Pasture Walk

Phil went to a pasture walk and general lecture about dairying today. Some of the interesting tidbits: pull a calf and bottle feed, up to about three gallons of milk a day to produce strong, capable milkers in the future. The escutcheon, a pattern on the backside of a cow, is indicative of good milk production: the broader, the better. And that's genetic: if the escutcheon is slim, all babies will also be slim, good nutrition or not.

We had considered having Jadon go, too, since one of the presenters is a nationally recognized organic vet (Dr. Paul Detloff), but with the rain, we decided Jadon should stay home. We had almost half an inch fall off and on all day. When Phil got home, though, a real deluge began: more than that fell in a half hour.

I did some weeding in the nursery bed. How discouraging! I had cleaned it "thoroughly" two weeks ago, and now it is again a solid mat of green.

Worse, I've lost thirty of my grafts, ten percent of the total. All but one or two were grafted with electrical tape. It kills me, because almost three weeks ago, when my sister was visiting, I noticed one was dying. At the time, I figured it was probably time and past time for me to slit the electrical tape that joined the graft.

But somehow, I never made it back down with a knife. A simple, twenty-minute task in a timely manner would have saved those thirty trees.

I realized this yesterday, after finding the dead chicks. In my despair, I was tempted to not even bother slitting the tape on the rest of the trees. But perhaps I'm growing in character, since I went and found an exacto blade and made slits. It was impossible to tell if I was going deep enough: the cut tape looked about like uncut tape.

Today, though, with an inch and more of rain, the slits had burst through. It was good to open up those trees.

But in future grafting years, I intend to ensure I have lots and lots of Parafilm or freezer tape. I don't ever want to run out again!

My other "keep your chin up" moment came today with the chicks. I get really tired by dusk, but I heard some cheeping and went to investigate. The chicks had jumped up onto the ledge of the garbage can where we've stored feed. They finished the feed today, so the can was empty. I'm guessing the chicks hadn't had perfect balance, as I reached in, blind, and came out with two flustered birds.

Then I added some feed, and stuck the handle in up near the top. Hopefully if any others meet with disaster, they will be able to get out.

I used the empty feed bag to cover the waterer, too. If they're roosting on the edge of the feed bin and falling in, I'd rather not lose any to a drowning death. Ugh.

Around the farm, there is growth. Much of the comfrey in the orchard is well up, with the rain.

The greenhouse comfrey is actually visible from a distance (the little green in the far right corner). At least a quarter has sprouted, but you can see that we have some drainage issues in the greenhouse: I don't dare walk on the comfrey patch to weed and count sprouts.

I have dutifully checked the tree pots daily for signs of sprouting pawpaws. There hasn't been anything, but it's not worrying: pawpaw grows down for a long time before it grows up. But today, there were two pawpaw seeds poking up, and four more little sprouts about to break free.

My most advanced gingko biloba sprout is looking good, too. And I like growing it mostly because gingko biloba is so fun to say.

I am especially looking forward to having the metal building up off the ground in front of the orchard. I take nice photos about three trees in, avoiding what's on the ground and making the farm look as good as possible in the blog.

The reality, though, is all visitors get the view from the drive.

Not too much longer now!

I had a lovely day, going through school books. Since we use Sonlight, "school books" is usually defined as "great books." Today, though, I wanted to clear out several shelves for next year's books, soon to arrive, and that required looking through various workbooks and electives that I haven't gotten to yet. And there's always a book or two I miss during the school year. I have a multi-year collection of those misfits, waiting for me to read them to Jadon and Isaiah. I'm guessing that I might just wait another year or two, and then make the older boys listen when I read the books to the littles.

Abraham, the only son who seems less interested in books, had a breakthrough day today. He had finished his second I Can Read It! readers yesterday, so I prompted him to try a "real" books today. He chose the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham.

And he read it through! In one sitting!

My moment of Mommy guilt came, though, about a third of the way through.

When I only had Jadon, I read and reread Dr. Seuss books. He craved them. He loved them. When he started to read them, I was fairly sure he was actually reading, but there could have been some level of recitation there, too.

Abraham, though, had no recollection of ever hearing the story. We were laughing over the pictures and he said, "I had no idea it would be this funny!"

Which is good, since it shows that he was enjoying the book as he read it (books can be good!). But, oh, how sad for me, to realize he had missed out on 100 earlier readings of Green Eggs and Ham.

There's only so much Amy to go around. If I'm weeding the baby tree nursery, I'm not reading to the growing boys.

Some days, I'm pretty sure my balance is off. Like today.

