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.

Late July on the Farm

In early June, Mike was putting together a drip irrigation system in our garden.  Sadly, his mom passed away before it was finished, so he gave me a quick tutorial before he flew to California.  We wanted to have it ready for someone to easily water in our absence.  Now, drip lines pinned to the soil feed mini sprayers and drip spouts throughout the perennial garden when the spigots are turned on.  In the veggie garden, we have timers for drip lines to the pumpkins and sprinklers for the raised beds.  The greenhouse needs to be watered by hand every couple of days.  This whole system saves hours of time and many gallons of water.

I drove down to join Mike in California, and we have only been home a few days since mid-June.  The gardens are full of weeds and many of our veggies were ravaged by slugs, but it's still flourishing.

From this view, you can see a bed of beets on the left, which we will freeze and use throughout the winter.  The bed to the right has a zucchini in the foreground and the rest is carrots.  Beyond that are raised beds with cabbage, broccoli, fennel, potatoes, kale, spinach, and salad greens.  On the far end is a huge winter squash patch, and there is a bee hive in the far right corner.

Inside the greenhouse (it was hard to shoot a full view), the left side is full of tomatoes and there are snap peas beyond them.  There are cucumbers on the right, training up twine suspended from the roof.  Calendula and basil are planted in between everything else.  So far, I've only been able to eat one ripe cherry tomato, but there are many green tomatoes that will be ripe soon.  I eat the snap peas straight off the vines, and I have more cukes than I can eat on my own right now.  They are delicious!

The turkeys are growing fast, and are always famished.  You can see the ducks peeking out from behind them.  The black rouens are absolutely gorgeous.

Most of these chickens were babies only a few months ago.  They have finally gotten through their awkward teenage phase and are coming into their own.  I am only getting about one egg per day right now, so I look forward to these hens beginning to lay.

And the goats are sweet as ever, though Pan has been getting abrasions of some kind on his face, and Isabel currently has a similar injury on her face.  I have no idea what could be causing them.

In addition to the veggie garden, we have berries and fruit growing all over the property.  I've frozen 5 gallons of raspberries, and I've been snacking on blueberries and strawberries.  I'm trying to spend some time harvesting lavender each day, and the herbs are just going to seed.  Our grape vines are huge, and little grape bunches are just starting to grow from them. 

I'm so glad to be home for the summer, and enjoying the beginning of the harvest season.

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.

General update on homestead and business

I've written a few entries about our efforts to grow our own food and to engage in the Slow Food movement. (Confession: Until this year, I thought Slow Food meant taking your time eating.) It was more challenging with Mike's mom visiting over the holidays. This is the woman who has refused to drink our organic milk in the past because she thinks extra chemicals and hormones MUST be added for health purposes. We generally take her to the grocery store on the way home from the airport to make sure she has food that she likes. So, for the first time in months, we ate salad with our meals.

It's one thing to live with unusual food choices as a family, but it is another when we have visitors who aren't used to eating pumpkin three times a day. And I felt fine about adding some out-of-season ingredients during the holidays.

Besides, it is getting harder lately to put tasty meals together with the food we have available. On Christmas Eve, which is also my dad's birthday, I made a special dinner of Buffalo roast (grown about a mile and a half away), salad, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (our pumpkin).

Unfortunately, I used many of our frozen veggies to make a big soup, but it turned out awful. Even I couldn't eat it. What a waste of hard-earned food! Overall, we are getting about one egg per day, we still have a lot of chicken and some vegetables in our garage freezer, and there are a few loaves of zucchini bread left. I just harvested the last of our carrots yesterday. Every morning, I make Mike a smoothie from our carrots, chard and blueberries. I add strawberries, bananas, protein powder and juice from the store. As winter progresses, we are buying more and more food ingredients, but trying to pay attention to where they come from and choosing organic.

An abandoned bunny joined our family two days ago. His name is Uncle Wiggily, and he was left behind when a family moved from their home. Anouk has been begging for a bunny for years, so she's thrilled. We are still figuring out where he will live, but so far, he's settling in fine.

As for my business, I took a break from mosaic during the past couple of weeks, mainly because my studio was in a state of complete chaos, and I didn't have time to clean it. In the evenings, I worked in the house on fabric experiments and some projects for us that I had been putting off. Now I'm preparing to start 3 new commissions and creating new art panels for galleries and a recycled art festival in March.

I've had many ideas over the past few months that I haven't had time to realize, so I expected to get out there and whip out some of those. However, I find myself making something totally new and different. Suddenly, I'm working small and abstract, piecing together little bits of glass into inset rectangles on drawer faces. I have this nagging feeling that I'm wasting time, while I'm doing it, like I should be working off of the sketches in my notebooks, concocting masterpieces. Last night, I realized that I have something to learn from these little, simple mosaics, and I need to follow that urge. It could be as simple as a need to play, and to let go of the pressure to make something grand and impressive. Besides, these small pieces will provide some items that I can sell in a lower price range.

It's a new year and everyone seems to be looking toward spring. Bulbs are already coming up in the garden, and by the end of the month some of the trees will have small buds on them. I have a sense of a new beginning for me as well, with ideas brewing, new projects, and many goals to work on.

Tending the garden on the hottest day EVER!

It has been one hot summer, and I'm trying not to freak out. Today is predicted to be the hottest day ever in the Pacific NW, over 100 degrees F. Day after day, we try to water the garden as much as possible early in the morning and after dusk, but many of the plants are still wilting. Our well runs out of water over and over throughout the day. We would take more showers to cool off, but water is scarce. I try to just spray myself down periodically while watering plants, and it helps a lot. Mike has been taking Anouk to town to enjoy air conditioned facilities.

We thought this would be the ideal place to live as the threat of climate change looms in the future. We are on high ground, but enjoy a diverse ecosystem. We are surrounded by creeks and rivers, and this area gets so much water all year. We are far enough inland to avoid the worst of raging storms, and far enough from local volcanoes that we would be fairly safe if one erupts. But this heat wave is an indication that we are not sufficiently prepared when it comes to our water. Our well is not deep enough. We can't afford to drill a new one right now, so we are brainstorming water storage. We want to find a tank that we can use to collect and store rainwater, at least for maintaining the animals and most vital plants, or for washing.

The animals seem to be weathering the heat pretty well. I'm tempted to set the goats free in the forest today, where they can forage and avoid the hot sun. Yesterday, I dunked the ferret in water occasionally, and put him in front of a fan. I keep reminding myself that people and animals live in places that frequently get this hot, and they are fine.

Meanwhile, the vegetables are ripening in full force, so that I can barely keep up with harvesting them and finding ways to use or preserve them. I think I will visit a neighbor later with a veggie delivery, and I'm planning to have a vegetable party soon so that people will come and eat a lot of our abundant food. I'd like to get some of it to the food bank, but I wish someone would make it easy by swinging by to pick it up, or even helping me to gather it. I know there are programs for that in some areas, set up by our new administration. There has to be a way to share the bounty with those who need it.

The computer is upstairs, and it is quickly becoming unbearably hot up here. Time to retreat to lower levels, and to check on the garden.