Farmhand Frustration

My oldest daughter, Rowan, moved out last December. She was twenty-two at the time, so I can't really blame her, but we miss her around here. Not only is she simply fun to be around, funny, cheerful, and smart as a whip, but she chucked in a good deal of the hard physical labor around here, and we miss her muscle as well as her wit.

A few years ago, Rowan used to have a boyfriend who I called "P." on the blog. For a while, he lived here, and he paid us rent in labor. P. was (and is) a quality young man, friendly, hardworking, and kind. We all liked him, and we still do, but alas, he is no longer around to be our farmhand. I have to say, I could really get used to having a strong young man in his twenties, with seemingly boundless energy, at my beck and call. It's a good thing for my daughters that the days of selling them to a suitor for a few years of hard labor are over, because I would be SORELY tempted.

Today, Rowan came back for a visit, and she helped us get some work done. It has been raining non-stop, seemingly for months. I know that I am constantly bitching about the weather this time of year (okay, really, when am I not?) but it has, in fact, been an unusually late, wet spring. I've just spent ten minutes trying to add an image, a chart showing triple normal precipitation for February and nearly double for March, but my computer is not being cooperative. See here if you don't believe me.

The farm is more or less underwater. A constant shallow river is pouring out of the driveway and into the roadside ditches. The pastures are more puddle than grass. And the sacrifice area - where all the animals still are - is a disgusting swamp of mud and poop. My poor goats are so desperately unhappy. Goats hate the wet. I finally told Homero that he simply HAD to muck out the barn (recently vacated by the pigs, who have been processed) so the goats can get out of the mud and slime. They are pregnant, poor things. This afternoon, he and Rowan spent a few hours mucking, laying down lime, and then spreading a bed of straw in the barn. The goats have been transferred. They look very happy to be dry. They are going to have to live in the barn itself, however, because we have not yet been able to fix the gate that closes in the main pasture. We need to set a new post in cement, and we can't do that until it dries out a bit.

Remaining in the sacrifice area are Rosy Pony and Nettles the Cow. There is not enough room for them in the barn with the goats, so they are going to have to deal with it a while longer. They have a field shelter, which keeps the rain from falling on their heads, but which does nothing to keep the wet from seeping in from underneath. Even under the roof of the shelter, the ground is soggy and poopy and gross. It needed bedding.

We do, in fact, have a ton of hog fuel, thanks to my brother-in-law and his tree service. Whenever he has a job nearby, he will stop here and dump the chips. Maybe fifteen yards are piled up alongside the fence.  But there is no good way to move to around. Homero's Case loader is broken (it's normal state of being; the Case has basically replaced the Murray lawnmower as his personal mechanical nemesis). We have a big, deep black rubber wheelbarrow, but its tires are flat and it is in the playroom full of a bunch of Homero's heavy power tools. No good way to spread any hog fuel, other than plain old fashioned elbow grease.

Rowan and I spent a half hour or so in the driving rain this afternoon, expending aforementioned elbow-grease laying down a layer of chips in the field shelter. I filled five gallon buckets with chips and passed them over the fence, and she trudged through the mud to the field shelter and dumped the chips inside, kicking them around to cover the space evenly. It was a stop---gap measure, to be sure, but at least the cow and pony will sleep dry tonight.

I need to find a farmhand. I was never very strong, but nowadays I can not even make a pretense of being able to do things like muck out deep litter. Last week, Homero and I cut apart the old calf--hutch that was ruined and ripped by windstorms, and I was at least able to help him drag the big awkward pieces of plastic through the field. That was tough. I cannot spread fifteen yards of hogfuel, or turn the compost pile, or mix cement. We need regular, if sporadic, help for that sort of thing, as well as for placing cattle panels, turning the compost pile, making dump runs, planting trees, et cetera.

Yesterday I placed a plea for help in a Facebook farmer's group. I gave a description of what I needed, and offered $15/hour plus transportation, tools, and lunch. I have had several responses, and a couple of them even come recommended. Here's hoping one of these young people works out.

