Just when I thought Scarlett was not pregnant after all, since her due date came and went, she gives birth to a lovely heifer on a cold, wet afternoon in late October. I was on my way to town to have dinner and see a movie with my oldest and I was trying to get the cows to come in before I left. They were waaaaay at the back of the pasture and Dawn was bellowing at me. Sure enough I took a good look and I saw a reddish lump on the ground. I quickly sent Emma a one-word text “Baby!!!” and she knew what it meant and bundled up to head out to help me. Because it was October 26th at 5:00 p.m. and windy and raining and cold and I was not leaving that newborn out in that weather.
So I picked up Rose and Emma ran interference for me as Scarlett kept trying to get her baby back and we made it to the cowshed and got mama and calf into shelter.
Then I changed out of my clothing now covered in afterbirth and mud and washed up the best I could. I didn’t make it in time for dinner, but I did for the movie, although I think I still smelled like afterbirth.
That’s two heifers in a row! If Scarlett is pregnant again now (and I hope Dawn is as well), we could use a bull calf. Just sayin’.
We start on halter training…and she did really well, despite what it looks like in this picture. 🙂The herd is slowly growing! And that’s fine by us! We aren’t ready yet for the milking part, and goodness knows we still need plenty of fencing and infrastructure!
With these snowy days, I’ve noticed Rooster Cogburn has a funny habit…one that indicates life in the hen house is hard on a fellow! This photo isn’t very good, but here’s what happens: I open the chicken coop door and the “girls” decide it’s still too cold to go out so they stay inside. But not Cogburn! He’s out the door and under their little rain shelter (an old card table), and there he sits enjoying the peace and quiet. I guess life with 20 females ain’t all it’s cracked up to be when you’re cooped up with them for 14 hours straight! Poor Cogburn! 🙂
When our free range chickens think it’s too cold to leave the coop, our rooster can’t wait to get a break from the ladies it seems!
It rained today. In fact, it’s still raining. I can hear and smell the gentle summer rain through the open windows. We’ve had an unusually dry summer, so the rain is welcome. We went all of the month of July without rain, which hasn’t happened since 1926. Or at least that’s what I heard reported on the local radio station.
The rain today did several things. One, it showed me putting gutters on the chicken coop is not going to help to keep the chicken yard dry after all…
The gutter will likely help some (once I get the drainpipe added to and draining away from the coop), but watching this rain running off the chicken coop roof and onto the ground was a little disappointing.
The rain also reminded me that it is time to prep for winter. This will be when I miss my deployed husband the most. If you want to start a farm, you quickly learn that summer is spent getting ready for winter. For us, since the farmhouse has taken up most of our time and energy (all of our time and energy??), we don’t have a lot of farm yet at our place. But we have a lot of winter prep just the same because our place was in such disrepair when we bought it.
We’ve got as much of our hay as we can fit into our broken down barn, with a verbal agreement with the neighbors down the road that we’ll buy 100 bales of their second cutting, an agreement we’ll make official this week with money. But that’s about all that is done.
I was putting off winter preparations until my work on the farmhouse was done, but Hubby and I have agreed that it’s time to hire out drywall to experts. There are only two rooms left that need mudding and taping, but they include ceilings and some of the sheetrock needs to be redone and it has been 10 days since I was supposed to start on this and I still haven’t. (I have been trying to only hire people to do work I can’t do. But in this case, I can do it…but don’t want to.)
Once these two rooms are done, then it’s back to me to finish the house, and we prime and paint, and then we are ready for floors throughout and after floors comes trim and then all focus can go on finishing the kitchen…. The two upstairs rooms might be small, but they are significant in our progress.
Maybe this rain is a sign that yes, hiring someone to finish the drywall upstairs is a smart move so I can move on to figuring out why the barn floods, seeing if I can get someone to help fix the barn doors (to protect the hay), finding affordable firewood…and I started canning applesauce yesterday because the Transparent tree is dropping apples all over and we eat a lot of applesauce in the winter. Speaking of, I would like to at least get some green beans and corn frozen, and can some corn relish and blackberry cordial and more…
I also need to fashion some kind of winter paddock for the horses, and figure out the bedding for the chicken coop. Plus I’d really like the pastures mowed. And then there’s seeing about getting someone to close in all the places the contractor didn’t do outside the house–but that’s another story.
For now, it’s raining, and it’s a good reminder that my past 10 days of taking it easy are done…and how much more I am going to miss my husband these next few months. I am very proud of his service! But I miss him, his hugs and his strong back always, and there are times when his absence is felt even more strongly than others. Today is one of them.
