Journal 5 April

Planted 8 pots with San Marzano tomato seeds (a paste variety). Transferred 7 sweet potato slips to pots.

Dug Flax Bed 1 a second time.

(Note 1/1/11: Due to chicken incursions, never planted flax at the farm. Planted out the sweet potatoes in that bed, but it turns out that cats love sweet potatoes. They were all devoured overnight.)

Journal 3 April

Planted three apple trees purchased from Ferda's Nursery. In pond pasture, row starting at road: McIntosh, Honeycrisp, and Gala varieties.

Also built a temporary fence from the corner of the garden (closest to bridge) to the creek bank. Set up electric netting from Forest Gate to creek bank and let goats into the enclosed area.

March planting continued

Planted 64 lettuce seeds today. That would be one block. I am hoping there will be much salad eating this summer. I say this, because I have not had much luck with lettuce in Ohio, although it is probably in part to a backlog of old seeds I needed to get through. If we actually get a surplus, lettuce should be marketable; otherwise, what doesn't get eaten by us or sold at market should be greatly appreciated by the chickens.

Then I planted 432 onion seeds. At 9 seeds per square, that is a mere three blocks. Supposedly, these go from seed to bulb in one season. They are yellow sweet Spanish. Southern Exposure lists them at a 110 day maturity rate. Of course, my performance with onions has been more abysmal than lettuce. Other than scallions one year and garlic one other, the only things in genus allium that even come up is the crow garlic (decent for nibbling the greens [might be good in a salad], but not much use in cooking), which is everywhere. Anyway, assuming they do come up and reach harvestable size, what aren't eaten or sold can be dried or pickled. I've also heard good things about onion wine.

First plantings

I got my garlic transplanted out today. I never got around to planting them in October, so I started them indoors in January. I put out 11 plants. Hopefully, the geese won't take interest before I get a chance to move the geese to the pond pasture.

In addition I planted seeds as follows:

Arugula - 20 seeds -- I'm not expecting this to be a particularly big market draw and I don't know of any appropriate preservation methods, so I decided small succession plantings were in order. Past seasons have shown arugula grows well in Ohio, pretty much regardless of when planted.

Fava Beans - 40 seeds -- The whole package; Southern Exposure says culture similar to peas, so we shall see. I planted favas two years ago and the pods rotted before they were ready to harvest. I thought maybe it was too wet here; perhaps I just planted them too late?

Bok Choy - 216 seeds -- Again, I don't expect a big draw at farmer's markets for bok choy, but it makes fine kimchee, so I'm not worried about swimming in the stuff. Also, it does not work for succession plantings -- any bok choy planted after March will bolt before it really develops. Starting in July, we can do succession plantings for fall crops.

After two years of planting in rows, I'm back to planting based on Mel Bartholomew's square foot method. I'm using four foot wide strips (I call a 4'x4' section a "block" and a 1'x1' a "square"). This is what I used in Arizona and the first two years in Ohio. I changed to rows because I thought it would be faster. Unfortunately, rows did not significantly help me get seeds planted, and they made it more difficult to keep track of where things were planted. Weeding was a nightmare. Square foot gardening employs an intensity that aids in weed suppression, as well as aiding in seeing where the "strips" are. I'm also being a bit more realistic about what and how much I plant. We're looking forward to a good year in 2010.

2010 Maple Syrup Production

Sap collection ended last week, after about a three week collection period. We tapped 18 trees this year -- 11 with proper spiles and buckets, 7 with copper tubing and food service buckets. We produced about 9 quarts of syrup. My last batch I processed into maple sugar -- first time. Unfortunately, I couldn't quite get the temperature right and scorched the bottom of the pan. The resulting sugar is usable, but strongly flavored.

Catch Up

Things that have changed since the last time I blogged:

We bought four started White Embden goslings. One has slipped wings and will be Christmas dinner. Of the remaining three, hopefully both genders are represented so that we can raise more goslings next year. They certainly keep the grass mowed down well!

The female Pekin duck with leg problems has recovered. I'm contemplating hatching a few ducklings next spring, since I have so many broody hens. The final remaining runner duck disappeared. I really liked the runner ducks, but they seem to be entirely too fragile for our farm.

