Winding Down

 I think it's nearing the end of farm stand season - everything in the greenhouse has slowed way down. Today I got a handful of cherry tomatoes instead of the pounds I was getting just a few weeks ago. We'll still have cooler weather stuff in the fall (lettuce, kale, winter squash) and hopefully some eggs...but no more delicious tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans or zucchini!

Ryan trying to sell some produce (and probably himself, too - he isn't a big fan of his foster sister Lexi).

I thought there weren't many beans anymore but I picked a big bowl full this morning.

Nathan's first foray into preserving - this tomato relish/chutney is really spicy and really good.

Ryan getting ready for another day on the farm. He gets to bring me the sheep almost every morning since I've been checking Ewean's foot. 

Walt's also doing some morning stretches.

From L to R: Hank, Skyler, Walt, Saul and Gus. Skyler and Gus are the definite (and I think only) girls.

Hank the rooster.

But not the King Rooster. Zebra Head just keeps growing...

Nom nom nom blackberries.

Another case of bumblefoot...at least this time I knew what to do. Sheba is a lot heavier than Speckles so she's having more trouble hobbling around.

The girls were pretty excited to come out for another walk today.

May stretching for the tastiest leaves. This is how Maggie now stands up for grain - it's almost on command.

It's hard to get pictures of Maggie because every time I bend down, she comes running over to see if I have anything for her. 

Mother Clucker helping with the brush removal.

We leave for our trip tomorrow. It's a bit nerve wracking leaving all the animals (the dogs are coming with us). I had to stop myself from writing an essay to our landlord about goat care. I limited it to a paragraph...or two...

Goodbye Jane

Fully stocked farm stand! Except cucumbers - those seem to ripen in batches so we suddenly have 5 ripe and then a week with none.

I can't get enough of these cherry tomatoes...which is a good thing since we're picking this many every day right now!

Time to make some pesto for the freezer.

I thought there weren't any zucchini and then I looked a little harder...oops!

It was a sad morning for me yesterday when I went outside and found one of the chicks dead. I think she got her head through the mesh and got stuck, then the adult chickens on the outside pecked her to death. Apparently chickens (like dogs) will sometimes respond like that to distressed sounds.  It was kind of awful to find her like that. I've closed the yard so the chickens can't get close to the chick pen. RIP Jane. There are now 5 chicks left that we've named Walt, Skyler's Ts, Gus, Jesse and Saul (if they're hens, they just have to deal with their masculine names. We have a minor Breaking Bad addiction). I'll have to take some photos of them - they're huge, already!

Abby's healing up nicely. That's one of the dead fish (from a few months ago - bleh!) that she managed to find buried under blackberry bushes. We waste nothing around here...

Ryan is relieved to be taken off farm patrol duty.

We have 12 hens...I think: Speckles, Denise, Dorothy, Mother Clucker, Magpie, Pagpie, Little Brown, Tiny Brown, Raven, Sheba, Clarice, Squishy. Yup, 12. The young ones are 5 months old now so they should be laying eggs, but we're only finding 5-6 a day. I'm thinking there are hidden nests all over the farm but we can't find them!

"Nothing to see, here..." (this is in the hay pile). 

Farm Birthday

We were away all weekend for a wedding. It was a bit stressful leaving everything even though it was only a few days. Our landlord kept an eye on everyone's water and fed the chickens and fish. We brought the dogs to my parents' and left the chicks inside with a pile of food and a big waterer. Everything was just as we left it when we got back - except the veggies. We had so much to pick that our stand had its biggest day yet yesterday!

The view from our campsite. It turns out that trying to get ready for a wedding when there is no running water or power is slightly difficult. Luckily I can always use "I live on a farm" as an excuse...

Turkey poults at Nathan's work. They're so funny - they already strut around in that puffed up position even though they're only 6" tall.

Ryan got to be the tiniest bit useful as a sheep dog, for once. He helped Nathan move a bunch of the work cattle and sheep through 2 pastures. He wasn't actually that useful at all...mostly he just had to heel and help intimidate the animals since he doesn't know the concept of driving vs gathering. At one point, though, the ram and wether went into a deep patch of brambles that would have scratched everyone's legs up. Ryan flushed them right out and earned himself a dip in the stock tank. 

We ate our first eggplant last night. This isn't a very good photo to show how pretty they are.

Today Abby turns 9 years old. I took her for a birthday swim but I'm pretty sure living on the farm is the only present she'd ever ask for.

Hay Hay Hay

I have been way too busy to blog!

We had some more guests on Saturday for the day - they brought their dogs so we went on a nice hike along the river and then had a farm tour and bbq. They are already planning their next trip back.

On Sunday we did a bunch of work on the farm and then took one of the fish to a pond store for a scraping to try and figure out what's wrong. For almost 3 weeks we've been losing a fish a day. The scraping didn't reveal any parasites - the problem seems to be some kind of bacteria. There are different treatments for bacteria in fish but none of them are to be used in fish intended for human consumption. Since the water is also circulating through the plants that we eat, treating the fish with a non-food treatment isn't really an option. This weekend, though, Nathan switched to using pond water for the fish instead of regular (degassed) tap water. So far no more fish have died....it's still a mystery, but hopefully the pond water has fixed the problem.

