Six Months Later

We've been farming for 6 months now! I can't even put into words how much we've both learned. I think that going into this with no experience has been one of the best things about it. We've made some mistakes, but without experience we had no expectations and we were able to jump into it without the pressure of knowing how things should be.

We went from never having even touched a chicken to owning over 20 of them, building coops and runs, eating and selling eggs, slaughtering chickens ourselves and hatching a chick from our own stock (Squishy did most of that).

The chicks in April - too scared to walk around on grass for the first time.

The chickens now - too spoiled to want to walk around on grass in the rain.

We went from never having grown anything to growing a greenhouse full of organic vegetables and eating, storing and selling them.

Little basil seedling in April.

The herb garden now...

We went from never having owned livestock to owning sheep, goats and a llama - and building fencing, gates, shelters, stalls and a barn.

April - just the horses and cows on the leased paddock here.

Now: Goats and sheep enjoying the grass - Thomas and Zeb were just off to the left behind that gate.

We went from knowing nothing but the definition of "aquaponics" to setting up a fully functioning system complete with Tilapia and a bunch of vegetables (Nathan gets full credit for this one). 

Aquaponics system at the beginning:

Grow bed #3 last month - I'll have to take an updated photo. Nathan also just finished building a compost pile next to it (with polypipe running through it) to hopefully heat the water over winter.

We went from never having bees to....having a hive ready and still never having bees. Oh well. It may have been a little bit much to handle in the first 6 months, anyway. We got a ton of wasps, instead. 

I leave you with...Flying Goat!

Lazy Friday

Speckles getting a drink the lazy way; make Zebra Head do the work and then drink from his beak.

Fungus Friday

Untrimmed bushes have, unfortunately, led to fungus.

 It doesn't look too good in the other half of the greenhouse and I'm crossing my fingers that the fungus doesn't spread to our plants. 

I've still been diligent about pruning any leaves that look iffy, but it means that there aren't very many more leaves that can come off without it being detrimental to the plant. We've talked about maybe dividing the greenhouse in half with a wall or tarp but I'm not sure that will work at this point. Today is the first wet day in weeks so that doesn't help, either. There's just no air circulation through the plants in the landlord's half - the branches and leaves are all in big, damp masses.

Our cherry tomatoes are so delicious - I don't want them to end up like those plants! 

Thomas doesn't care. He just wants scratches and treats.

After tricking Ewean a few times (feeding her grain and then grabbing her to check her feet) she isn't so into scratches anymore. I'll have to work on that again, plus we're going to build an actual catch pen soon. They're all such piggies about grain though that they can't stay away if they think I have some.

Until a dog sneaks up behind me, that is. 

"What? Just keeping this farm under control."

Abby has a farm checking and chores routine every morning and every evening. It involves a sprint down the driveway to chase any rabbits, then a quick perimeter check of the main yard, a jaunt through the greenhouse to look for snakes and mice, a loop through the orchard just 'cause, and then snack time (a delicious chicken poop/feed combo) in the coops. 

Surveying her land.

"It's a hard job, but someone's gotta do it."

Ryan's more into looking for food than anything else. He's also terrified of Thomas. He tries to sniff Thomas but if Thomas even looks at him, Ryan runs away. He's such a chicken...

No, really, he thinks he's a chicken.

Why do chickens always look so shocked when they're laying an egg? I mean, I'm sure it doesn't feel pleasant to push one of those out but it happens every single morning.

If I open the nest box while she's still in there she screams at me. She never stays broody for long, though.

Little Magpie is out of her awkward teenage phase. Still not laying eggs, but I wouldn't be surprised if she had a secret nest somewhere. 

Tonight we'll try our first artichokes!

Preserving: the Beginning

The farm stand is selling veggies steadily now - not very much, but at least a few things sell every day. Kale is the biggest seller - more than bagged baby greens, cucumbers or lettuce. Herbs seem to sell fairly consistently, especially after I started cutting them nicely and putting them in little bags with a damp paper towel to keep them fresh. Oh, and zucchini - it sells out every time it's out there. I didn't plant very many since I heard over and over about the beginner gardener who ends up having to give away bucket loads of zucchini. We only have 3 plants now and I wish I'd planted double that. It does take up a ton of room in the garden though. 

What we are overloaded with at the moment is cucumbers! They don't stay crisp for very long so yesterday I tried making refrigerator pickles for the first time. It was pretty easy, so hopefully they taste good. I just added dill (the flowering heads apparently taste the best for pickles), garlic, onion, pepper flakes, apple cider vinegar, salt and water - enough to cover the cucumber slices. These are slicing cucumbers and not pickling cucumbers so they might not end up as crispy.

With the less crispy cucumbers I'm making relish. So far I just chopped the cucumbers up (in my fancy new food processor) with some onion and the green mush is in the fridge with salt mixed in to draw out the moisture.

Tomatoes are ripening!

Yellow cherry tomatoes - they're neon yellow right now.