Getting' Grubby

It is only during the short window of time after the grass begins to grow and before the fruit sets on the trees that we can let the horses graze in the orchard. There's nothing to eat before growing season, and if we let them in there after the fruit sets they would eat all the green fruit and get colic. But right now, the window is open, and we are putting the horses to graze in the orchard almost every day. 

Which means there is always fresh horse poop in the orchard. 

Which means this: 

Haku loves to roll in fresh horse poop. He loves it almost as much as he loves tearing up feather pillows and chasing the sheep. And he does not understand why we insist on removing all his lovely smelly horse-poop camouflage by rubbing him with a soapy towel before we let him back in the house. He only wants to jump back into our bed and roll around in it, to give us some of his beautiful fragrance. Because he loves us. That's all. 

Choices

Today I chose the slippery beam. Apparently both choices are equally awful. Walked back to the house this time with a cold muddy bum. 

My Mud Nightmare Has Come to Pass

Just went out to do the afternoon feeding, with Haku tied to me via a long leash around my waist. That's my new plan for desensitizing him to the livestock - take him with me every day and make him walk among the animals. It's about 4 o'clock, dim, very cold, and very muddy.

It's been very muddy for weeks. The mud is worse than average this year, because we raised a pig this year. Pigs always root up, dig, and generally soften up the ground wherever they are, and this pig spent a lot of time in the barnyard. Homero laid a couple of wide 2x8 beams across the worst of the yard, and that helped for a while. But now the mud has come up over the beams, and while you can still see where they are, they aren't much help anymore. They're slippery, see.

I have to choose between trying to walk on a slippery beam with a 90 lb. dog tied to my waist - a dog that is tugging manfully - or walking in the mud. I chose the mud. I have good boots. They go up to my knees.

One of my good boots got stuck. Really stuck. I pulled and pulled - I let Haku pull and pull to help me - but no dice. That boot was in almost to the top and it wasn't coming out. After a few minutes of thinking and not coming up with any plans, I gave in to the inevitable.

I slipped my foot out of the boot and set it down in the mud. It sank in right up to my shins - just as cold, squishy, and awful as I had known it would be. Without my foot inside, it was easy to grasp the empty boot and pull it up. Now I had a new dilemma. Should I put my gross muddy foot back inside my boot, or should I carry the boot and keep the inside clean, and walk back to the house half barefoot?

I really didn't want to get the inside of my boot as muddy as the outside. Then I'd have to clean it out with the hose, and it would be wet for days. So I started off towards the house - about 50 yards - squish, squish, squish.

It froze last night. Not hard enough to lock up the mud, obviously, but enough to make the ground very uncomfortable on a bare foot. When I hit the sharp, frozen gravel, I decided to put my boot back on. Now I have one leg wet and filthy to the knee, and two muddy boots - one on the inside as well as the outside.

Haku, as usual, has four legs muddy to the hocks. He doesn't care.

The Bog of Eternal Stench, The Dog from Hell, and Bad Knees

Once again it is November, number one on the list of months I wish I could fast-forward through, closely followed by February. Torrential rains have turned the barnyard - as always this time of year - into a sucking swamp. There is still a small pile of hog fuel we could spread, but so far we haven't been able to figure out how to do that without the pig charging out of the yard and into the backyard.

The pig has been able to get out of his pen for months now, and he has rooted up huge clumps of the pasture. He is now about 350 pounds, and that's no joke hurtling towards you at high speed and emitting high-pitched screams at the volume of a Van Halen concert, circa 1984.  The pig has a date with destiny, courtesy of our local mobile butcher, in a little over a week, so the problem will work itself out soon enough.

I did make a deal, way back last spring, with a tree service guy to trade cheese all summer in exchange for cedar chips come fall. He has called a couple of times, but we haven't been able to nail down a delivery, and now it is looking more and more doubtful that I will ever receive any chips.  That's the risk of trading for future goods. Meanwhile, the mud threatens to come up over my boot-tops.