Yesterday I started my great hand haying adventure. You know that expression about reinventing the wheel? Well, I feel like I've gone back about 70 years and am figuring out for myself why people worked so hard to invent mechanized hay equipment. It seems ridiculous, though, to let a field's worth of hay go to waste and then go out and buy bales of hay from someone else's field to feed our animals. So out I went on Monday morning with my (stupid, heavy, splintery, not-intended-for-hay) rake and my trusty companions.

This is what the field looked like after the landlord mowed it. The cut grass was lying in rows and was pretty much fully dry already. 

I raked down each row, gathering the hay into piles. I lined up the piles to make collecting it easier. There was barely any damp hay left, but I tried to leave the damper stuff on top of the piles.

After hours of raking, I left the piles to dry in the sun in the afternoon. That's when Nathan called to say he had hurt his back at work (picking up bales of hay, of all things). We were going to meet for a swim in the lake after work but when I got there, he was sitting on a bench and he could barely walk (I'm not sure how he thought he would enter and exit the water). We drove to the one walk in clinic in town, which turned out to be full for the evening...so we had to go to the emergency room. After 2.5 hours there, he finally got a prescription for some muscle relaxants. 

The next morning he woke up and couldn't stand up. After crawling to the bathroom, he realized that he couldn't go to work. He took his pain killer cocktail and once it had taken effect he was slightly more mobile - mobile enough to drive his truck back and forth along the field while I gathered up the hay. It was pretty bouncy, though, and I felt bad that he was out there with his bad back. When he passed out in the afternoon from more pain killers I took the truck out myself and finished the second truck load. 

I tried baling some of it by stuffing it into a tupperware that I'd lined with twine, then tying it up when it was compacted. It worked well but it was way too time consuming.

I think I raked and collected about a third to a half of the field and ended up with two compacted truck loads. I unloaded all of the hay into the garage in a chicken wire frame/fence thing that I put together. By the end of it I was sweaty, itchy and exhausted but seeing those two big piles of hay that I'd collected for the sheep for the winter was incredibly satisfying. 

What was incredibly dissatisfying was going out to lock the chickens up in the evening and finding the newly stacked hay pulled apart and eaten by the horses. I had put a tarp on top and weighted it down but they still got into it. I don't think they ate very much of it; they have *so much* fresh grass to eat. Stay away from my hay!  If anybody had told me a year ago that I'd be angrily grumbling, as I fell asleep, about stupid horses eating my hay, I'd definitely have laughed at them. 

They look so creepy in their fly masks.

I'm tempted to go out and rake some more hay today, but I've been busy this morning. 

A few hours of picking these:

The stand sold out yesterday! Three pounds of tomatoes, 5 cucumbers, 2 bags of peas, 2 zucchini, a bag of basil, a bunch of kale...all sold. It was our best day yet!

Then I bought some more grain for these guys: 

Yes, Speckles has her head up Zebra Head's butt. I have no idea why.

And then, I picked up my reward for haying the field. 

Six Ameraucana chicks. My excuse is that they'll lay blue eggs, which is really cool. The truth is that I'm on the fast track towards becoming a crazy chicken lady...

One for Woolly Bully

There was definitely no time to update the blog this weekend. The weather changed from a rainy, grey week to extreme heat just in time for our 8 guests to arrive. It was so hot that Nathan took both ends off the greenhouse and we built Zeb and Thomas an extra shade shelter since Molly the horse was hogging the first shelter. We knew they needed another one when we saw Thomas chasing Zeb all over the field (who knows why) and then suddenly collapse, breathing really hard. Zeb didn't even look winded - maybe his stint with Lucy last week got him in shape.

While we were building the shade shelter, our guests were sitting on stumps watching us and enjoying the traditional bbq in the paddock. We were concentrating on pounding the posts in when we heard screaming. Before we even really noticed what was happening, all of our friends were inside Nathan's truck with doors and windows closed. Woolly Bully had been walking along the fence and he took a half-hearted 3-step charge at Abby (she very easily avoided him), which I admit may have been panic inducing for a newcomer to the farm. I wish we had had a camera out there...

It was also finally hot enough to swim in the creek we discovered a few months ago. We all hiked in there to swim on Saturday, then went to a nearby lake on Sunday and to the ocean on Monday. Apparently there's a lazy river nearby that the locals tube down in the summer - that's next on the list!

When we cooked dinner on Saturday it was so nice to hear things like "this is how chicken is supposed to taste!" and "I don't normally like green beans but these are delicious!".

Carrots, beans, broccoli, peas and basil...everything is growing so quickly now!

Including the "chicks". Zebra Head now crows every morning....but they still take naps throughout the day. 

They also still sleep in a pile instead of on their roosts, and try to burrow underneath each other like they would with their mother.