Things Fall Apart

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....

Though I don't agree with the heart of Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," those lines have the right feel for my day.

Our well is, as far as we can tell, restored. We didn't need a plumber to come: simply shutting off all water hydrants entirely for a night allowed the well reserves to recharge. We are thankful.

We have prayed for rain. A lovely rain fell much of the day.

A quarter of the comfrey cuttings are up. I hadn't anticipated any sprouting for a few months, so to have so many sprout in a few weeks is really pleasing.

Phil and his helpers worked hard Saturday and managed to get the form work finished by Saturday afternoon. They have a little back filling to finish, and then they'll be ready to pour.

Saturday night we went to the house of our friends, and were restored and refreshed. The dirty dishes in the sink remained, but overall I had finished what I needed to for the week. Phil was physically exhausted from 14 hours days of demanding labor, but pleased with the accomplishments of the week.

Sunday evening, I started the dishes. This is the summer, and since it had been four full days since I last did dishes, there were plenty of maggots in the sink and dishwater. It's disgusting, but the flypaper only catches so many flies; the rest feel the need to reproduce, all over the food bits left on plates.

But that wasn't so bad.

I bent to put a bottle in the cupboard, when the strong, unmistakable smell of mouse hit my nose. My Mom had intimated that there may be a mouse problem when she was visiting, but other than a single rare mouse dropping, I hadn't noticed mouse evidence. (There were so many droppings in the barn before the cats came, I wondered if those single bits had migrated somehow.)

Back to the cupboard. All but one of the items stored are in glass jars or tins, difficult for a mouse to consume. But I had put a small bag of granola in there about a month back: all but the millet was consumed, the bag in shreds.

So I started a thorough kitchen clean out. Most drawers had one or two droppings, way at the bottom. Clearly not horribly About midnight, I quit for the evening.

Isaiah wasn't feeling good. He was in my spot in the bed, so I spent the night fighting for space on our full sized bed between feverish Isaiah, thrashing Joe, and Phil. Finally I went up to Isaiah's bed up near the ceiling.

My first thought on waking was to go and a morning chore routine: feed the chicks, water the plants I didn't water yesterday evening. A bit later, when I headed outside, I again thought I should feed the chicks, but the boys needed breakfast, and the mouse-dropping, maggoty kitchen still needed several hours of attention. The chicks have a plaintive cheep when they need food, and they were quiet and content.

Phil woke up with a sore throat. He went over to move the cows, only to find that they had had a mass paddock break. They weren't grazing at the neighbors, just hanging out down by the creek, but they had jumped ahead several days of grazing, and needed to be corralled. The chicks were not on his mind. He rarely checks the chicks. It isn't really anyone's job, on anyone's chore list. If I hear them cheeping, I feed them, or send a boy to do so.

The boys visit the chicks regularly, too, but today turned rainy a little after 10am, and they stayed indoors.

When I finally went to check on the chicks, late in the afternoon, I found that the box around their light, that they shelter under at night, had fallen off the light. Twenty-eight of the chicks were trapped inside. Without food and water, none survived.

This was upsetting, but it was more upsetting when I realized that I had had two strong impressions to check those chicks, and had not paid attention. Whether that was the prompting of the Holy Spirit (as I would call it), or simply intuition, those chicks did not have to die today. But they did.

It stinks.

A Well That Never Will Run Dry

For cooking and washing purposes, we usually have the 40-gallon RV tank at least partially full. It has been on the last dregs for a few days now, but I hadn't taken the time to just fill it up. Finally, though, I took the half minute to flip the proper switches, inside and out, and heard the water come on.

Phil noticed a bit later that it wasn't filling. The water pressure has been quite low the last few days, so we walked the new cow waterline, but didn't see any leaks. Phil's walked the whole length repeatedly. Perhaps the filter was clogged: we do have a good deal of sediment come in the water.

He changed the filter. The pump went slow and slower, and then simply quit.

I had no water stored in our potable RV tank. I went to make bread and had to use a cup of water the boys had left on the table. I washed my hands in the stock tank swimming pool.

Phil called the company that installed the well. The earliest they could come was Tuesday. Maybe. They couldn't schedule it, since the person who schedules such things was out of the office.

We are all filthy: a week of play and work outside leaves us needing showers. Is it possible to feed a family without potable water? I have kombucha and broth prepared, so that's several gallons. But ... Tuesday?!

I haven't had a moment of panic in some time, but I came awfully close. I know we lived without running water for two and a half months when we moved here. How did we do it?