Haku, our new German Shepherd puppy, has apparently made it his mission to tear my entire house into bite-sized chunks. I would post a picture of our playroom, if I could figure out how under the new operating system, but that would probably bring FEMA down on our heads. Seriously, it looks like - well, like a German Shepherd puppy has torn apart two queen-sized mattresses and one large sofa, not to mention gnawed an antique Victorian dollhouse to matchsticks and knocked over a shelf full of board games, torn up the boxes and ripped up all the cards, etc,  and evenly distributed all the chewed-up bits. I figure there's no point in cleaning it all up until he's finished - it might keep him occupied enough to leave a few of our furnishings alone. Why he isn't interested in the fifteen chew-toys I've bought for him I have no idea.

Homero has been suffering greatly this fall from a torn meniscus in his right knee. As a mechanic, he spends a lot of time getting up and down onto a concrete floor, sometimes squatting and sometimes kneeling. His knee will freeze up on him and leave him hobbling back to the house, unable to work for the rest of the day. He hates to take medicine of any kind; apparently he prefers to lay about looking pitiful and asking me to bring him stuff.

I know I sound unsympathetic - and maybe I am. He never reads this blog, so I feel free to say that his knee is nowhere near as bad as mine was - MY meniscus had two big "bucket handle" tears and various smaller tears.  My ACL was completely severed (the surgeon who read my MRI report used the word "trashed" to describe the state of my joint). Without health insurance, I had no choice but to live with it for four long years. I did my share of bitching and moaning - I'm not saying I didn't. I'm just saying I know how he feels, and then some. And then some more.

In my case, as soon as the ACA kicked in and we could finally afford health insurance, and the insurance companies couldn't exclude pre-existing conditions, I scheduled surgery and Hallelujah it has been almost a total cure. They had to remove almost all of the meniscus, and I was told that I'd need a total knee replacement sooner or later, but the pain has almost entirely disappeared, and the instability has been reduced by about 75%. The surgery - first surgery I ever had, unless you count wisdom teeth - was a piece of cake. From the time I woke up in the recovery room I was in less pain than I had been the day before. The next day I was walking on the beach.

Homero has been reluctant to schedule surgery. I'm not sure why. He's never had surgery before either - not even wisdom teeth - so maybe he's afraid. I was. But just as everyone told me, the only thing I was sorry about is that I hadn't done it sooner. I guess Homero just had to wait until it got bad enough. He's finally having surgery at the end of this month. I hope it will be as good for him as it was for me.

The first part of December looks to be a nice quiet time. Homero will be recuperating, and I will be taking a break from work. Right now I'm just finishing up a big job that, though it has left me exhausted, will pay enough to ensure a merry christmas and let me take time off to nurse my husband back to health.

Now if it we could just get a nice, hard freeze to lock up all the mud.

It Rained a Murder

The weather has all of us in a funk. It simply will not stop raining for more than an hour or two. Yesterday I saw the sun and ran and did a load of laundry on the short cycle so I could hang it to dry before it started to rain again. It wouldn't have dried, but the wind is so stiff that it dried in just an hour or two, and when the rain began again I took it all in.

The yard looks like hell, the animals are living in a swamp, and I've had to replant my peas twice and it looks like I may have to do it again. I have a few seedlings started in the greenhouse, but overall it looks like this will be a very late garden this year.

My husband can't stand it. He hates the rain and cold with a passion, because he works outside most of the time. A fair chunk of the day he spends on his back under a car, and if he has to lie in a puddle that's not going to put anybody in a very good mood. He has begun to make noises about trying to get away somewhere warm. I can't say as I blame him. I'd like to go somewhere dry, at least.

I know I bitch and moan about the rain and mud every spring (and every fall) but in fact, we are at more than double the average precipitation for March. In a normal year, we expect a generous 7" of rain in March - this year we have received over 16". Really, frayed tempers and muddy boots are the least of it. The rain can have deadly consequences, as it did for the small community of Darrington, just a few miles south of us.

Unofficial death toll climbs to 24 in Washington state mudslide

A square mile of mountain simply slid down into the Stillaguamish river, taking some thirty homes and a hundred or more  people with it. The rescue effort has by now become a recovery mission, but the truth is that probably many bodies will never be recovered. The mud is more than fifteen feet deep in some areas, and the river is backing up into a lake, drowning more land.

