Pasture Patrol, Spring 2016

After evening chores today I decided to walk the perimeter fence of the big pasture, something I have not done in some period of time rather longer than it ought to be. It was a lovely evening - we have finally been enjoying some true spring-like weather - and Haku needed some extra exercise. Here are a few things I saw whilst on pasture patrol:

These odd, bright red, tiny fungi. They are growing on the underside of clumps of turf that were turned over last fall by the pig. Only saw three little patches, all within about five square feet. Each about the size of a single drop of water. No clue what they are, but they're cute. 

If I want any more nettles this year, I'd better get on it. Once the flower heads open, which these look like they will do within a couple of days, nettles are no longer good to eat. Although they might retain medicinal properties; I'll have to look that up. There seem to be fewer nettles than there were in previous years, and it's certainly not because I've been over harvesting them. They grow along the western fence line, in the area that was disturbed when we dug up all the old trash and remnants of the old dairy barn that the previous owners buried. I think the land is simply progressing beyond the "nettle" stage of recovery, as pasture grass, dandelions, and clover take over. Any disturbed land will be colonized by a predictable series of wild plants, according to its location and other qualities. 

Another couple of weeds - less welcome than nettle - that colonize disturbed ground. Superficially similar looking at this stage, the top photo is poison Hemlock (with which I have waged an epic, years long battle  -Weeds) and the second is common tansy. Tansy has it's uses; it is a very good vermifuge, for example, but it is a tenacious plant with a habit of spreading and taking over pasture. Very difficult to pull by hand. Hemlock has no uses I know of, except to execute troublesome philosophers who are corrupting the youth of the city by teaching subversive ideas in the agora. 

Along the western fence line there are a couple of spots where the field fencing needs to be tacked down, maybe even some fill brought in. These scrapes under the fence were most likely dug by the coyotes who prey on our poultry. Of course I would like to stop that predation, but there is a more immediate reason. If a coyote can get under there, Haku can get under there, as soon as it occurs to him to try. And if Haku runs amok over in that particular neighbor's fields, frightening his mules or chasing his chickens, Haku will get shot pretty damn quick. Not that I would blame that neighbor - controlling one's dog is country etiquette 101.

On the eastern side of the pasture, there has always been a low spot that tended to get boggy in the winter. Creeping buttercup dominates that area. This is a natural feature of the hillside - it is easy to see the wide, shallow path of drainage running down from the ridge away to the southwest. In the past, before our neighbor bought the lot and built his HSH (hotel-sized-house), the swale was only wet in the depths of winter. The rest of the year it was simply a slightly softer area where plants that enjoy more moistness predominated.

In latter years I have noticed that the area stays much wetter for more of the year. I am starting to think that the rearrangement of the neighboring property has permanently altered the drainage in such a way as to send more water through this swale. Walking the area today, I saw a fair amount of standing water.

To be fair, this has been the wettest wet season on record in western Washington. We have had something like 80 inches of rain since last November. Additionally, the pig enjoyed rooting in this soft dirt, and his activity may also have caused there to be a more generally swampy appearance. Hopefully it will dry up with a few more weeks of little-to-no precipitation.

That will be too late, however, to save my nice shoes. I underestimated the swampiness and as I was crossing the swale I stepped into a deceptively deep puddle and sank in almost up to my knees. Silly me, I was wearing my only pair of nice shoes. Yes, I know it is exceedingly idiotic to traipse about a muddy pasture in early April wearing one's one and only pair of shoes suitable for work. What can I say - it was a spur of the moment thing.

Nettle Season (Copycat Cheese)

Today was a beautiful unseasonably warm day for March. I think it was 60 degrees. We took the kids down to the beach, where it was warm enough for them to roil up their pant-sleeves and squish around in the cool mud, turning over rocks and looking for crabs and limpets.

It was more than warm enough for me to move some dirt around and plant some things in the garden - radishes, arugula, peas, even potatoes - but I have been sinfully lazy. In fact a large part of the reason we went to the beach is so I wouldn't have to feel guilty for not working in the garden.

Much easier than shovel-work is scissors-work: in the afternoon, after we got home from the bay, I took a pair of kitchen gloves, a pair of scissors, and a big brown paper bag and went out to the field to harvest nettles. In the past, I have usually used the nettles to make Avgolemono Soup, but this year I decided to make nettle cheese.

On the way to the bay, there is a wonderful local cheese maker, Samish Bay cheese.  They sell their beautiful cow's milk cheese at local farmer's markets,. and they are justly locally famous for their Ladysmith Cheese, Gouda flavored with Caraway, and Jalapeño Queso Fresco. They also have a seasonable fresh cheese, available for just a few months each year, flavored with nettles.

