April Homestead Update

As for life in the country and efforts to be self-sufficient, we are kicking into high gear this month.  Unfortunately, I sometimes feel like, while we keep moving forward, we also fall back.  We might be learning how to make better use of our space, getting a greenhouse and hoop-houses built, learning more and more about beekeeping, and enjoying an increasingly established garden, but there is so much to maintain!  Garden gates are sagging, paint is peeling, weeds find new places to push through, and our barn walls are rotting into nothing.

This is our goat barn.  We've been ignoring the problem for too long.  But the solution is daunting!

We finally, after YEARS of working at it, have the pasture fenced for the goats.  (It was finished in 2007, but two winters of severe flooding took it all down.)  Now, the pasture is a short walk down a hill via a switchback, but the goats have all become very comfortable in a fenced area close to the house.  They love to graze just outside of their enclosure, but they get nervous when I take them down to the pasture, and they panic if I put them inside of the fence and leave.  So far, they have always found a way out, and will work their way back up to our driveway, sometimes limping as if they went to desperate measures to escape.  Yesterday, I believe I secured all exit points by stretching chicken wire across any slightly wide openings and putting concrete blocks under the gates.  They stayed put, bleating as if their hearts were broken, for a couple of hours.  The goal is to have them grazing down there during the day, reducing our need to buy feed by about 90%.  (It's about time!)

This is just a small area of the pasture; a giant goat buffet.

This is part of our effort to make sense of having goats.  Until now, they have been expensive weed-composting machines and sweet pets.  We recently bought a baby boy goat named Thorin.  In a few months, he'll be old enough to impregnate our 3 does.  We plan to sell the offspring when they are weaned (we have enough goats) and milk the does.  Yes, we have had goats for 10 years without successfully milking them.  It's a long story.  So, if we can cut cost of feed and have fresh goat milk, it will justify my choice to keep goats.

Introducing Thorin.  He is very shy and nervous around people.  He sure is adorable, though.

We lost 2 ducks in early spring to raccoons.  But the remaining 3 include a female, and I'm still hoping she'll hatch some babies.  So far, she has no interest.  I find her cold eggs scattered all over the place.  But, they wander around all day and through the night munching slugs.  Tomorrow, I will be picking up a pair of baby geese to live in the veggie garden.  Ducks and geese are excellent slug control.  We also have 2 teenage Buff Orpington chicks and 2 baby Polish chicks living in the greenhouse with Blind Chicken.

Blind chicken was attacked by our cute little lap dog last year and, while she recovered her health, she can't see.  I put her in front of food and water every day.  The other chickens are incredibly cruel to her, so she lives in the greenhouse for now.  We have a new coop in progress, which needs to be completed soon so that we can put plants into the dirt in the greenhouse without them being eaten by the chicks.  Blind chicken will live in the old coop with the ducks and geese.

We spend all of our spare time trying to keep up with weeds, failing gates that are tied together with bungee cords, seed planting, and general cleaning.  As usual, we are late getting the garden tilled and planted, but Mike is advisor for his school's horticulture club, so we get starts from them each year at the plant sale, and that helps us catch up.  Then, Mike has a couple of months during summer to spend working the garden and taking care of all of these huge projects.

This is a section of the perennial garden, which is interspersed with herbs, hops, grapes, strawberries and raspberries.

Sometimes, I think I should keep two blogs: one for homesteading and one for art.  I'm not very good at writing about why they are inherently connected.  But, I use each to support the other, if that makes sense.  I earn shockingly little income from my mosaic at this point.  My daughter is still young enough, and we are so remote and lacking a support system, that the cost of getting a job outweighs the benefit.  Through my efforts  splitting my time between homesteading activities and trying to grow the business, we are able to squeak by on Mike's income.  Plus, we get fresh, homegrown food and best of all, a really great lifestyle.  Our daughter has grown up with a mom who creates almost every day and she has been by my side at art shows and festivals since she was a baby.  She is very proud when people come to see my work, or when I make an appearance in a newspaper or magazine.  She has also helped harvest a lot of our food, and she helps herself to food straight from the garden, happily snacking on kale and fennel and using chives as straws.  So, I am considering starting a separate blog just for art, but I don't know if it's necessary.  I would be curious to know what my nine followers think.

Farm Update for late May

Each year, we face some kind of delay getting our garden planted and projects started, but it seems to always come together.  This spring has been very cold and dreary.  I even had to scrape my car windows on Monday morning!  My early attempts to seed greens resulted in no sprouts at all, so I tried again a few weeks later and got a few little starts, and now I feel pretty confident that the seeds I planted last weekend will be successful.

Luckily for us, Mike runs the Horticulture program at his school, so there are always plenty of starts available if we can't pull it together.  Also, our best friends own a nursery, (www.BarnyardGardens.com) so we lean on them when our luck runs out.