We didn't have 360 plants in pots; no chicks to water, no cows. We didn't go to church because how would we have cleaned up? We hauled water in five gallon containers.

That could be doable again.

Phil thought to call a plumber. One should come tomorrow.

But hours after shutting down all the spigots, we had some water again. Was the pump simply run dry by a leak somewhere? Is it actually fixed? Phil will check in the morning. We'll see what happens. Oh for a well that never will run dry.

As for me, I spent several hours dealing with garlic. The most promising 150 bulbs (a few, on reflection, are almost the size of cutie oranges: a good deal better than a cherry) I tied in groups of ten and strung up in the barn. The hundreds and hundreds of teeny bulbs I cut off with three inches of stem and put in a bulb crate. It may not be ideal, but I have limited storage space, and bulbs the size of cherries simply don't get the best treatment.

I have plenty more to manage in the morning.

Phil continues to work until dark on cow fencing. He does that morning and evening. It's coming along. The neighbor came over for several hours this afternoon. He brought a tire iron (bless him: he saw the tire off and said, "It's always something, ain't it?"). He and Phil worked on the form work until Phil's body gave out. Tomorrow.

1350 Garlic Bulbs

The last two years, I have enjoyed garlic harvest immensely. I had built my lasagna beds, so the bulbs were planted in inches of organic matter. I put a teaspoon of bone meal in each hole, maybe weeded a bit, and pulled out large heads six or seven months later. Because the soil was so rich, the bulbs simply popped out. Marvelous!

I planted three 45' beds of garlic last fall, with high hopes for the 2012 harvest. I must have run out of bone meal, as I didn't pre-sprinkle the holes (I never plan to skip that step again). The lasagna beds were no more, so I planted the bulbs in freshly tilled soil, nicely amended with compost and peat moss. I mulched the beds around New Years, and have watched the growth with pleasure.

Today was garlic harvest day. And it was an utter, utter disappointment.

First of all, the physical labor was exhausting. Because of offset planting, the bulbs made a nice diamond pattern: pleasant to look at, difficult to hoe. So I hadn't weeded at all. But I was dealing with the seed bank of decades (if not centuries), and the weeds came up in force. With 2' weeds covering the ground, it's difficult to see the garlic heads themselves. And so I weeded as I went. All 540 square feet. That's a lot of squatting, stooping, standing, tugging, digging.

But the labor would have been almost pleasant had I had a decent harvest. But the garlic I pulled up ranged in size from a pea to a golf ball, average probably about a good-sized cherry. As the bulbs cure, they'll shrink.

The last two years, I've pulled garlic the size of my palm.

What went wrong?

Well, pulling 1350 garlic heads gave me time for reflection. I think it was a combination of factors.

• Initially, I should have only used cloves from the largest heads, not chosen the largest cloves even in smaller heads. This was probably a minor error, overall.
• I should have done the bone meal for fertilization.
• I needed to amend the soil much, much more heavily. Knowing where the soil was when we started, it seems rich and wonderful to me today: it actually grows grass, for example! But pulling the garlic was extremely difficult: the tilled soil had settled, with an inch of solid clay on the surface. It made it challenging to pull garlic (one whole bed I had to dig with the shovel), and reminded me that, even if we've improved our soil ten-fold, since we started at 3 out of 100 on the fertility scale, we're still only about 30%. We have a long way to go. Maybe in the fall I will make deeper, more fertile lasagna beds.
• As a corollary, there wasn't much life in the soil. I saw several bugs, yes, but very few worms. If a healthy square foot of soil has 25 earthworms, and I saw 25 earthworms (maybe that many) in 540 square feet, the garlic was just having a hard time. (And I'm guessing that figure of 25 earthworms should be measured in cubic feet. It just goes to show you can't trust everything on the internet.)
• We missed an entire month of rain during the garlic's main growing season. I'm guessing this was a biggie. Last year we had a lovely inch of rain every week during the spring; this year, we went without for a month. It never crossed my mind to irrigate the garlic (which would have been impractical anyway: they were all offset!), but it's something to consider for the future.
• I should have snapped off the scapes. I think. I had left them on because I wanted longer storability, and had read that scapes stand upright and turn woody, which helps the garlic harden off, too. So I left most on, since I figured I lost about 40% of my favorite variety in storage last year. Longer storability was what I wanted! I had snapped several scapes off one variety of garlic. The largest bulbs from that variety were, interestingly, all scapeless. The smallest bulbs (the ones the size of a pea) all had healthy scapes still attached.
  The book had said that soils with low organic matter should be wary of leaving scapes on. But to me, my soil seemed so healthy, I didn't think it applied to me. In retrospect, I think it did. Furthermore, the garlic farmer who doesn't snap scapes apparently harvests in July. I hadn't thought of it until today, but an extra month of growing would have made a huge difference. Many of my scapes were still easily snapable by hand: they hadn't turned woody at all. But my leaves had shriveled and died, showing that it was time to harvest. Several of the bulbs had burst open underground, showing that they were overripe. But the scapes weren't finished hardening off?! I'm missing an extra month, here in the Virginia climate.
  And so I ended up with the worst possible combination: no extra growth in the roots from snapping off scapes, and no extra hardening off from keeping them. Just a big bust.
• I should have kept the garlic weeded: two feet of weed growth means the weeds were getting a significant amount of the water that the garlic could have had.