I adore stinging nettles. Well, let me amend that statement just a little - I love eating stinging nettles; I do not love accidentally wading into a patch of them in capri-pants. Stinging nettles are a wild child's nemesis - lying in wait along roadside ditches and fence-lines to attack the unwary. The merest brush of the dusty green leaves against bare skin causes a sting that lasts hours - not for nothing is this plant's name is Spanish "Mala Mujer."

However, the sting is easily removed by drying or by blanching for even a few seconds in boiling water. I put a full kettle on to boil, place the nettles in a colander in the sink, and trickle the boiling water over the nettles. Let sit for five minutes, then rinse with cold water and squeeze to remove excess water. Then they are ready to be used as food or medicine. Many herbalists consider the nettle to be a near- panacea (see, for example http://www.herballegacy.com/Vance_Medicinal.html) and I certainly can't quibble. But there is no doubt as to nettle's nutritional qualities.

Plus, they are just plain delicious. They taste like a blend of spinach and asparagus. They have a full, soft texture and a wonderful mouth-feel. They are one of those foods that you can feel make you stronger and healthier as you eat them.

Tonight, I am going to try making my own version of Samish Bay's nettle cheese. I am making my basic cheddar recipe, but in the second pressing I will add the finely chopped nettles along with the salt. Of course, I am working with goat milk instead of cow's milk, and also my cheese is made from raw milk whereas their's is pasteurized. I expect it to be delicious. I'll let you know.

Warm Weather Work (Slug Shoes)

Today brought the first real warm weather of the season, by which I mean I'm pretty sure it was over 64 degrees fahrenheit. In any case it was warm enough that I got rather sweaty doing some digging out in the garden.

The potatoes that I planted as an experiment in tubs in the playroom back in january (Spud 'Speriment (Potato Poetry)) needed to be hilled already, which I did, digging up some nice black dirt from the oldest, backmost part of the compost heap, now five years old and covered with grass. I also did quite a bit of transplanting. I transplanted some sage and some thyme from black plastic into pretty, porch-worthy containers. I moved some globe artichoke starts from the greenhouse outside, and I moved the greenhouse tomatoes and peppers into larger containers. 65 degrees notwithstanding, I don't trust the weather enough to move tomatoes outside until June.

After all that shovel work, my back was aching and I needed a stretch. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the tiny white cobwebby beginnings of a tent caterpillar infestation in the orchard. Tent caterpillars, for those of you lucky enough to live somewhere they don't, are a thoroughly disgusting form of insect life with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Tent caterpillars are one of those mysterious kinds of bug that has some multi-year life cycle, making it difficult to predict when they are going to show up. Like locusts. The lore of my youth said that every three - or five - or seven years there would be a bad infestation. That doesn't even leave much scope for accuracy, but what I can say is that we have lived here for seven years and these are the first I've seen.

This link will tell you more about tent caterpillars and what kind of unholy chemical hell you can unleash on them if you are so inclined (http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/caterpillars.htm). I prefer to walk the orchard on fine evening such as this, and when I see a tent, I bend over and grab a dock leaf, or a plantain leaf, or some other broad and sturdy leaf; fold it into my palm, and squish the little fuckers manually.

It's an unpleasant job, squishing caterpillars by hand. Nobody said homesteading was always aesthetically pleasing. I never promised you a rose garden. However I will say that today, squishing caterpillars in the warm, slanting sunshine with a carpet of dandelions under my feet and the orchard blossoms forming a fragrant cloud about my head was considerably more pleasant than squishing caterpillars was last week, when I was doing it in a frigid drizzle.

Times like this, I sometimes wish I had a boy child, who might actively enjoy such work. When I was small and we lived on a small farm, my father put a bounty on slugs in the springtime. Slugs are one of the many banes of a garden, and my dad didn't like to use chemical control if he could help it. He preferred to pay us kids to deal with them. Many's the dewy morning I was sent out with a salt shaker. Because we all liked to go barefoot in the springtime, we all, of course, often had the unpleasant experience of stepping on a slug.

Even today, I have a visceral memory of that awful, unexpected slimy squash, followed by the grim discovery that slugs just don't wipe off. A squished slug forms a sticky plaque that endures for days. Me and my sister, whenever we stepped on a slug, would emit high pitched squeals and run to the gravel driveway to commence the futile task of scraping our feet. My brother, on the other hand, actually enjoyed stepping on slugs.

I remember him stomping around the garden, about nine years old, defiantly barefoot, squashing every slug he could find. He said he was going to make himself a pair of slug shoes. He covered every square centimeter of the soles of his feet with that thick, sticky, durable, dark brown substance otherwise known as slug guts.

Really, who hasn't stepped on a slug? I pity the child who never has. As horrible as the experience is, at least it means I'm walking on grass. What are those kids stepping on instead, cigarette butts? I'm glad my fingers and thumb know the feel of a mass of tiny caterpillars meeting their doom between them. I'm glad I know that bug guts are greeny-yellow; that spit bugs spit on bladderwort; that buttercups feel greasy; that garter snakes stink but don't bite; and that push comes to shove, I can always make shoes out of slugs.