Speaking of fragile, we're getting out of meat goats. All of the kids born this year died. I think it was stomach worms, even though we dewormed them, because with the new baby we weren't able to rotate them through the forest so they were just in the main pasture for most of the summer. There are two does left (because we sold three troublemakers earlier in the summer), and I need to get pictures of them and list them for sale.

However! In July we bought two Saanen does, with one of them in milk. She's dried off now, because she was producing so little, but during the summer we were getting nearly a gallon a day. The younger one is looking very round, so I'm beginning to wonder if she was bred before we bought her. It's not ideal to have young kids in autumn (although better than the depths of winter!), but if it turns out to be the case it will be nice to have milk through the winter. I still need to find a buck, preferably Saanen but other dairy is acceptable, to breed the other doe this winter. We're going to be focusing on dairy goats, with meat simply as a side product.




There are a bunch of new chicks. The two broody hens I wrote about before hatched out 14 chicks between them, and we also bought 50 Rhode Island Red pullet chicks from the hatchery. There was still one more broody hen last month, so I let her sit on another dozen eggs. She only hatched four, but is otherwise a good mother. One of the chicks has blue feathers and looks like it will be gorgeous. I'm hoping it's a pullet, but even if it's a cockerel I might still keep it. At this point there aren't any more broodies, which is good because the weather has gotten cold.


We have boarders at our farm. An acquaintance needed space for her animals, so in exchange for lumber and supplies to build shelters, we now have two sheep and a whole bunch of pygmy goats living in our pasture. She also brought her two rabbits and their hutches, but decided to give them to Cerra after Cerra said how much she loved them. So now we have rabbits. I believe that they are male and female, so we'll see about breeding some bunnies here soon. We'll want another hutch first, though, to house the young rabbits while they grow.

I've still got lots of work to do to get ready for winter. I've gotten a good start on the chicken shelter; I can probably finish it in a couple of hours at this point. I've started a shelter for hay for the goats. I'm pretty confidant in my ability to build the frame, but I'm a little bit anxious about the roof. I've never really built a roof before. The ducks and geese are set; they have our old truck shell for a shelter. We've gotten about seven years of use out of it, but it's finally gotten to the point where it's not safe to have on the truck anymore. I don't want the water fowl in with the chickens because they'll eat too much grain and get too fat. Finally, I haven't even started the run-in shed for the goats and sheep. I think I'll need to get the boarders to help me with that one in order to get it done reasonably soon. The weather was cold and wet for several weeks, and Paul was working at the post office, so that left me very little time to work on things at the farm. It's warm and dry now, so I need to take advantage of the weather and get things taken care of.

My garden didn't do all that well, what with the cool weather all summer. The corn was the only thing that really thrived. The tomato was planted much too late, but I was hoping to get at least a few fruits before winter. However, we had an extremely early first frost in September which killed the plant before any of the tomatoes were big enough to pick. The beans would have been great if they had been snap beans, but they're soup beans and I was growing them for seed. Only maybe half of the pods got mature enough to harvest before the weather got really cold. Oh, and the poor okra didn't tolerate the cool weather at all. The one month of hot weather in August got them growing well, but it had cooled off by the time they started setting fruit, and they all just rotted instead of developing.

When I get a chance, I'll post the egg tallies for the latest months and update the farm production in the sidebar.

Duck Liquidation

I sold most of our Pekins yesterday. The only ones left are a female with leg problems and an extra male. Duck soup!

We just didn't have time to be dealing with meat ducks with everything else we're doing. They're pretty unforgiving, because if you don't slaughter at seven weeks then you have to wait until after the molt or deal with thousands of pin feathers. Plus, the males were really aggressive to the runner ducks, and had killed several. I'm down to only two runner ducks at this point.

The Pekins went to a small farm up in Jewett. The people that bought them were very nice. I would have liked to spend more time talking with them, but it was getting late and we all had kids that needed to get home to bed.

Brooding

Two of the Australorps have been broody for about two months, but I've been much too busy to mess with them. I finally had a chance to set up nesting cages for them in the basement, in dog crates. Broody hens make a funny trilling sound if you move them, and raise their neck feathers to try to look intimidating. They trilled at me when I started arranging the hay they were sitting on into a nest, but as soon as I started putting eggs into it the angry sounds turned into a satisfied clucking. The hens seemed to be a bit surprised by the unprecedented event of the human putting eggs into the the nest, instead of taking them away. When I was done they used their beaks to rearrange the eggs more to their liking and then settled down, happy at last. I gave each of them a dozen fresh eggs, so hopefully we'll have some chicks by the end of the month.

