broken neck

CSA First Pickup is June 15th!!!!!!

With the plant sale and putting everything in the ground and all this warm weather, I'm left wondering - where did spring go?
I think I blinked and missed it. I rejoiced at the first tshirt day... and I don't think that I have worn a sweater more than a couple days since.

I had so much fun at the plant sale this year! Thanks to everyone who came out and helped. It was great meeting new csa and meat share members and watching kids play with baby ducks. Everything that is leftover fit on a couple tables and slowly we've been planting them flat by flat. We have hundreds of tomato plants in the ground and hundreds of pepper plants happily growing in the gardens. We're running out of room! Travis moved his melon patch up by my parents house and they're starting to grow. We have all different, unique kinds this year. It must be bad if I'm already planning my order for next year and anticipating seed catalogs. Gardening must be an addiction, which is odd that even though I'm saturated in it, I'm still looking for more.


On a really sad note, one of our super garden helpers, my Grandma, broke her neck. She was playing in the back garden, getting a pump in the creek to water everything that was coming up on Memorial day and she tripped and fell backwards, hitting her head on a fencepost and cracking her C2 vertebrate right in half diagonally. The emergency room on a holiday was terrible and they sent her home with a neck brace and told her to take anacin. Yeah... that didn't fly for more than a few days before she was back in the emergency room begging for Dr. Kevorkian. But now she's back at home on a bit stronger medication with a better neck brace, talking about picking beans in a few weeks. She's amazing and the gardens are a lot less lively without her bossing us around and making fun of the way I plant potatoes. I am so glad she's not paralized.


Anyway, everything is growing at an odd pace: our asparagus is slowing production, our strawberries started producing really early this year, rhubarb flowered before I could make a pie, bok choy already choked in the heat, the peppers are loving it, my onions are the size of golf balls, and I'm having a heck of a time keeping the garlic from flowering already. And my sister declared this the year of the tomato because we already have little green tomatoes forming on a few of our plants. I'm just worried that all this hot weather will burn out our broccoli and lettuce before it's even begun.


Oh Ohio! You are sooooo weird.

This morning

I woke up this morning to my normal routine - put a bottle in the microwave for the new fainting goat orphans. Then I sat on the couch and rifled through the bag of seeds that are all begging to be planted right at the right time and upon deciding to throw some keeper squash in my garden at work, I heard a cheep come from the incubator. The turkey eggs are pipping and one turkey had it's beak out and was complaining about being stuck in an egg in an incubator. That's turkeys. Always complaining. But I'm happy they are starting to hatch as they are delicious and hatching right on time for landing on a Thanksgiving table this year.

From there, I walked back to the sheep and goats with a steaming hot bottle of milk in one hand and throwing pepper the ball with the other hand as she bounded through the grass still wet with last nights rain. The back field was heavy with a weird fog that made the sleeping alpaca look like a lockness monster in the middle of the field while the sheep trudged through with their zombie-like morning hunger groans. I went to check on the Icelandic we call Black Cloud that I had spent hours brushing out yesterday for a shear date of today only to find that among the giant curtain of frizzed out wool was a perfect little white lamb.


I still am baffled by sheep genetics and so I'm not sure how almost every sheep I've had born here looked the exact same - black with a little white spot on its head. Why then is the blackest of all our sheep the mother of the whitest lamb we have?

Oh well. Either way, I'm happy. The lamb is healthy and resting and despite being rather young, Black Cloud is caring for her little one like a veteran matron.


I'd say I had a good morning. I watched the ducks in their endless games of tag, washed the three dozen eggs were are getting a day here! Wohoo! I checked on the baby bunnies, nestled in their little hay nest. The next batch of egg laying chickens looks happy as they play with the baby geese. The greenhouse is ridiculously green in full effect.


I have such a busy day ahead that the excitement of the morning is just a sliver of my entire day. Fence building, seed planting, grapevine trimming... I've got to get back to work!

april 3rd

It's April now and unseasonably warm. About 20 degrees higher than this time of year usually is.

We're planting potatoes if you'd like to come out to the workshop here and help Wed, April 7th at 6pm. It's $10 if you'd like to take a bag of potatoes home. Email me so I can get a rough count.


I dormant oiled the fruit trees last week and am staring at their swelling buds, hoping that they don't burst into bloom when a frost is approaching. I hate it - it's like sliding on black ice, where you have no control over the situation, but you're still in it and trying to do all that you can. The plums are two days away from blooming. I'm not going to fight it. If it happens, it happens. I won't try to cover them with blankets or frantically turn on the sprinklers when the next wave of snow inevitably comes our way. I need to prepare myself for it so I don't freak out when the cold snap hits. Each year is different.
I'm just hoping that the apple trees and grapevines hold off.

I think our last set of lambs were born last week and I'm looking at the three yearling sheep that didn't lamb this year as pretty doubtful that they will lamb this year. Although, I'm new at this so anything can happen. I'm happy to have 5 healthy fainting goat kids and 5 healthy crossbred lambs, all growing like little weeds and playing happily in the greening fields.


We're starting to put seeds in the ground - peas are in along with beets, turnips, and some cabbage. The kale came back from last year and is looking delicious as always. With the mild nights ahead, we're looking forward to not having to heat the greenhouse, which is now filled and double stacked with seedling tomatoes, peppers, marigolds, different types of basil, broccoli, onions, kale, raddicio, artichokes, and cauliflower. I'm staring at the dang ground cherries and they just won't grow! I might order another set of seeds from somewhere else because I can't imagine not having ground cherries this year. So delicious!


Our CSA is FULL - if you've contacted me before today, you're fine. Returning members please email me as I need a final count of members as potatoes are going in this week and I need to know how many I'm planting for.