Goats Do My Landscaping

I'm not saying that goats are GOOD landscapers; but they do work cheap. Why, some people are even villifying goats as "undocumented workers" taking American jobs! Check out the link if you don't believe me - Stephen Colbert does a great expose.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/15/the-colbert-report-goats-_n_763934.html

Plodding Along

There hasn't been a whole lot going on here, we're just plodding along through this cold spring. The weather has finally turned a corner and we have had several days of sunshine, but it is still very cold. We ran out of propane about three weeks ago and I didn't buy any more, thinking that any day now spring would kick in. Nearly a month later and we are still shivering in our sweaters. At least the sunshine means it warms up in the greenhouse. The kids like to play in there, and I took in a folding chair and a book just to enjoy the warmth through the glass.

The broiler chicks got too big for the rabbit hutch, and we were casting about for a place to put them, when I spied an old truck canopy upside down out in the blackberry bushes. Righted and dragged over to the side yard, it makes a fine chicken house, Except that Lancelot, the collie dog, tore out the mesh on one of the windows so he could crawl in with the chicks. He didn't kill any of them, he just wanted to be in there with them. Weird dog. So now we have to keep that window closed. They still need the light at night, but not during the day.

The annual struggle with the lawnmower has begun. This time, it only took Homero about a half an hour to get it running - a record - but it only ran for about two minutes before one of the tires peeled off. Another record. He doesn't want to look at the damn thing anymore (I don't blame him) but on the other hand the grass is really starting to get long and if we don't mow now we will need to rent a brushmower.

I did something to my left shoulder. It's been bothering me moderately for some time now, but yesterday I tripped on a brick, fell on the shoulder, and now I can't lift it more than 45 degrees in any direction. I'm wearing a sling and taking lots of ibuprofen, and we'll see how it in a week.

This Is What Poor Pasture Management Leads To....

I was trying to turn over a bit of the compost pile today - something I had no business trying to do, in light of my three fractured vertebrae - and I tripped and sat down rather heavily. No harm done, except that I sat down in a patch of burdock. Three thousand burrs immediately leaped off the plant and into my hair. It was a case of insta-dread.

One hour and one bottle of conditioner later, no harm done. But still and all, it wasn't very pleasant. Just one more reason for vigilance against the weeds. Just one... small... reason.

Back to the Grind

I took one full day's rest before getting back to the summer farm routine - well, of course I milked the goats, but other than that. Yesterday, it was back on track, full steam ahead!

The first thing I did was walk the property and take mental notes. The grass is awfully high, and the mower is still broken, but I made Homero use the weedeater to clear a space around the fruit trees and to whack down the poison hemlock, which is flowering even though it has been mowed twice already. My little garden is almost lost in the high grass. I see that many of my plants are a dead loss - I think the problem is my heavy clay soil, which bakes into a brick when it gets hot and dry. I did mix in a lot of compost, but that didn't do the trick, I guess. My beets, for example, made nice big leaves but no beets at all. Same with the carrots. Squash and beans, on the other hand, are doing very well. I have harvested three zucchinis and have more little ones which will be ready in a week or so. Potatoes look good. Tomatoes not so much.

The trees all look good - man are we going to have a lot of pears. There are so many pears on that big tree we'll probably have to make cider. Or, as pear cider is called, Perry. One of the small pear trees also has a few dozen pears on it. The Ranier cherry bore fruit, and I was looking forward to eating some, but when I got there the birds had eaten most of each cherry, without taking the cherries off the tree, so it looked like they were still good from far away. Bummer. Net next year, I guess.

However, I did harvest a big ol' bowl of cherries - pie cherries from the neighbor's trees that lean out over the fenceline. These cherries aren't very sweet, but we still like to eat them out of hand, they are juicy and bracingly tart. When we had eaten our fill, I used the rest to make a cherry cordial with vodka. I'll keep it in the freezer and come christmas put it into pretty little bottles for my friends who drink.

I also made some fresh cheese (although the cheese I left in the fridge to age is doing so deliciously) and am making more today.

I checked through the bee equipment to try and put together two honey-supers (the small boxes you put on top of the hives this time of year to collect extra honey) and realized we didn't have enough frames. So I put an ad on Craigslist and immediately found someone willing to lend me ten frames in exchange for half my surplus honey - if any, of course. I explained this is my first year and I might not get any. She understood and was willing to take the risk. So, later today Rowan and I will put the supers on.

The farrier is coming today. The ponies have lost their halters somewhere in the field so I have to try and find them and go buy new ones if I can't. They haven't been handled in a few weeks, of course, and Rosie especially is as wild as a deer. I'm sure the farrier will have a wonderful time. He just loves Rosie - NOT.