June Egg Tally

564 eggs, 2301 for the year, out of four Rhode Island Reds, one Silver Laced Wyandotte, and approximately 35 Black Australorp pullets.

Don't Count Your Chickens...

...until they've grown up. I think the cats found where Buffy was keeping her chicks, since in one night eight of them disappeared. The next night another one was lost, leaving only one. She kept that one safe for a few days, but last night I noticed that Buffy was roosting on top of the chicken house with the other chickens while her chick was running around the yard peeping frantically. I guess she decided she'd had enough of motherhood. The chick is only about two weeks old and is a little bit too young to be out in the chilly (for a chick) night without any chickens to cuddle against, so I caught it and brought it home. It's in a bird cage, and it is not amused. At least it is alive. I'll take it back out to the farm once it has grown some more feathers.

A Successful First Day

Today was the first Farmer's Market of the year in Steubenville. I spent much of yesterday baking cupcakes and frosting them. That part didn't exactly go smoothly. First, the power was out for several hours that morning, so I got a much later start than I had intended. I thought that my cake recipes made about two dozen cupcakes, but I must have done something differently this time because it was really closer to three dozen. This was a problem because I made a double batch of the yellow cake, intending to make four dozen cupcakes. However, the batter spilled over the top and made some very messy looking cupcakes, as well as wasting a lot on the edges of the pan. I only made a single batch of the chocolate, and that worked out much better.

Although I enjoy baking, I don't have much practice with frosting or decorating cakes. I used the star tip on the piping bag, but was a bit discouraged by the results, although by the last dozen it was looking okay. Perception is a funny thing, though, because the people at the farmer's market exclaimed over how pretty the cupcakes were.

The cupcake boxes I had ordered hadn't come in yet, so I had to improvise by lining jelly jar boxes with foil. It was fine for transporting them, but things got a little bit tricky when people wanted to buy more than one cupcake at a time. It worked out, though. My cupcake boxes arrived this afternoon, so next time my presentation and packaging will be much better. I think I'll also wrap some individually in plastic wrap.

I needed to sell 20 cupcakes to make back the vendor fee, and I met that goal fairly easily. At around 12:15, though, Paul started talking about packing things up, since it had been about an hour since the last sale and it was getting pretty hot out there (I need to find our shade thingy; I think we have one somewhere). However, I wanted to wait a little bit longer, since it was still lunchtime. In the next 15 minutes, there were a couple more individual sales and one guy who bought two dozen at once! We ended up with only 11 cupcakes left over (out of 6 dozen to start), so I think I gauged the market pretty well. Next week we will have wild black raspberries to sell as well as the cupcakes, since they are just starting to ripen.

The vendor right next to us was a woman selling rolls and cookies, and she was really nice. I enjoyed talking with her during the lulls in business. She has a four-year-old boy who was there for the latter part of the day, so Cerra had a great time playing with him. All in all, I feel like our first farmer's market went very well.

There's also a market in Barnesville on Saturdays that we will be going to starting next week. That one allows egg sales, although there are several regulatory hoops we would need to jump through first. I spoke with the Department of Agriculture and the county health department, and the requirements look doable. I'll write more about my research in another post, since a thunderstorm is blowing in right now.

Farmer's Market Preparations

The Steubenville Farmer's Market starts this Thursday, and I plan to be a vendor this year. My main product will be cupcakes and other baked goods made with our pastured eggs, and we will bring other produce as it becomes available. The first thing will be black raspberries, since they are just ripening. If it's allowed, we'll also sell our eggs, but even if it isn't allowed we can at least advertise them. I will be calling the person in charge tomorrow to find out about that.

Speaking of eggs, today I bought an old dorm refrigerator for egg storage, since we are running out of room in the main refrigerator. I would have liked a bigger one, but at only $25 this one was worth getting. I can always buy a larger one later if I need it.

Poor Man's Hay Baler

When I cut hay last month, I stuffed the cured hay into empty feed bags for storage. It was kind of a pain to fill the bags, and it turned out that they only hold about ten pounds of hay each. Even ignoring the high labor cost, it would take about 400 bags to make a winter's worth of hay. I have a lot of empty feed bags, but not that many. So I decided to try something different with this batch.

