Art of Proprietation

And I Will Call Her Bunny

2011-04-24T18:38:00.001-07:00

Easter Sunday morning, at about 1:30 AM, we took delivery on two brand spanking new baby doelings, delivered by our doe goat, Sparky. In these first couple of days, saanen kids are reminiscent of rabbits, hence this one will be our Easter Bunny. The other is Bender. In Dairy goat naming convention, it's a 'B' year and the rest of the reference is too obscure for most folks.

We had been waiting for Sparky to deliver for a couple of days. It was a nice sunny day on her due date Friday. But she didn't deliver. Friday night was a windstorm with some rain. Saturday it snowed enough to stick. Saturday night was cold and wet. Sunday morning, early, more so.

Here is sparky with a pretty glazed look getting close to labor.

She kept licking us in the face and hands, like she was washing off the after birth. Getting practice for the real event.

In spite of the weather and late delivery, every seems to have turned out OK. Two Doelings, nursing, peeing and pooping. All good sings.

While all this goat delivery was going on, he was tangling with a Skunk. He'll be sleeping outside for the near future even if I wasn't out there sleeping with the kids and new mom.

On of the benefits of sleeping out with the goats, my wife brings me out coffee in the morning..

8 pints

2011-04-07T19:43:00.001-07:00

I am sure there are plenty of people who are fine doing animal slaughter. I don't like it much. But it is necessary part of the cycle. For me, it's like going over a waterfall. I dread it coming up to it, consider any excuse not to do it, but once I commit, the rest just happens. Once past that point of no return, the rest just happens like gravity. And I know something about falling over waterfalls.

On the way up to the field I came up with a lot of excuses not to shoot Little goat in the head. He was big and strapping, friendly and human centric. He would have made a great cart goat or companion animal. But in the end, it turned out he had a lot organ fat that I rendered into 8 pints of goat lard. I think Lard more correctly describes rendered pig fat, but Little Goat's is papery white, anyway. We'll see how it tastes. Probably not as good as pork lard. But still usable. And if it doesn't work well with eggs, maybe we'll make soap instead.

The rendered goat fat has a different texture than pork lard, though. It congeals and even hardens at a much higher temperature. More like wax than pork lard. one reference I ran across said that goat fat makes very hard soap. I could see that for sure.

In addition to eight pints of goat lard, Little was about 80 pounds of meat for the freezer plus another 20 pounds of bone for stock and then Baloo dog. Little had a large hide, he was a good sized three year old goat. His liver goes to a friend who is anemic. Apparently goat liver is a good source of iron. What we won't eat has gone into our mortality compost pile and will nourish our soil. Little was born on our soil, was fed from our soil and he will return to it.

I did look into finding another home for Little. I put him on Craig's list with a high enough price that he wouldn't be bought for slaughter. If he was going to slaughter, I would do it myself. The one woman who responded asked if he came from a 'milky' line of goats. I explained that he did, but given as I had advertised him as friendly whether, he was castrated and he couldn't pass on those milky traits. She didn't get back to me.

Little made it as far as he did because he had a purpose. Little's purpose was he was expendable. If we had a goat we needed to segregate, Little was the goat who would keep that lonely goat company. Unfortunately for Little, we have enough does now that we don't need to keep a companion goat anymore.

Little was a good goat. We will miss him. I didn't enjoy killing him or harvesting his parts. But he will feed us and the line he came from lives on in our does.

RIP, Little Goat.

170 Million Americans

2011-03-04T19:51:00.000-08:00

Public Radio has an ongoing campaign called something like \170 Million Americans\ to protest the US House cutting funding for public radio.

I have been a dues paying member of public radio my entire adult life. I am a frequent public radio listener. I listen to public radio when I am in the car, in my home office when I am working, in the milking shed, under my ear muffs on the tractor. I don't listen to any other radio stations. I find it to be an excellent source of varied news programming.

I think that my public radio station and NPR should give up any government funding.

National public radio gets something like 2% of it's funding from the Fed. My public radio station gets something like 10% from the fed and nothing from the state. But it is time to give up that funding.

My public radio station has the highest penetration of any public radio station. More people in my state listen to PR than any other state (by %). If public radio can stand on it's own two feet in any state, it should be here. And they can. 10% is not make or break for them. It would take belt tightening, but they could do it. And I strongly believe if they publicized that they were giving up federal funding, the membership would stand behind them and make up the difference, probably more.

NPR is in a similar position. When NPR was created, it struggled for funding and government support was crucial in providing radio programming in under served areas. But they are a mature organization now. It is time for NPR to stand on it's own two feet. And it is important for NPR's integrity to do so. Money from the fed comes with strings attached. To be a truly an independant organization, NPR should no longer accept federal money.

Part of my reasoning is the need for journalistic independence. But it is also based on principle. Public radio prides itself on being member supported and not compelling listeners to pay for broadcasts. By accepting money from the government, they are accepting money that has been collected by compulsion through taxes. Unfortunately, there are tax payers who don't wish to make a contribution to public radio. Accepting contributions that are not willingly given is not the right thing to do.

If 170 million Americans believe that public radio deserves support, then let them support it. It wouldn't take much of a contribution from each of those Americans to fully fund public radio. It's time for NPR and my public radio station to stop treating federal funding like an entitlement and look at past funding as seed money.

This year, when I made my contribution to public radio, I wrote a short note expressing my belief that they should give up governement funding. And I doubled my annual contribution. I am encouraging other public radio listeners to increase their contribution and tell public radio to keep their integrity and give up federal funding.

I am being careful not to say that all public radio stations need to give up government funding. There may be under served areas of the country that still need government support to remain viable. Areas that just don't have the population density to fully support their own public radio station alone. But I am encouraging the listeners across the country to increase their contribution and consider if they really need federal funding. I have considered it here, and believe federal funding for my station is not worth the strings that come with it.

Let's find 170 million Americans who are willing to support public radio. Lets show the politians that we can support public radio without them.

64 x 80 = 5120 / 144 = 35.6 square feet

2011-02-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

64 x 80 = 5120 / 144 = 35.6 square feet

Those are the approximate dimensions of the bathroom in the Elle, our private space.

It's not very big. And it has a stair that leans over about third of it. When I re-did the bathroom, I spent a long time figuring out how to fit a bathtub/shower, toilet and sink in that space. And have enough room leftover to stand up straight. It's obvious now, but it wasn't obvious to the previous designer. A man by the name of Barrel, or maybe Barrow. It was a long time ago, anyway.

I was thinking about this, because I was brushing my teeth while my wife was finishing her shower. I had to squeeze over so she could exit the room while I finished. It's a little bigger than a closet, but not a lot bigger.

For a variety of reasons, I needed to do a lot of work in this bathroom when I bought the house. I ended up tearing down all the interior plaster and lath, pulling up the rotten hardwood floor and sub-floor, putting in a new carrying wall in the basement under it rewiring it and re-plumbing it. I saved the toilet and the sink, but everything else went. On of the niceties I put in was a radiant floor in a suspended slab, which I like very much. And I changed the entry door from the kitchen to the trap room. It took the kitchen from having four doors on three walls to three which made the kitchen less of a traffic zone.

I think it has turned out well. We have a full bathroom for our private space in the Elle. And it is a vast improvement over the original pantry closet that was converted into a bathroom. We don't have a lot space in the Elle, so having a small bathroom gives us more room to do other things. And making use of what we have is what makes what we have work.

Routines

2011-02-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

I like having a cook stove in the kitchen. We have an antique glenwood, maybe an A model. It's pretty basic, fire box on the left, draft goes over the oven, down the right side, under the oven and up the back of the stove to the damper. With decent wood, it's easy to get 500 degrees F in the oven. The surface of the stove is hot enough that we use firebricks with an 2" air gap to have a warming area. I usually keep a baking stone in the oven. It's convenient, with that kind of heat sitting around in the kitchen it's easy to warm up leftovers in a skillet, make a toasted sandwich on the baking stone, etc. All that hot cast iron holds a lot of energy at the ready.

The Glennwood keeps our part of the house warm all winter. We do have a radiant floor in the bathroom, but that comes off the trap room, so it has no air flow from the kitchen. The stove doesn't run for much more than an hour untended, so things cool off by morning. But the house is comfortable for us.

It takes some doing to orchestrate it, though. Last spring, I was collecting trees and cutting wood. The tree crew for the power lines came through. Because I was available, they were more aggressive about the size trees they cut. One of the guys said he dropped his largest diameter tree yet that day. Me being there with the tractor meant they only had to get the tree down and they could drop it in the road. They would normally have to cut up the down wood. For me, they left it in the largest pieces I could take away. That made it easier for me, less handwork than picking up a lot of small pieces. It also means it's cut up the way I like it for my stove. One of my neighbors also had several trees come down. It's their second home, so they don't have much want or need for the wood and were happy to have it disappear. Between those two sources, I have at least two years worth of wood.

I like to minimally split my wood for seasoning and wait until later to split it down to kitchen wood. I am will have to handle it a couple of times to get it into the house wood shed, so keeping it in large pieces means I don't have to handle so many. In the fall I brought down this years wood to the house and stacked it in a stock panel wood shed. Now, I go out to woodshed daily and split a bunch of big chunks into kitchen wood.

We use five gallon buckets to manage wood from the shed into the kitchen. There is a rack near the stove for four buckets. The buckets catch the falling wood detritus and melting snow, etc. They are also a handy measure. Depending on the wood quality and how it's split, five to eight buckets of wood feed the stove all day.

The Glenwood has a satisfying number of controls. It loads through the eyes on top. There are two draft controls on the fire box, a lever for the diverter to send the flu gasses around the oven, a slider damper on the back of the stove and a damper in the round stovepipe above the stove. Each has it's own particular metal clank, thud, scrape or squeal. They are often uncomfortably hot to touch and I use the stove iron to hook or push them. There is an oven door temperature indicator and a flu thermometer. I can hear the draft and the tone of the fire. Standing near the stove I can feel if the fire is ebbing and the stove is cooling off. It is not unlike running an old engine that is adjusted with nudges, done by feel and confirmed by listening.

I have a routine in the morning. Up and start the fire while I make the boy something to eat. Bring in the milk cooler that skimmed over with ice overnight. Fill water buckets for the animals while the coffee steeps. Keep an eye on the stove. As the kindling warms to flu, watch for the flu to come up to temp and shift the diverter around the oven when it is drawing sufficient. Put in some small square wood that will catch easialy edge the fire up. Take empty wood buckets out to the shed on the way to the animals. Feed and water the goats. Loose the chickens and put out their grain. Bring the water buckets back to the trap room and check the fire. Put in some larger wood and set the draft for heat. Out to the woodshed, split and fill the buckets until the rack in the kitchen is full. Wash up and head out to milk. Don't forget a black coffee to make a goat latte with milk straight from the teat. Measure out the grain. Bring out Sparque who is always in a rush. Milk Heddar. Drink coffee. Relax a minute, watch the goats. Deal with any animal issues that show themselves. Put out more hay. The milk has been air chilling at these temps just hanging in the milking shed any way. Back in with the milk. Check the fire. Filter the milk into quart bottles and on into the ice bath to chill. Refill the kitchen wood buckets that got used and cut kindling for tomorrow's fire. Stop lallygagging and get to the days work.

Cold, Cold, Cold

2011-01-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

I waited for things to warm up this morning before I went out to milk. It was twenty one degrees below zero Fahrenheit when I did milk.

Milk pails have a have a habit of reminding me of the temperature while I am out there.
At about ten degrees, stainless steel on bare hands gets cold quick.
At about five degrees, there's a momentary adhesion as any surface moisture flash freezes to the pail's handle.
At negative twenty, there's a little epidermis left behind stuck to the handle when the hand is pulled off.

This morning, there was hoar frost in the hair of the goats when they came into the milking parlor. The milk parlor is just an unheated shed off the back of the barn, so it is not like it is warm, though.

The upside of cold weather like this, it's real dry. I can walk around outside in wool socks and my crocks as long as I stick to the packed paths. I think the crocks are just as warm as my rubber boots in this situation. In March, it will warm up and be much too wet and cold for crocks.

Barbecue Turkey

2011-01-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

Not really on the Barbi, but cooked in a barbecue sauce, anyway.

When my wife said she was marinading a turkey leg in barbecue sauce, I was a little skeptical. I have to admit, it came out well, though. It was juicy, flavorful and the texture was good.

This summer we raised turkeys again. We did more this year because last year's turned out well and we sold them easily. Again, they sold easily this year. My wife says she couldn't do any more than we did this year. I don't blame her doing all the slaughter and butcher ourselves was a lot of work.

We have eaten four turkeys for various holiday gatherings, one went to my brother, two went into our freezer as parts and the rest we sold. The turkey along with the goat from bucklings, roosters and the occasional pig we buy are most of our meat. We don't look a gift piece of beef in the mouth, but we don't by beef because we have enough of our own meat. It makes it that much more special to get it on rare occasions.

It's just an interesting juxtaposition for me. I can remember how long it's been since I bought a 29 cents a pound loss leader turkey or dollar ninety nine manager's special pork loin. Contrary to a lot of assumptions, raising our own food isn't so much about saving money. It's about knowing what food our food eats.

What I like about goats

2010-12-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

We've been keeping goats for coming up on four years now. I don't consider myself an authority on goats, but I have had a chance to learn if I like them.

I got goats because I wanted a secure source of milk that I confidence in. I chose goats over cows milk because I liked the human scale of goats. A typical milking doe weighs in at 120 - 200 lbs. As a friend of mine is want to say, "When a cow kicks you, you stay kicked". There's also the issue of goat tough. Building to the international standard "goat tough" is a lot cheaper than building for "cow tough" certifiaction. It didn't hurt that I was offered a Saanen doe that I was sure of to get started with. Saanens are a large breed dairy goat and I knew the doe I was getting was a good producer because I had been milking her for close to a year at a friend's.

I find goats to have personalities similar to dogs. Friendly dogs. They seek human attention and are easy to train to routines. They can be skittish, but not hard win back over.

I have had challenges in keeping goats. I started from scratch, I didn't have any fencing or housing, I didn't even have that much grass. I chose to go with a high tension smooth wire fencing for their first paddock. While that might be handy for training a new goat to electric fence, but I now think those five wires are over kill. I have been quite successful keeping them behind three flimsy poly wires strands for most of the season. I am trying to do rotational grazing, something I am growing into. Since my first season, I have continuously expanded our pasture areas and I am able to feed them for about six months a year on pasture. For the remainder of the year, I have to buy in hay. The steady expansion of our pastures means that even though we have grown from two animals to 7, our hay costs have been pretty steady. I do face a dilemma about grain though. I haven't found a ready source of organic that I feel I can afford, so I am using a conventional grain to supplement the hay for milking animals. For housing, I didn't want to have something permanent. I didn't want to have lazy barn goats or the parasites and health problems go with them. I have found that goats do just fine in our cold snowy winters with three sided stock panel structures. And there are enough health risks to worry about, making sure the goats have access to minerals, don't carry a heavy parasite load and don't succumb to something like Johnnes or CAE. As big as anything is the daily grind of milking. My wife or I have to milk goats everyday if we are going to keep the goats in production. Because of that, we have only been away overnight together once since we got goats. My final challenge is breeding. I have found only one other Saanen breeder in my area. For some complicated reasons I have chosen to stick with purebred goats, but I am not a big enough operation to carry a buck for breeding. For the time being, I am lucky the one farm close enough is willing to provide stud service for us.

So, after all that, why would I keep goats? Primarily Daily milk. Before I got goats, I was buying three or four gallons of milk each week. I consume a lot of milk, it's an important part of my diet and always has been. Now that I have goats, I also have milk to make cheese with. On a weekly basis, I make chevre, my wife makes a nice mozzarella and quaso blanco. And this year I have started making a Gouda. There is also meat, an inevitable by product of lactation. We can't keep all the offspring created by freshening our goats for milk. Bucklings just don't have much use, and there will come a time when we can't keep all the doelings. On farm slaughter has meant that we also get a small amount of meat from our goats. Then there is the compost. Sure, everybody poops, but not every bodies poop is equal. Goat poop is ready to go from day one. It is nearly perfectly balanced Nitrogen Carbon. And with brush control like goats, I doubt I'll ever need to put a rear mower behind my tractor. Goats clear out many aggressive species like sumac and raspberry. And they love Japanese knot weed and honeysuckle.

I enjoy my goats. They are affectionate and likeable. I enjoy the work and the fruits of my labor. Even early morning milkings in the field are pleasant. There is something refreshing about a goat latte right from the teat on a crisp morning before the mist has cleared.

Now there are none

2010-12-04T19:12:00.000-08:00

We finished off the last four the turkeys today. Along with the turkeys, we culled our older hens and slaughtered this years roosters.

We've been plucking the turkeys by hand all fall, but for this slaughter we rented a plucker. We wanted to try one out and see what they were like. See which styles work well. I have seen tiny ones to attach to a drill advertised, rotating drums and tub varieties like we rented. We rented a tub style one. I do think the tub style should work well for turkeys, but the one we rented didn't work out well for us. It worked OK for the chickens, but not for the turkeys. The turkeys would get stuck, a foot or head or whatever getting caught between the spinning plate and the tub wall. The turkeys just didn't tumble effectively, so they didn't get plucked. The guy we rented it from said it would handle upto 35 pound birds, and ours were only about 25 lbs live weight.

In all fairness, I think our scalding wasn't optimal either, but this plucker just banged the birds up too much. Even the chickens got beat up.