Also it is high hay season and if we want to stock up on reasonably priced hay now is the time to go buy it off the fields. Of course the pickup truck is out of commission, so I'll have to either borrow somebody's truck or pay to have hay delivered.

Oh I forgot to mention yesterday I also took the kids out to the raspberry fields to pick berries before the season ends. We came home with four gallon-sized ziplocs full, two of which are already gone. Raspberries are my favorite berry, and I want to pick as many as I can this week for the freezer.

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me, so I'd better get off my butt and get to it.

Notes on a Field (Benign Neglect)

In nature, there is no such thing as a blank slate, but this property was pretty close, when we bought it. The previous owners had scraped down the entire back pasture and leveled it, leaving it all bare dirt and trucked-in sand. At the time, I was mystified as to why they would do such a thing, but now I know it was to hide the fact that they had buried tons of rubble from their old dairy barn (Spring Cleaning).

The front acre, on the other hand, was a different kind of clean slate: a perfect lawn, every last dandelion, daisy, and buttercup stoned into submission with heavy chemicals. Each of these areas has benefitted, over the last three years, from my benign neglect. Basically, I have done diddly-squat to either of these fields, neither to promote the good nor to repress the bad. There are exceptions (Weeds), but basically I have left "well-enough" alone, as far as active management is concerned.

I would love to be able to observe and take notes on the "natural" course of regeneration on the scraped-over back field, but of course I cannot, since I introduced livestock back there. The goats and the chickens and the ponies, and even the alpacas while they were here, have each had their peculiar influence on the area - what each species likes and dislikes to eat has profound consequences for which plants will thrive and which will die off.

Since I spend so much time out watching the goats, I know by far the most about what it is they prefer to eat. While there is a general hierarchy of favorite foods - fruit trees being number one, followed by blackberries, anything that grows in my garden, and then, in descending order, any young tree-tips, such as alder, willow, most species of evergreen, then roses and clover - there is a surprising variability between individual goats as to what they like to eat.

Iris loves dandelion flowers and will spend hours eating practically nothing else. Django and Cloud are the only goats who will eat thistles, and they will only eat the unopened flower buds, not the leaves. All the goats will eat burdock, but only after the burrs have formed, alas. They totally ignore the tender young leaves in the spring and then gobble the mature leaves starting just about now, mid-summer.

Oddly, all the goats will eat the poison hemlock. So far it hasn't done them any harm, but I take no chances and try my hardest to get rid of it before they all poison themselves. Also, they all love rhododendron, which is also toxic. I have to beat them off the rhodie with a stick.

Nobody will eat stinging nettle, more's the pity.

No tree will ever sprout in the goat-pasture, because the goats will attack it without mercy, but in the front area where the goats seldom go, many trees have spontaneously emerged. The most numerous are offspring of my neighbor's sour pie-cherries, but there are also alders and maples. I leave these be - I'd like more trees about the place, especially if they bear cherries. The most prevalent weeds in the goat pasture are buttercup, thistles of various stripes, milkweed, amaranth, nettle, and hemlock.

The early invaders of the perfect lawn were dandelion (of course), thistles, and creeping buttercup. Three years on, blackberry is making an appearance, along with many suckers from the antique pear (that thing spreads like wildfire) and dock. Recently, horsetail has been spreading up from the culvert. I don't really care about lawn except that I hate to step on thistles, so I may be able to just keep observing what happens there.

On the high flat compacted area where the dairy barn once stood there is a (seasonal) abundance of mushrooms. Shaggy manes are the most prevalent. According to my mushroom book they like compacted soil, and they are delicious. Speaking of mushrooms, the other day I was working in the garden when I saw some mushrooms that looked so exactly like button mushrooms from the store that I picked some. They smelled just like button mushrooms from the store, too. So I ate one. It tasted just like a button mushroom from the store. Now, three days later, I feel fine, so I'm going to call them button mushrooms and eat them from now on.

My property is certainly not a model of pasture management - I guess you've picked up on that by now. I'm not making any effort to create a particular population of plants here - although I encourage grass and discourage hemlock and other "bad" plants. I do rotate grazing, just to avoid any area being grazed to the ground and also to minimize parasite issues. Mostly I am just fascinated by closely observing the earth doing what it does, and trying to identify and name the factors that contribute to the mosaic of life that I see. I love knowing my property intimately, even if I can't do much to influence it's behavior.

I haven't even begun to talk about the bees, yet. Oh, the bees are so happy right now, with the clover and the blackberry in bloom!

Aimee vs. the Weeds, round 118

The Bellingham Herald reports there have been four cases of human poisonings from the above plant this year. One fatality. The Herald reports that people mistake Hemlock for carrot or anise, and provides a detailed description to help people avoid making the mistake:

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) was introduced to the U.S. from Europe as an ornamental plant. It has adapted to a wide range of climates and grows along roadsides and waterways, in pastures and playgrounds, in vacant lots and cracks in the pavement.

