Broccoli, Baby Rabbits, and Being Sick

January has come and gone and half of February has past by my in a blur. I've been sick. First I had pneumonia. Yay me ... and then I got conjunctivitis. The pneumonia was the remnants from a viral bug that did the rounds, so this all started even before my lungs flooded. And so, I've been miserable and not doing much.

But I managed to venture outside this week and found the farm just keeps on going whether I'm there or not. I found a nice harvest of broccoli in my greenhouse, savoy cabbage heads beginning to form, baby brussel sprouts filling the plants, and a couple of heads of lettuce tucked into leaves from the wisteria.

I love growing broccoli over the winter. It's sweeter and I don't have to contend with cabbage moths destroying my plants or picking the worms out of the heads like I do if grow them in the spring time. Plus it gives me a green harvest in the middle of winter which is very welcome indeed.

I also found baby bunnies. These guys hopping around happily.

There are four in that nest box snuggled together if you can't tell. Four is our average litter of kits. Sometimes we get six or seven at a time but four seems to be the best number for the moms to handle and in terms of good growth on the babies. Some people might remove some of the babies to have a better outcome overall with bigger litters, but I'm too squeamish to do that and feel like nature can handle that on her own. I just deal with what we get.

Writing, Goats, and Lots of Time

I bet anyone who might still be following this blog will be shocked to find a new post on it. I've been thinking a lot about the farm lately and resuming my blog about it. The last two years has been a roller coaster of activity in my life. Writing has taken center stage. Fiction writing, that is. Writing about writing. Promoting writing. Sharing writing. Being a writer.

I had no idea what I was getting myself in when I started down this path.

My farm life has turned into my mecca even more than it originally was. It's my retreat. It's the part of me I don't share too much any more. And that's a shame, really, because I do enjoy it so much.

Since my last post a lot has happened on our little farm. The two boar goats we started out with have been replaced by their son and a female Alpine plus their two babies.

This cutey is Adelaide, a boer/alpine cross. This is one of my favorite photos of her when she newborn ... about 6 hours old or so. A friend was concerned that she was laying down but goats often lay down especially as they get older. This one didn't stay on the ground too long. She is the bounciest jumping baby ever and routinely greets us by jumping up on top of the stall partition wall. 

This is a pic of mama Raphaela and both babies when they were around a month old. Remington is on the left and Adelaide on the right. Remington is actually a calm sweet male much like his daddy, while Adelaide is the wild one like her mama.

Speaking of her mama ... I milk her. Even when the babies were nursing, she gave me about three gallons of milk a week, which is way more than we'll ever drink. I've been making cheese with it, like this:

We are quite pleased with the flavor and abundance of it. I just wish I had the facilities to age it properly but I have managed to make some decent cheddar with it as well as chevre and mozzarella. Just one more notch in my homesteading stick.

So I guess since I'm reviving this blog for my farming things, I'll have to try and keep up with it. Winter is upon us though so there isn't a whole lot to write on for now, but seeds will have to be planted soon and the goat keeps on giving milk and new chicks will arrive so we shall see what the future holds.

Keep on learning!!

The farmyard ice rink ... or is that slush pool?

9 January 2014

Have you ever seen a goat ice skating?

No, really.

It's been an amusing, messy, cold, wet week here at the farm. Between the sub-zero temperatures, ice and snow storms, and baby turkeys being born, I'm not sure where the muck ends and our house begins any more. AND of course this was the week when I started my new venture into full time writing.

What week would be complete without a blog entry about the farm critters?

Biggest excitement of the week - six baby turkeys hatched. They moved from the incubator to a big box with a heat lamp attached at the end of my bed after 24 hours. Remember those days of having a new born infant in your room? Yeah, it's kind of like that.They fall asleep at odd times, wake to the slightest noise, do not sleep through the night in any way, scream like a banshee if left alone for two seconds or if they get too cold or too hot or if all but one of them falls asleep or if one of them pecks another one or ... you get the idea.

But dang they are cute little unicorns.

Opening the shell after 24 hours of pipping

Standing up for the first time

A few days old in the brooder box

All the while it was snowing and blowing and cold enough to freeze soap bubbles. Everyone except the goats spent two days locked inside the barn which made for some messy messy housing. When I opened the doors finally yesterday to the snow covered yard, the birds all stood and looked at me like I had lost my mind. One chicken ventured outside and almost immediately returned to the house and chewed me out for about twenty minutes before I decided to be nice and put down a blanket of straw for them to walk on.

And no, no one even thanked me for that. The gratitude I live with ... Lol.

Oh, the soap bubbles you ask ... yep, we froze soap bubbles. I only got a picture of one of them so here it is.

It crystalized into this feathery pattern. It was fun to watch it grow at is froze.

And then today came along and melted most of the snow. Ugh. As much as I was tired of sliding and slipping and keeping the animals cooped up and carrying buckets of hot water around, the melting is often worse. Then everything is covered in a layer of muck and mud - floors, feed buckets, waterers, hoses, gates, handles, shoes, boots, birds, goats, ducks, sidewalks, steps, etc ... EVERYTHING.

The goats loved it though. They got to play in the slush and quickly figured out how to slide across the patio on the partially frozen partially wet surface. Vincent ran with glee, hit the patio and slide like an awkward overweight figure skater right into the garden netting, then turned around and repeated it all over again in the opposite direction.

It's funny. For the all the awkwardness the goats have, they are remarkably sure-footed and nimble. They prance around on the tiniest of ledges and branches and squeeze themselves through the smallest of openings. And we just watch in awe. If we were to try to move through some of the places that they move through, we would fall unceremoniously on our heads or break something in the process. But they just scamper like little mice. And they aren't little at all.

And then there are the meat birds ... that should have been processed three weeks ago ... Anyone need an 8 pound chicken??

End of the year or What matters in the end ...

2 January 2014

I don't normally do this. And by this, I mean, blog or write or even think about "end of the year" reports, updates, etc ...

I just don't believe in them.

When I was younger I did. Everything was about beginnings and endings, where I was going, where I had been, who was in my life, who was no longer in my life, what I accomplished, what I didn't accomplish, where I had been, where I hadn't been ...

But somewhere along the way, I realized that life is more about the journey and less about the destination.

When does a year end and another begin? By a date on the calendar? By the birth of a child? By the death of a loved one? By a wild night of drinking followed with a vow to never drink again? By the germination of a seed? By the harvest?

What defines where we start and where we end?

In June of this past year I lost a very good friend. Her death was unexpected and sudden and devastating to all those who knew her. I have grieved more than I even realized I could.

Then in December our nephew died in a car accident.

I've experienced death before. I've lost loved ones and friends. I live on a farm with animals where life and death is expected and dealt with on a routine basis.

But none of that matters in the end.

All my life I've heard people say that in the end, the people that matter the most, are the people that walk through the hard times together, who support each other through thick and thin, ...

"you know who your friends are by who was there when you needed them the most ...  "

But if I learned anything in the past calendar year, if I learned anything from the death of my loved ones, I learned this.

What matters in the end is NOT our birth or death, where we go or where we've been, what we accomplish or where we fail. It's NOT the number of good times we had or the bad times that consume us. It's NOT who stands by us when we need someone the most.

What matters in the end is the journey we take and how we take it.

What matters in the end is who we journeyed with.

What matters in the end is who we stood beside when they needed us the most.

People are human. They can't always be there for us. They can't always deal with our bad times like we need them to. They can't always be the people we want them to be. We have to accept them as they are and as they come to us ... for the day, the time, the need, the life ...

All we can do is be there for them ... as other people have been there for us.

Because, in the end, that's all we have to give.

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.