I am glad the birds we did today we not for customers, they wouldn't have been saleable.

I still think that a tub style plucker will work. I have heard very good things about the featherpro machines. We'll be looking to try one of those next year. I am glad there won't be another opportunity till then. I am done with processing turkeys for a while.

And then there were four

2010-11-22T19:55:00.000-08:00

We're down to four turkeys still kicking. There are still four not kicking in the market fridge pending pickup.

We did twenty five turkeys this spring. We lost five chicks in the first week, no losses beyond that. We have been doing a slaughter day each week for about a month. Hand plucking makes for long slaughter days. But having an extended window for slaughter has meant we met the window for each customer's desired weight. We had requests for < 12 to 22 pounds dressed weight. Our smallest bird was a little over twelve, the largest has been 23.5 lbs dressed.

I talked to a nearby farmer and he talked about having commercial white toms coming in at 39lbs live weight, which I would guess would be close to 30 lbs dressed. I am assuming the major difference from his max weight to ours is more grain. Interestingly, it sounds like his hens weighed in at about the same as ours. Whatever led to his big toms did not translate to bigger hens.

We have sold 12 birds this year. Our goal had been 10, but it seemed like a good idea to satisfy our available market. That's without any advertising outside word of mouth. My wife does all the selling, connections she makes at the farmer's markets and the community. After giving two to family, two for the harvest party, one for our thanksgiving and another one at Christmas, there are two for our freezer to enjoy later. I like eating roast turkey, its a big meal that carries us for days after that isn't hard to do. And during the winter, it is hard to beat the way it satisfies hunger.

We are thinking about renting a plucker for the final slaughter day. We want to try one out as we think a plucker is in our future. I'd like to get an idea for how the different styles compare. We have some roosters that will help make it worthwhile. I think about making one of those Wizbang pluckers, but I haven't gotten up the motivation.

Hard Frost

2010-11-14T18:09:00.000-08:00

We've been getting Hard Frosts. A little late, but they have finally come. We're not complaining, it allowed us to finish out the ambitious farmer's market season with a lot more produce. And more time to prepare for winter is always in short supply.

But with the hard frost has come the annual transition of our water system. In the spring, we setup our garden supply and various collection and storage sites. We have a spring that gravity feeds to the house garden and a cistern that eventually supplies the market garden. The Market Garden is uphill, so that involves about 400 feet of pipe, a pump, a battery and solar panel / charger.

We also supply water to the poultry and the goats. The poultry are close enough to the house that we just have a spigot in the yard off the old well. For the Goats, I use an old Studebaker truck rear end trailer to tow two fifty gallon drums of clean water. In the summer I need to refresh the goat water about once a week. In the cooler season, I can go two weeks.

With the hard frost, these things change, though. All the tanks need to be emptied, lines drained. The goat water and poultry spigots are generally frozen when I go up to milk early in the morning. If I wait until the afternoon, they usually have thawed. We'll make do for the goats, adding a blanket over the barrels and valve at night. Soon enough we'll get out the heated base for the poultry. Eventually, we'll end up hauling water out from the kitchen when the outdoor faucet no longer thaws. It's not the end of the world, just the wreck of a barbie Ferrari. In the picture at the top, I was using steam from my coffee water to thaw out the pipe for the goat water. It worked after a fashion, but it took a long while. I have blankets over the tank tonight. If I really get serious, I would go with a valve directly off the tank opening, drape it in plastic and insulate the valve over night. I think I'll move the goats down to the house for the winter before it goes that far. With any luck.

I've had complaints

2010-10-26T18:59:00.000-07:00

I have had complaints that I don't post more regularly. Sorry. Life gets in the way of documentation.

It has been a busy fall with a productive growing season. We've been concentrating on harvesting the fall crops, preparing the beds for the next planting, laying in manure for composting, fattening up the turkeys and getting the last of the hay into the barn.

We cooked a couple of turkeys for our annual harvest potluck. It's a good chance for us to check out the condition of the birds before we start slaughtering for customers. The birds are still a little lean, like last year at this time. But they are coming along nicely. The birds were very tasty (we had sales generated by attendees of the party), but they didn't make a lot of gravy.

The hay is in the barn. What hay we have. I don't have as much as I would like. We have more animals than ever. Two milking does, four doelings from the spring and the whether. We had six goats going into the winter last year, but we slaughtered the two bucklings in February. By most accounts it was a decent year for hay. A little dry in August, but better than some years. But my favorite hay supplier sold his entire crop to one buyer, I got none. It's the best hay we have access to, a nice alfalfa mix. The animals eat it well and I am confident the pregnant does are getting a good diet to make kids. It's in heavy square bales, the guy takes great pride in making very consistent bales. I think one of those bales is worth two of bales we get from other farms. We also got two dry round bales. Round bales are attractive for their shear size. They are priced a little less than square bales. But square bales are definitely more versatile than round. With the round, once I open it, that's where it is. And I am not going to store it in the barn, so they are only good for us in the fall and early winter.

I've tilled in the remains of the bean crop. We opened up another quadrant in the market garden this spring. Last year there were 8 inch poplars growing there. I cut most of the trees last spring, grazed the goats in there twice last season and this spring pulled the stumps. I dragged the area with my box blades scarifiers after pulling the stumps this spring. Spread a good amount of manure and tilled and plowed with the middle buster. We plated beans to start building up the soil. After harvesting the last of the dry beans, the remains were tilled in. We are forming the beds and planting garlic and other alliums now.

Manual Mowing

2010-09-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

I have heard people call it "scything" but that sounds funny to me. There must have been a time when if you said mowing, you couldn't mean any other way. I guess now you could say manual mowing to be clear there wasn't an engine involved.

I bought a scythe this spring. A friend had let me borrow his brush scythe and snath. I bought a 30" grass blade and tried it on his snath. I found it a great combination for what I wanted to do. Pictured is the grass blade on a snath I made from hemlock (and reinforced some) with a broom handle stem and nibs I whittled from odd bits. I patterned it after a purchased one.

In a few minutes I can easily cut a day or two's fresh grass to help with my rotational grazing. It allows me to cut grass from paddocks ahead of my parasite rotation. That allows me to get the benefit of the growth without exposing the paddock to parasite eggs.

I also frequently use the scythe to true up a paddock after the goats have been through it. I take down any weeds left standing. I particularly want to control poison ivy and black swallow wart or anything else the goats don't care to eat.

I ended up buying a 20" bush blade to go with my grass blade. The bush blade is much stouter, but it's shorter length allows it to maneuver in tighter quarters. The stronger blade allows me to cut light woody material with more confidence. Using the bush blade for blackberry canes and this year's saplings saves me a lot of banging on the grass blade. It is excellent for cutting paths through the wild berry patches. The bush blade does a lot of work keeping the electric fences clear and is excellent for cutting under the fence. I can even reach through the fence to get the opposite side. And a wooden snath doesn't carry current. I know I cut more volume with the grass blade, but the bush blade gets more frequent use.

I am very happy with my first season of use. It's probably right up there with a shovel for usefulness and I think I probably use one more often. I think I am as fast with a scythe as I am with my fancy string trimmer. And since my string trimmer engine is in never ending need of adjustment or repair, maybe faster. The scythe is easily as capable. I have a sickle bar mower that I have used for under the fences, but that was always dicey. I had to loosen the low wire and tie it up out of the way but I was still worried about cutting the wire. And I needed to turn off the fence to cut. And I feel a lot more confident about cutting around the new fruit trees. And the string trimmer burns mixed fuel while the sickle bar engine needs new rings. I am saving all that particulate, too.

Windfall

2010-09-10T16:06:00.001-07:00

My neighbors down the way let me pick up their windfall apples for my turkeys. There were probably between 75 and 100 lbs of apples. I am hoping the apples will help finish the turkeys this year. Last year our first turkey was a little on the dry side. We slaughtered the first about mid September as a test bird. Given that turkey had virtually no fat, we started adding cracked corn to their grain ration. It had the desired effect, the subsequent turkey's were much more moist. This year I am hoping we can fatten the turkeys on apple, at least in part. Apples are a crop we have on our land and our neighbors. And I hope apples add something special to these turkeys.

Last year was our first with turkeys. We did ten, mostly for ourselves. This year we have twenty, enough to sell some. They are looking pretty good, we'll probably be able to slaughter a few by October. The plan is to have one or two on the table for our harvest party in October.

Bubba's got a new phone Samsung U640 Convoy

2010-08-09T10:58:00.000-07:00

I finally broke down and got a new phone. I got it through the "new every two" program with my cell phone provider. My old phone was seven years old.

I got a new phone because my old phone, an audiovox 9155 from 2003, was getting terrible battery life and seemed to not be connected to the network unless I was actively dialing out. It resulted in a lot of missed calls and didn't alert me to waiting messages. I think that the roaming programming had changed enough that my phone was constantly searching for a tower. The reprogramming function, *28 or similar, did not seem to correct it. Since I actually had an extra 9155 I had bought for spare parts, I tested that and got the same result. I assume that changes in cell phone programming made the 9155 incompatible. It was also getting increaseingly difficult to get a decent battery for the 9155. Interestingly, the batteries were also getting increasingly cheaper. I think the last pair I bouhgt off Ebay were about $1 a peice, and all the batteries available were similar. Unfortunatley, the batteries were not quite worth a dollar each.

Looking through the offerings from verizon, the only solid phones available were blackberry's which would have meant adding data to my service and would have doubled my operating costs. I have no want for email or internet access on my phone, so I bit the bullet and got the folding Samsung U640 Convoy. It caught my eye because it had a 2 mega pixel camera and claimed to be ruggedized.

I am not going to critique the rugged aspect of it other than to say it doesn't feel an more solid than I would expect an average phone to feel. I have always believed that folding phones are inherently more at risk because of the hinged connection. My solid 9155 survived many falls on pavement so I am a little apprehensive of a folding phone. But since I didn't have any other choice, there's no sense bemoaning it.

The other thing that attracted me was the camera. It is the highest resolution camera of the phones I considered, 2 mega pixels. It works, and there is a neat panoramic function. But I do find the operation cumbersome. I snap a picture, wait for the ccd lag, wait for it to appear and then I have to remember to "save" it. If I hit the OK button for another shot, that is actually the default choice to "send" the picture. Sending puts the phone into the new message sequence. Canceling out of the messaging squence closes the camera function, I loose the original photo and I have to restart the camera app to take another picture to replace the one I lost. It would be nice if the default was to save the picture and go onto a new shot. The pictures themselves are mediocre. The resolution is 1600 x 1200, and the default contrast settings leave a lot to be desired. It's also annoying that to transfer pictures off the phone I needed a mini SD card. But it is better than not having a camera in my pocket.

So, after listing off a bunch of faults with the phone, it might sound like I am ranting about it. I am not. It has great battery life. The standard battery that came with it went the first week without needing a charge with my normal usage. It has reasonably good reception. The screen and menus are readable. It fulfills the purpose I bought it for. It's a phone. And I didn't have to upgrade the minimal service plan I have to add it. I did have to sign a new two year contract to get it for free, though.

I did add some things to it. As soon as I picked it out, I went to ebay and for under twenty dollars, I got a hard skin with a rubber outer finish to protect the flip out cover, a hard plastic clip on holster that protects the back, a 2 gig mini SD card for transfering pictures, an adapter that allows me to plug in a standard mini headphone jack if I want to use it as a mp3 player and I put a clear plastic film protector over the two screens. The skin and holster add a lot of protection in case it is dropped. The skin also makes the camera lens recessed and less likely to get scratched. The clip holster allows me to have the phone clipped to the top of my pocket so it doesn't fall down to the bottom with my keys, various screws, nails and other sharps and get scratched. I also should have ordered an extra charging cable. The cable uses a non standard connection to plug into a USB port for charging and transfering music (but not pictures!!). It would be nice if the connection on the phone were a mini USB so a standard cable would work. I am sure I will misplace the charging cable at some point and need to order one Johnny quick.

I am leaping into the future with this phone. Wish me luck.

We are one buckling and three roosters lighter

2010-07-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Today was a slaughter day. Time to prepare the various unproductive males for their "next stage"...

Slaughtering is never pleasant, but a necessary evil if we are going to breed animals. The facts come down to we cannot support an ever growing population, maybe humans should take note.

I had been planning to keep the buckling, Alarm, through breeding season to breed to our one unrelated doe, Heddar. Alarm comes from one of our original does, Sparque, and Heddar comes from the other, Ruffles. But I realized we already have that genetic mix (last years bucklings, same dam and sire bred to this target doe gave us this springs doeling, Able). So there is not a lot of sense breeding Alarm to Heddar. It's further redundant because the other does from this spring all come from that Sparque Sire mix, either first generation or one generation out. Heddar is our only animal not related to Sparque and her suitor from last year. I bred Sparque to same Buck three times waiting for her to give us a doe. In the meantime, I bred one of her bucklings to Heddar and Ruffles last fall. So it's important that we get Heddar bred to a new line in order to get some balance back in our genetic diversity. Breeding Alarm to Heddar does save us $50 in breading fees, but that wasn't enough of a reason.

And now, we don't have to keep the buck separate from the does going into breeding season. That greatly simplifies our paddocks. Pretty soon the kids will be weaned and we won't need any subdivisions. Woo Whoo! Sad for Alarm, good for me.

So, Alarm was just about three months old. He was coming into sexual maturity and he yielded about 30 pounds of meat, bone in. That's pretty interesting because last years bucklings I slaughtered in Late winter and they were also 30 pounds bone in. It was winter, and they were on hay only. This buckling has been nursing and getting Lamb and Kid grain. In addition to the meat, he had significant organ fat and fat under the skin. The boys from last year had very little fat. Again, time of year and ration. But still interesting that going into the fall Alarm had as much meat and more reserve as the boys twice his age and similar genetics (they were all brothers from the same dam and sire). And the boys from last year looked good and performed well (the breeder buckling sired three does by Heddar and Ruffles).

I didn't face any quandaries about the Roosters. We had a clutch hatch earlier this summer and they are well along. The Roosters' days have been numbered since. It was just waiting for an ambitious day. It didn't help that the dominant rooster was attacking the back of my legs on a periodic basis. And they were waking us up at slightest provocation. Killing sucks, but I am not going to miss the roosters.

My PI cleared up by the way, in less than two days without more than a light rash. I am going to claim the prompt washing helped. If anyone cares.

I got PI

2010-07-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

I think I have a poison ivy rash going on my wrist. Hazard of the locale. The field that we are developing has areas that are rife with poison ivy. I've been cutting new fence lines for the goats. If I think about it ahead of time, I cut the PI out of my way to keep the risk manageable.

I don't have a lot of trouble with PI sensitivity, but I try to avoid it when possible and washup as soon as I can when contact is unavoidable. I keep soap and water in the field and try to washup periodically through the day. Another tactic I use is spraying down my boots and laces with a dilute mixture of vinegaur and water. I thought it up this spring and it may not help, but have had less trouble with PI this year than last.

I don't have a terrible time with PI, my wife has it worse, but I was wondering if others have found solutions that work.

I got to do some bailing

2010-07-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

A friend of a friend needed help getting in his hay. He has a bumper crop of hay and is struggling with where to put it all. So he was selling it in exchange for help getting the rest in. I ran a baler today and yesterday, maybe eight or nine hundred smallish bales. And there was the work of gethering, loading the bales onto a trailer and then loading them into the barn. Noon to eight or nine PM yesterday, one to six PM today. In the middle of this I got about 150 bales out of it today. It's not great hay, but I was willing to trade experience for labor.

It was a small baler, I think, maybe five feet wide. An old New Holland. It was good experience. I've been interested in learning more about hay production to better understand what I buy for hay and to do a better job with the little bit I cut myself.

So what did I learn? I am not an expereinced tractor driver. Most of my tractor work is loader work, and it does not translate well to open fields. I am slow as molasses because I lack experience. But slow is better than fast and risky, anyway.

I only sheared one pin, I didn't break anything and we didn't re-rake anything I baled. I feel pretty good about it.

Tilt'n back a couple of pints

2010-07-04T15:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a very busy spring. Bottle kids on top of extra kids. We have twice as much ground planted. We have maxed out on daily chores with the new animals and farmer's markets. We have been working at learning to work smarter instead of harder, but finesse comes with experience and it's tough to learn much without making a mistep here and there.

But as the kids get older, our efforts are beginning to bare fruit. Literal fruit in the garden, Fruit of our labors with the goats. We had gyros from last year's bucks this weekend. And there is enough milk in the house for drinking again.

It's nice to be able to tip back a pint or two in the evening.

Ruffles

2010-06-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

2010-05-16T19:48:00.000-07:00

I am going to try not to make this into a rant. It's going to be hard, but I am going to try.

I have been self employed the majority of my career. And that whole time, even when I was a twenty something, I paid for health insurance out of pocket. I had my first claim this year. I hurt my back this winter and I went to a physical therapist to recover from it. The therapist really did help me and was glad that I did it. I didn't think my insurance would cover me. And I was right. I have a high deductible traditional insurance plan and an accident only plan to cover some of the gap. I didn't have much faith that the either insurance company would cover me, and they lived up to my expectations. But I figured that going into it and was prepared to pay it out of pocket. I got the bill, I was expecting about $300 an hour, turned out to be $489 an hour after the 20% disconnect for immediate payment. The treatment involved visual assessment and recommendations of therapeutic exercises. No Xrays or other high tech diagnostics. No capitol equipment. I questioned the rate and their response was it's what the state allows them to charge. They are charging me the maximum amount allowed by law. Oh, now I feel better. And as it turned out, my accident insurance denied my claim because it wasn't noted in the diagnosis that the injury was due to an accident.