"This plant is very adaptable," Baldwin said.

Its stem is hollow, and the erect biennial is usually 4 to 6 feet tall.

The numerous flowers are white. Its leaves are lush, and look like a cross between Italian parsley and a fern. All parts of the plant are poisonous and affect the nervous system.

Initial symptoms could include a burning sensation in the mouth, nausea, confusion, and muscle paralysis.

Baldwin said the smooth and hairless stem with purple spots near the base are sure-fire indicators of poison hemlock.

It spreads by seed. When crushed, the plant has an unpleasant odor that has been describe as musky or smelling like mouse urine.

This smell is what makes me wonder how anyone could mistake it for carrot. Carrots smell good: Hemlock stinks like hell. Those of you with long memories will remember my years-long battle with this evil weed (Philosopher's Bane) . It's a battle I've been slowly losing, I'm afraid. Over the years, the Hemlock has been stealthily expanding it's range, while I have only been getting older and stiffer, which makes it much harder to stoop over and pull it's devilishly long taproot. Here's what I had to say about Hemlock back in 2008:

I really dislike this stuff. It's seriously poisonous, poisonous enough to pose a real hazard to animals and small children; it spreads like wildfire; it's hard, backaching work to try to pull it out by the roots, it stinks horribly and gives me hives, and if all that weren't enough, it grows in inaccessible places, like in the middle of thistle patches and along the fence line amidst the concrete rubble from the old barn. Every time I go wage a battle against the poison hemlock, I come back scratched, red, bumpy, itchy, and limping. I may eventually need to call in the cavalry: Roundup.

Well, I realize I have tied one hand behind my back here, but I have NOT called in the chemical cavalry, nor do I intend too. As far as I'm concerned, Monsanto is a far greater evil being than Hemlock is. Neither do I have the equipment (or the money to rent same) needed to disk the whole field, till, and plant new grass the way professionals do. No, it's just me, my aching back, and the pathetic old Murray lawnmower, which really deserves it's own label in this screed, considering the length and complexity of its ongoing saga.

In the last installment of the lawnmower saga, Homero fixed the machine for the umpteenth time and bought a new battery for it. That means it actually starts without having to drag a car battery and jumper cables out to wherever it was when it died last time. It means that I am actually capable of starting it myself and cutting the grass without asking my husband for his manly assistance.

Today I decided I would take the irascible machine out to the back pasture and try to mow as much Hemlock as I could. I would have to be extremely careful as there are still - despite several hours of really hard work with a crowbar - many large rocks imbedded in the ground and any one of them would kill the mower if I ran over it, not seeing it amongst the tall poisonous plants. Oh the many perils that exist in one small field! The idea, which is not exactly supported by experience, is that repeated mowing of the plants before they flower and go to seed will prevent them from spreading, at least.

Well, I managed to mow for a good thirty minutes, and I did mow down a large expanse of young hemlock plants. I felt pretty good. I felt pretty successful. I got ambitious and decided to go out to the other large patch of hemlock out by the fence. Now, this was dangerous because there is a steep drop-off right along the fenceline. The hemlock - along with stinging nettle and blackberry - grows down into this small ravine right up to the fence. Obviously, I was going to stay up on the plain and just get as much as I reasonably could get with the riding mower. The stuff down in the valley would have to be got with a weedeater.

Do you see where we are going here?

No no, not quite. I didn't drive right over the edge. But I did try to get too close and the mower started to slide sideways. I put on the brake, threw it in reverse, and tried to back up but I only backed up a half a foot or so before something stopped me. I thought that might be enough, so I put in the lowest forward gear and leaned my weight hard to the right and tried to go forward. No soap; the wheels spun and the machine started to tip sideways again.

After a couple more equally ineffective tries, I couldn't think of anything to do but kill the motor and hop off - right into a patch of stinging nettle, I might add - before the whole operation quite literally went south. Slightly scratched, with stinging ankles, and rather annoyed with myself, I stomped off to the shop to tell my husband I was going to need his manly assistance after all.

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.

Napoleon in the Garden

It was a productive day on the farm, although it doesn't look like much.

It surprises me how much work it is to fill and then empty a (large) wheelbarrow twice. That's basically what I did. Well, okay, I also sawed the top off of a couple of tires. I admit I used an electric saw, but that's still more work than you think it is. Previously, I had used a hacksaw to take the tops off of two tires and I thought my arm was gonna fall off by the time I was done.

Why am I sawing up tires? Well, I've decided that this year, I'm going to an all-container garden design, and tires are economical, seeing as how we have a buttload of them lying around doing nothing. Three years in a row, the weeds have kicked my ass all the way home, and I consider that a decisive loss on my part. Only an idiot wouldn't change his tactics, and I, my friends, am no idiot.