Good thing I love beans! They definitely need to be picked every day - the few that I missed yesterday got huge and tough. 

Yum - baked with soy sauce, sesame oil and garlic is definitely my favourite way to eat beans.

I shamelessly use baking to lure people to the farm stand...except Nathan and I ended up eating 99% of these ginger cookies.

I've been working on halter training Oprah and Thomas (through the fence). So far, so good - I can put loops of rope around their faces and heads while feeding them and they don't freak out. I'm going to make some halters this week. If Thomas is halter trained then at least he can be restrained if we have to check him closely for anything. We'll probably end up having to make a pen, too. 

The weekend is approaching quickly...survey your kingdom while you still can, mister...

Sneaky Veggies

I went to take some photos of the tiny bush beans that are finally growing 

 and when I looked more carefully I found these! Mmm green (and purple) beans with dinner - I like them baked in the oven for just a few minutes with sesame oil, soy sauce and garlic. 

Then I was examining the cucumber plants to make sure that this wasn't happening again:

The cucumber on the right is a normal cucumber, off of one of our landlord's plants. The cucumber on the left is our first...and it was never a normal size. It started out growing that fat and when it didn't seem to be getting much longer or more normally shaped I picked it. It's on the stand right now but I'm guessing nobody will buy it so it will be sampled in our salad tonight. 

Anyway, I realized some of the vines needed to be tied up and when I did that, I found 8 beautiful cucumbers ready to be picked, completely hidden.

Just as I was writing this a lady drove up to the house to ask when we would have more eggs and to say she's been loving our veggies. We're only producing 4 eggs a day (...2 after we eat breakfast) until the chicks start laying in August.

I think we'll have some of our own chicken next week, though. These meat birds are getting huge. 

Don't worry, not you Dorothy.

These two boys will be the first to go. They're the biggest and they bite me when I top up their food.

Look at them next to Magpie!

I'm sure I'll feel sad after having raised them from chicks but at the same time, I know they couldn't have had a better life. Our friends Jess and Josh visited this weekend and they were laughing that the farm was like a chicken community center. The three separate groups come out of their coops in the morning and congregate in the same shady area every day, then they all split off to do their activities. Mother Clucker's morning activity still involves this guy:

He seemed to think my camera's shutter noise was a threat of some kind. Unfortunately, he isn't smart enough to realize that the neighbour's dog that got onto the farm and chased the hens was the real threat. He was off in the garage somewhere and did nothing to protect the girls (not that he could have done much). Luckily I grabbed the dog before any damage was done.

The sheep are getting so tame that taking photos of them is becoming difficult. I wanted some photos from far away of them in their paddock and I only managed to get this one.

The rest of the photos were "gimme some grain" close ups.

 Oprah lets me pet her now. Both lambs will coming running at full speed from anywhere when they're called and eat out of our hands. It's good that they're getting easier to handle since their ewe and ram buddies (and an extra surprise) arrive tomorrow!

Addiction

After giving the lambs almost a week to settle in, we decided it was time to get them to like us. They've stopped running away from us when we walk by  (it didn't help that we had to grab them on day 1 to check Ewean's gimpy leg - she had been limping but seems better now) but we want them to come running to us (and I want to pet them...and halter train them...). 

Day 2 of training and now when we go outside we see this: 

This was all thanks to the magic of Farmyard Crack. No, I'm not talking about my low sitting farm jeans: I mean sheep grain. We bought some to use for training and we started off yesterday by dropping a bit into a bowl for the lambs every time we walked by them.

Both Ewean and Oprah (her formal name is still Eweneequa but it's a bit of a mouthful) are still jumpy but are now eating out of our hands. Oprah is definitely the leader of the two - she is the first to stomp angrily when the dogs get too close to the fence, and the first to investigate anything new. Ewean doesn't investigate as much but she also seems less suspicious of everything.

The problem is, Farmyard Crack is equally loved by everyone. It's really hard to stay still and try to get nervous lambs to come over to you when you're trying to shoo chickens off of you. Especially when those chickens can get most of their bodies through the fence to try and eat the grain.

Sheep training helpers. 

That Farmyard Crack is something. When I stood up to walk down the driveway I saw this coming towards me:

This following me:

And I heard a pleading "baaaaaa!" next to me.

The cooler weather has slowed everything down in the greenhouse but it's still mostly looking good.

Baby cucumber

 Lots of Kale.

Cantaloupe. Apparently when you grow melons vertically they need to be supported in a net of some kind since they get too heavy for the plant. One YouTube video suggested using brassieres...I'm not sure if these tiny melons will need training bras first?

Itsy Bitsy Watermelon.

Not so itsy bitsy tomatoes. 

The tomatoes look fine but the folliage does not. I really hope this isn't Early Blight. I think the humid days in the greenhouse combined with cooler nights hasn't been great for tomato plants. Two of the plants in the grow bed have most of their leaves affected and the big Sweet Million plants have their bottom leaves affected.