OK, so I ranted a little. I'll try not to do it again.

The last of the apples

2010-05-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

That was the last Honey Crisp apple that we picked last fall at the orchard across the river. Behind it is the heirloom apple tree near the house. Hopefully those blossoms mean we will have a good harvest this year.

My son thinks those Honey Crisp last pretty well. We picked these in September and they are still good today. They have dehydrated some, so the skin is a little wrinkled. But the flesh was still firm and not meally. Still a good eating apple.

Four years ago, we planted a pair of our own honey crisp trees. They might bare this year, but we probably have a year before we get apples from this tree.

This weekend we planted another nine fruit trees, Apples, Pears and cherries. We are hoping to have a variety of fruit here.

FINALLY!!!!

2010-04-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

Our last doe finally gave up the goat.

We only have three milking does, so some people will look at this and say big deal. But today our last pregnant doe finally kidded. A healthy doeling, thank you very much. It feels like about time, we have been waiting for kidding, kidding, taking care of kidding related crisis and following up with kids for a month and a half. I think that I have slept in my bed in the house three times during that period. I was ready for it to end. And Heddar, the last doe, took her sweet bippy time waiting for pretty much the least convenient moment. It was raining, my wife had left the property and I was trying to get on the road for business. As I was telling myself I needed to jump in the car to go, I checked on her one more time to find her in the midst of a contraction with two hooves and a bubble sticking out. But it turned out OK.

And just to prove kids are unsafe at any speed, the new kid peed on me within 1/2 hour of birth.

All of these photos captured in their wild state by a boy who is not yet four.

Middle busting

2010-04-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

That's our new middle buster. Last year, we formed all our beds with shovels and our backs. After both of us ended up in physical therapy for our backs this winter, I was a little worried that we (I) might not be up to it with the expanded garden this year. Physical Therapy is going to cost me $1500 (some day I'll talk about why my "insurance" wouldn't cover it), so it didn't seem outlandish to spend $400 on a plow to do the digging for us.

We went with a middle buster from Lowery Manufacturing of Alabama. A third of it was the shipping, it came by motor freight. I went with this one because I liked the design and I thought it would be versatile. It's made of 1/4" wall 2-1/2 inch square tubing and is very strong feeling. It's not as wide as I would like, but I think I could have extensions welded on if I needed to.

The idea is to dig trenches that throw the dirt up and onto the bed between. It gives us deeper tilled soil to work with, raises the planting surface up relative to the walking path and makes tilling in the fall go better. We finished the entire garden in less than three hours as apposed to digging it by hand over a week or more. And the three hours included figuring out how the plow would work. I think next time I could do it in half the time and I won't need a spotter to keep the lines straight. When we got done my wife told me she had doubts about the idea of the plow, but after seeing what it did, it was the right thing.

This is the progression since last fall. I tilled every thing in and spread compost shortly before snowfly. The garden was all ready when the plow arrived this spring. And we have begun planting.

A telling of true events, only the names of the innocent have been changed

2010-04-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

It was an adequately uneventful birthing.

Sparking started showing signs in the late afternoon / evening, goo and such. About 10:30 my wife came back from checking on her saying there were contractions. Sparque broke her water at about midnight. About 12:15 AM she showed the first sac, followed by a second. We hemmed and hawed about which sac to deal with first. The second one was the first to show a hoof, so that's the one we dealt with first. My wife had to reach in and reposition the head to get it to follow the front hooves and that kid went quickly afterward. It was the Doe. We did all the toweling off and cleaning up while we waited for second one. Checking Sparque's abdomen, I could feel the second kid, but it was a solid 20, maybe 30, minutes before contractions started again. That whole time, the second one's sac had been protruding about three inches out of Sparque's butt. Once I knew I had two hooves at or out of the birth canal, I pierced the sac. She was tired and laying down, so it took some gentle pulling, but it was probably only three contractions from the end. We cleaned them off and got the first feeding of colostrum into them. The doeling fed off Sparque directly, but I hand fed the buckling as he wasn't strong enough to stand or move around right off. Both kids are feeding off the Sparque's teats this morning. Sparque is a good and attentive mother.

Given that lag between the kids, I am really glad we didn't jump the gun and pierce the bucklings sac early. If we had chosen the wrong one to start with or pierced it right after the doe passed, we would have ended up "reachen in and fishen 'round" which I don't like to do. There was a certain amount of drama, but not enough to nourish anxiety in the future.

Ruffles is still in a funk. She has been barely eating since her kidding. She was only making enough milk to feed the one baby and we weren't sure she was making enough for even that. She had pretty much rejected the first kid, Amos, in favor of the second, Andy. Funny because Amos, the first, seemed bigger and more robust to me at birth. But early on Andy caught up and surpassed Amos. We went through the last of our freezer colostrum and have been feeding cows milk since. That smarts.

Ruffles has gotten a vitamin B complex shot and is due for another today. She has also been getting Nutri-Drench, which she hates. Given her obvious depressed mood, I hesitate to force the Nutri-Drench. She's had pretty much free choice grain, but she shows no interest. It ends up feeding the chickens and not her. She has been out on pasture, and she'll browse some, but doesn't seem to have a sustained interest in any food. I have made sure she has minerals, we've tried separating her from the herd with her kids and without, nursing and not. The best seems in the herd without her kids so she has companionship but the kids aren't running her ragged. I just haven't found anything that seems to make enough difference, she is wasting away to skin and bones quickly. And the latest is she's giving raisin poo. Normally her poo is nice big plump black olives. Now they are shriveled little wrinkled raisins. Maybe some yogurt or probios is the next thing to try. I am pretty unhappy about her progress. It makes us question if this is her last pregnancy. But with Sparque kidded out, some of the milk pressure will be off and hopefully we can make some progress.

A Buck and a Doe

2010-04-20T04:13:00.000-07:00

Sparque final shared her secret with us.

Sparque was actually due on the 15th, so we were getting a little antsy to find out what was in store for us. After she was late a couple of days, my wife started reading all the goat books. One of them said call a vet if the goat is more than four days late as the kids can get to big to fit through the birth canal. That wasn't something I wanted to hear so I was glad that on the morning of the 5th day (roughly 12:23 AM) we had both kids out without calling on the services of a vet and very little reachen in. Keeping goats is already expensive, having a vet out for a delivery would pretty much spoil it.

So now we have two new kids to add to this years list, a buckling and a doeling. Alice and Alarm.

Essential farm equipment

2010-04-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

That's my sleeping system. I probably sleep out with the animals more than a lot of livestock owners. I do it when there is an impending event like a pregnancy, for human imprinting with young herd animals I intend to keep as breeding stock or if I suspect a predator is in the neighborhood. My dog really enjoys it, he likes camping out. Some of the goats enjoy it, they like to snuggle. And I enjoy it, I like the outdoors and I am comfortable.

One thing that makes a big difference is my sleeping system. Layer one is a reasonably waterproof sleeping bag cover. It's an old school nylon cover and it is cut to fit a large rectangular sleeping bag. It's job is to give an initial layer of protections and keep the rest of my system clean. The sleeping bag cover is big enough to fit my next element, a self inflating sleeping pad. The sleeping pad is a generous one, 72X 28 X 2". It's enough to absorb irregularities in the ground and give a thermal separation from the ground. Then I have a gortex bivy sac cut for a mummy sleeping bag. I have put this bivy sac to the test, and it really is waterproof. The final layer is a synthetic filled winter mummy sleeping bag. I figure the sleeping bag cover and bivy sac each give 5 to 10 degrees f added comfort range. The double layer also helps ensure waterproofness. And the sleeping bag cover helps keep my sleeping bag on the sleeping pad. My sleeping bag is not as warm as it was when I bought it ten years ago, but with this system, I am still comfortable done in the Zero F range. Down that low, I might also add some long underwear, though.

I have always enjoyed camping. I was in the BSA from the time I was eleven and camping was one of the highlights. Looking back on it now, though, I am surprised I wasn't deterred early on. I did not have very good equipment, especially compared to today's equipment. Those were the pre gortex years, when the only way to keep things from leaking was vinyl or liberal amounts of various sealants. A good backpack then was a boxy bunch of nylon stretched on an aluminum frame. Closed cell foam was the state of the art in sleeping pad technology. And A-frame pup tents were still the norm. There were a lot of cold, damp nights in those early years of my camping career.
My first sleeping bag probably had cotton fill and I had cotton long underwear. Leather boots were only water proof for about the first hour and nearly everything was a hand me down. But since I had never experienced better, I guess didn't feel bad. Having solid equipment now allows me to sleep out in any weather at the drop of a hat. And I do whether I need to or not. I actually enjoy the colder weather more. Insects bother me more than cold temps, I guess. And in extremely cold temps, it's easier to stay dry.

It's April, Remember?

2010-04-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

It's fun to camp, and Ruffles has been depressed since the delivery. Companionship seems to help. Well, companionship that doesn't eat her grain, anyway. It's a little tight in there for Ruffles, the kids and me, but Ruffles does like to snuggle. No, really.

So I have been sleeping out in the goat house. Last night it rained. A lot. And I was reminded I should have put a plastic liner under an old tarp like this. I had over estimated the water proofness of that blue tarp. I got dripped on all night. I contemplated going inside, but I was warm and dry inside my sleeping system, so I weathered it. In the morning I awoke to snow on the ground. Maybe I should have gone in.

The other morning I tore down half of the winter chicken house, flopped the panels over the fence and reassembled it as a two ended goat shelter. With this, I have two nursery shelters and a main shelter. We have a delivery due any moment and another at the end of the week. Pretty soon, Little, the whether, will be the only adult not nursing kids. In there is a bed of coarse wood chips and straw on top of that. It gets everybody up off the ground, keeping them warm and dry. Even the drips last night didn't really get the area wet. This morning I salvaged a piece of plastic from the chicken house and used it to line the tarp to stop the drip. I'll find out tonight how effective it is.

It has been really nice weather for more than a week. Into the seventies in early April.

The Sunny weather was helping Ruffles ward off the blues. I'll have to pay attention to her to get throuhg this wet weather.

All the best laid plans of mice and men

2010-04-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

...Are dashed by the relentless flow of nature.

That's Ruffles on top, her daughter Heddar below. They are both pregnant in the picture. Preggers as my wife might say. Ruffles has been ready to pop for a little while. As I alluded to before, I have been sleeping in the goat house for a while. As it turns out, I had the breeding date wrong. I was twelve days early. And it took me ten nights out in the goat house to go re check my notes. I started sleeping out in the goat house again as the new date approached. Another four nights. Mostly in the rain. As of this morning, no mucus plug, no nesting behavior, no braying, nothing. I checked again at about 10:30 AM, again nothing. I went out at just before noon to give the pregnant does their grain snack. From a distance Ruffles looked like she had some pink showing through the leg hair. "Does she have leg mites I didn't notice?" I thought to myself. Then I noticed the umbilical cord hanging down. Hmm, and umbilical cord, I wonder were that came from?....

After all those nights sleeping in the goat house. Mentally preparing myself for "Reachen In". Wondering if I had enough light out there. Trying to schedule my work around this unpredictable event. She went and had the kids without me. Two healthy doelings, just what we wanted. Ruffles is eight and we might only get one more pregnancy from her. She is by far the best producing doe and we were really hoping to have more does from her line. And we really wanted to get more does from her.

The doelings needed a little help finding and holding a teat. It doesn't help that Ruffles has not nursed kids before. In the past, we have always hand raised (bottle fed) Ruffles' kids. Part of the idea is the kids view the person who feeds them as a member of their herd, maybe their mother and are less skittish with them. And the Doe views the one milking them as their kid. Last year, with a different doe, we decided to try allowing the kids to nurse on the doe. We let the kids nurse freely for the first two weeks. After that, we separate the kids from the doe at night to allow her to build up some milk for a morning milking. Then the kids nurse during the day. At about two months, we separate the doe from the kids (which she was ever so grateful for). Allowing the Doe to nurse the Kids gets us off the hook for a lot of midnight feedings. It also gets the doe off the hook for an engorged udder for those first couple weeks where her production demands milking twice a day. I do have to work hard to get a good imprint with the kids since I am not bottle feeding them. I'll still sleep out in the goat house for a few more nights. But that makes it easy to ensure they are getting enough to eat and are staying warm at night. It also means we have to teach ruffles to be a good mother. She's never done it before, and so far, I am not so sure she is interested in learning. Sparky figured it out last year, so I imagine Ruffles will to.
Either that or we move back to the old model for her....

A little later the same day:

Ruffles wasn't real thrilled with this whole motherhood thing. I think I heard her say something about great grandmothers shouldn't have to breast feed. Or put up with infants. Here I am using my arms locked into a peice of stock panel to get her to hold still long enough for the kids to nurse. While I was doing it alone two hours later, I thought to myself, ya right, this is easier than bottle feeding... But the kids will be up and agile soon enough. They'll be running her ragged wanting to nurse.

Learn something new every day

2010-03-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

I got a chance to try something today.

When I bought my tractor, had a chain hook welded on the backside of the backhoe bucket. The hooks on the top lip of the FEL bucket get a lot of use. I might use them for picking up a large log or a round bale or pulling small stumps or anything else heavy. The Backhoe doesn't have the same kind of capacity as the FEL. It also has a lot of leverage on the tractor. So I am not going to pickup the kind of weight with the backhoe hooks as the FEL.

I have had the tractor for a while but I haven't had much use of that hook on the backhoe bucket and I was wondering if I ever would. I moved a big blower with it once and is was kind of handy as the blower was bulky.

The power company came by recently, or at least their tree contractors. They have been cutting trees under the lines across the road from us. It has been a windfall of wood. But a lot of it was down a significant embankment. I could have cut it in place but the slope wasn't a great place to cut and it was a lot of trips to carry it out as individual peices. So I used the backhoe and a chain to lift and pull the the logs out in reasonable lengths. The boom cylinder doesn't have the right leverage to lift a log, particularly with the dipper stick extended much. But there is a lot of power to pull something to the tractor. And when it is in close to the tractor, I can get the boom vertical and the dipper can lift the log, craning it. It was a nice way to recover these logs. The weren't real big, 12 to 18 inch diameters and 10 to 12 feet long. Using the backhoe was a lot more fun than lugging them up by hand.

I definitely could have done it by hand. And it took a while to get the backhoe out of winter storage and onto the tractor. In part I want to do it this way to try out craning with the backhoe. If I don't try something when it is relatively easy, I may not have the skills or experience to do it when it is a necessity.

Things are a bit on edge

2010-03-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting. Waiting for a new plow to arrive. Waiting for snow to melt. Waiting seeds to sprout. And most of all, waiting for a goat to pop.

I calculated our Doe goat Ruffles' due date as March 19th. Last time she was about 24 hours early and that matched previous owner's experience. To be safe, we have been prepared since the 16th or so.

When I have a goat due, I sleep out in the goat house. I should be able to check her condition before going to bed and decide if she might go before I get up, but she fooled us last time. That time at midnight I went to bed not seeing any of the "24 hour" signs. When I came out at 6 AM, she was down on the ground with a doeling sticking out of her back end showing the neck down to the doelings shoulders. Not a reassuring sight. If I had gotten up an hour later I am sure we would have lost the doeling, and maybe Ruffles, too.

Since we have so few births a year, every one is important to us. If we had lost Ruffles two years ago, we would have lost more than half our milk production and half of our genetic diversity. We also would have lost a years worth of breeding. Both Ruffles and her doeling are very important to us.

So for a week now, I have been sleeping in the goat house. It's reasonably comfortable. Although temps get down to 20f, I have a good sleeping bag, inner and outer bivy sacks and a thermorest. I am sleeping inside a dry shelter with three sides and a roof. The floor is a yeilding bed of straw and wood chips. My goats sleep there in much colder weather without complaint. There is the occasional goat attempting to snuggle up in the middle of the night, but who doesn't like to snuggle? But a week of checking on her every 2 hours during the day, sleeping out every night and needing to be prepared to intervene is starting to get old.

I am pretty sure about her due date. I kept the bucklings separate from the does during rut and only introduced them for supervised visits during the three days of each Doe's heat. So I was pretty sure who was breeding who when. It's 150 days from breeding to kidding, plus or minus a day. At least it has been till now.

The honest answer is we don't do this enough to say things are one way or another. We can only say what they were in the past. We may never get to a point where we can say "Wellll, on our farm, this is the way we do it" with any kind of a confident swagger. We'll probably never breed more than six Does. I don't think we have enough summer pasture for more of a breeding population. And since not every Doe breeds every year, it will take us a while to get to a dozen kiddings.

So, a week of this has me a little on edge. If not tonight, maybe tomorrow

Potential to rough the viewer

2010-03-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

These are our bucklings from April 2009. A pretty pair of boys. We kept them to breed in the fall. Keeping them into the winter costs a lot of hay, but having them to breed two of our does saves $100 in breeding fees.

Just a warning, not everyone is going to see the happy ending in all this.

Having dairy animals has certain realities. Chiefly, without a pregnancy there is no milk. And chances are, the progeny of that pregnancy doesn't have a long term place on the farm. So, from the day they were born, the day these knives got sharpened was coming.