Tires do not represent the full scope of my battle plan: No; I also have a pair of recycled bathtubs and an old half wine barrel. Plus four or five rather large plastic bins of the type that nurseries sell trees in, and a flotilla of milk crates lined with cardboard boxes (the kind that once housed half-racks of Pacifico beer, Mexico's finest).

My troops consist of my own two arms (weak) and a pick, a pitchfork, a shovel, a rake, and the fruit of my loins. Two of them are under seven years old, and the other one is a surly teenager, so that means I'm fairly on my own. Oh yeah, and the husband can occasionally called to action for an hour or so.

The artillery is my compost pile. A heap of well-rotted straw, mixed animal poop, and food scraps about eight feet by six feet by three feet high; fluffy, golden, and virgin above, black as the stygian depths beneath. Each of my containers was filled halfway with deep, dark compost, and then filled the rest of the way with topsoil displaced from Homero's shop project.

Since the soil was until extremely recently a foot or so underground, I think it will be relatively free of weed seeds. I plan to go ahead and plant spinach, radishes, and peas quite soon and then cover my containers with plastic wrap. That ought to keep the seedlings safe from my other enemies: the chickens.

The children were out playing all afternoon while I worked. About four o-clock, they came running to inform me they found a bird's nest in the big tree and would I please come and take a picture. I did, and here it is.

State of the Farm, Late Summer

Django eating thistles. The goats do eat thistles, but not with great enthusiasm and not nearly enough of them to make a dent in the great sea of thistles that covers 75% of my pasture.

Marcus says this is fire blight on the pear tree. (I don't why everything is underlined now. I can't fix it. To hell with it.) All the pear trees have it to some degree. I may have to spray. I think Marcus said sulfur. Anybody?

The roses like the hot dry weather. They are blooming for the third time this year.

My plum tree is bearing. First year! I thought the plums would never get ripe, but finally they are turning purple.

Poppy is growing like a weed. She is taller than her mother already. She has learned to walk on a lead. She is the sweetest, most lovable pony! She runs up to me wherever I am and kisses me.

Thistle Situation

The end of July, and already it's been a long hot summer. I think the heat may have peaked yesterday (at 101 degrees!!!) but it's not really going to cool down to what we might call normal temperatures anytime soon. And as far as I know, there's no rain in the forecast at all. In fact, I remember hearing that the long-term forecast was for "drier than normal" conditions right through september. 

I hope that doesn't mean no rain at all. There was a thunderstorm about a week ago, with enough rain to spoil all the hay in the fields, but aside from that, nothing since May, and not much then. The grass is dry and dead looking. The trees all look droopy and tired, even old well-established trees. Blackberries are doing fine, though. Clover is still mostly green. And, not surprisingly, thriving are the thistles. That's my back field at the top of the page: pretty much a sea of thistles. If anyone out there is doing a survey of the types of thistles that grow in Whatcom County, well, you're invited. They're all here, I'm sure. 

At least the honeybees like them. That's the one good thing about thistles I can think of. 

              How many goats can you find in this picture? Hint: four. 

Homero got the mower working. He managed to mow the front lawn and the back lawn where the playset is, and I think he even got around the fruit trees. First time we've managed to mow without it breaking down in the middle since early spring. Hooray! 

But I'm not going to try it against the thistles. I know which side would win that confrontation!

Summer Solstice State of the Farm

Just a few days ago, it seems, I went out and looked at the pear tree and lamented that it looked like we weren't going to have many pears this year. I wondered if it was the paucity of bees, or if perhaps the tree was an every-other-year producer like so many apple trees are. But today, suddenly, it's broken out in tiny hard little red pears all over! I think we will have at least as many as last year. And now that I know that pears are one of those weird fruits that don't ripen until AFTER you pick them, I won't get frustrated and pick them all at once and have seventy-five ripe pears in a drawer at the same time. 

I decided to do the rounds and see what's in bloom now, weeds included. I know the Hemlock's in bloom, because I've been wading around in the thistle and stinging nettles trying to pull it all or at least pinch the flowering tops off before it goes to seed. I think I'm becoming immune to stinging nettles. Sort of. Okay maybe not. I did send Homero over the fence into the neighbor's pasture with the gas powered weedeater. He got most of it on that side.

The clover is in bloom, both red and white. The blackberries are in bloom. I spoke to a beekeeper who posted an ad on Craigslist looking for somebody with at least an acre of blackberries to place a few hives and pay them in honey at the end of the season. I called him and told him I wasn't sure about the acreage, but we had a blackberry hedge 400 feet long and twelve or fifteen feet wide. He said he'd come over this weekend, but I haven't heard from him yet. Dang, I'd love to get some local honey to put up.

My tomato plants are in bloom. They aren't looking too happy in amongst the weeds, but maybe I'll get a few tomatoes. The potatoes have not bloomed yet.

