bonus that we would avoid the dreaded squash bugs that our warm summers bring. I think I'll pass for this year and just hope we can keep them at bay long enough to get a harvest.

Winter squash two weeks ago

one of over a hundred tomato plants

And newest of all the projects, wedged in between giving spas to cold wet chickens, splinting a broken turkey leg, and building nest boxes for rabbits that will hopefully kindle soon, is building a gutter garden. It isn't done yet so maybe, if I post next week, I'll have some pics of the in process and finished project complete with strawberries ... Just a little teaser for you. And a few more pics for your viewing pleasure -

Our five new baby khaki campbell ducks

Taking a swim in the bathtub

dehydrating potatoes from our 50lbs

Seed pack design - made for a seed swap but I was playing with logos for the farm and like this one

Week One 2013 - new babies and everything

Okay, before you say it, I know it's been a couple of months since I posted anything. Life just seems to have a way of getting in the way of sitting down and writing things out to share. So today, for the first time in two months I have a Wednesday afternoon that I'm not tied down doing anything in particular so here's a new blog post from me.

Filling everything in since my last post would be a nightmare I think. I'm not even sure I remember what I had for breakfast yesterday let alone what all has happened since November. But I'll give it a go...

Let's see, sad thing first - we lost all but one of our ducks to an opossum. Stupid thing killed two of our male ducks but didn't even try to eat them. We were not happy. However, our surviving female has integrated well with the chickens and turkeys in the coop so alls well I guess until we can get more in the spring. Hehehe, just today as I was feeding them greens from the garden bed (broccoli plants that overwintered well in the greenhouse) I saw Silver snatch bites of food from one of the chickens beak. Every time the chicken would pick up a piece of broccoli leaf, Silver would take it away and swallow it. At least she's holding her own.

We also have raised two sets of meat birds and processed all of them. What a chore between feeding them fermented grains, cleaning their pens, processing them all, freezing, canning, making stock ... Jeepers. But now my freezer is FULL of chicken, and my pantry is FULL of chicken and stock plus I have several jars of homemade bouillon. Think we'll get tired of eating chicken soon??? Lol. After paying for the feed, the birds, the shipping, the straw, the cleaning stuff, and the electric bill I'm pretty sure it would be tons cheaper to just buy it at the store. Oh well, at least we know what they ate and how they were treated in the process of their short lives.

Christmas we spent at my parents house with my sister and nephew. Got a new Nook HD and the first session of a writing course that will start this spring that I'm really looking forward to. If I could just afford the other several months of it ... dreams I guess. At least it's a start and maybe we'll come up with the funds for another couple of the sessions if we sell enough turkey poults and eggs this year.

New Years my dad then took the whole clan of us out for dinner at Joe's Crab Shack and then we went to see MannHeim Steamroller in concert. It was awesome and a great start for a new year.

In other news this month, we hatched out 4 baby turkeys from a set of 5 eggs. All of them started out fertile but one "quit" the day before lock down. It happens I guess. Supposedly even the big hatcheries with all the fancy incubator systems only get between 70 and 80% hatch rate so I think we did pretty well in our new little incubator. I've started putting out feelers for selling eggs and baby poults in places so hopefully we'll have some buyers before too long. We set another 25 eggs yesterday that should hatch in the mid February. It would be great if we could sell ALL of them.

So here's a pic of the babies!

Pipping it's shell

Coming out, wings first

Getting his head out

It's so hard to stand up when you're first born

2 days old

And in the gardening arena, I have three 72 cell seed flats planted with various items. Over 100 cells are tomatoes (not sure where they are going to all get planted ... hmm, maybe I can sell some of those too) and almost all of the tomatoes are already up and sprouted. I also planted peppers, parsley, basil, and some squashes along with 36 cells of artichokes. Warm weather better hurry up and arrive for good! My green thumbs are itching!