I used a pistol for the actual deed. I have used other methods, and this was the first time I used a pistol, but the pistol is probably the best method for me. It has the downside of introducing lead shot into the carcass. But I am probably not dedicated enough to do anything with the brain anyway. I borrowed a semi auto ruger .22 target pistol that uses long rifle rounds. A pistol gave me a lot more freedom of movement than my rifle and it was nice knowing there would be an immediate second shot if I needed it. I didn't though, they both went down with one shot behind the ear each. I led them up to the arch with grain and they we eating a little grain treat when I killed them so there was never any stress. They were never conscious of anything being wrong.

I used the Arch of the Garden gate to hang and bleed out the carcass. Hanging for the skinning and rough cuts helps keep the meat clean. Most of the skinning I do with the mini chef knife looking knife. The blade length is good and it holds an edge well. The utility knife on the end is good for separating joints. It has a thick strong blade and the serrations go through cartilage nicely. Down at the house, most of the work is with the boning knife.

I did the skinning and the rough cuts with it hanging. That's a change from what I have done in the past and it worked out much better this way. It meant I could piece it into a clean bucket to carry it down to the house. Carrying down the whole carcass would have been awkward. I separated it into the four legs, two sides of ribs, neck roast, the hips and chops.

Down in the kitchen, I completely deboned it. Last time we cooked the meat on the bone. With the ribs it was a detractment from the meal trying to find the meat on the bone. It was a curry in a thick sauce. So this goat I deboned everything but the neck.

I was a little surprised in the yield. 28 lbs before I deboned it. Heck, it's not that much bigger than a good sized turkey. And I am pretty sure the live animal was close to 100 lbs. He was 11 months old. Not much in the way of fat, but that is what I would expect from a goat.

It's not a pleasant task, but a necessary one if we are going to continue to keep goats for Dairy.

Melting out

2010-03-12T05:07:00.000-08:00

We are well into the spring melt. Daytime temps are getting into the 50s and night time temps are in the 20s. We have melted out in areas that get good sun. Some years the shadowed areas might have snow until late May, but I don't think we will this year. It's been a light winter for us. We had warm temps into the middle of December and we are melting out in the begining of March. I like winter, really cold temps keep things dry and easy work. It's the in between times when the humidity comes up with the temperature and the mud thaws that feel uncomfortable. Humid air at 45 degrees feels a lot colder than dry air at 5 degrees. To me at least.

When the snow melts out, all the grass is layed down and with the foliage gone, it highlights all the short cuts we might have taken last fall. It's a good chance to find forgotten items before the rush of spring growth. It's easy for me to get motivated to clean things up after the winter low time.

I got the tractor out and turned the compost pile. I don't pay a lot of attenntion to the compost over the winter. But with the warmer temps, I wanted to get things moving along. Rollong the pile remixes the material with the compost organisms, airates it and moves the material that had been on th outside of the pile to the inside. This remixing puts the right pieces together for active decomposition back in the middle where it will have a chance to heat back up.

I have put a tarp over the north side of the pile. The north side doesn't get as much sun, the tarp will help keep it warm. It will also keep some of the spring rain off it. Rain will cool the pile and too much rain will slow down the decomp. Grabbing a handful of compost, I should be able to squeeze and see water glisten between my fingers. But water running when I squeeze signals too much water. Right now, I am most worried about too much water because it will cool the pile. As the spring warms up, I'll keep an eye on it. If the pile starts to get dry, I'll remove the tarp or make a double peak to form a V to catch and retain water in the pile. I did see some steam come off this pile, but most of the pile was pretty cool. I probably should have had the tarp on all winter. But I didn't have any tarps available earlier. But less than optimal decomp over the winter won't be that much of a problem. We won't need this compost until October or November, so there is plenty of time to bring it along.

Our other big pile that I started early last summer is pretty much ready now. It is well mixed and the bits have mostly broken down to unrecognizeable peices. The larger wood chips are the only thing still identifiable. When the market garden has dried out, we'll use this compost to build up the beds.

Another spring task is to deal with brush piles. We will probably burn the piles inside the market garden. The ones on the outside I am more like to take to my brush dump where I am letting it decompose on their own.

A neat log

2010-02-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

I found this when I was splitting wood for the kitchen fire.

Its a log quarter from a cherry, maybe twelve inches in diameter. I like the way the tree grew around the broken limb, completely encasing it. Even preserving it. The grain of the wood rippling and changing directions to get around the limb.

I saw another earlier in the season where a burrowing insect had used a dead limb to gain access to the heart wood. Or maybe it was the escape route. When I split the log, I could see the path regardless of direction.

There was an old oak out on the corner of the back yard. It was slowly falling to the ground of it's own accord. I wanted to put a fence nearby. I cut it for firewood so I would not have to worry about it falling on the fence. It was a venerable tree that had fallen on hard times. But it had been a member of the community. There were nails that had disappeared into the tree forty years ago. Maybe someones tree house, or a corner for a fence line. And long before those nails, someone had cared enough to trim the limbs near the ground. And like the cherry, those old limbs were grown in, deep inside that four foot diameter trunk. The swirls of grain made it hard to split.

So, back on the hom front

2010-01-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

On the cooperative household side of things, we had a very lean fall. For the first time in more than ten years we were actually empty for about a month. The cooperative household can be as much as 25% of our cash flow, so being empty put quite a dent in our financials.

And when things are lean, I have to admit I am willing to be more flexible than I would otherwise. Mostly that means we have been willing to work with shorter terms than I have in the past. In our state, there is a duration dividing line between places of accommodation (hotels) and real estate, and we make sure to structure what we have to offer as real estate rental, not a hotel. Generally it has not been an issue in the past. Three months has been about the shortest period we have worked with. But with tenants in short supply we have been reduced to the legal limit recently. So we have had a cop who was new to the area and his permanent digs weren't available yet, a research student from Chicago, A med student doing a rotation at the local teaching hospital, an electrician on temporary assignment and next up a Physical Therapist doing a stint at a nearby hospital.

Having this much turnover is a little taxing. Doing reference checks and interviews easily eats a day. And for every one we get to the point of doing references check, we consider/interview another ten. Training a tenant is also part of the over head. Cutting the duration of stay by a third triples the overhead efforts to turn over new tenants. It also triples the losses due to gaps between tenants.

Short duration has been a choice that worked for us in the past. Short term people come with less baggage. Their foibles are easier to endure because of the limited exposure. Temporary situations like ours can be difficult to find, so people who need it are willing to consider the conditions we place on it. And it's nice to have fresh faces cropping up from time to time.

So, accepting less than optimal terms in times of trial is something we do to endure until things are better.

Food Snoot

2010-01-24T19:28:00.000-08:00

A friend has rescued me. Well, thrown me a lifeline, anyway. You know, one of those donut floating things. Well, it's better than drowning, really!

I've been through two or three gallons of feedlot milk. I even mistakenly bought 1% milk. Friends have come to my rescue with a shipment of milk from their goats. It has been great to have real milk in the house again. I had an image in my head that I would quit drinking milk when I dried off the goats. But quitting a forty year habit has proven difficult. Even just until Ruffles kids in March.

This is kind of a good segue for something I have been thinking about for a while. Over the past 10 years I have become snooty about food. Ten years ago I felt pretty superior about cooking a dinner that was a supermarket turkey, store bought potatoes, packaged stuffing. Today, I turn up my nose at eggs that didn't come from my yard, I feel bad about feeding my goats grain from away. My wife and I talk behind our friends backs about their shopping habits. We now sell food and produce from our farm. And my eating habits have truly changed.

It's probably been a little annoying for my friends who are ahead of me on this curve. Urgently emailing them at all hours of the night with some food related tidbit of news that they have known about for years. I appreciate their forbearance in these matters.

Flat on my back

2010-01-13T19:54:00.000-08:00

I was flat on my back for a while. My wife hurt hers maybe two weeks earlier. Nothing dramatic, I leaned too far out lifting the ice chains onto the tractor wheel. A strain. But it hasn't been fun. And I am getting to try out the insurance I have been paying for all these years. This is the first time I have gotten more than a tetanus booster. Can't say I am impressed with the insurance either.

Since all lifting is out for at least another week, we went ahead and dried off the goats a month early. I am not happy about that, I was hoping I had the pregnancies timed right so the first doe would kid about the time I dried off the last one.

We have eked along with the help of a friend. She was already staying with us while between gigs. She is the stalwart type and has been a great help, keeping the animals watered and schlepping wood. If you try sometimes, you get what you need...

Last pint of milk for our goats' 2009 lactation cycle

Changes in time

2009-12-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

For the past nine months or so I have been periodically taking a series of photos and assembling them into panoramas from one location near where we have been developing our market garden. As is always with these time stop projects, I wish I had thought to start sooner and had captured more of the changes. But we have to start somewhere.

We started with an open field that had some trees and brush grown up in it.

My trailer is a fairweather friend

2009-12-08T19:28:00.000-08:00

I think I over did using my trailer by one day this year.

I have a smallish 5X10 flat bed trailer that I use to to move things around with. It's a road trailer, single axle and it's rated for 3800 plus 800 on the tongue. It's not big enough to move my tractor with. But it can haul about 5 yards of horse manure, maybe seven yards of wood chips. It can hold as much as I want to haul with my two wheel drive 92 GMC van.

I have been making regular runs to a horse farm about ten miles away, building up a serious pile of poo. I figured I was about done with manure for the year, but I wanted to do one more run. I wanted to cover up the goat manure I got a week ago and I wanted to make one more dent in the horse farm's pile. It's good for them, saves renting a truck or paying for hauling to get rid of it. And it's good for us, we need a lot of organic material to incorporate into our silt and sand soil.

I have been pretty spoiled with the weather. Fifties into December. Over the weekend, we just had our first snow that really stuck. I intentionally waited a couple of days to be sure the roads would be clear. When I spoke to the horse farm this morning he threw in an aside, be carfully of the downhills, there might be some ice... But it was just an aside. I figured he meant some drainage water had frozen over night.

When I got there, the farm driveway looked fine, wet gravel. It winds in, mostly down hill, until the end, where there is a little rise. But as soon as we got onto the north side of the hill, it was all solid snow packed into ice. And somehow I didn't have enough momentum at the end and I started spining short of the top. And with the trailer, there was no faking it by hitting the gas and hoping you dig in. The problem got trickier, not only could I not get up the hill, I couldn't hold where I was, I started sliding backwards. Behind me, there was a pond on the north side and a ravine on the south. The road was basically a dam that formed the pond. And I had a choice of brakes or stearing. Pretty soon, I had the trailer jacknifed and was headed for the ravine. A distinctly unpleasant prospect. In retrospect, the trailer saved me, as the ravine only got steeper. The trailer draging like that is what brought me to a stop. And even if I had manged to make it into the farm without event, I never would have made it out. The hill is twice as long and high going out.

I bent the step bumper and tweeked the bumper hitch pretty good. Other than that, I think my pride is the only thing that really suffered. Getting pulled out of the ditch is embarassing. But I stilled managed to get two loads of manure home, about 10 yards. And my pile is now full. No more manure runs till dry weather in the spring.

Goat Latte

2009-11-03T06:57:00.000-08:00

I like a goat latte in the morning. Here's a video a friend of mine made that morning:

Goat Latte by WannBee Farm Productions

Having goats means milking every day, every day. It's an obligation, but it has its perks. Bruce, note the Canyon REO cup. When in Flagstaff, we use Canyon REO as our preffered outfitter. That cup is from a trip in 2000, I think. Damn fine cup, for the price.

I like to milk in the morning. We have tried it several ways, but mornings work best for me. I generally get up, put coffee in the press to steep, go out and feed the chickens. When I come back in I have fresh coffee to take up to the field when I milk the goats. While I am there, it's nice to get a little extra milk, blood warm, and foam to boot. Heddar doe doesn't seem to mind.

And if I am lucky, I get a few minutes to sit and enjoy the view from the milk house.

Sung to the tune of Grandmas Feather bed

2009-10-20T13:59:00.001-07:00

"Oh, It was 8 feet wide and fifteen long

Sleek as a big ol' brick

Made from the steel of four dump trucks

Took a whole pitt crew to make her tick

We didn't get very far

But we had a lot of fun

In the back of CJs chevy van"

I have to apologize to Bruce King. I recently dismissed his vehicle troubles saying I had never had a starter go completely bad on me. It wasn't fair, as it's not like I have never had one fail to operate and I have replaced enough so I have a small cache of them in the barn. Instead, it is more accurate that I have been foolish enough to run them longer than I should by keeping a hammer handy but still managed to always replaced them before I got completely stranded without tools.

In retribution for my flippant remarks, I had to replace one I could not revive. And to be sure I learned my lesson, I had to replace this one twice as I foolishly replaced it with one from the barn first. I should know better than to try to reuse a starter. Of any component, starters suffer more than most from inactivity and degrade quickly on a vehicle or not.

Bruce, my apologies.

Cylon Detector

2009-10-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

I got to use my cylon detector today

Actually, it is a mold for making a concrete counter weight for my tractor. It helps the tractor by preventing a heavy weight lifted on the bucket arms from lifting the rear tires off the ground. Actually, hopefully, it is heavy enough to transfer some of the weight from the front axle to the rear. The rear of the tractor can handle a lot more weight than the front. It seems odd that the heavy lifting arms are on the front...

The block of cement fits into the three point hitch on the back of the tractor. I used a 3ph draw bar with a bumper hitch mounted on it to attach the weight to the tractor.

The Draw bar and hitch fit into the cavity in the bottom of the block. There is a pair of eight inch long 3/4" bolts embedded in the block that hold it all together.

On the front, there is a receiving hole for the top link.

I also molded a V of rebar into the opposite face as a lifting eye. I am not convinced I embedded it far enough, though, so I haven't used that to lift the block. It makes a great place to hook the trailer's safety chains, though.

I made the counter weight because I was often unloading and moving around heavy bins of material from my trailer. I use a flatbed 5 X 10 trailer for picking up loads of manure and wood chips. Since I use the tractor to get the trailer up into the field where the composting is, I need easy access to to a trailer hitch. If I just need ballast and there weren't the complication of pulling the trailer, I could have just used my box blade as a counter weight. But switching between my trailer hitch and box blade chews up a lot of time. With my new counter weight I can tow the trailer without taking it off. It also means I have the counter weight on when I use the tractor to go across the way to the mill and pickup wood chips. I don't really need the counter weight on for loader work, as I have loaded rear tires. But it helps make the tractor more stable.

And when I am unloading the bins it really makes a difference. Each bin holds three or four bucket loads of material. Even though the bins are far lighter than the bucket, the combined weight of material and bin is enough tip the balance of the tractor. And the bins allow the weight to be further from the front axle, giving it more leverage. It isn't safe, and it isn't good for the tractor. To date I had the choice of partially unloading the bins to keep them light enough or taking the time to switch implements on the 3ph. The new regime is a big improvement.

I still have some work to do. This counter weight is smaller than I really want. It took six ninety pound bags of concrete, so about 540 pounds. I really want a little more than one thousand pounds. The plan is to make a second L shaped block. The L will be inverted and hook onto the original block. That is why there is a lip on the back front of this one. I want to be able to store the next one in a position so I can back up to it slip this one under it and pick it up, doubling my counter weight. That way, I have a reasonable counter weight for loader work and a heavy one for bigger jobs that is quick on and off.

There are a couple things I wish I had done differently. I should have embedded one and better yet two 5/8s rebar rods across the block, sticking out about three inches on each side. These would have allowed me to pickup the block with the 3 ph when it is sitting on the ground. As it is, I will need to set it down on something about twelve inches tall in order to pick it up with the 3 ph. I would also have liked to have a second lifting eye on the back and another on the top. And my top link connection is a little hokey. It is two pieces of pipe embedded in the concrete with rebar around it. It seemed like a good idea at he time, but the pipes need to be longer and deeper in the concrete. I also should have used a concrete vibrator. I have some voids. And I could have done the reliefs for the 3 ph draft arms better. All of these things I thought of right after I poured the concrete.

Oh ya, and I should have made a relief for where the trailer side of th hitch is. There is technically enough room there, but I nudge the block with the trailer almost every time I take it off.

Changing the oil in my tractor's transmission

2009-10-07T18:44:00.001-07:00

Now, some people might question whether changing the transmission oil in my tractor belongs on a blog about the ins and outs of running a cooperative household. I am going to say it does on mine. Things at the cooperative household have been slow lately. Our last tenant moved out today, and as yet I don't have anyone lined up for one of the three available rooms. And when things are slow, you get other things done. At the moment, it is change the oil in the tractor.

I am changing the oil a little early because I have noticed the power steering has not been as responsive as I want it to be. On my tractor, the steering is provided by a complex set of valves attached to the steering wheel supplying hydraulic pressure to a cylinder that changes the direction of the tires. Think of it that as the steering wheel turns it "pumps" the hydraulic fluid to push the tires to a new orientation. This activity is dependant on the high pressure hydraulic flow from the tractor engine. Without the hydraulic pressure, it is very difficult to effect a turn. Lately I have been noticing a hesitation in my steering in certain conditions. After ruling out some other possibilities I got to the point of ensuring proper hydraulic oil supply to the pump. It could be a blocked filter or pickup screen. To remove and clean the pickup screen, the entire hydraulic sump needs to be drained.

The sump holds about 9.6 gallons of hydraulic oil according to the manual. It took a long time for it to drain. I had warmed up the tractor to make the fluid less viscous. I opened the fill cap to prevent suction from building up. It still took more than ten minutes for a 1/2 inch stream of oil to drain out. Time for me to go back to the barn, get other tools and get set up for the next step.