OK, I’ll admit it. I went and spent $35 on bird netting to cover the chicken yard without even measuring the chicken yard. The package said the bird netting was 28 ft by 28 ft. That’s huge! How could our chicken yard possibly be bigger than that?
Yeah, well, it turns out our chickens are SPOILED!! Their chicken yard is huge. No way will that netting keep out any crows or protect any eggs.
Today was the day I gave a little more thought to crow intelligence. Thinking I should probably understand the critter I’m dealing with, I was dismayed to learn that some scientists consider them smarter than great apes:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpgCQj-sgqk]
So I bought the netting, thinking they couldn’t think their way through that. Oops. They won’t have to.
So round 3 goes to the crows. And I have demonstrated that they are, in fact, smarter than me, because I didn’t measure the chicken yard before buying the netting.
And as chance would have it, the neighbor came by to warn me he’ll be shooting at crows and not to let the noise bother me. I asked if he could shoot some on my property too. He laughed and said it’s really to scare them off, not kill them, and I read today that they will be back, so shooting at them is only a temporary fix…and killing them only opens the door to more crows.
That took guns off my “next thing to try” list.
But I have a secret weapon, something the crows don’t have, something their superior intellect can’t compare to or overcome. That secret weapon? Opposable thumbs! Ha!
I do have a way to protect the eggs. I’ve only been too lazy and cheap to employ it. I can work that latch, and I can keep the chickens locked in until they are done laying for the day. We built the coop for 30 chickens, and we have 19 nesting boxes. But here’s the thing: Keeping them in means more poop to clean up and more food to buy. Our chickens are usually truly free range. Even our surprise baby chick now roams the property toddling along behind mama hen. Letting them free range means their poop gets spread all over (aka fertilizer) and they feed themselves (can you say bugs?). Keeping them locked in for even 4 hours a day will definitely change my workload. Plus I am a little concerned about how the younger hens are treated by one of the old fart Rhode Island Reds when they are locked in the coop.
Still, I need eggs. I need to show a product for all the effort put in. And I need to outsmart those darn crows!
So I will pull out my secret weapon…and see if I can get my money back for the bird netting. 🙂
One thing I love about starting a farm is morning. I am so looking forward to the day when we are living in the farmhouse and I am not driving from town to the farm every morning for morning chores! When I wake up at the farm (rather than having to drive there), I like doing morning chores first thing, before showering or putting on lipstick. OK, but not before that first cup of coffee… Anyway, I really don’t mind doing the morning chores in our 20 degree weather because I slip on my nice warm PINK overalls with my rubber boots and I am good to go! I am warm and dry, and the animals are fed and cared for…without my real clothes getting dirty at all. 🙂 Oh, did I mention I also love that my overalls are PINK?
My morning attire in winter: rubber boots and toasty warm overalls!
I love this horse but he gets into everything. I say he’s as friendly as a dog, curious as a cat and stubborn as a mule. Apparently he has taken up a new hobby too: escaping.
This morning, trouble here was loose for the second time in five days. On Friday morning, Bob and Jake found him in the orchard and found where he got through the fence…which they repaired. This morning Bob saw him down the street in the neighbor’s yard, but never figured out how he got out.
I think Chase is trying to tell us that we are at the point where it’s absolutely imperative that we get moved to that farmhouse, no matter the condition it’s in. He can’t speak, but he can escape, and that speaks in a volume louder than words ever could!
If someone were to ask me today how to start a farm and what’s the first thing to do, I’d say fix the fences.
Starting a farm has proven to be something we can’t even really get to yet because we are having to rebuild the farmhouse. And our summer garden was a disaster because we couldn’t give it enough time as a result. Plus it turns out living in this new place means new dirt, new pests, new garden challenges.
Still, we are only slightly daunted, and I planted some fall seeds finally last night. Below are a few photos of the pretty stuff only, not the grass that’s two-feet tall and trying to take over the garden again, not the thistles, not the weeds…only some pretty little glimpses of what can be…
Chard seeds sprout in the evening sun.
A patty pan squash boldly grows in the hostile environment that is our “garden.”
Found a use for those empty beer bottles! As seed labels!
Another shot of the beer bottle turned garden marker. I love parsnips. They were planted late but I hope we have a long, warm, dry fall and some parsnips as a result!
Although the plants in our pumpkin patch flourish, the squash themselves struggle. Here’s one little one making a go of it. Grow, pumpkin, grow!