And still it rains, hampering the recovery efforts, making the debris field unstable and too dangerous to search. Will it never stop? Will we ever be dry again, will we ever be warm? Sitiing here in my chilly, damp house, I am reminded of Tom Robbins' passage, in his debut novel Another Roadside Attraction, on the subject of the local rains:

“And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.”

If you want to help the families and communities devastated by the slide, you can donate to the Red Cross here.

Not Sure if I'm Cut Out For This (Late Winter Blues)

Most of what I do on this blog, it seems, is bitch and moan about the weather. Well, stand back, I'm about to do it again. Life on this farm is so much more difficult and arduous than life would be if the farm were located in - say - central California.

In particular, it's the mud that gets me down. Five months of mud, without respite or relief. The mud varies in temperature, but not in depth or disgustingness. It might be merely chilly or it might form an ice-crystally crust that holds you for a fraction of a second with each step, before breaking and plunging you in well over your ankles. This a jarring experience. Several times this winter the mud has sucked off one of my gumboots entirely, leaving me hopping and cursing helplessly.

The animals hate the mud, too. Goats especially hate mud, and they have been more or less confined to quarters for weeks because they refuse to traverse the lake of mud between the barn and the nearest dry ground. The horses aren't quite as affected, but they also dislike the mud and the unrelenting wet. The poor beasts look glum, plodding around up to their hocks in mud or standing forlornly under the roof of the small field shelter. The chickens are bedraggled and not laying as well as they should be at this time of year. We are running out of hay and I can't turn the animals out on the pasture yet, even for short periods, because the ground is so waterlogged that every step a hoofed animal takes destroys turf. This inactivity means that manure piles up quick inside the barn and field shelter. More work for me.

The pigs - who are now in the freezer - were the only animals who didn't mind the mud. They seemed to ignore it completely, and actually they were responsible for a great deal of the mud. The area in front of the barn has always been muddy, but this year it became the enclosure for the pigs and they are the ones who turned it into a deep lake, by constantly trodding and churning and rooting. And pooping, of course. Can't forget pooping. Can't forget that what I'm wading through it not as innocuous as mere mud. The pigs themselves didn't mind the mud, but they made ME mind it a great deal more, because they were constantly spreading it on me with their horrible snouts.

And the dogs! Oh, the dogs. The dogs actually come into the house, you know. The dogs jump on my bed.

Argh. Enough about mud. Let's talk about rain. And wind. And sleet and hail and snow in April. It's going to snow again tomorrow, they say. I should be planting the earliest seeds, snow peas and spinach and radishes, but no-oooo, I'm cowering in my bed under the covers with the heat turned up way past what we can afford. I have to screw up my nerve every time I go out to do chores, and race through them as fast as possible. Last week I had to trim goat hooves - I'd put it off, waiting for a dry stretch, but alas, no dry stretch is forthcoming. I almost cried, holding the wet filthy hooves and getting liberally smeared with ordure when the goats kicked.

I never used to think of myself as fastidious. Not the kind of person who was bothered by a little mess. But this life has made me realize that actually I am a prim little princess who can't bear to get her hands dirty. It turns out, I really hate reaching for a flake of hay and slapping my hand down into a pile of fresh chickenshit. I really hate changing my clothes three times a day and still smelling of barnyard delight.

I also never used to think of myself as weak. In fact, I used to think I was pretty strong, for a woman my size. I didn't have any trouble with the kind of jobs I was called upon to do once in a while - moving furniture around, flipping a mattress. But I am decidedly not equal to the tasks that running a farm demands of me. I can carry 50 pound sacks of feed without too much trouble - but I can't carry four or five of them out to the barn without feeling the effects of it later on that night in my lower back. And there are many tasks I can't do at all. I can't muck out the barn in the spring after a winter of deep-litter. The straw gets compacted and hard and incredibly heavy, and I can't move it. The best I can do is drive the pitchfork into the mass and wiggle it, loosening it up for Homero, so he can muck later on.