As long as I am draining the oil, I am far enough along in this maintenance period that I am doing the scheduled transmission maintenance. Since I was already cleaning the pickup screen and changing the filter, all I had to do in addition was clean the inline screen and change the oil. The inline the screen is that brass colored object amidst the black. It's not nearly as big as the pickup screen. From the pluming it looks like it screens the oil as it returns from the oil intercooler up near the radiator.

That's the inline screen disassembled. Pretty clean. That's good, because any contamination that gets this far has traveled through the high pressure side of the hydraulics. Anything other than hydraulic oil oil in there causes damage.

This is the pickup screen as I pulled it out. It is basically a tube with many 1/8 inch holes covered with a corrugated fine mesh screen. The pickup screens job is to catch large particles before they get to the pumps and the high pressure side.

That corkscrew of metal is a chip left from manufacture. There are a lot of gears and other machined parts inside the transmission and some of the machining may occur after it is assembled which are a source of chips.

This is the pickup screen as I pulled it out of the transmission. There was a small amount of chips and other detritus on the screen, but I would be surprised if it was significantly blocked. I cleaned it, replaced it in the transmission, changed the filter and re-assembled the plumbing. This wasn't a difficult project. It did involve some large wrenches and more force than I am generally accustomed to. And problem solving. The manual described this maintenance procedure in a fourteen point procedure. I think it took me three hours to finish that procedure.

There's been no recurrence of the steering issue or leaks in the hydraulics. I might not be fast, but I am finished.

Turkeys, a work in progress

2009-10-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

These are our turkeys on graduation day. This was their first day on grass back in June. And they do like it. They immediately began eating the weeds.

This guy barely escaped the knife today. He was in the group segregated for slaughter today, but some how he slipped out of the enclosure.

My wife and I have an arrangement. She does the plucking, I do the cutting.

We slaughtered one turkey about two weeks ago as a trial. To see what our turkeys were up to in terms of weight. How they would cook up. From that feedback we decided they could use more calories to convert to fat but they were up to size. Today we slaughtered three more. Two for our annual harvest party and one for my folks for Thanksgiving.

These are the necks, livers, hearts and gizzards. They will go into the giblet gravy. We ended up with about 50 lbs of turkey between the three of them.

And enough snacks to last Baloo for a while.

Field Milkhouse

2009-09-12T20:12:00.001-07:00

That's our field milk house.

For a while in the spring I was walking the does up and down from the backfield to the barn for milkings. It was a pain, and invited disaster. It was a time consuming, we had to go by plants the goats liked but we didn't want them to eat and there was opportunity for mishap at every turn. There is a better way.

So I brought the milking stanchion up to the backfield and put it under a tarp covered stock panel arch. It gave me a place to hang the scale, store milking supplies and keep everything dry.

To improve on that, I built the field milk house. It's a hemlock deck (locally sawn, hemlocks the best choice available from my rough sawn guy). It has uprights for attaching the arch and is built on skids so I can pick up the whole thing on my loader forks, carry it to a new location and set it down. The skids also keep the rest of it out of the dirt so it will last longer.

It is certainly nice bringing the house to the animals instead of the other way around. Much faster and more productive. And it gives me a dry place to store nik nacs in the field. I moved it this afternoon for the first time. As advertised, slid under it with the forks, lift and carry.

in the whirlwind

2009-09-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

The wood is down at the house, split and piled, waiting to stack. At least it's now under cover.

The Rice Paddy has it's stock panel cover to keep it warm into the early fall for a little more growing and maturing. We probably won't eat any rice out of it this year, but we will harvest enough seed to start our One Hundred plants for next year. One hundred plants will fill the rice Paddy and that should give us some eating rice for next falls Harvest Festival dinner.

The mill across the way was doing whatever it is they do to produce the premier bedding shavings. Most of the time we get the rough chips from the de-barker, three inch and longer wood fragments. They are usable, but the shavings I got this weekend are a much more palatable option.

Our hay came in this weekend, also. We have a fair amount left from last year still. Good thing, as we can't get any alfalfa this year. And we weren't sure to get any grass hay either. It's been so wet, there's been no cutting going on until the last two weeks. The square bales are in the barn and we are trying out some dry unwrapped round bale this fall. The round bales are new to us and it took a couple of tries. The first two I got were plastic wrapped and too wet for goats. The hay ferments in the wrapped bale and there is too much risk of lysteriosis. The other thing about round bales is we don't have a barn to store them in. They are too big for me to get into the loft like we do the square bales. So we will station them in the back field and put an Arch over them to feed them through the fall. When real winter comes, we'll be bringing the goats closer to the house.

Today was chicken butchering day. We have been saying we wanted to get to it for at least two weeks now. Sometimes the que is that long.

It's been a busy end of summer, making up for lost time while trying get the usual stuff done.

Underway

2009-08-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

I spent the day cutting and splitting wood. I should have done this three months ago. I started to, but I got side tracked by the fence and then there was temporary goat fence to deal with. Then it got hot. And there's always the other things that need to be done.

I got around to it today, though. I am going to feel it day after tomorrow, too. But it's important to get it done. I've put it off too long already and I am little worried it won't be well seasoned. Less than dry wood will burn with less heat for the house as all that moisture goes up the chimney as water vapor.

I got about half of the wood down to the house. I am processing as much as possible away from the house. It's a pain to clean up all the leavings. I also feel that it attracts insects to the proximity of the house. I have a wooden house, so I avoid enticing wood parasites closer. I also went to a workshop for on farm composting. One of their suggestions was that hardwood bark is an excellent source of the fungus spores necessary for good decomposition. So I am planning to split the wood where I compost and incorporate it into my next compost pile.

Half of what we need is at the house. The rest is down and cut waiting to be split. It isn't stacked yet, but it is under cover. It is underway.

Fence restrung

2009-08-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

This is our cover crop of field peas tilled in. That mass on the left is the section we planted late. They weren't as dry and got caught up in the tiller tight. there was a lot of yanking and pulling, a certain amount of cussin' and some knife work.

To get at the peas, I had to unstring the fence. I had foreseen this when I built the fence, so I put loops on each fence wire. The loops allow me to attach a ratchet strap and keep the rest of the fence line tight while I put down this end. It makes getting the fence backup a lot easier. This way I only have to pull out the sag from between two posts to get it threaded into the tensioner. For the wire at the eight foot level, it makes a big difference.

I'll probably need to drop this fence three or four times a year so I can get in and till, spread compost, etc. There is a tractor path that goes down the middle and has a cross in the middle. But during the growing season, it's tight to get in there and I would have had to cross active beds to get to the field peas.

My wife planted field peas to start amending the soil. This is our first year growing in the new big garden. The soil is not great, silty sand. We're working hard to amend it, the peas will add organic material and nitrogen. We'll also be spreading composted manure later this year.

Fencing

2009-07-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

This morning I went out to milk and found these sumacs laying on the fence and blocking the path. It was the second time this weekend.

The fence was loaded pretty good, at least half way to the ground and very tight. It took a while to cut through with a bow saw and a pair of loppers. By the time I was done, the fence had regained it's line. Gotta love high tension fence and glad I put springs on it.

I have been dealing with fencing a lot lately.

Last year we enlarged our number of paddocks so we could have better rotation for parasite management. I moved the goats up to the backfield a couple of weeks ago. Now my push is to keep enough browse fenced in ahead of them. I am trying to move away from hay and more towards pasture only for the growing season.

This spring I fenced the new garden plot with the super deer fence. It is in the middle of th new goat pasture. Half of the garden is grown up with brush, poplar and small pines. Great browse for goats. So for the last month I have been browsing the goats inside the deer fence on the undeveloped half of the garden. But now that I am starting to use areas outside the deer fence, keeping ahead of the goats with new fence is challenging. I have a threefold goal of re-establishing old fence lines, keeping the goats fed and keeping the goats moving enough so I am not recycling pasture more than every four months. Someday, the goal is to have a lower perimeter fence forming a ring of goat pasture around the garden. But it won't happen all at once. For now, I am planting posts where I can and cutting through a lot of honeysuckle. After the goats have chewed their way through it will be easier to see the lay of the land and decide on the permanent fence line.

I also have two groups of goats to deal with. The Does and the Bucklings. Since I am keeping the Bucklings intact, it's important they are separate. Wouldn't want any hanky panky going on prematurely.

It took me a while, but I think I have finally worked out a cycle I think will work and am putting together the infrastructure to make it happen. I want the Does to see the pasture first and get the choicest bits. Then rest it for a week before I turn the Bucklings in to clean it up. That way I always keep a double fence between the Does and the Bucklings, no piece of ground sees animals for more than four weeks in four months, and I can keep a portable milking hut in the resting pasture. It beats moving the does back and forth from the backfield to the milking parlor at the back of the barn. The portable milking hut in the resting paddock between the Bucks and the Does was the key.

At present, I am just using three strands of poly wire to keep the goats in. Is nice because it is easy to work with, coils easily and doesn't require any tools. Also, a simple post in a reasonable hole for corner posts and fiber glass rods as line posts on long runs is all it requires to stay up. No need for corner bracing or getting elaborate. Sometimes I find the Bucklings need the extra convincing of a fourth wire, but that's not really a big deal. I hear a lot of horror stories about people unable to contain their goats. With our Saanens, I just don't see it. About the worst thing they do is play hard to get when it's time to put on a lead.

In the future, I would like to put up a 5 wire high tension fence around the entire goat fence. That way I could section for paddocks simply by stretching poly wire between the outer perimeter fence and the inner deer fence around the garden. I like the high tension smooth steel wire for permanent fencing. It is a significant physical barrier on it's own. But backed up with the fence charger, it is very convincing to those I want to keep in and those who should stay out. It isn't hard to string and I can take it down if I feel the need. If I turn of the charger, it isn't menacing to those who know it is off. And it takes a beating.

CPS Erection

2009-07-07T12:48:00.000-07:00

I really like cattle Panel structures. We use them for green houses, animal shelters and storage buildings. CPS structures are robust, inexpensive, simple to erect, flexible and reusable. This is a pretty good example. These materials were a wood shed over the winter, a shelter for young kids this spring, a tool shed and now an on site milking shed in our new pasture away from the house. In about an hour today, by myself I disassembled it, hand carried it to a new location, sited and re-erected it all with just a sledge hammer to drive the stakes.

This shelter consists of one 16 foot by 52 inch panel that I bend into a U six feet tall and eight feet wide. I used an eight foot section for the back wall. There is a tarp over the top with bail ties to hold it on. Two stakes anchor it to the ground. That's about $45 worth of cattle panel and $5 worth of tarp. If I wanted a larger structure, I would add successive panels, each adding about four feet to the length. The back wall is not strictly necessary, but I had the panel available and it is a convenient way to make the structure resilient. The tarp will last about a year, the cattle panel I expect to last ten or more years. The stakes and the bail ties are leftovers from previous uses.

To move the existing structure, I just untie the tarp and remove the back wall

Remove the stakes and tip the arched panel on it's side.

I folded up the tarp and stacked it with the back wall on the main panel. I lashed the stakes onto the bottom of main panel to make skids so I wouldn't scrape the galvanized coating off. Then I simply dragged it to the new location, maybe 500 feet away, up a hill and into the new pasture.

In the new location, I erected the arch, lashed the back wall on and staked down the front opening.

Stretching the tarp over it and tying it down finished it. Under an hour and nothing more complicated than a lashing. It will give us a sun shelter for the goats in their new pasture. When the goats move on to their next paddock it will become a milking shed. After that, the sky's the limit.

A brown van will haul a ton of poop

2009-06-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

My ugly brown $450 van brought home another load of manure. This is a load of horse manure, a mix of horse apples and sawdust. I don't have much of an estimate but am pretty sure it is in excess of 3000 lbs of material. For Jeff, we'll just round it off to a ton of poop.

Last year I got a five by ten flatbed trailer from a friend. It has stake rack sides, about 36 inches tall. I can hold about five and a half yards if I can handle the weight. That's a lot of poop to pitch by hand, though. Last fall I built a pair of bins on pallets so I could lift the poop out of the trailer with the forks on my tractor. The bins are about 5 x 5 and four feet high. The bins do make unloading the trailer lot easier. But with bins that large, it's not hard to over load the tractor. It's not so much the actual weight as it is the distance of the center of mass from the front axle. The bins allow the center of mass to be a lot further out, giving it more leverage. So there is still a lot of hand work getting enough compost out of the bins so I can safely move the bins with the tractor. It's still worth using the bins because the tractor allows me to stack the compost much higher than I could reasonably by hand.

It is nice having these big bins for materials that I can handle in or near full bins worth. The debarker chips from the saw mill across the way are a good example. But I am toying with making some smaller pallet bins for denser materials. If I cut the bin depth by a third I could handle them with less hand work. But then I would need a place to keep the bins I am not using. And unloading three bins is significantly more difficult than two because it requires a different approach angle. I am waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Turkey Poults

2009-06-19T07:42:00.001-07:00

These are our newest addition, turkey poults. It is always a struggle to get a local turkey in the fall. They are in short supply and expensive. Last year they were between three and four dollars a pound. That makes a good sized bird as much as $80, which is getting too expensive for us. We like turkey and like to cook several between October and March, for holiday meals and family gatherings. Turkey's are a great way to put on a big pleasant meal. Turkey's at the supermarket are often cheap around Thanksgiving, but now that they are explicitly marked as a product of US / Canada / Mexico, I can no longer buy them in good conscience. It was bad enough knowing they were feed lot / poultry barn birds. Now that they might be foreign made industrial ag animals, it's just too much.

So, this year, we are trying raising our own birds. It's not a big difference in cost over buying a local organic bird since we are feeding grain. The ten poults were about $50, 50 lbs of grain is about $10, even our inexpensive stock panel housing costs money and the opportunity cost of choosing to spend our time raising turkeys instead of something else. We are starting with ten with the hope of getting at least six birds out of the season. Since we don't know a lot about turkey's I wouldn't be surprised if we have some losses.

These are broad breasted birds, bred for more breast meat. Bronze and Polish White's. Heritage breeds were not as readily available and after plucking Guineas, I was willing to accept the broad breasted birds. Maybe we'll try heritage breeds in the future for their ability to reproduce. But we'll start with these and see how it goes.

Lend a tool program

2009-06-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

That's a front wheel spindle on my new to me $450 van. The van is a 1991 GMC Vandura 3500 series 1 ton van. When I bought the van, I could tell from the steering there was an issue in the front end, so I wasn't surprised when the inspection turned up a loose ball joint. I have done plenty of tie rod ends over the years, but this was the first time I tackled a ball joint.

It wasn't easy.

The ball joint allows the steering knuckle to be attached to the upper and lower control arms and allows that whole assembly to flex while keeping the tire in a vertical position. That allows the tire to follow the road surface with some independence from the vehicle body.

The ball joint is connected to the steering knuckle by a tapered rod. Time and function tend to lock the tapered rod in it's socket and it takes a fair amount of force to get them apart. The bottom of the ball joint is a press fit into the lower control arm.

I had to buy a ball joint separator, but I did manage to get the tapered end of the ball joint out of the steering knuckle. But in doing so, I buggered the threads for the nut on top. That meant I could not reassemble the joint and move the van. And this became a problem because I couldn't get the press fit end out of the lower control arm. I use a trick using the a jack and the weight of the van to separate tie rod ends, but that wouldn't work in this situation. I worked on it off and on for three days but was unable to get the ball joint off the lower control arm. This was a big problem because in order to get the van to a mechanic to have the job completed would now require a tow truck. So on top of wasting my own time, paying to get the job done, paying for the tow, the mechanic might have given me a hard time about using the part I had bought ($70). Mechanics make part of their living on the market on parts and the labor rate for installing customer provided parts is usually punitive. I fretted about this all weekend, but after one last attempt on Monday morning to get it done, I was convinced I couldn't do it and I called the mechanic to make arrangements. But they were not open, I always forget they are closed Mondays. With the extra night to think about it, I decided to try getting a ball joint press through one of these lone a tool programs several of the national chain auto parts stores provide.

I called around and Advanced Auto Parts and Auto Zone both have this program. Auto Zone was the only one with the tool I needed available, though. The way Auto Zone's program works is you can come in and buy the tool, use it and bring it back for a refund of the purchase price. And they didn't even give me a hard time about not buying a ball joint. I took the tool home, used it and brought back a week later and they politely credited my account. There were no fees and no hassles. I was really impressed that they are willing to accept such an expensive tool back like this.

Not everything went perfectly, though. The press is a large arbor and a threaded rod like a big C clamp. There are various cups and adapters to make get allow the clearance to push the ball joint out. Unfortunately, the arbor was not wide enough to get the ball joint of my 1 ton van into it. I had to Jerry rig it a little and I wasn't able to use a straight line push. But I eventually found a way to do it. Pushing the new ball joint in had similar challenges, but I managed it.

So, I am giving Auto Zone a plug here for providing the lend a tool program. It saved me a lot of money getting the van towed to a mechanic to have the job finished. I was a lot happier with myself after getting it all back together than I was when I was contemplating getting the van towed. I still have more work to do on the van but it has already pulled home more $ in composted manure than I paid for it.

That aint no goat

2009-05-19T16:29:00.001-07:00

That aint no goat. That there is the proverbial north end of a southbound moose. It waltzed by early one morning. It's the first moose I have seen in our neighborhood. Ever. My next door neighbor said later that day he also saw a bear take the same path. Another first. My wife and I decided it portends the end of the world as we know it. Que REM.

