Purple Iris

Goings on

Thinking it might be nice to have more regular updates on here, so some shorter ones more frequently may be happening.
Things are finally thawing out for us.  The daffodil bloom has come and gone.  Our chicken losses have slowed but continue.  We lost one tonight to drop us down to 3 total.  That's a far cry from almost 20 this past fall.  Pearl continues to grow, and it turns out a good suitor is hard to find.  Hopefully we will find her fella within the next two weeks.  Our 3 pregnant goats just aren't sure they're ready to release their babies on the world.  Seems like they must pop in the next few days, but we've been thinking that for weeks now.

In the plant world, the garden is coming along, lots of seedlings are in the ground and more in the greenhouse. Peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, basil, eggplants, and greens.  We had fresh spinach as part of Annie's birthday dinner last night.  Also before the recent rains we planted a lot of cover crops - mostly rye grass, but some sorghum and buckwheat.  Hoping the rains didn't wash that away - so the goats get an especially good salad bar this summer.

All in all its an exciting time of year to have a farm!   -Jeff

Do not cast your pearls before swine.

Meet Pearl, the pig!  Pearl is a 7 month old Berkshire gilt (young female pig).  Raine referred to her as our new friend, when she came to us about 3 weeks ago.  In the photo, Jeff is trying to comfort Pearl and get her to enter her new pen.  Pearl ended up spending the night in our new, old and crusty livestock trailer (Fred is now working on fixing it up a bit more for us).  The need to relieve herself and a new tactic used by Jeff finally convinced her to leave the trailer (poor thing!).  Pearl is now settling in well in her new digs.  She has been trained to the electric fence and has gained access to a large pasture area, which she is beginning to explore.  We have not gotten a boar yet and are considering attempting artificial insemination.  AI is supposed to be fairly easy (and, yes, there is a you-tube video on that) and is far less expensive than keeping a boar.  The challenge is detecting her estrus cycle, so everything can be timed just right.  We have been checking her for the signs of estrus twice a day, and, possibly, we saw some of the signs yesterday.  Possibly.

It is also possible that the goats will be kidding soon.  Their udders have started filling out, so it shouldn't be long now.  In fact, they will probably all give birth right after we leave town for a short vacation later this week.  In any event, hopefully all will go smoothly.

Spring is definitely around the corner.  The daffodils are just past the peak of their bloom, and the forsythia are just starting.  Things are starting to green up, so the animals will soon have lots of fresh forage.

Annie

Introducing Twisted Oak Farm

Last fall, we had a small gathering of family and friends to celebrate the new developments that year on our 10 acres across the road as well as the naming of the land, Twisted Oak Farm.  We all walked the property, visited with the animals, feasted on Fred's stew, and enjoyed a big fire in the new fire pit we made by the goat barn.  Since then, we have built a shelter for hay bales and firewood as well as a new pig hut.

Pig hut, goat barn, and shelter

Our goat herd currently consists of 4 goats: the buck and 3 does.  We slaughtered all of last year's Spanish kids for meat, since they turned out to be so small.  However, the does are definitely starting to show, so we should have a new batch of kids in the coming months, which will hopefully grow better.  We also hope that we will be past any further crazy cold spells by then.

Predators have taken a huge toll on our chicken flock.  We are down to only 6 hens.  We have trapped a couple large coons and 2 small possums, since the beginning of November (when we had 17 hens and a rooster).  We had been making the coop harder and harder to get into, but the last coon kept eluding the trap and eventually getting through our defenses.  Finally, a larger and sturdier trap caught it.  Right now, we are not planning to rebuild The Haven flock.  Instead, we may start raising meat birds at Twisted Oak and eventually start a new laying flock there as well.  Xander, our livestock guardian dog, appears to be doing well with the goats.  We shall see how he does with other animals.

Portable pig hut

As the mention of the pig hut indicates, we are gearing up for more pigs.  Jeff raised 2 feeder pigs a couple of years ago, but this time, we are going to try our hand at breeding pigs.  We hope the pigs will help with land clearing and plowing gardening space.  We aim to develop a rotational grazing system with the pigs, goats,and chickens to maximize the health and productivity of the land and the animals and minimize the amount of commercial feed needed for the animals.  Fred is taking part in this new pig adventure too. He and Jeff built the pig hut, which is portable, so it can be moved to different pastures as needed.  Jeff is excited about raising Berkshire pigs, which have been referred to as the Kobe beef of pigs.