I can't turn the compost. I can't stack hay. That annoys me - I ought to be able to stack hay. The small grass hay bales we buy only weigh about fifty pounds, sometimes less, but they are so awkward I can't lift them. I really hate leaving all the muscle work to my husband. Partly because it isn't fair, and partly because he doesn't do it in a timely fashion and we fight about it.

It's not just a matter of strength, either. There seems to be something wrong with my skin. I am continually hurting myself, getting cut or stabbed or bruised up doing ordinary things. The other day I was using a special serrated comb on Poppy, trying to get burrs out of her tail, when it slipped and raked across my thumb, opening up an inch long gash that bled like murder. And here's the thing - it wasn't even sharp! One of the reasons I can't stack hay is that the twine cuts my hands open. Apparently I have soft girly little marshmallow hands.

Most of this angst is specific to the season. I will feel better as soon as we get a week without rain. Blue skies and temperatures in the sixties will perk me right up. That may not happen until June, though. I do love our summers here, and give thanks every day that we don't have to endure weeks of above 90 degree temperatures. I suppose the flip side of mud is dust. Recently I read the book Epitaph for a Peach by a farmer in southern California (good book), and he spends a lot of time cursing the dust. We never have dust around here. We also don't have to irrigate anything, ever. Water is so cheap that mine is not even metered.

And I suppose that gloves would go a long way in protecting my marshmallow hands.

Mud Patrol (I Heart Hog Fuel)

We have a serious mud problem here. We always have. We live on the broad, flat crest of a high hill, and apparently the earth beneath us is totally impervious. The incessant rain we experience every year from - oh, I'm going to say October 15th to May 1st, on average - puddles up and creates a knee-deep mud situation for some six months of the year.

I am not the only person with a mud problem - mud is a fact of life here in the Pacific Northwest, and everybody has got to deal with it. People with enough money can hire geological engineers to create a slope-map then hire men with large machinery to carry out the blueprint, putting into place a plan whereby all the rain that falls on their property will run off of it and create mud on someone else's adjacent property.

Or, if you don't have any need for pasture, you can hire a different kind of expert (a biologist) to create a different kind of plan for you. You can, if you wish to spend the money and time, create a native wetland or native woodland capable of absorbing a lot of the water that falls. And as useful as that is for protecting native species and for filtering waste water and aesthetically and all of that, it isn't much much good for raising any kind of animal except frogs.

For the rest of us, there's hogfuel. Hogfuel is the by-product of land clearing - the ground up residue of trees and shrubs and stumps. It's wood. And it's absorbent. Yesterday, I had twenty-some yards of mostly cedar hogfuel delivered. It made a pretty large pile. The horses went nuts. They love it - they try to climb the pile like a mountain, they roll in it, they paw at it with their front feet. I don't know what exactly is so attractive about hogfuel, but I'm here to tell you that it is like catnip for equines. I tried to take some good pictures, but I was so absorbed in watching them that by the time I thought to run for my camera, they were about done playing. Here's a couple of pictures I did manage to snap.

Just Who Do I think I Am, and What the Hell Do I Think I'm Doing?

Although it was a beautiful day here, weatherwise, it was a rather discouraging day for me personally. I'm not sure why - it was a fairly ordinary day. Some friends came by in the morning unexpectedly, and I had to scramble to find a meal to cook for them (Mexicans - if a family of Mexicans ever comes to visit you, know that you should provide a fairly substantial meal no matter what the time of day, and also that you will have to coax them to eat it. They will refuse, but just load up the plates and push. That's what's expected.).

I had about twenty minutes notice, so after I checked the fridge and ascertained there was basically nothing in it, I ran out to the chest freezer. There was also basically nothing in it. I'm down to three gallons of blueberries, three or four large beef roasts, one half-ham, and some dog bones. I picked the last package of small steaks - tenderloins, and cut them up frozen and fried them with jalapenos and garlic (I didn't have an onion in the house, can you imagine?) and served them with last night's reheated white rice and some canned refried beans. Pretty embarrassing.