Setting Posts with the Tractor

2009-05-15T18:24:00.001-07:00

I had some big posts to put up, so I used the tractor...

I was putting up the posts for the deer fence around our new garden in the back field.
Some of the posts were pretty big.

Usually, I use my post hole auger to put in posts. Our land is relatively rock free, mostly sand and clay. So the auger makes a neat hole as deep as I can go with the handle. I can do a little more than 40" with this bar. The bar can be threaded out of the of the head and an extension added. But the hole is only 8 - 12" in diameter. Not big enough for the posts I am working with.

I wanted a tall fence, about 8 feet to keep the deer out. I don't have any cedar on my land but I can get nice 8 foot cedar posts for as little as $6. But posts long enough for an eight foot fence start to get a little pricey, if I can get them at all. But I can cut over sized posts from my own land. And I can get them in any length I want. They might not last as long as cedar, but that's why I cut them over sized. I will use increased girth to make up for inadequate material.
With such big posts, I had to cheat and use the tractor to move them, set them and dig the holes. It was good practice with the backhoe, though. I got good at digging deep without making a wide hole. Some of the holes were as much as seven feet deep. I would get as deep as I could staying narrow with the backhoe and then finish with a shovel. Since I was still making a sizable hole, I put in a footer log at or near the bottom. That and a log buried close to the surface on the opposite side give the post extra resistance to tipping under the tension of the fence.

I like to make corner posts with an outrigger, horizontal and a diagonal brace in each direction the fence goes around the post. This kind of bracing can be done without the diagonal brace using a tension cable instead, but I prefer to use wood under compression.

I notched the posts and used 1/2" rebar to pin them. My goal is to make sure the diagonal brace starts out under compression before I string the fence. After I assembled the diagonal brace and attached the horizontal to the main post I used a crude windlass to winch the outrigger post into the notch of the horizontal. I cut the notch in the horizontal about 2" short so the outrigger is drawn in, putting the diagonal under compression.

It was fun working with these larger timbers. I got a lot of experience making notches with a chainsaw. But they were heavy enough that I had to figure out some mechanical helpers to help during assembly. Things like using the flat webbing to suspend the diagonal brace while I scribed the angle for the end cuts or fitted the pins.

Over all, I am happy with these corner posts. I learned a lot putting them up. They are different and significantly bigger than ones I have put up before. So there are plenty of things I did one way on the first one but learned to do better before I got to the last one. But the are all rock steady. Standing on top of one gives a nice view of the garden area. There is a lot of mass in the posts and I was careful to get them tight. Now I need to string the wire.

As Good as it gets

2009-05-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

In the movie, As good as it gets, Jack Nicholson's character, Melvin Udyll, is an obnoxious obsessive compulsive man who has fallen in love with his waitress Carol, played by Helen Hunt. At one point, Melvin is trying to give Carol compliment. He tells her a long rambling story about how he hates to take his medication but he has decided to take it. She points out that in general, a compliment has something to do with the person being complimented. And he says something to the effect of oh, it's all about you. I am taking my medication because you make me want to be a better man.

I was working on a deer fence for the new garden in the backfield this morning. The corner posts for this fence are of absurd proportions, 18" diameter posts, 9" diameter cross members and horizontals. They are that big because I wanted to use wood I could cut on my land but I don't have any cedar. So I am going with over sized posts to makeup for lack of rot resistance. While I was notching these over sized members I thought about how a couple of years ago I never would have managed to tackle a project of this size and scope. Before about four years ago, I was too wrapped up my hardcore whitewater paddling career and riding around on my motorcycle to take on something like this. To prove it, for nearly ten years, I had a kitchen that I had torn apart but never gotten operational again. When I bought this house, I had two kitchens and I thought that summer I would renovate the one in the Elle. I disconnected the plumbing. I took the cabinets off the walls. Then the project sat idle for nearly ten years while I was busy doing other things. I did about the same thing with the bathroom in the Elle, tearing it down to the studs and the floor joists then getting distracted for years.

Working on that corner post this morning, I realized that my wife has been a significant motivator in my taking on these big projects and pushing them to a point of functionality even if not complete. When my wife moved and our son was born, I re-tackled the kitchen and bathroom projects. This spring, we began converting a half acre of brush filled pasture into a giant garden. Around that garden I am building a eight foot high deer fence. I doubt I would have tackled any of these things while I was pursuing the perfect wave.

My wife makes me want to be a better man.

Happy Mother's day, Smoochie.

I saw something new today

2009-04-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

That's a string of rail cars carrying continuous rails. The track worker I talked to said they are as much as 1600 feet long. They were delivering one near my house and then moving south to deliver them to various locations in the stat. The string of cars goes on out of sight. I have lived here for more than ten years with the railroad across the street, but I have never seen a load of rails like this before.

I am doing my part

2009-04-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

I just bought a GM vehicle. I am doing my part to prop up the US economy.

So what if I only paid $450 and GM lost interest in this particular vehicle about seven years ago.

I just acquired a different van. When I say Van, I mean a full size GM van of the G series. I have had a long string of them. This is my ninth, I think. I have a definite pattern. When I find my previous van is faltering for the last time, I look around for a high mileage business van being sold at a loss. I generally buy a van at around 150K miles. At the time of purchase it needs to be ready to pass inspection, have a strong running engine and no obvious mechanical problems I can't fix in my driveway. The previous owner has already gotten as much use as they anticipated from the van. Every thing I do with it is bonus. It's kind of like recycling, but better since my way doesn't require tearing it apart and working to turn it into something else. The color is unimportant.

I was being facetious. My wife might correct me and say "You were trying to be facetious".

I think any vehicle that is running, road worthy and inspectable is worth at least $500. I think I have paid as little as $300 and as much as $3000. Both of those extremes ended up being mistakes. On that $300 one I did extensive body repairs, painted it and then hit a deer. After I replaced the radiator the main bearing on the engine went. I owned it less than eight months. The $3000 one I bought from a used car salesman, the only and last time I'll do that. The used car guy lied about repairs he had done and did not disclose the extensive electrical problems in the van. That and I found shovelfuls of gravel in the door cavities. I only drove that one about 30K miles, making it the most expensive per mile van I have owned. Outside of those two, I have gotten outstanding performance out of my beat up old vans. The rest of them went 60K to 100K miles and cost in the $.15 - $.25 per mile range. And that's everything, purchase price, repairs, gas, insurance, tires, any improvements. Everything. The honest truth is my motorcycle, which gets 50 mpg, costs several multiples more to drive per mile than my full size van. I won't bore you with the details, trust me, I have checked my math. I really enjoy my motorcycle, but truth be told, if I had to make a choice I'd probably choose a van.

I like my vans because I don't care if I need to scrape through brush driving down a logging road. As a a commercial vehicle, they don't have a lot of extras to maintain. They have high clearance, another plus on logging roads. As a cargo van, there isn't a lot of plush interior for goat piss to soak into and the poo sweeps out pretty easy. I can carry six or eight kayaks inside. A van can pull a large trailer of manure. I can sleep across the back of the van without getting cramped. I can do the majority of reasonable repairs in my driveway. A motorcycle rolls in to the back like a horse into it's stall. The G van body style began in the sixties and ended in 1996. My first was a 1979 and the lessons I learned on that one have been applicable on each subsequent van.

I have had eight vans. I lost the first to a connecting rod protruding from the side of the engine block. The second was the main bearing. The third, a manual transmission, lost 2nd gear. The fourth the transmission. In the fifth I was T-boned by a driver doing twice the posted speed limit at an unmarked intersection driving it home from the purchase. I salvaged the engine and transmission out of #5 back into #4 and kept #4 alive. #4 went on to do a cross country trip that included kayaking the grand canyon, back country snowboarding in the Tetons and Niagara falls the Canadian side. The sixth I sold as a running vehicle, a one and only time for me. Seven was was a personal best and favorite but I had to put down with a bad cam shaft after 100K miles of my own driving and 255K total on the van. Original engine and transmission. I called it the old gray mare and she went out to pasture when she could no longer pull the wagon. The eighth was the $3000 electrical basket case. I still managed to drive it for six years, but it was never my primary vehicle. I bought Eight thinking number Seven's time was coming soon. Seven fooled me and went three more years. By the time Eight was my only van, the price of gas was through the roof and I was driving a civic as my primary vehicle. A bad fuel pump is the end of Eight. That and the rust I don't feel like fixing and the electrical problems. And I found a replacement for $450.

It isn't perfect. It isn't pretty. There are a few things I want to address right off, like paint it anything other than the ugly maroon it came as. But it has a strong running engine, is road worthy and I think it will pass inspection as soon as I replace one headlight.

Big Chicken

2009-04-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

That's a big chicken. That in fact, is Big Chicken.

This is Big Chicken as a chick. He was a free rare breed chick that Murray McMurray Hatchery throws in with orders. He is probably a Buff Cochin. We didn't take much notice of him because we were concetrating on egg breeds. But he was distinctive from day one with his side stockings.

Big Chicken turned into a great rooster though. He was big, and he was relatively gentle with mild manners. He didn't overly dominate the hens and he didn't fight with other males. And he was good looking
When we were butchering Chickens and Guineas last fall, Big Chicken got a pass because we wanted to keep his genetics in our flock. He looked like he had a good size carcass, he had good disposition. And he was our only rooster anyway. We were going to look around for a rooster from an egg laying breed, but we like having some birds worth the effort of slaughtering. There is a downside, Buff Cochins are known for laying small eggs. We'll probably look around for a egg laying rooster for next year's hatching. But I'd like to selectively breed Big Chicken's progeny to keep a group of larger frame birds. We have stayed away from Cornish Cross in the past for a variety of reasons so I am glad we have found an alternative meat bird.

That's Big Chicken on the left, a Americana in the middle and a rockbarred on the right.

This is a next generation rooster from Big Chicken, a cross with a Buff Orpington probably. He is already showing the size that his father passed him. To keep the Buff Cochin characteristics strong in our flock, we'll have to pay more attention to selective breeding in the future. But Big Chicken will live on in our flock long after the last of the chicken soup is gone.

Update on the Kids

2009-04-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

Here are the details about yesterday's kids:
Sparky (Sparque as she prefers it) delivered two bucklings yesterday afternoon at about 2:00 in the afternoon. As Jeff predicted, she waited until the weather turned and it was the most inconvenient moment. It had turned cold and rainy and we were expecting company at the house. I guess she decided that middle of the night wasn't inconvenient enough since I have been sleeping int he goat house since Tuesday anyway.

The delivery went well. Both bucklings came out front hooves followed by noses in diver formation. The first one spent a while coming out and going back in, but the second one didn't fool around. We did get nervous about the after birth. Last year Sparque had a retained placenta and it was unpleasant. We had oxitocin on hand this year and when Sparque hadn't passed the afterbirth two hours after the delivery, I intervened. She passed the after birth shortly after that. The oxitocin triggers the contraction of the uterus. It can also be used to induce delivery. It's possible she would have eventually passed it on her own, but given her history, I was glad to have it.

I did get to try my bounce technique out to check for additional kids after the first. It was quite obvious there was still another body in there, I could feel the hard parts moving around in her belly.

All in all, a good delivery. Nobody died and no reachin' in. The delivery was later than we expected and we were starting to get a little on edge. Last year, she was a day early, so this year we have been prepared since Tuesday and expect it by Thursday. She had gone into a false labor the Thursday prior. It does seem like we got a lot of rare bad experiences out of the way last year with two poor presentations, a retained placenta and a still born. We are hoping we have paid our dues for a while.

We are pretty sure we are done for the season. Our other doe that we bred does not look pregnant. But she still has nearly 1-1/2 months to go if she is, so it is possible.

Whealt, it's been a long day of over due equipment work and I still have to go out and check on the kids...

A promise made is a deed left undone

2009-04-04T17:11:00.001-07:00

I promised I would get a blog post up immediately afterward...
they are in reverse order so steel yourself.

Warning Will Rogers....

Extra points for picking out body parts

I was moving in to gently pierce the birth sac when it burst.

Gutting a Z61m laptop

2009-03-30T14:13:00.001-07:00

Recently I had to gut and clean my laptop.

For about a year now, I have been having trouble keeping my Lenovo Z61m laptop from overheating. It started last springish when I was watching a netflix Watch it now movie. My Laptop squealed a little scream and then abruptly quit. I didn't realize what was happening at first and it scared the pants off me. My laptop is my biggest source of income and is pretty important to me. I had upgraded from an IBM A20m about a year earlier and it was a size able investment for me. It's the cost of doing business, but I didn't make the decision lightly.

So I was pretty elated that it restarted later. But it took me a little while to realize the laptop was overheating. I have had laptops get pretty hot, but I have never had one shutdown on it's own. When I realized what the problem was, I looked around to see how others had dealt with this and to see if it was a common problem with the Z61m model. I didn't find much, but I did find that there is a utility out there called TPfancontrol that allows you to control the fan speed manually. I reprogrammed the fan speed / max component temperature map and that helped for while. But as we got into summer, I had more trouble. I also bought a laptop fan base. The fan base allows better air flow under the laptop and uses three fans to blow air against the bottom of the laptop. In the hottest months of summer, this made the difference between being able to operate my laptop or not.

With those measures, I limped along for long time, but the problem got progressively worse. Last week, it finally got so bad that I bit the bullet and disassembled my laptop. I wasn't able to find much in the way of documentation on how to do it, but it ended up reasonably straight forward. Like most laptops, the keyboard is the key to disassembly. Once the keyboard is off, the innards are exposed.

I was reasonably sure I was going to find a fan blocked with lint or some such. I think those heat exchanger fins were at least 70 - 80% blocked. It is pretty amazing that those copper bars can conduct away heat so effectively. Because of their shape, I wonder if maybe they are filled with a heat conducting fluid.

Now that I have cleaned the heat exchanger, the idle temperature of my laptop has dropped about 10 degrees C. And even during the most demanding tasks (streaming video) it only gets up to 65 C. Previously I couldn't do those tasks at all as the laptop would quickly get up to 100 C and shutdown.

Here is the cleaned heat exchanger:

We are all pleased the operation was a success.

Pheeeeeew

2009-03-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

For the first time since November, we aren't brooding chickens in the house. It's a bit of a relief.

In November, we had an unplanned hatch under an Orpington hen. It was too cold to leave them outside and it began our looong journey. We had been planning to hatch in January anyway, and keeping the November chicks didn't seem much of a stretch. But then the January hatch rate was poor and we decided to hatch again in February. Now, after finally moving the last of the chicks outside, those November chicks feel like much more of a stretch.

The weather has warmed considerably in the last two weeks. The sunnier north half of the yard is free of snow. The South East facing hillside gardens are thawed and the garlic is up. We are that quickening where it all seems to change over night.

And there is mud. Nothing to complain about, mud means moisture and warm temps, growing temps, but there it is, Mud.

We are on our way.

Scammers....

2009-03-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

It's about time I got back to a post about Proprietating. Given my posts of the past year, a person would be forgiven for not knowing that the art of proprietation is about running a cooperative household.

Since we prefer short term renters, it means we have more turn over than most landlords. More turn over means more advertising and I do a fair amount of mine on the Internet. Advertising on the Internet invariably attracts scam artists. Like love and marriage, the Internet and scammers just go together.

The most common scam goes something like "A friend of mine will send you a cashier's check for more than the price and you can wire me the difference. And there will be enough left over to make it worth your while." And they want you to do it fast, before the check has a chance to clear your bank. By the time you find out their check was bogus they have picked up your money from western union and you have no recourse. Probably everything from their location to their name and story has been a lie. Maybe they only dealt with you via email. They could be anywhere. It's a simple, transparent scam, but it actual snares a lot of people. It's generally called the Nigerian check scam or an advanced fee fraud.

It's not hard to spot your average Internet scam. They are not particularly sophisticated. Invariably, they offer to pay more than you are asking or some other inducement to get you to front money in some fashion. Often their written English is poor at best. And they are going to put up some ludicrous explanation as to why they need to have you do their transaction without meeting. Something about their uncle's business dealings and maybe a family trust and how they are a British born model on shoot in Africa and on and on. And for some reason they are always putting themselves out as Evangelical Christians. Maybe they figure people will trust them more that way.

But it's really not enough to spot them. It's important to not allow them to get a toe hold with personal information. My general rule of thumb is I don't put anything on the Internet that could lead someone back to me. I don't post our postal or physical address, phone number, last name or an email that can lead back to me. All my posts go through an anonymous free email. When I do get a contact, I get a phone number to contact them at and call them rather than give them my phone number. I google their email address, phone number and any other information they give me. I don't often get a lot of information from those google searches, but any information is helpful. And when I do call, I don't call from my home phone.

Those are not fool proof rules. There are ways for a more sophisticated scam to still get through, but I have never had a scammer get close enough to get my address or other physical information before I spotted them. The one that got close was someone who used a local cell phone number to pose as a local resident. That's why it is worth finding an alternative to the home phone to make the initial contact.

The easiest thing to do is get an email from any of big players, Yahoo, Hot mail, Gmail, etc to put in your Internet advertisements. Do not put any personally identifiable information in the profile. I don't suggest making up a fake name like Susy Smith, it might be awkward to explain to your legitimate contacts. Instead, something that is obviously anonymous like John Q Public or maybe first name: Selling last name: MyBoat that matches your advertising.