Composting tumbler

I have started lots of seed for this year's garden, and all of the garlic I planted last fall appears to be doing well.  We purchased a deeply discounted greenhouse kit, which we have set up in the clearing behind our blueberry bushes at The Haven.  It will help with getting young plants started plus other gardening needs.  Jeff also built us a composting tumbler, which will hopefully produce compost more quickly and easily.  We found a good local source of used food grade metal barrels for making composting tumblers plus other things such as a smoker.

We acquired 6 apple trees last weekend.  Our first fruit trees!  We'd visited a local apple orchard about a month ago and got a great tour from the very nice and knowledgeable owner.  We chose a variety of southern heirlooms with which to start: Gold Rush, King David, Liberty, Roxbury Russett, Lowry, and Black Twig.  We prefer tart apples, but we got a couple of sweet ones too.  We also took into consideration time of maturity and natural disease resistance.  They are planted along the middle of the southern property line of Twisted Oak.  At the recommendation of the grower, we will pick the blossoms for the next 2 years, making our first harvest the year Raine turns 5.

Yule log burning

Jeff thoroughly enjoyed the cob building workshop he attended in TN last fall.  He is eager to start experimenting with cob here, using our soil.  As soon as the weather gets warm enough, we will build a cob oven at The Haven, as our first cob project.  The whole family is registered to attend a cob building workshop in KY, during the first week of May.  Even Raine will get involved as part of the associated kids' camp.

Jeff and I are very happy about starting to develop our land, and we are excited about all of our plans, especially building our own home.  Of course, there is some apprehension too, as we wonder about having the time and resources to accomplish everything and managing the other challenges we might face.  However, we will do our best to figure it all out as we go along.  Furthermore, I suppose when we are finally able to start living on our land - at least in some capacity, we will rename this blog again.  :-)

The Big New Fence

New Perimeter Fence

We finally finished clearing a fence line around our 10 acres across the road, and hired a fencing company to put up the fence.  It is a 4 foot 4x4 wrapped wire fence.  It took the workers about a week to get it done, and it looks good.  We are now contemplating turning the goats loose inside the new fence and just using the electric fence to protect certain areas of interest.  We are eager for the goats to do enough clearing so that we can determine our future housing site.  Jeff will be attending a two week cob building workshop this fall to get his feet wet (and dirty!), learning lots of good things about building earthen structures.

Timbuktu

Our herd has now grown by 2 for a total of 8 goats.  We bought two young purebred Kiko goats about a month ago. They were both sired by Katmandu, so we went with an exotic city theme and named the male Timbuktu and the white female Geneva.  Timbuktu is a nice big buckling, and we hope that he will throw kids that grow faster than the Spanish kids born here this spring.  There are a few possible factors that could explain the slow growth of the Spanish kids, which we can correct during the next kidding season, so that should help too.

Geneva

 Xander appears to be doing a good job staying with and guarding the herd.  The fence workers said that he barked at them a lot, as a good guard dog should, when strangers are nearby.  We've had to make some adjustments to the feeding system, but hopefully the "moat" we created around his self-feeder will keep the darn ants out.  We were able to find the other dog a new home, so we will probably get Xander a new girlfriend at some point.

The other new additions to the farm are the chicks that hatched out in June.  The Dominicker hen hatched out 11 chicks, and there were no issues with snakes this time, even though we didn't end up using any snake repellents.  When the chicks (or, as Raine likes to call them, peep peeps) were 2 months old, we moved them into the chicken house.  All of them transitioned well, except the one New Hampshire Red cockerel.  I found him dead under the roosts in the chicken house on the second day after the move.  I'm not sure what happened to him, but I've heard that chickens will attack a chick if it looks different from all of the rest, and that cockerel was the only light colored one of the bunch.  The chicks are now like teenagers, and someday soon the 6 or so males left will be ready for harvesting.  This year, we have started banding the chickens so we can tell one hatch set from another.  The 2013 chickens have green bands.  

The gardens are doing fairly well.  I had a pretty good cantaloupe harvest this year.  I was particularly happy with the flavor of this year's variety, but almost every melon had worm holes and/or blow outs (from too much rain).  Since they weren't saleable, we ate tons of cantaloupe and froze the rest.  We are looking forward to trying out a new cantaloupe ice cream recipe that we found. :-)  There were a bunch of pickling and canning sessions at The Haven this summer, using the combined produce from my garden and my in-laws' garden.  Fred, Pat, and I made green tomato relish, several different types of cucumber pickles, dilly beans, and green salsa, among other things.  Most of the tomato and squash plants are finishing now, and I am getting the fall garden underway.