I've been following a lot of "sustainability" blogs, and there are apparently a lot of people out there who take producing their own food a lot more seriously than I do. I have nothing but admiration for these people - I desire to emulate them. But surely I am not there yet. If my family had to depend on what I have been able to produce and preserve over the last year, we'd be in serious starvation mode right about now. Much less would I be able to entertain - as evidenced by today's adventure.

Of course, when I moved out of the city three years ago, starvation was the very last thing on my mind. I simply wanted to provide my young children with the opportunity to grow up with space to run and experience nature, the way I did. I wanted them to have the chance to interact with the plant and the animal kingdom in an immediate and emotional way, to ENJOY nature in the simplest, most visceral way - by playing in it. I wanted to recreate the best aspects of my own childhood while (hopefully) avoiding the worst. And in terms of that goal, I have been extremely successful. My kids have a grand old time digging for worms, catching frogs and snakes, gathering eggs, milking goats, picking flowers, and generally running wild.

But over a relatively short period of time, my goals changed. I became aware of crucial and short-term problems such as peak oil, climate change, and the disappearance of the honeybee. I started to worry, in a serious and sustained way, about how I was going to provide for the well-being of my progeny, to the second and third generation. The most common way parents try to do this is by paying for their children's college education, or maybe even giving them the funds for a down payment on a house. Thanks to my generous ancestors, my kid's college education is assured. I hope they will each take full advantage of that benefit. However, in the past few generations, Americans seem to have collectively decided that preparing our children for the future means preparing them to make money. I no longer believe that is a very practical goal. I have begun to wonder if money in the bank is going to be worth anything at all by the time my children are adults starting their own families.

I don't pretend to know what the world will be like in twenty or thirty years. But I will say I am not very optimistic. I believe there is a better than even chance that life is going to be very much more difficult - Americans will be poorer, with less access to healthcare and credit, and in general people will have to depend much more on localized economies - barter with their neighbors -and the sweat of their own brows. If that is the case, then the most important thing I can leave my children is fertile land and the knowhow to make it productive. When I think about what I can do to help my children be successful, I think about preparing them to be able to grow, store, and prepare their own food; to build and maintain their own systems of energy generation; to care for livestock and the fertility of the soil, and to doctor themselves and their children.

Well.... for the last three years, I've been working pretty hard to try and educate myself about all those subjects. I've made it my business to learn about small scale subsistence farming. I've laid out a plan for a self-sustaining homestead that includes food production, energy production, water security, and a full-scale library on a wide variety of topics, from beekeeping to home midwifery. I've laid in a supply of hand tools and a multi-year supply of seeds.

But while I have thoroughly enjoyed the planning and the reading, I would be a liar if I said that the practical results have been wholly satisfactory. Here is a small list of the things that are currently plaguing my homestead:

1) the chickens are not laying. They apparently don't like their home. Some of them seem to have diarrhea - most likely coccidia from living in a damp environment. They were happier and healthier when let to range freely, but we could never find the eggs and they would destroy our seedlings in the spring garden. Which is the better path? Don't know..... don't know. Everything I read says chickens are the easiest livestock on earth, which only makes me me feel like the biggest idiot on earth.

2) Pasture rotation - it turns out that a couple of ponies and four to six goats can strip five acres of land right down to the bone in three years. When we first came here, there were blackberry bushes galore - so many that I thought our goats would never be able to control them. Boy was I wrong. Now I wish the whole damn property was covered in blackberry bushes.

3) Noxious Weeds - there are some things the goats won't eat. Turns out these things are: various species of thistles, poison hemlock, creeping buttercup, milkweed, shotweed, and pretty much every noxious or invasive weed you've ever heard of. What this means is that year after year, my pastures have a tendency to become more and more thickly covered with poisonous and/or invasive/illegal weeds. Good plants die off as the goats eat them, and whatever is too evil to be eaten wins the evolutionary rat race and becomes dominant. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time pulling the deep taproot of poison hemlock out of the ground, and yet it is kicking my ass. Sooner or later I assume my entire property will be covered with venomous strangling vines and stinging nettle.