It is a fine line. There are definitely people reading my ad that are uncomfortable giving out their information just like I am. There is a hypothetical chicken or the egg thing there. But I have honestly almost never run into it. My posts advertising our room for rent is well worded and is evidently straightforward enough. I can think of only one person who questioned my you first policy on contact information. With those kinds of odds, I will accept losing a potential contact rather than expose myself to a potential scam.

Crocs

2009-03-01T21:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know when they became fashionable, but I didn't think much of those eva foam clogs called Crocs when I first saw them. They looked bulbous and short lived in garish colors. But at some point I was won over and I got a pair of yellow ones. They made me look like I had duck feet, which didn't really bother me. I figured if I wore them much I wouldn't get much more than a year out of them, but I wanted some shoes that would dry easily and come off and on easily for round the house duties. That was about three years ago.

I have been wearing that pair close to continuously ever since. I like them in the summer because to keep my feet cool and don't track dirt in the house. They are easy to kick off at the door. In the fall, I'll wear them outside unless the mud gets sloppy enough to squeeze in through the holes. In the winter, as long as the snow is crusty and not too wet, they work fine for a trip out to the wood shed or doing the animal chores. In the spring we are busting loose to get outside and a pair of bright yellow shows just screams warmer weather is coming. In all weather the crocs have a well cushioned sole and insulate my feet from cold or hard floors.

I am really surprised at how long these plastic shoes have lasted. I wear them daily year round. They are starting to be worn and they long ago picked up permanent dirt that cannot be washed away. The soles are no longer ribbed, I have worn them smooth. But they have not ripped like I thought they would.

There are lots of situations that are not appropriate for crocs. Working with machinery, or a shovel. Tramping thorough blackberry brambles or other half inch thorns that might Pierce the sole. I once found an upholstery tack embedded in the sole. It must not have been a half inch as it never reached my foot. And I wouldn't suggest mowing the lawn in crocs, not adequate protection for the feet.

I did try out some cheaper alternatives. When I saw an imitation for a fifth the cost, I did try them. I only use them when I am away, but I was disappointed in the imitators. The soles were not nearly as thick and do not provide adequate cushion. I probably won't find out how long they last since I avoid wearing them.

Pig and a bit

2009-02-24T18:23:00.000-08:00

We got our pig over the weekend. And a bit more.

We have been waiting for our slot in the schedule to get a pig from the farm we buy from. The farmer called to say that the pigs are not the usual 150 lbs dressed that they have been in the past and did we want to wait for the next batch to go to slaughter. We had already delayed once on the weight issue and I didn't want to be the fly in the ointment (oinkment??). I also wanted a pig, we are out of bacon, chops, ground meat and down to our last roast from the last pig. The farmer offered to help us get a little more meat by selling us some pig bits from his accumulated oddments that are waiting for retail sale. That was fine with me. It meant extra ground meat, ribs and back fat.

We met in a dark parking lot and transferred boxes of cryovacced meat like a clandestine raw milk sale. Just kidding, we met for dinner and we took home a pig in the back of our jetta. I noticed from the volume of the boxes we were loading that it was more than past pigs. The farmer's wife laughed knowingly and said it pays to be on good terms with the farmer.

When we got home we had to load the meat into the freezers. We have two chest freezers, a small 5 CU foot and a larger 10 cubic foot. We chose to go with the two unequal sized freezers because our freezer space needs change dramatically throughout the year. As we eat the contents going into spring, we'll empty the little one and shut it down. As summer keeps going we'll eat through enough of the big one and empty that into the little one again. When late summer harvests come in we'll start filling up again. And we need enough room that we can swallow a pig in one gulp as needed. It works out nice that we defrost the freezers at least once a year and go through the contents completely. It's amazing the things that can get lost in there if attention is not paid.

Now that we are flush with pig parts we have to find a use for all that. We got extra back fat with this one. We wanted to start rendering lard, and the extra back fat has given us a jump start on that. We spent a couple of hours this evening cutting up back fat and cooking it down. I am glad we had the glenwood to do it on. It was a long slow cook. Now we have bags of "cracklings" and quarts of lard. The cracklings we'll trade with a friend who wants them or give them to the dog. He likes them more than me and my waist line doesn't need them. The lard we will have for cooking. We'll freeze most of it to make sure it keeps.

They dog gets some of the other bits as well. He gets the organs. He'll get the feet and the ears. There will be bones after the soup. And when we were going through the freezer, rearranging things, we found some things we had forgotten. The dog also has some Guinea feet coming from last falls slaughter. A tasty treat. He says so anyway. With all the best intentions, things go into the freezer. The trick is to make sure they all come out again in a timely fashion. Not too long ago, we came across some crab legs that were left in the freezer way too long. I think a tenant forgot them when she left, we thought maybe we would use them, but we never did. They were un-appatizing when I got rid of them last fall.

Generator Transfer Switch

2009-02-12T12:32:00.001-08:00

I got to use my generator transfer switch today for the first time!!

Years ago, I bought a generator transfer switch so I could more safely use my generator in case of a power emergency. The generator transfer switch allows me to switch from line power to generator power with no chance of being connected both at the same time. It also allows me to select several circuits in the house that are priority as I don't have enough generator to power the entire house during an outage.

As I said, I bought the transfer switch years ago, but I only just last summer got around to installing it. And, in general, our power outages are rarely long enough to warrant hooking up the generator. Today was a special case though, as we have eggs hatching in a couple days and we could lose the whole batch if we didn't get power to the incubator pretty quick. I even got to use my inverter to power the incubator while I went out and messed with the generator. And, true to form, not long after I got everything running smoothly on the generator, the power came back on.

It does make me think about the limitations of our backup power. We have just enough generator to power refrigeration and heating. Not enough for a 220 motor or the electric range. We do run a cook stove all winter anyway, so cooking is covered, but we can't run the well pump, so no showers and pretty soon no flush toilets. More importantly, it makes watering the animals more difficult. We also are not set up to power anything on the second floor, niceties like lights or the wireless network.

If I really got desperate, I could power the wireless and our router off the inverter. And we have a number of little LED lanterns. I really like the lanterns, they last forever on rechargeable batteries (about three days continuous use on 4 AAs) and now I have some that are crankable. I have looked around at more capable generators, but the cost to benefit just isn't there for me. I don't think we have been out of power for 24 hours in more than 10 years. And I only have the little generator as a leftover from a past use.

But I am quite sure we could live though an extended power outage in our house without a larger generator. We wouldn't live like we were on grid power. We would elect not to use (heat) areas that were unnecessary. We wouldn't spend much time on the Internet. But neither us or our house would come to harm.

Moderately Snowy Winter

2009-02-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

That's a three foot stake I used for laying out a line last summer. That's the top 6 inches or so.

Remnants from buckets left in the goat house overnight. When it is negative twenty over night it is really important to take out fresh liquid water a couple times a day.

On a really snowy winter the snow is continuous from the roof to the ground. We aren't as deep as we were last year, and not as deep as some of the blogs I read. But we do have a good snow cover. I think it is good for the land.

We burned a lot of wood in January. We are a little further through it than I would like. But the weather has started to warm. We haven't bothered to light a fire the last two days. Strong sunlight has kept us warm. If we go down to burning a fire only 4 or 5 days a week, the wood will stretch a lot further.

I think we have enough dry oak and cherry in the back to make it through till warmer weather. Last weekend I did cut a dead birch I've had my eye on, though. It was falling into the path to the upper field, not far from the house and all downhill. I could toboggan it down to the house with a minimum of pulling.

It's a pain burning the birch because it isn't dry. It has to come in and thaw before it goes on the fire. And it needs to be a hot fire already. But if there is a good bed of coals, it seems like the birch gets the oven hotter than usual, not sure why. Maybe the higher moisture content helps transfer the energy to the oven walls? The oven thermometer pegs at 500+ when we are burning the birch.

It will be time to cut next years firewood soon. If it is cut and stacked in the spring and under cover for the summer it will be well dried for next winter. I'll do a lot less damage to the ground cutting while it is frozen. It's a lot easier to see what I am doing while the foliage is off the trees. Wearing my protective gear in the cool spring temps is a lot less irritating than summer heat. It can be annoying to have to go everywhere on snow shoes. But the snow cover also helps lift logs above the dirt and protect the saw. And now is when I have the time. There are other things that can only be done when the earth is thawed and the growing season has begun.

Nobody here but us chickens

2009-01-26T12:05:00.001-08:00

That's the result of our latest chicken hatching endeavor. A reprieve for the rooster, since I don't want to slaughter before I am sure I don't need him any more. What hatched looks pretty good, lively and vigorous, but I wanted more than 7. I think it is my own fault though. I let the hatching eggs get too cold while I was storing them to get enough for the incubator. Our trap room, a cool room that gets no direct heat, got down into the thirties. It was that really cold spell in December. I should have kept them in the pantry that is closer to the wood stove in the kitchen, more like 50's. It also didn't help that it took 10 days to get enough eggs for the incubator.

So it looks like on rock barred, at least one Americana and the rest are Buff Orpingtons mixed with our Brahama, maybe Buff Cochin rooster. All the light colored chicks have the side stalkings, showing the rooster's trait. I have not seen it on the dark chick, though. Interestingly, the previous chicks that a hen sat back in November did not get their side stalkings till later. These chicks had pretty downy side stalkings from day one.

I was looking through Murray McMurray's spring catalog and Buff Cochin is what the rooster looks like the most. He was a the extra free rare breed they throw in to keep everybody warm / generate interest in rare breeds. I did note that the Buff Cochin's are listed as poor layers and small eggs to boot. Luckily, it isn't eggs I figure he brings to the table, so to speak... He is looking huge these days. He is twice the size of our laying hens. I would not want him to hear it, but I am looking forward to finding out what he tastes like. He is broad and heavy in the breast. I wonder if he has trouble mounting the hens like they talk about broad breasted turkeys having. Probably not since at least 70% of the eggs showed at least some development when I candled them.

I sort of lost my way there

2009-01-19T17:31:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I set out to talk about some things I have had to come to terms with since getting dairy goats. And I made a good start on it, the relationship between milk and the fate of the offspring that made the milk possible are an important aspect. But I did get side tracked.

Another aspect of all livestock raising is the element of risk. All us living things are finding new and different ways to end our existence every day. Some are hardier than others, but in general, at it's core, there is a spark of life and if, for even the briefest moment, that light goes out, it can never be lit again. Life is not only precious, it is fragile. Some short story I read, maybe in a college lit class, the author said a chicken can die from a thousand different ailments. I think he may have under estimated.

When we got our dairy goats, they were both in milk. One of them I had been milking part time for a friend for about a year before I bought her and brought her home. The first day we brought the does home, we milked them and had that milk to drink. That spoiled us, I fear. We had an immediate return on our investment and it continued to return for eight more months. Since then I have read a lot more about goats. Many of the descriptions talked about first time goat owners buying a spring kid and raising it up over the summer, getting to breeding weight, finding a buck, sheltering it through the winter and kidding in the spring. Going through all that without getting a drop of milk until the very end. That takes a lot of faith. All the things that could go wrong, even if it didn't extinguish the spark, if it just failed one of those tests, all could be for naught.

I think our first introduction to fear was coming up on kidding. We had read many books and sought advice of experienced handlers. But the anxiety starting about a week before kidding was due was acute. And, as it happens, it was not completely without reason. We had a not so smooth kidding from both goats. Two bad presentations, a still born and a retained placenta. The retained placenta was probably our fault, at least in part. While the first goat was kidding and things weren't going so well, I had enough spare thought to think about where it might lead. If that goat could die in childbirth, well, then the other could too. What would losing one or both goats mean to us? We had invested in our fencing, feed and housing the goats. We had accepted that we were drinking expensive milk in order to gain more control over our food sources. But what if that source were of a sudden not there. And it would put us at least a year back on breeding up a critical mass of our own herd. And if things went wrong on the first try, would we have the fortitude to try again anyway? I'd like to think so, but when I had half a kid sticking out of Our Doe Goat Sparky the wrong way, there was some doubt.

And now, nearly a year further into it, I have found ever more issues to dwell on. Are we doing enough to protect them from parasites? Do we practice enough bio-security to prevent someone else's problem from becoming ours. Are our gates and fences strong enough to keep them in and out of the grain bin? If they did get bloat, would we react soon enough? Will the neighbors dog be a problem. Will the neighbors kid be a problem (I worry more about the kid, by the way). What if we don't spot the heat and miss our breeding window? Does Sparky have scar tissue in her womb from the hard kidding? Can she still conceive? Will we be able to get hay for winter? Did I buy enough? Is the barn dry enough to prevent mold? None of these were worries when I got my milk in a plastic jug at the store in town.

I don't want to discourage anyone from trying their hand at goat herding. It is, in general, a pleasant pastime. It rewards us with sustenance and moments of triumph and joy. Our animals are sweet, even Sparky who complains too much. But it is not without anxiety or dark days. I don't think it is something you can put in a balance scale, though. There is not a beam strong enough to weigh these matters and the pans would never accommodate all the details needing to be weighed.

On Kids, Kidding and Breeding to have kids

2009-01-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

We still have one goat milking, we hope she'll milk through. She has milked at least two years per freshening in the past and we hope she will continue.

Having a dairy animal in our family has brought us in touch with what milk means, and it is not an altogether pretty sight. Often people say they couldn't kill to eat meat, but milk has a charismatic image of wholesome goodness, warmth of motherhood. Having dairy animals has brought me closer to the more stark reality that milk requires breeding, and more often than not the resulting prodigy is not an animal that will live to maturity. For the success of the breed, most of that offspring probably should not complete the cycle of life. That means slaughtering kids. And that's the basic equation that becomes obvious after being in the dairy vocation for any amount of time. Milk equals killing kids. We get the doe pregnant in order to take the milk made for the kid for ourselves. And more than likely, we will slaughter that kid and eat him too. Milk has an unseemly side. The knowledge has not slowed our consumption of milk, but it is a sobering reality.

This idea is similar to many that have become lost in our anonymous industrial food system. The element of risk has been removed from the consumer's experience. Consumers never need worry about a failed harvest, weather events that destroy seedlings or an out break of disease in livestock. And just about any unpleasant experience, from washing off dirt to dealing with the slaughtering or butchering. The luxury if specialization has allowed our modern society to make huge gains in productivity. But I think that with the outbreaks of super bacteria and virus bred on a steady diet of low level antibiotics on CAFOs and the changes in our landscape from monoculture agriculture are beginning to make their costs known.

I don't think it is realistic to suggest that the average person should become food independent. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far towards industrial agriculture and anonymous food.

The south end of a north facing goat house

2009-01-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

We like stock panel structures. They help us house goats and chickens, dry and protect firewood. They provide a wind break and keep their contents dry. They are easy to erect and economical on a small scale. They are easily adapted for a variety uses. They allow us to provide for our animals needs with flexibility.

Pictured above is Goat House North. It has a goat house in each end with access to seperate paddocks. There is a human section in the middle where we store a week or two's worth of hay, minerals, etc. We can feed the goats from the human side and check on things. The goat house is made from six arched 4 X 16 stock panels sitting on top of some wooden side panels that give us an extra foot of headroom. the wooden sides are attached to posts. the posts help us keep the first two feet of stock panel vertical. For this year we also added pillars at the ends and a 2x4 ridge pole to insure against heavy snow. I have been successful in the past just using bailing twine cords to keep the arch in shape. But now that we have a total of 4 goat stall houses, a green house and a woodshed made from stock panels, I decided I didn't want to have to stress about keeping the roofs clear after snow storms.

We get between 20 and 40 degrees of temperatur difference from inside the goat house to the outside, depending on how sunny it is. That often makes the difference between frozen water bucks and not. It also keeps the animals comfortable on hard winter days and nights.

2009 Incubator

2009-01-02T05:08:00.001-08:00

That's our mighty rooster. He looks like a Brahma. He was one of the free ones the hatchery threw in to have enough warm bodies in our shipment of chicks last spring. Just a bit of luck. I am not much for fancy chickens, and when I saw his side stockings and I didn't think he was going to last long with us. But he has turned out to be a gentle rooster who does not harass the hens. He is a big bird, maybe twice the size of the hens with a pronounced large breast. We are hoping we have found a good eating chicken that we don't mind keeping.

This is our beat up old incubator, I think a little giant. We have a similar hovabator also, but the auto egg turner fits in this on. This one also has the fan unit that keeps the air moving around the incubator, helping to cut down temp variation in the incubator.

We bought all of it off eBay. No complaints. And that auto turner makes for much better results. Maybe the constant turning is better, maybe not opening the incubator keeps the humidity / temp more constant. I like it, though.

Today was the final day of egg collection. Not quite enough eggs to fill the racks, but I didn't want my collected eggs to age out. We didn't have the best storage temp, a little on the cold side. I hope it doesn't destroy our hatch. We stored the eggs in our cold room and with the cold temps outside, we got well below the 56' optimum storage temp.

Given that, I think I am going to hold off slaughtering the rooster until we see the results of this hatch.

Winter has arrived here also

2008-12-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

Looking around at blogs, a lot of people are talking about winter having arrived. It is here too. -10 F this morning at 7:30, no idea how cold it got. We have more than two feet of fresh snow over the weekend. And tonight there might be freezing rain to top it off.

I like to leave the snow on the stock panel structures as insulation. But with the recent fiasco with the garden green house, I didn't risk it. I cleared the snow off each with a push broom. Which is not hard, but it can get deep on the backside.