Right now, I'm working most days while Anouk is in school, so I'm up by 6am to get all of us ready and off to school, then I drive the long commute to the job site, and put in about 4 hours of work before I race back to her school to pick her up.  After school, we run errands and I try to accomplish some important task at home, like cleaning, bill paying, and garden maintenance, before cooking dinner and putting her to bed.  I usually fall asleep during that process and I'm toast after that.

Two Black Rouen & Two Swedish Blue

In between those tasks, I tend to our animals.  Our ducklings grew to nearly full-size within a month, and they now live where our turkeys have lived in past years.  I failed to socialize them, so they run from me, but they are very easy to take care of, and we have been supplementing their feed with a steady supply of slugs.  They are gorgeous and fun to watch.

Our chicks are now about half grown, so I moved them to the main coop just the other day.  First, I put them in an adjacent enclosure for the afternoon so that they could introduce themselves to the established flock through the fence.

That evening, all of the chickens retired to the coop as usual.  The rooster was particularly loud, but not aggressive, and they have been happily cohabitating for three days now.  (Chickens will become very territorial if you put new in with old during the day, and they sometimes kill the newbies.)

When we get baby poultry, they spend the first couple of weeks in a plastic tub in a closet with a heat lamp.  Then I move them out to our original chicken coop, close to the house, in our old rabbit cage for extra security.  When they are ready, I move them out of the cage to have full range of the brooding coop until they are big enough to be out in a yard.  When I moved the chickens, I was able to release the baby turkeys from the hutch, so they now have a big coop to play in.  We did not go with a heritage breed this year, but I would have to write another long blog to explain why.  Next time I get a day to myself...

It has been a beautiful week, and today is predicted to be the best weather yet this spring, so I had better get off my butt and enjoy the sunshine.  I have plants to water, bees to check, and a car to pack full for the POSSCA Artist's Garage Sale taking place tomorrow.

Tomato and basil starts in the greenhouse, with cukes waiting in the tray.

Broccoli and cauliflower bed.

Waste Not

One of the things I enjoy about raising chickens and goats is their role as instant-composters.  We have a small compost pile, but I use it only for moldy food and manure.  Almost all of our food waste is used to supplement our animal feed.  Though we try to eat what we grow and buy from local sources, there are definitely some exceptions that we make, like bananas and avocados.  So, in addtion to any leftover greens, our goats LOVE to eat our banana and avocado peels, along with tamale husks.  The chickens eat all grain-based leftovers, cheese, potatoes, legumes and cooked veggies.  We give them leftover cooked eggs and crushed eggshells, and if I ever drop an egg in the coop, they rush over to devour it because it is full of nutrition.

As for any meat scraps, the dogs and cats are happy to take care of those.  Whenever I cook a chicken (purchased from Barnyard Gardens in Shelton, WA www.barnyardgardens.com) I usually use the white meat as a main dish the first night, the dark meat incorporated into a dish the second night, then I boil the rest to make broth and peel every bit of the yucky meat from the bones as treats for our indoor pets.

When we tend the garden, we toss the weeds over the fence to the goats and chickens to munch on.  By the time they finish processing all of this waste, it is well on it's way to nutrient-rich compost.  We cut down on feed costs, the animals enjoy a yummier, more nutritious diet, and we don't send any of it to the dump.

Happy New Year, Poultry!

I spent this New Years morning cleaning the chicken coop. That means I strap on my dust mask, take a flat-bottom shovel and wheelbarrow, and remove all of the old bedding, feces, and in this case, chicken body parts from the inside of the coop.

Why chicken body parts? That sounds so morbid! Well, it was Mike's birthday on the 29th, so we went into town and enjoyed some drinks and dinner with friends. We didn't get home until a whopping 9pm; hours past our curfew. In our absence, raccoons had savagely killed both of our roosters, spreading feathers and innards all over the coop, inside and out. (In the dark, we thought more were missing, including our female turkey. Thankfully, all of our hens, ducks and both turkeys were there in the morning.) We are still brainstorming how to deal with the ever-increasing coon attacks.

When we were building the house, the I asked the flooring guys to give me any linoleum scraps they might have floating around. I was given a couple of rolls, and the countertop guy also brought me some. They were all happy to give them to someone instead of paying to take them to the landfill. I used some for countertops in my studio, then used the rest for the floor and nesting boxes in the new coop. I am so glad that I did that because it makes it much easier to remove the soiled bedding. I fill load after load into the wheelbarrow and take it to garden beds to spread as mulch.

When I worked in an office, they bagged up the shredding to be thrown away. I used to take the bags home and use them for nesting boxes. This worked great and saved money. I use cedar shavings from a local mill for the floor. Cedar has natural antibiotic properties and stays clean longer than anything else I've tried. My friend Paul at Barnyard Gardens showed me how to build a ledge in the opening of my coop and fill it at least 6 inches with shavings. I toss scratch grains onto the floor each day, so the chickens turn the bedding, and I can go about 3 months before changing it out again.

New Year, clean coop. I also cleaned my studio, so I can finally get back in there and get some work done. But that's a story for another day.