I used a large Rubbermaid container as the form, and laid lengths of twine across the bottom. Then I filled the box with hay (compressing it down as much as I could), tied the twine across the top, tipped the box over, and voila! had a small bale of hay. I made four bales before it got dark, and I think I'll get about another four bales out of the rest of the hay. Tomorrow I'll weigh the bales; I'm guessing that they're about 15 or 20 pounds each, more or less. Since this idea worked so well, I intend to look for an even larger container for my form. I'd like to make 50 pound bales, but that may be a bit out of reach.

Work in the Pond Pasture

Saturday evening I mowed nearly a quarter of the pond pasture. I like working in that area because there are spearmint plants growing in the wet areas. Minty hay smells wonderful! Here the hay has been tedded once, this evening. The bare ground behind the mowed area is my garden.


I also planted paste tomatoes (San Marzano) and okra in my garden. It's a bit late to be planting tomato seeds, so there won't be a very long harvest. However, I've grown this variety of tomato before, and it stores very well at room temperature. We harvested all of the green tomatoes just before the first freeze in October that year, and had fresh tomatoes until the end of December.

At the bottom of this picture you can see the three rows of corn that have come up. I planted those seeds a few weeks ago. I had originally planned on six rows of corn, but that's all I managed to plant in the first session, so I decided to just move on with my planting.


I still have cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and bush beans to plant.

Peeps

Today I finally got to see the chicks that our banty hatched. They were foraging in the tall grass at one end of Paul's garden.

This is Buffy, the banty. She's normally very wild and nervous around people, but today she actually let me approach and take pictures of her and the chicks. I counted 10, but I don't know if one died or if it was just hidden in the grass. At any rate, she's doing a very good job at taking care of them so far.

Dewdrop and Max

I should have posted these pictures on May 4th, since that's when I took them, but I never got around to it. Dewdrop and Max are Natalia's kids, the first goats we've bred ourselves.

This is Dewdrop the doeling. We intend to keep her as a breeding doe.


And here is Max the buckling (now a wether).


A good look at their markings.


There are three other kids, all doelings, that I need to get photos of.

Speaking of Hidden Nests...

Today one of our banty hens showed up with eleven chicks in tow: eight yellow, two black, and one buff-colored. The two black ones are most likely from Australorp eggs, but most of the others are probably banties. It will be interesting to see how they turn out when they grow up.

May Egg Tally

Late, but as of May 31:

892 eggs, 1737 for the year, out of four Rhode Island Reds, one Silver Laced Wyandotte, and approximately 35 Black Australorp pullets.

Things are slowing down a little bit, since several of the Australorps are broody and now that the pasture grass is high they don't all lay their eggs in the nest box. We know about many of the clutches, but they keep finding new spots to hide their eggs. However, I'm working on a new fence for their pen which should do a better job of containing them at night, so this should become less of an issue.

We also finally ran out of re-used egg cartons, and had to order new ones of our own. You have to order many thousands to get custom printing, so we bought 100 cartons with generic printing and a space for a label or custom stamp. Now I need to design a label to go on it.

April Egg Tally

Things are really picking up!

626 eggs, 845 for the year, out of four Rhode Island Reds, one Silver Laced Wyandotte, and approximately 35 Black Australorp pullets. Wow, that's a lot of eggs. I have sold some, but most of the eggs are pretty small. I have them available at a discount, but most people want large eggs so I'm mostly keeping the small ones for our own use. I've frozen about 10 dozen for future use, and done lots of baking and cooking: sponge cakes, pudding, citrus curd (lemon, lime, and key lime), and meringues. There are still plenty to use up, though!

We're Now Goat Breeders

Natalia had two kids today. These are the first kids that we've actually bred ourselves. They are healthy, although a bit small. The doeling was 3 pounds and the buckling was 3-1/2 pounds. They were a bit confused at first, since they thought Balto (the dog) was their mother. They both tried to nurse from him that first day. We moved Natalia and her kids out to the main pasture so that she could get more to eat than is available right now in the forest. Also, I remember from two years ago that young kids are very difficult to move to a new pen, since they don't know the routine and they will neither follow nor be herded. They'll also be easier to tame out in the main pasture.

The buckling is already promised to the son of one of my friends. He's named him "Max." We'll be keeping the doeling for our own herd. There are at least two more does that look bred, so I'm looking forward to more kids this year.