The oxeye daisies are in bloom. The roadsides are covered in them, I love it. The butter cups are in bloom. The foxglove is in bloom. A lot of stuff that I don't know what it is in bloom.

Here is Storm Cloud, looking like he might be in bloom. He's big enough to really keep up with the herd now. Up until a week ago, he'd usually lie down in a patch of tall grass and wait for his mama to come back to him, but now he grazes alongside everybody else. He tries to jump and climb with the other babies, but they are way ahead of him. He sure is pretty.

Speaking of pretty. Poppy is just getting more and more gorgeous all the time. She loves to play with the goats, jumping up and bucking and nipping them and then running away, circling back, doing it all over again. The goats don't really get into it so much. Poppy is growing like a weed herself. She's not only going to be tall, she's going to be strong. Look at the hindquarters on her! She's got a nice chunky butt. Maybe her papa was a quarter horse. Who knows?

On this longest day of the year, things are going well. Everybody's healthy - except for Xanadu, but she's slowly getting better. The kids are happy, the chickens are laying, I'm hanging in there and this old world is spinning along right on schedule. 

Blessings!

A Hard Day's Work

The lawnmower is still not fixed, despite seven separate trips to the mower place for parts (they are laughing at us, I know they are) and much cursing. Today, Homero decided to rent a brush hog to mow the front lawn. And the thistles which were forming an impenetrable thicket in the back pasture. And the giant patch of poison hemlock, which has been weed-eaten twice so far this year but which was starting to flower nonetheless. You don't have to like the nasty stuff, but you kind of have to admire it. Homero said he's enjoying working out in the sun (it's 87 degrees out). He says it reminds him of life in Mexico. 

Meanwhile, I have been washing and dyeing alpaca fiber. This saturday - day after tomorrow - is kid's day at the farmer's market and Rowan's big chance to make back our shearing fees and thus keep the alpacas. However, it's also finals week and she hasn't had time to process the fiber. So I'm helping her. What you see above is about one-fiftieth of what we've got. Less. I can't understand how anybody can make a living with this stuff: it takes whole shitloads of time to process little bitty amounts. It's annoying. But I don't have patience for this sort of work.

This was yesterday's sunset. I'm looking forward to tonight's, with a cold beer in my hand.

Playing Catchup

I just noticed that it's been several days since I last posted anything. I guess I've been too busy to get to the computer! Let's see....

Iris is still pregnant, although she looks like she's about to pop, the poor thing. She waddles everywhere and I swear she's wider than she is high. Triplets, I think. Flopsy, however.. I still can't say for certain if she's pregnant. If she's not pregnant, then she's damn fat. But there's no evidence of an udder yet, and she ought to be due only days after her mom. Wait and see. Either there will be babies or there won't. 

The grass which I sowed in the back pasture did in fact sprout, and I'm happy to say that I think that pasture will be greatly improved over last year. However, there's still a whole lot of the "bad plant" aka poison hemlock. This afternoon I was talking over the back fence with my neighbor who was out pulling hemlock from her pasture, and I felt compelled to apologize even though it was the previous owners who allowed the hemlock to flourish. I did tell her about my newest find: a cool tool for digging out long-rooted plants like hemlock and burdock. It's a bulb-planter; meant, obviously, for planting bulbs. But it works very well for removing long roots. It's like a shovel, but where the blade of a shovel would be, there's a sharpened tube instead, about three inches in diameter. You can just line it up over the center of a bad plant and step on the crossbar, driving the tube a foot into the ground, then lever the root out and toss it away.  There's far too many hemlock plants to remove them all this way (maybe a thousand?) but I can work on it little by little, and use the gas powered weedeater to prevent seedheads from forming on the ones I can't root out.

I tried to introduce Xana and her babies into the herd. They need to get integrated soon, because Iris is going to give birth any day now and she will need the private space of the mama barn. At first, it seemed to be going well. The other goats checked out the babies perfunctorily, then ignored them and they all grazed peacefully for a couple of hours. Great. I went inside. But when I came back out to check on everybody a couple of hours later, I found a gory scene. Xana had knocked off her scur, most likely in the defense of her babies, and was bleeding fairly profusely from the head. She is also still bleeding from the other end, from kid-birth, so she really presented a grisly picture. She looked like the goat that crawled up from hell. Poor thing. 

On the advice of my vet, who said yeah, it really is kind of an emergency, Rowan and I spent a half an hour attempting to get a pressure bandage on her head. Turns out, that goat is stronger than the two of us put together. After our best efforts, we were panting and liberally streaked with gore, and the goat was thoroughly freaked out, but no bandage had been applied. I did manage to dribble a little iodine on the wound, and I decided to call that good enough, figuring that a goat as feisty as Xana was unlikely to die overnight. And she didn't; she's fine. 