Rhubarb is up, farmer's fields are getting tilled, the killdeer are searching for nesting sites in the vineyard, and spring s certainly here.

grass growing

Spring lambs are here!

The grass is getting green beneath my feet. I have my first sunburn. The geese are playing in the spring puddles right next to the road. And all signs point to the fact that spring is here!

I have ten half finished blogs about winter where I would start and then wouldn't really know what else to say. Now I have so many things to do I can hardly sit down for a minute!

The goats are kidding as I write this, I'm hoping for twins. So far, our first fainter kid is pretty darn cute. The sheep lamb out in the field like old pros. The lambs really look like their father and I'm excited to get rid of my ram and try a new one for next season.

My sister is talking of tilling. With this streak of nice weather, It sounds like a fine idea.

Jason and I are doing minimal tilling in the front garden. I never thought that I would do anything just to not disturb the earthworms... but it's all holistic in the end.

We have seedlings growing everywhere! I do mean everywhere too. My entire dining room is now a seedling room with a grow light nourishing flat after flat of vegetables and herbs.

Spring is coming now and it's so exciting!!!!

spoke too soon....

Yeah, so no sooner had I given up and told Jason I wasn't going back to check on the goats 15 times a day anymore, than he went back and found a bright eyed little kid. So cute!

Babies!

I've been staring at pregnant goats for months now. I've been fussing over them, making sure that their diet is perfect and that they have a nice little pregnancy ward that's warm and safe and fresh water and plenty of hay. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking - oh no, today might be the day - and then walk all the way back to the barn at the back corner of the property just to have them cry at me that I didn't bring them more grain. Spoiled rotten.

So it's the end of Feb and I can certainly say that I have got my exercise running buckets back and forth of water, which they invariably kick over and hay, which they just throw all around. And in my frenzy of pregnant goat caretaker, I just so happened to notice that one of my sheep didn't come out of her morning meal. So I went back, got a bucket kicked over by an ungrateful goat and then made my way to see what was going on with my Jacob/Icelandic cross named Petrone. Wandering out into the sheep pasture, I found her box and peered inside and found a pair of stunned little eyes staring back at me, all knock-kneed and freshly born. While I was standing there marveling at the ease in which Petrone took to her motherly tasks, she birthed a second knock-kneed, shivering ball of wool. She cleaned them up quickly, making very odd, maternal sounds.

They are a day old now and tromping around after their mother in the snow. They have little toupees of white hair in between their tiny lamps ears and I have yet to see them nurse, but their temps are right and their bellies feel full. Sometimes nature just does it, I guess.

I think it's funny how much time I have spent worrying about goats, I've just been throwing some hay to the sheep on the way to worry about the pregnant goats. I just never worried about the sheep. I wonder if they always lamb so easily. Maybe it's just that goats are such complainers that I dote on them more. The sheep just do their own thing.

So, I have heard that a watched pot never boils, but does a watched goat never kid?

buyer beware

I'm not sure how many different books or websites I've read that all say - DON'T BUY FROM LIVESTOCK AUCTIONS.

Well, being a stubborn little know-it-all, I went and looooved it. It's like a buffet of anything that you can think of all at once and the excitement of being the highest bidder is overwhelming. I saw a little cow sell for $5 once! There's tons of different types of animals all at once and they are brought out so fast and then sent back so fast and some go for a ton of money and some go really cheap. It's fascinating.
I always do the same thing -- get really excited about the auction, go to the auction, not bid on anything too expensive, bid on things when think I'm getting a really good deal, end up getting stuck with a crappy quality animal.
The problem is you never know exactly what you are getting. A lot of people dump their problem children off at the auction, the runts of the litter, the pregnancy that's not quite right, the animal that's on it's last leg but no one wants to pull the trigger. That's not always the case. Some good animals end up there. The trick is trying to tell which one is which.
It's kinda like the beloved family dog - no family would throw their dog in the pound, nameless, and with no description of what the dog likes or dislikes or how house broken or not he is. A family that loves their dog would post him in the paper - to loving home - and explain face to face what's going on. It's a lot harder to lie about the problems with an animal when the new prospective buyer is wide eyed standing there asking a bunch of questions as to the care and feeding schedule.
I have sold at the auction. I sent some of the most spoiled peachicks there. Someone got an excellent deal and went home with well cared for, de-wormed, well fed little birds. It was my last resort after a bunch of no call-no shows.

I guess what I'm going to say is advice for those who want to build their flock, whether they take it or not.... DON'T BUY FROM A LIVESTOCK AUCTION.

On the flip side, I have had the pleasure of meeting some of the best farmers in the area through online ads and craigslist. I loooove going to other farms, talking with the farmers and being able to ask them about their stock. The prices are set early and usually are higher that I think I want to pay, but they are ALWAYS worth the price. I have a well stocked pasture with beautiful Jacob / Finn crosses and some Icelandics that I thought were outlandish when I bought them but are beautiful and growing well and healthy as can be.
I only have two survivors from the auction lot and one is our "herdsire" who Jason calls a "midget fruit bat" and the other is a cute little shetland who was in dire need of a haircut, but otherwise was healthy and is getting along beautifully.

I'm in the market for a cow now and I'm not going back to the auction, especially with such an unvestment in time and feed. I am excitedly looking for a couple scottish highlands while my neighbor is clearing a space in his barn and pasture. I can't wait to eat the meat goats this year, although I'm pretty sure the feed to meat ratio is pretty darn low on those guys so they better taste really delicious.
I'm stir crazy at this point and ready for this sea of white to start melting. The turkeys fly and land in snow drifts over their heads. The hens don't even leave the hen house, but have started laying again, which at least means fresh omlettes to go with the mass quantities of sausage we're still working through in the freezer.
...and I'm not complaining. The pork chops are fantastic!