-Annie

Our First Truck

We finally bought our first truck, a 2006 Toyota Tundra.  It's a big boy (or maybe girl - we haven't decided yet).  Now we can transport livestock and haul all of our farm-related materials.  The truck's first job was to carry trash bags of leaves back home from the B&B that we were staying at, near the town we got the truck, on our first baby-free weekend.  Anyway, now we feel like real farmers.  :-)

In other news, the barn and first goat pasture were completed across the street, and the goats and dogs were moved in.  The goats have done a great job clearing the brush, and we are working on expanding their pasture to give them access to more green forage.  Unfortunately, we lost another kid: one of Morena's boys.  He had hurt his leg, but seemed to be on the mend, when he turned up dead in the middle of the pasture one evening without any marks on him.  Xander appears to be doing quite well, but the 3yo female dog we got back in April isn't working out.  She doesn't stay inside the fencing, and it turns out she isn't a purebred Great Pyrenees.  She appears to be part Golden Retriever, which helps explains her friendliness and desire to be with people.  She's a sweet dog, but we are trying to find her a new home.

The chickens are doing well, and egg production has been good.  The Dominicker hen went broody, so we have her sitting on some eggs in one of the chicken tractors.  The hatch date is Father's Day, and I'm pretty sure she hatched out chicks on Father's Day last year too.  We are looking into getting a snake repellent to keep snakes from eating eggs and some of the baby chicks again this year.

The garden is coming along - somewhat slowly this year, but it is coming.  I grew sugar snap peas this year, and we got a good harvest from them.  The vines are about done, but the cucumber plants are eager to take over the trellis. The carrot crop was really good this year too.  I've had a hard time with carrots in the past, and it seemed like they weren't going to germinate well this year either, but they finally came up and thrived.  I've got lots of peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, melon, and squash planted.  This year, I planted most of my viney squash at a friend's place, where they have lots of room to roam.  The sweet potatoe slips are due to arrive this weekend, and my luffa plants still aren't in the ground yet either.   I am in the process of harvesting my first crop of lavender, which is exciting.  Small bundles of lavender are hanging all around the house.  I am vending at the farmers' market again this summer, but this time, I am sharing a booth with my friend, The Frantic Organtic.  Together, we are the manic mommy contigent, as we both have 2 year olds.

 -Annie

A New Goat Adventure

Morena and Luz (Spanish for dark and light)

 Three weeks ago, Jeff and I purchased 2 Spanish does, thus beginning an adventure with meat goats.  They are currently in one of the old goat pastures at The Haven until we finish building a goat shelter across the street and train the goats to electric fencing.  Spanish meat goats are reputedly very hardy goats, which should work well with the limited management system we plan to establish.  Both does are pregnant and due to kid this month, so we should have a respectable herd in no time.  :-)  We're excited about having goats again and eagerly anticipate the arrival of cute baby goats.  Keep your fingers crossed for more girls!  We will hopefully get a buck this Spring from a farm in Chatsworth in northwest GA, which has a very cool meat goat operation.

Jeff's Dad, Fred, and his friend, Shane, have been a big help in developing our new goat infrastructure.  Using Fred's tractor, they have bush hogged future fence lines around the Haven and across the street (Jeff and I have not settled on a name for our independent farming operation yet) in addition to building the goat shelter.  We hope to completely enclose our 10 acre lot with wrapped wire fencing, and then use electric fencing to control what the goats clear inside that.  The trees and brush have grown up quite a bit since the last time the land was clear cut, which makes the bush hogging a very intense job. The tractor has needed a number of repairs, including a new grill which was made out of an old hay feeder and chicken wire. Fred's big red tractor has been an object of fascination for Raine.

Raine on "Pawpaw's tractor"

Alexander, the Great Pyrenees

Since the plan for the goats is to have them clear the land across the street, where we won't be able to have as close of an eye on them, we decided to acquire a livestock guardian.  We considered donkeys and llamas, but we went with a Great Pyrenees dog, which is commonly used around here for this purpose and has a good reputation as a guardian.  Great Pyrenees will also guard a flock of chickens!  So we purchased a puppy from the Chatsworth farm, and he is currently in the pasture with both our goats and chickens. He is cute, although he is already a good sized dog even at 13 weeks old.  He is still a bit timid with us, but he typically stays with the goats, keeping a small distance from them as well.  However, as he has started to settle in more and get more lively, he has started giving playful chase to the chickens occasionally, which we need to try to put the kibosh on.  We named him Alexander and call him Xander.  We're considering getting a female in order to breed them.  I am a novice dog owner, but Jeff's family use to have hunting dogs, and Jeff is very happy to have this dog.

-Annie