Combine lack of water, lack of nutrients, and growth focused on the wrong thing (the potential seeds in the scapes above ground, not the bulb underground) made for a disappointing day.

Happily, this disappointment didn't come last year, when everything else failed. That's a mercy.

And I have an idea on how to remedy the disaster next year, which I appreciate.

But between the chickens scratching through my potted on Goji berries in the little greenhouse (eep!), Phil flushing deer out of the orchard (what?!), and such a bust with the garlic, I'm feeling a bit like I'm beating my head against a wall.

And poor Phil went off to get a load of hay, mostly just for mulch, and came home to find he needed to put a tire back on the wheel. The boys had been playing with his tire jack in their water trough swimming pool last week, so he rescued the tire iron and put it in a safe place. Which he now can't remember.

So we're sitting in separate trailers at the moment, both trying to regain our equilibrium. I've mostly regained mine by writing about today. He's probably researching how to make a tire iron out of scrap lumber, or something like that.

Even if you can't trust everything on the internet, you can find a lot of interesting things!

Building Forms: Halfway!

While I spent another contented day mostly indoors (schooling, dishes, work, reading to the boys), Phil and our neighbor spent eight hours building forms for the foundation of the metal building. The got the entire outer perimeter placed in that time. Only the inner perimeter yet to go.

Physically demanding, with posts driven in with sledgehammer; mentally challenging, to determine the best way to build these things, a task Phil had never done before. But a great deal of visible progress!

Isaiah watched the men work most of the afternoon. When work finished for the day, he came down with a mysterious wooden creation. "It's a hobby horse!" he told me, designed and built by Isaiah, age eight.

Phil, despite rising at 5:30am to go to a Bible study in town, and then doing a bit of grocery shopping for me, working for eight hours, Phil headed out to do a few hours of fencing on the neighbor's land. What had been sagging now sags no more. "It's a happy looking fence," he told me.

The comfrey plantings continue to delight me. Over a third of the year-old plants are visible, and the cuttings are approaching ten percent. I had wondered how the broadleaf plant would emerge, and now I know. The leaves come up, folded tightly into little green spears.
comfrey bits
I went down to visit the bees. The Damaris hive especially hummed with activity, as dozens (hundreds?) of bees triangulated around the entrance. All those little fledgling fliers.

The moon garden, already sprinkled with nasturtiums and cosmos, has other little blooms budding out. It makes me eager for the coming weeks.

I'm expecting to harvest the garlic tomorrow. So today, I am enjoying a last look at the beautiful purple blooms of the three garlics that actually flowered.

We all had a good day.

Transit of Venus

Today and tomorrow are bad for planting, biodynamically speaking. As one lecturer put it, "Some days, you accomplish the most by just staying home."

I'm guessing that's because of the Transit of Venus, "among of the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena" (as Wikipedia says). Venus crossed the sun eight years ago, and again right now; next time will be in 2117. Even if we had proper viewing glasses or apparatus, the gray storm clouds obscured the sun all afternoon, so I appreciate that it is happening, even if I can't see it myself.

I was ready for a rest day. I read to the boys more than usual, and did nothing more than a bit of spot weeding in the greenhouse comfrey as I checked for plants. Over 30 have come up, or about 5%. In the orchard, where we planted hardy year-olds, we've had a quarter of plants emerge already, only eleven days after planting, and without a good rainfall since.

As dusk fell, a gentle rain started. How we love the soaking rain. I look forward to watching the comfrey spring forth even more.

Phil has taken the last two days off from metal building work to do some system improvements on the grazing area next door. First, he laid out new water line almost all the way down the hill. He put little waterers at each paddock.