4) Mud. Hooves are the enemy of grass. I have seven or eight hoofed animals, and every one of them is doing it's level best to trample every bit of fertile soil I own into a quagmire. I have spent hundreds of dollars on hog fuel and injured my back trying to spread it over the most vulnerable areas, but nonetheless, greater and greater areas of my property are inexorably being converted into deep, sucking mud. The pig is especially destructive, rooting up turf and creating muddy wallows all over the main pasture. We have tried to confine him to his 12 x 20 foot pen, but he is an escape artist worthy of Houdini.

5) Parasites. Goats are particularly prone to worms, and without careful and aggressive management will become progressively overloaded with intestinal parasites. Resistance to common medications is a major problem. So far, my goats have not had serious parasite problems, but it's entirely likely that they will, and without access to high powered drugs, I don't know how I can continue to protect them.

6) Ignorance. I'm sure if I kept thinking about it, there are several things I could remunerate.

But I am a late-twentieth-century American and that means I am lazy, tired, overweight, and apathetic. God damn. I can't help but feel but that my best efforts are rather pathetic, judged by historical standards.

I know my brother will understand this - I swing between wildly opposed poles of feeling kind of absurdly proud of my accomlishments and feeling abjectly ashamed of how little I have managed to get done. It is actually very difficult to arrive at an objective judgement, and also probably irrelevant. How'd I do? I dunno, how many live grandchildren do you have?

Well, time marches on and I have to put my progeny to bed, because one thing I know for sure is that the little buggers need sleep if they are going to grow satisfactorily.

Some sage said that when in doubt, we should "do that duty that lies nearest." Right now I have to go feed my kids and put them to bed.

Hog (Fuel) Heaven

As I think I have mentioned, the rains have started. With a vengeance. I have no idea how much rain in inches we have received in the last couple of weeks, but I can tell you it's been enough to turn the barnyard into poo soup.

I really don't like wading through the poo soup every morning. It's not good for the animal's hooves, either. I have been remiss about trimming the goat's hooves, and that particular icky task is long overdue. If I let their hooves get overgrown, they will start to rot, and that - if left unchecked - will lead to lameness and infection and even, possibly, death. So yeah, I really need to get on that.

As an aside, why can't anybody manufacture a set of hoof trimmers that lasts more than three months? Has the science of steel really not advanced that far since 500 B.C.? Your basic hoof trimmers (which look like rose pruners, for those of you more familiar with roses than goats) cost twenty bucks and in this wet climate last only a very short time before they are rusted shut. I trim the goat's hooves once or maybe twice and then buy new ones. It's a small but significant drain on the finances.

So anyway. The mud was getting out of hand, as it does just about this time every year. Last year, I spent a lot of money on drain rock, and hurt my back pretty seriously trying to spread it. This year, I decided to spend a lot less money on hog fuel (a mix of chipped wood and dirt, basically) and spare my aching lumbar spine.

I ordered fifteen yards, which is a lot, and they actually brought me something closer to twenty, which is a hell of a lot. Forty minutes with a rake made no appreciable dent in the pile. The animals, however, loved to climb in it and paw it and generally help gravity do it's work, so maybe they will help me out a bit over the next few days. Poppy especially was adorable climbing the pile: her long legs kept sinking in nearly to the shoulder or hip, and she plunged and reared to get herself extricated.

I am looking forward to keeping me feet more or less dry when I do morning chores. I do, of course, have gumboots, but believe it or not, they often get stuck in the awful sucking muck. More than once I have lost a boot to the hideous slurping stew, and I'd much rather rise above it all on a carpet of hogfuel (not that it's particularly aromatic - whew!)

Here is a gratuitous shot of the sky this afternoon. I couldn't help myself, it was so beautiful.

Minor Changes

Whew, I just read back over some previous posts, and man have I been in a bad mood. It hasn't been all quite as relentlessly awful as this blog has made it sound, however. Really. It helps that we have a bright blue shy at the moment, predicted to last nearly all day before the next storm front moves in. The weather man was using his "Big Storm" voice, though, so I expect it will be a bad one. Ah well, I'll just try to spend as much time as I can outside today.