Some of the tomatoes below reach of the hungry mouths of deer. Hoping summer lasts long enough that our precious little crop turns red! Otherwise, I will be making green tomato relish for the first time. Waste nothing!
Another beer bottle marker…and another planted-late, hope-for-the-best fall planting!
Not a garden shot, just Paddy and Cloudy enjoying the evening sun. 🙂
View of the upper field looking toward the back of the farmhouse.
Tonight will be a forever memory for this new family. This beautiful summer Sunday evening was spent bucking hay together, the new husband and wife, the new step siblings…all of whom are also new to country life. As hard as the work is, it’s a very enjoyable way to spend a summer evening! I like it far better than watching TV, let me tell you!
Our first time putting up hay…talk about quality family time!
It’s our first time putting up on our own hay. It won’t be the best hay we’ve put in front of our horses, and I am doubtful about how well it will go over for our picky eaters, but we’ve got 291 bales of it and I hope by fall we have some cows to be feeding, and they’re sure to like it. Improving our fields so we can grow really nice hay is definitely on our to-do list for the distant future. But tonight? Tonight was the kids taking turns driving the truck and my heart swelling with pride as I watched one drive the one-ton while another pitched bales to the top of the pile…and the hubby quitting work on the roof to come join us. No, the house still isn’t livable, but we’ve got winter to plan for regardless, and getting the hay put up is part of that.
14 year old Emma driving the one ton through the hay field
The kids and I had to clean out a corner of the barn–which has already had a thorough going over since it was full of junk when we bought the place–and we will likely have to clean out more to make room for all this hay. That’s okay.
Our hay in our field for our livestock. Pretty cool.
The only downside there is the wetness of the barn. Turns out it was built over an underground spring and we have layer upon layer upon layer of tarps in there…buried under decades old hay, in places. None of that really does anything about the wetness. We were hoping to get the whole floor cemented over this fall, so we can get stalls in there in addition to hay storage, but now, I don’t know…I put wood down to keep the hay up off the wet stuff, but if we do have the funds for putting in a cement floor this fall, no way are we moving 291 bales to make room for it. That part is definitely tbd!
Emma driving while 13-year-old Jake stacks the bales I Throw into the back of the truck
Anyway, below are some pictures from this evening, most of which were taken by Emma, and now back to my point: Tonight was wonderful, with everyone working together working up a sweat and doing what they could to get the job done. Like Emma driving the truck slowly through the field as we tossed in the bales because she issn’t strong enough to pick up the bales. (She just turned 14.) And Jake in the back of the truck stacking the bales as I threw them in (he is only 13). And Bob joining us at last as he finished up some roof repairs, so we were really all working together, this new family of different people with different histories, to bring one big dream together.
Bob joins the fun and starts grabbing bales. Man, that guy can toss a hay bale!
Looking for a way to spend some quality time as a family? Buck hay on a summer Sunday evening, laughing and sweating and enjoying it all…then go to bed exhausted and content. Which is what I am about to do.
A Speckled Sussex Rooster Like the Free One I Picked Up This Morning as Part of a Typically Busy Day Learning to Be a Farmer
If it’s not the kids, it’s work. If it’s not work, it’s the farmhouse project. If it’s not the farmhouse, it’s someone from church with a need. If it’s not someone from church, it’s a friend or family member in crisis. If it’s not a crisis, it’s an emergency trip to the vet. If it’s not the vet, it’s the horses knocking over more fence. If it’s not the horses, it’s trying to get the 22 chickens and five turkeys out of the backyard before animal control shows up. If it’s not the poultry, it’s the seeds for the winter garden that just arrived…and a lack of garden to plant them in. If it’s not seeds, it’s the woodstove folks needing photos so they can plan for installation. And if it’s not the woodstove, trust me, it is something. It is always something.
Here’s a typical day as we try to tackle allllll of this at once: This morning I was out the door at 8:00 a.m. to get a free rooster from the next town over. Someone posted a Sussex rooster on Freecycle, and I was considering the Sussex breed for our meat chickens we want to breed, so I jumped at the chance to get him. Then to the farmhouse to check all the horses and chickens, getting everyone fed and watered for the day. Wanted to ride, but the weather was crummy.