Yesterday was a new record high in eggs: seventeen. That's the benefit of having dispatched the egg-eating hen, I guess. I also collected a pint of milk from Xana. I figure I'll be making my first cheese in about a week. Hooray! 

I brought the baby goats in to Hope's school to show to  her class. I put them in a cardboard box, and as I passed the front desk, I tipped the box towards the secretary  and the various scholastic functionaries to show them the babies. A collective feminine sigh went up and suddenly I was like the pied piper. I was surrounded by a crowd of middle aged ladies as I progressed down the hall to Hope's classroom, where I was enveloped by an equally adoring crowd of kindergartners.

Farming has it's rewards. 

Feeling Proud, And Tired

Many things got done this week, at least halfway done and some things got all the way done. The chicken coop, I personally hammered up three rolls of wire to turn the alpaca catch pen into the outdoor section of the chicken coop, and built a little chicken ladder so they can all get in and out of the barn, even the fat ladies. Then a latch on the inside of the coop so I can gather eggs without letting all the chickens free.

As an aside, I now have my own tools, well hidden from Homero. I couldn't find any of the tools I needed to do the job, not a hammer, not a pair of wire clippers, and not a staple gun. I know for a fact that we have two of each of these items, but they were nowhere to be found. This scenario has repeated itself endlessly at our house, me wandering from place to place, starting with the place that the tools are actually supposed to be and then checking Homero's shop (ha!), and eventually unlikely places like the kitchen cupboards, all to no avail. Most likely they are all out in the field somewhere, wherever Homero was when I called him in to dinner in the middle of his last project. So I went to the hardware store and I bought a hammer, a pair of wire cutters/pliers, and a staplegun. I told the lady about my fruitless search and she said "oh, I keep my own set of tools in a pink hatbox under the bed."  I don't have a hatbox, but now I have my own secret tool stash.

I also seeded the big field. Two twenty-five sacks of mixed-grass seed ("Western Pasture") all hand sown in a brisk wind. Hope something comes up. 

I planted spinach and beets in my garden beds, now that they can germinate unmolested by marauding chickens. The snow peas are ready for transplant, too. 

And Homero is building the little girls a fancy play set. It's half done, I hope it will be all done by Bibi's birthday (April 30th).

I still have to order a dumpster from the garbage company. It'll have to be one of the really huge ones the size of a railroad car. I plan to get every last speck of non-useful material out of this house and off this property in one fell swoop. There's a lot of it secreted about - broken chairs, ripped-up clothes, hunks of plastic kid-thingies, boxes of ancient magazines, non-working electronics from the late eighties, et cetera. I'm not debating any of it, either. 

Spring Cleaning

Even back when I lived in a medium sized house on an ordinary city lot, spring cleaning was still a daunting proposition. Open up all the closets, find and remove the fossilized cat poop (don't ask); go through the clothes and throw away everything that is truly beyond usefulness; clean the fridge and oven; wash the curtains and the slipcovers on the couches; start the yearly campaign against blackberries and morning glories. Not that I ever really did all those things in any one year, but just thinking about them was exhausting. 

Now that I live on five acres in a crumbling, antique farmhouse, the task of spring cleaning is larger by several orders of magnitude. By way of example:

I know I've mentioned before that the folks we bought this place from didn't do a very good job of removing the debris leftover from pulling down their old dairy barn. Well, I'm going to amend that statement. The folks we bought this place from purposefully and possibly criminally just buried large amounts of trash in the ground and then covered it thinly with sand and topsoil. A couple of years of settling has revealed the scope of the problem. There is literally tons of rubble and trash in the ground. It's shameful. The purchasing contract stated that "owners will remove debris pile," and I've thought about suing them to clean it up, but I decided I'm just not going there. 

Not only is this situation ugly and embarrassing (makes the place look extremely "trashy" ), but it has led to real issues of land management. The disturbed soil allowed some very bad weeds to get a foothold, in particular poison hemlock. Now, some of this is my fault, because I didn't recognize the hemlock and I let it go to seed the first year. But now, I have poison hemlock everywhere. It probably represents 10% of the total biomass on my land. At this point, it could only be controlled by one of two methods: massive spraying with copious amounts of serious poison, or a full scrape and till, followed by careful replanting with pasture grass.

I'm sure you know which option I'm choosing. Yes, the expensive and difficult one. I'm hiring a guy with a big excavator to come out and scrape all the crap into one pile (I can't afford the $100/ton dump fee) which I will then treat with copious amounts of poison to kill any remaining live hemlock. Then we'll till and plant grass. It means moving the animals off the main pasture for a good three months, and that means continuing to buy hay long into the time of year that they would ordinarily be foraging, so that is extra money on top of the $800 the guy with the excavator will cost. But I feel I have no choice. My land is useless if it is covered with a thick, waving carpet of poison hemlock.