I came up with an idea to make mucking out easier. As I think I mentioned in a previous post, there is  no way to maneuver a wheelbarrow in the barnyard right now. And I think I also mentioned that the pig no longer lives in his pen, since he would drown in his own muck if he did. So it occurred to me that I could use the empty pigpen for my compost pile. It abuts the barn, and one of the barn windows is perfectly situated for forking the dirty straw right out. Presto: no wheelbarrow, much cleaner, dryer, less smelly barn. And there's a fence around the pen, so the animals can't climb all over the compost, except for the chickens of course. 

Homero and I moved the remaining bunny, hutch and all, onto the back porch. It was quite a job carrying the hutch - which is pretty large and very heavy - through the gates and 300 feet to the house. The idea is to get the little girls more involved in taking care of their animal and to provide the bunny a little stimulation now and then, instead of letting it waste away of loneliness and boredom all alone in it's hutch. I'm fairly certain we aren't going to recover the white bunny, certain enough to bet Homero $100. He spent a half hour or so trying, and did manage to drive the bunny out from under the barn twice and onto open ground, but he wasn't able to net it either time before it dashed under the other, bigger barn. We really have to figure out a way to block up the space under the barns. During Operation Bunny Homero discovered several large clutches of eggs under there. 

I also managed to get the pony into the smaller pasture with the new field shelter in it. It's much drier there, no mud at all, much better for her hooves. Homero and I attempted to get the alpacas in there as well, but no dice. I have no idea how we will ever move them, or trap them for shearing. Instead I gave her two goats for companionship, Xango and her daughter Valentine. These are the only two does I won't be breeding this year, so if I get a buck on the place I can just put him in with the other three girls and let him have at it.

Speaking of which, I am bringing Xana to a buck this afternoon. When Rowan gets home, I'll have her watch the little kids and take the van with the goat in it. I'm hoping she won't hurt herself or me on the trip. It's not very far.

I know, I'm dubious too, but I have no other options.

Oh Gross

I fell down in the pigpen. Fell right on my butt. Made a big brown splash. I almost barfed in my lap. 

I had to strip down and walk back in the house butt naked. After my forty minute shower, I feel close to clean again, but my clothes went straight into the trash.

I sure love farming, I surely do. 

Rain, Rain

The weather report predicts heavy rain through the weekend. I don't see how it can get any wetter at this point, so I'm kind of indifferent.

Homero shoveled enough rock to make a couple of paths through the gunk. I saw that the pony was actually inside the barn with the goats, but she didn't look happy about it. The alpacas sit on their chests, tails to the wind, close their eyes, and just let it all wash over them. I hope they don't get sick.

The chickens mostly stay inside the barn, which means extra-fast pile up of poop, but still no eggs. When they come out to eat, their feathers blow all over the place and they look ragged and flimsy. I can't empty the barn of the compost pile in the corner, because there's absolutely no way of maneuvering a wheelbarrow  in the barnyard. I may have to wait until it freezes solid.

That would be a relief.

Mud and Mushrooms

What to do about mud? The recent rains have turned the barnyard into the most disgusting mire. Calling it mud is just a euphemism; it's really more like liquid zoo-doo. There is apparently no drainage at all out in front of the barns. It just puddles up and stays there. I have admittedly made things worse by spreading around the dirty straw. I thought it would soak it up and compact, but it just makes everything deeper. Homero spread two pick-up truckloads of gravel, which was just enough to make slender paths from the gate to each of the two barn doors. I think I'm going to have a big pile of gravel delivered. I know it's expensive, but holy sh.....

The rain has also brought forth the mushrooms. This cute little clump is actually part of a much larger patch of huge, shaggy, rapidly decomposing toadstools, which aren't cute at all. There is a mushroom festival this weekend somewhere in town, this just reminded me. I think I'll go take pictures of all the different mushrooms I can find on the property and try to identify them at the shroom show.