With the amazing quick connects that attach to a hose, he can move the empty watering trough, connect the hose, and rehook it into the trough in a few seconds. On that property, no more tractor pulling the water wagon!

Next, he used the tractor to cut a new road down the ridge, which will be both more safe and more easily accessible.

He had to dam off the swales on either side, and dig up any living chestnuts. Interestingly, there were few chestnuts that actually survived on the ridge.

After the new road was roughed in, he had the happy task of putting in semi-permanent electric line over the chestnuts. He had been using step-in pigtail posts (see the red handle), and moving them every day. Now, though, he's putting in small white posts that he won't have to move for some time (we hope). They are flexible, at the right height for cows, perfect for cross-fencing, and fairly inexpensive.

To make them functional, no drilling required: a pre-twisted metal clip slips over the top and holds the electric line in place. So cool!

He had to figure out how to manage movement. Clearly, with the road down the center, he needed to break the electric line along the road ... at each paddock change. And since we've used the lane on the side for a year now, he preferred not to permanently block that off, too. He thought about the various methods he could use for gates. Purchased tube gates would be prohibitively expensive. Homemade wire gates would still need some form of insulated hook on the end, so a person could open the gate without getting shocked. Plastic insulated hooks would require a trip to town, and though the total would probably be less than $100, then we'd have plastic all over. So he came up with the wood-and-wire insulated hook.

He said today, after using it for the first time, that the wood must not have been fully dry—he got a little shock when he handled it while the fence was hot. Hopefully it will dry over time. Or we'll always bring the fence remote to turn it off before touching it.

Another thing he did that I wouldn't have thought of was actually making each gate along the road really a gate. If he had just carried the electric line from paddock edge to the wood-and-wire hook, every time we would undo the hook, the rest of the wire would sag, useless. So he made each wire run up to the gate area, then tied it off tight. The wire gates are fully separate. (This is hard to explain, so if you didn't follow, just know that he had a problem to solve and did so well.)

Like all projects, this one is not near done. But we look forward to the day when it is finished, and moving the cows becomes a five minute task, rather than an hour or more. What a great day that will be!

One Decade of Parenting

We have had friends come to the farm at different seasons through the last year. They have admired the cows, the ducks, the sheep, the trampoline, the toy cars, and now the puppies and chicks. They came to visit yesterday before their impending move, and we snapped a few shots of the seven children on the trampoline.

The moment of almost stillness passed quickly, and soon all seven were bouncing with vigor. But only for a minute or two. And then they left, and we were the sadder for the departure of our friends.

Looking back at the biodynamic calendar, there was only a day and a half in all of May that was good for flower planting. Yesterday was a flower day, so I spent most of the day in the moon garden, finishing new beds with cardboard and mulching the top. The hay mulch that I used two months ago has been composting for a month, and I needed a shovel, rather than a hay fork, to scoop it into the wheelbarrow. It has broken down so beautifully!

After making beds, I transplanted what bulbs and flowers I could, and finished transplanting the last three flats of various herbs and flowers. One sweet herb was anise hyssop, I think: deliciously sweet with a strong hint of licorice at the end. Bees are supposed to enjoy it, and I hope they will.

Weeding just the moon garden was a bit overwhelming. I realize now that I should save feed bags to line the walkways between beds: though I don't have many weeds growing in the beds themselves—and the few that are growing are little ones springing from weed seeds in the mulch—I am having significant weed encroachment between beds in the walkways. I remember now that it is better to line a walkway with weed barrier, then sand, then flagstones: a rock path in a moon garden should have a bit more than just rocks on dirt.

While I spent the day in the garden, Phil spent the day running cows through the chute. It still took many hours, but he was doing it on his own, and at least 12 or 13 of the cows went through. I'm not sure if he got the bull through in the end.

The sad part at the end was what happened in the orchard. The cows have never shown much interest in the trees: as long as they have plenty of grass and clover, the trees offer little of interest. (They aren't goats.) He had hoped to leave them in a section of orchard maybe even overnight.

But then he realized that they were rubbing on the trees: too many flies, and a tree makes a convenient back scratcher. One apricot they uprooted entirely, and one peach they rubbed all the fruit off. The apricot he replanted; the peach will hopefully live to produce another year. He felt bad.

I've been watching the comfrey plantings, and today noticed about eight sprouts of the 600 root cuttings, and two vigorous sprouts in the orchard. So exciting!

And Phil and I have been parents for a decade now. Hard to believe. Jadon got what he wanted for his birthday: Ten Days in the Americas, a board game that teaches geography, and lots and lots of books.