Then it was back to the house in town to get the rooster into the chicken tractor (while keeping the rest of the chickens locked out…yes, we currently have chickens both at the farmhouse and in town, don’t ask) then sat down for some billable hours at the computer, then off to the livestock auction to think through beef cattle. Eventually we want to have a heritage breed–probably the Devon–but for now, needing meat for the freezer and needing to show an income from our land so the county doesn’t take away our agricultural tax status, I’m thinking some Angus steers are going to be the way to go. As for the milk cow, that is really on the back burner at this point, sigh. After that, headed to the post office to pick up my Avon package because I refuse to give up my lipstick, no matter how much farming we do or how dirty I get. Then the feedstore for more fence posts and gadgets for dividing our huge pastures into smaller chunks so we can manage our grass better.
While doing all of that, I was texting with a friend about getting free goats to help with the grass in the orchard and what will someday be the yard. And pondering last night’s conversation with the neighbor about getting pigs on the garden for now, so they can prep the land for next year and all the tractor work he did won’t be in vain. We also discussed haying the upper field, which means all the junk still in the barn that came with our rundown property is going to have to be moved…again…to make room for the hay.
And now? Now it is 3:15 and I need to clean up because we are headed to “the city” tonight to see our daughter in a play, and on the way we are going to stop at the department store to see if we can use any of our wedding gift cards, seeing as how we don’t have a home to buy for yet! While we are driving, I will be giving the hubby the rundown of the prices at the auction today, and discussing what to do about getting some cattle…because then next time I’m at the auction, it will be as a bidder!
I predict that later will be driving back home tonight to crash, then getting up early tomorrow morning to head to the farmhouse and start all over again.
My head is spinning, my to-do lists are out of control, I have at least four different notepads going with thoughts and learnings, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 🙂
This is the greenhouse my step dad bought us. It has been wonderful for getting things started, especially given yet another cold, wet spring!
Being married to a man with a job that requires him to be on call almost all the time means I spend Friday nights alone unexpectedly on a regular basis. We had plans to go to a play tonight on this, our two-month wedding anniversary. But alas, he is at work so I am blogging about the farm progress…or lack of.
See, it’s not just the falling down farmhouse we are trying to save. At the same time, we are trying to make the place safe for the horses, plus get set up for other livestock (like pigs and cows. OK, not like pigs and cows, just pigs and cows!), and get in a garden of some type so we can start on our goal of raising our own food…which really was the main impetus for buying the falling down, broken down place after all!
I have been dreaming of a pumpkin patch for years. These pumpkin plants thrived in the garden, started from seed. Now they are out in the “garden.” Fingers crossed! The cucumber beetles are already attacking them, as if the bad soil wasn’t challenge enough!
It was on our honeymoon that we realized we should divide and conquer, with the hubby focused on the house and me focused on the garden. So I haven’t spent that much time inside the house the last few weeks, but I have spent a lot of time in the greenhouse. Earlier this week I must have repotted 50 plants and seedlings, trying to move things along and keep them happy until we have a place for them in the “garden.” I am really behind. Our soil sucks, and getting rid of the sod near impossible. Now, if we wanted to start brick factory, we’d be all set with that clay! But that’s not the goal.
Seedlings thrive on the jerry-rigged shelves in the greenhouse. Now to make the outside as good for them as the inside!
The greenhouse (a gift from my stepfather) has been wonderful for getting seeds going and nursing plants along. We are still challenged by our ground, however, even despite all the work of our kind neighbor. Plus our farm-to-be is windy, something I didn’t expect. So I nurse things along in the greenhouse then pray for the best when planting outside.
This was our sad attempt to make garden beds before I finally conceded we’d have to invest in raised beds to start. You can see the first of the raised beds in the distance.
Originally, I had hoped to avoid the hassle and expense of building raised beds, even though that was the way the hubby wanted to go. I thought we had aalllll this room, we don’t need the raised beds of an urban garden. I realize now, we do, because we are trying to plant on/in clay that until a few weeks ago was pasture. That’s what we started on last week, building raised beds and filling them with compost. It is pricing, going this route! If in the end, the plants produce bountiful crops, and I am able to can and freeze the foods to feed us through winter, then it is money well spent. And any soil amendment (like compost) is really an investment in the future health of our soil (and farm). So it’s not money wasted. It’s just that we are also spending so much on lumber–still–for reframing that south wall.
So the beds go in slowly, as time permits, and the plants make their way from greenhouse to hardening off for a night or two to a final planting in the raised bed. Right now, the greenhouse is almost empty as I optimistically have moved almost all the seedlings outside in anticipation of planting. Soon the seeds for our winter garden will arrive and the greenhouse will be full again as we get those babies going. It’s all part of the process, all part of the journey, as we try to make this farm a reality.