But the wood is all stacked and dry. What a difference from last year. Last year we were burning birch that I cut from standing dead trees late last year. I was hoping the standing dead would be a little drier than green wood. And I am sure it was, but not enough. Those birch logs were frozen and we tried all winter to have them warmed up and dried out a little before we put them in the stove. This years wood is mostly oak that I cut early last spring. Some of it was standing dead, others were nuisance trees that would threaten the new fence. But more than anything, they have been under cover all summer and are dry dry, ready to go in the firebox. If the fire dies down, you can just stick these logs in and they catch. Not like last year, trying to nurse a fire back up with tomorrow mornings kindling. A little preparation prevents poor performance as I have been told.

Certainly glad I fixed the snow blower prior to this weekend. I did clear a lot of snow. I have been known to put things off on occasion. Just lucky on this one, I guess.

Snowblower repair

2008-12-17T10:18:00.000-08:00

That's a new friction wheel on my snow blower. The snow blower has been struggling along with the old friction wheel for the end of last year and the first snowstorm of this year. Considering how worn the old one was, it was doing pretty good.

The friction wheel sits against a spinning plate and that is what delivers power to the wheels. The plate moves in and out to effect a clutch. The friction wheel slides on it's axel. As the friction wheel slides further from the center of the plate, the friction wheel spins faster. This gives the snowblower an infinitely variable transmission. It's a neat and effective even if inherently wearing. The closer the friction wheel is to the center, the smaller the radius it is spinning on, the more the rubber wheel is stressed and eventually torn.

This is the old friction wheel. About a 1/4 inch of rubber is worn off all the way around. It was only sticking out past the metal rim in places. Like I said, I was impressed it did as well as it did. There were little bits of rubber everywhere inside the "transmission" housing. This is the original friction wheel and has lasted since May of 1997. I am not unhappy with it. Simple maintence like this can be rewarding. No manuals involved. Just look at it, take an educated guess and start removing bolts. Stop when it is fixed and reverse. Shade tree mechanics version of lather, rinse and repeat.

This is a 12 or 13 year old 9 horse power 2 stage snowblower sold under the name White. It's really made by MTD, one of the few remaining manufactures of snow blowers. I am really happy that it has lasted as long as it has. It is not a premium machine. But, it saves me a lot of shoveling and means I don't need to do any plowing. It is a great machine for the use I put it to. I don't really have a lot of area to clear. Our driveway has parking for seven cars but is only one car length deep off the narrow town road. We need a path around the barn to the milking shed, over to the goat house, past the woodshed and to the backdoor. The path is probably 300 feet. And the path has to squeezes through gates, past gardens, etc. Bigger equipment would be tough. The tecumseh engine is like new even if the sheet metal looks old. The fact that a little maintenance keeps it going strong is gratifying.

A woodstove warms you three times

2008-12-15T20:15:00.000-08:00

One of my son's great loves is apples. He is 2-1/2 and says "aaple?" sweetly and innocently. As if he can't remember what an awful mess we find in his diaper after a day of too much aaple.

But dried apples seem to help the problem. At least they slow him down enough that he doesn't end up eating a whole apple. Or two.

And the apples from our tree are getting soft. Drying apples is yet another thing our glenwood does well. There's something really pretty about a string of apples drying over the stove.

My wife cooked us a pork dinner on the stove the other night. It's tricky getting the stove top hot enough to boil the potatoes without overheating the oven and burning the roast, but she did a great job. It was a Loin End Roast and it is one of the best roasts we have done. It was tender and flavorful with a little crispiness on the outside that we like so much.

We were also happy about how close to home the food was. The potatoes were from our garden, same with the leeks and carrots. Milk for the potatoes from our goats. Pork from a local farm where we buy whole pigs. I think the only thing that came from away was the mushrooms.

A man said a fire warms you twice, once when you cut the wood and once when you burn it. I think I would add to that a cook stove warms you three times, for the hot meal that comes off it. and if you really want to get into it, again for the leftovers a day later.

A fella, Just a fella, a regular fella

2008-12-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

I saw a fuel oil truck get stuck this morning. He was at the top of a hill on a dead end road trying to back into a drive way. The driveway is a Y with the road and tilts down the hill too. There was a lot of ice on the road and driveway and the truck driver went in slow. When he went to give it gas (actually diesel) to back up off the the road, his traction didn't hold and the back end slid sideways downhill along the road, off the driveway and into the snowbank. Meanwhile, the front end slid also leaving him perpendicular to the road with his front wheels off the road on the opposite side. It's a narrow road and he was completely straddling it. When I saw him, he was trying to "rock it" and get some traction. I walked up there and found him with all rear wheels (duallies) maybe 12" deep in the snow, about a third of the way up the tire.

I had thought I was going to be able to say "I'll just go get my tractor and pull you out". It certainly seemed like the easy way out. But when I got up there, I looked at things and did not like what I saw. I wouldn't be able to get uphill of him and I didn't like the idea of pulling him down hill on top of me. I also thought about the fuel truck that went off the road a while ago that poisoned a bunch of peoples wells with MBTE. I wouldn't want to be connected with something like that. Further more, he was stuck really good and I don't know if my 3k lb tractor was going to pull out a truck filled with maybe 10k gallons of fuel oil.

I don't like to leave a fella stranded though. The driver and I looked at things and I offered to get a shovel. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get him out, but I was willing to work with him. From the barn I got a shovel. Since I didn't locate a second shovel immediately, I brought a heavy bar instead. And I also grabbed a pair of old 3" thick 12" wide boards about 36" long. I've tried using boards to get under a mired tired. Usually, they just spit out the back at 40 miles per hour. But, who knows and I couldn't think of anything else to do.

So we dug with the shovel, jammed the boards under the wheels and he climbed back in the truck. And it didn't do it. The truck broke one board but couldn't climb onto either. it was too deep.

The driver tried backing up (gently, we didn't want to get stuck worse), but it was too deep to go back either.

We hemmed and hawed. Looked at it from more angels. He tried rocking the truck again. The tires smoked. But he only got deeper. Part of me said don't do anything to make this worse. He has fuel oil in there, if it spills, it could get on my land, into my well. I certainly don't want to have to explain to somebodies wife what happened to her husband that cold day. And I definitely don't want someone to have a similar conversation with my wife.

I don't know whether it is because I like a challenge, that I don't want to leave a fella stranded. Or maybe I am just a nosy neighbor who gets into other peoples business, but I kept trying new ideas.

The only thing I could think of was if we couldn't raise the truck out of the hole, dig a ramp out of the hole for the tires. But we are talking about the edge of a frozen gravel road, it was not easy digging. All we could do was chip at it with the pry bar. Maybe we managed to chip down 4" or so, not a lot. We did that on both sides. The driver got back in and tried rocking it again. And low and behold, he got it out. He was still perpendicular to the road pointed down the embankment on the other side, but he was out of the ditch.

I spotted him as he eased it back to the rim of the ditch cutting the wheel back. And then the other way going forward. He didn't have more than 18" back and forth to work with. We even got to use those boards, in the hole as a bridge. After the second or third try, though, he couldn't get enough steering traction to turn further up the hill. When he tried to go forward I could see the front end lift up and then skip straight forward regardless of of the direction the wheels were pointed. He tried that a couple of times, but even though he wasn't in the ditch, he was still stuck.

Finally, he did what had gotten him trouble in the first place. He revved the engine, cut the wheels up hill and let out the clutch. The rear tires spun, losing traction and sliding to the side downhill and the whole truck pivoted around that front left tire. In short order the truck was close to parallel to the road. He was able to roll back down the hill and straighten out the rest of the way. From there he was able to get enough momentum to racing up the hill and launch into the driveway.

At about this point, the able bodied young man from the house the driver was trying to deliver to came out, walked the dog and went back inside without saying a word.

At no point before the truck's tires cleared the ditch did I think we were going to be able to get that truck un-stuck. Before he left, the driver thanked me for my help and the tools and expressed how happy he was that he would not be on the wall of shame at work.

Greenhouse CatAsTrophe

2008-12-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

We've been having a tough time in the greenhouse. These are some leeks from the greenhouse. Yes, those are teethmarks on them. Somebody, probably several somebodies are using our greenhouse as their own winter larder. Probably voles or mice. They have wiped out the greens and other starts. It's been discouraging. We're not sure what to do different for next year. I don't really want to do a foundation. Maybe we had the plastic on too soon, we should have let the ground freeze. It will take some thought for next year.

The rodents aren't all. If we were too far ahead putting on the plastic, we were too late with the bracing cords. On Thursday night we got a small snow storm and then heavy rain. Freezing rain. We were luckier than people north and south of us, there 25,000 power customers without it and we only lost it briefly overnight. But the waterlogged snow was too much weight for the inadequately braced greenhouse.

In the past we have braced the greenhouse with cords that act like spokes, maintaining the curve of the greenhouse. If there are enough of these cords, the strength of the 1/4" steel that makes up the cattle panel will hold the shape of the greenhouse under extraordinary snow loads. I have gone out and cleared 3 feet off the greenhouses in the past that did not collapse them. We didn't have near enough bracing in the greenhouse this year, though and this relatively small storm took us down.

The lucky thing is that the snow didn't entirely crush the greenhouse or kink the wire. If it had been kinked, straightening it without totally disassembling the greenhouse would have been next to impossible.

As it is, the wire is bent, which dramatically decreases the greenhouse's strength. The design depends on the flat panel in a stressed arch. It is curved, but not beyond it's plastic deformation point. So it is trying to return to a flat panel. The internal cords prevent it from returning to a flat panel and transfer the load further down the structure.

Since the greenhouse was not completely crushed and we could still crawl inside, we we're able to lift it back into shape. As we lifted, we tied new cords. After the initial round, we went back and tied more to correct where we were still out of shape. Then again, often untying the first ones. It's a process like tuning a bicycle wheel. You work slowly, making small corrections in many places.

Since the wire had been bent, though, just getting the arch back wasn't enough. We'll have to also need a vertical brace because the wire is no longer straight and won't carry the vertical load. That's the 2x4 on the end. It carries another 2x4 that goes the length of the greenhouse and another post on this end.

We still have work to do, and we won't be starting any new plants in the cold weather. But at least we'll get a jump on spring in the greenhouse.

Ferris' Favorite Spot by Far

2008-12-13T06:29:00.001-08:00

That's Ferris' favorite sport by far. in the heat behind the wood stove.

It's not uncommon for the oven to get to 500 if we don't open the door. Ferris likes it hot. And it appears to be good for her. For years she had dread lock tangles in her hair (she is not an overly clean cat). But since we have added the wood stove to our kitchen, the dread locks have disappeared and her coat and cleanliness have much improved. She'll spend hours behind or under the stove. I would imagine the temp under there is over 100 F if not higher.

Is it cold in here?

2008-12-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

I turned on the heat in the bathroom today. It's starting to get cold in there, and we do bathe the boy in there...

Like a lot of old buildings, we have a kind of cobbled heating system. The main house has a steam radiator system in seven of the rooms. That's the primary system for the cooperative household. I added a heat exchanger to the boiler and there is now baseboard hot water for the back badrooms and the upstairs bath in the main house, also. For the Elle, we have a suspended slab in the bathroom with radiant floor tubing, also off the boiler heat exchanger. The rest of the elle has no heat except when we build a fire in the glenwood cookstove. It actually heats the kitchen nicely and takes the edge off in our living area and bedroom upstairs.

It has been below zero a couple of mornings lately, a little early in the season for that according to me. So, today I turn on the radiant floor in the bathroom. Its really nice to walk in there and be able to stand on a warm floor.

A borrowed buck

2008-12-08T17:29:00.000-08:00

A fella once said neither a borrower nor lender be. I was thinking about that while I drove home with a borrowed buck in the back of my van. I wonder if William meant the borrowed buck might poop in the back of your wagon. Probably not, old William would have been smart enough to tether goat behind the wagon. Or better yet, pull the wagon.

We've been trying to get our little doe goat bred. She's a kid from this spring. She'll be in heat two, maybe three days in 21. The trick is to spot that heat early in the season and be able to predict the date of the next one. Arrange with some one who owns a buck for the next one. Watch for the next heat. And hustle over there the next time you see her in heat. Then you let nature take it's course... Problem is, it's late in the season and I haven't spotted a heat yet. Thought I did once. But I think she had me fooled.

The lady who's bucks we usually breed with suggested maybe we take a little buck home with us and have him tell us when the little doe is in heat. I don't really like the idea. Bucks can get expensive, depending on their lineage. They can be hard to contain, particularly if they think there is a doe in heat over there. And they might leave more than their genetics behind.

But we're getting nervous about getting the little doe bred. If we don't get her bred, that means she isn't freshend in the spring and we are down a milker. That makes us that more dependant on a successfull kidding from the other doe we bred. It means less cheese next summer. And it means we are that much slower getting to a critical mass of herd members on our little farm.

It also raises the ugly spectar of what if something goes wrong. If we only had the one doe bred and something went wrong, then we'd be in trouble. We would have lost half our genetic pool, we would have no milk, no prodigany and no prospects. The idea can get overwhelming.

But it makes me glad we have goats instead of cows. If it were cows, I could only afford one cow. And then there is no redundancy. If anything goes wrong, all is lost. And when there is milk, there is a lot of milk. When there is not a lot, there is none at all. And you can't put a bull into the your van to bring him over for breeding. Not that I am bashing cows, they just are not the right solution for us.

So we hemmed and hawed over bringing a borrowed buck onto our farm. We don't like it, but sometimes you have to do something you don't want to in order to go somewhere you need to.

Someone Else's Tractor

2008-12-06T19:23:00.000-08:00

I got someone else's tractor stuck. A nice grandmother's tractor. I got it stuck. While she let me use it to get a load of manure. And I got it stuck.

It was a heart rending moment. I was using her tractor to load my trailer full of manure from her farm. It's been cold enough that there was a crust frozen on the manure. Her tractor is a geared transmission, a tricck to drive and not familiar to me. I was doing OK with it at first. My biggest problem was that with the manure pile frozen, I had to break the crust into small enough pieces this tractor could lift. This is an 870 tractor, I am not sure what it's lift capacity is.

So there I was, peacefully minding my own business, when the front wheels slipped off the frozen crust into the soft muck that I had exposed. The manure pile is out behind the barn, down a slope in a kind of marshy area. Looking down, I knew it wasn't going to be good. The criust was at about the half way point on the wheel. I tried backing up, but the crust just broke off and the wheel sank further. I wasn't up to the fram yet, but I knew that if I would be if I kept going like this.

I was a little surprised, I couldn't find a differential lock on this tractor. With that, I probably could have backed out with out much problem. I jiggled around a little more, getting myself in deeper, thinking about the conversation with the grandmother. "Uhm, I think I got the tractor stuck." What would I expect her to do? She doesn't even drive it, her grandson does that for her. She's not going to push it out. And I would be surprized if she had something to pull it out.

It's not like I was even stuck all that bad. Yet. The problem was I was only getting deeper.

The obvious had not occured to me yet. A lot of tractors, the loader can pickup the front end of the tractor. Mine can. I have seen many pictures of tractors for sale demonstrating their continued vigor but pickeing themselves up. But when I planted the bucket flat and tried the down circuit, this tractor could not. I boosted up the throttle and tried again. But htis only proved that more throttle does not equal more hydraulic pressure, just faster flow. Luckily, the lift arms are not a fellas last resort. After maxing out the lift arms, I used the curl to give a little more push. That was enough to get the tire almost out of the mud.

I used a some blocking from the trailer to push a bunch of mud under the tire and set it down. Doing this a couple of times I was able to get the wheel high enough off the mud to get some blocking under the tire and crib it out. And then I was able to back out of the hole.

I was really happy I didn;t need to go tell that grandmother I got her tractor stuck. I finidhed loading the trailer, staying away from any soft areas. About half of it I loaded into the bucket by hand with a fork to avoid taking any chances. I thanked the grandmother for the use of her tractor and the manure, alluded that there were some soft spots out there and took my load of goat poo home before anything really bad could happen.

This is the third load of poo we have brought home with the new trailer. Each time it has been a full trailer load, about six yeards. I'd estimate that each load was close to 2500 lbs. But it is pretty amazing how the pile shrinks. After the first two weeks, the first load shrank by at least a third. That's because it is working, I know. But it is a little disconcerting. All that work, and the pile keeps getting smaller.

Since this is the last laod we'll do this year, we should cove the pile to keep it warmer (hold in the heat). Some of this is pretty fresh and it would be nice if we could get it active enough to use it next spring. The field really needs a lot of amendment.

The Circle of life

2008-11-21T18:01:00.000-08:00

I was out there, doing the rounds. Feed the goats. Get them water. Grain the chickens. Look for eggs. Check under the broody hen. Hey, where are those peeps coming from?

For a while now, the broody hen, a buff Orpington, has been sitting a nest in the laying box I set up in the vacant goat house we were using as a chicken roost. We have four goat sheds. Each month (or 4 weeks, really) we move the goats to a new paddock. That gives us three months of separation to knock down the parasites. The chickens follow the goats, roughly. While a goat house aren't being goat or chicken house, they double as a tool shed for garden tools, or some times a play house for our son.

And now, apparently, a place to hatch eggs. A few weeks ago, I found a clutch of eggs under the bushes by the corner of the fence. The eggs had been in the nest too long to eat them, so I removed the wooden eggs that were fooling the Orpington and swapped them with the clutch of eggs. And Viola, 23 days later (or so, I didn't count), peep peep. It does sort of ring with the recent demise of the guineas.

We had been planning to try hatching some chicks over the winter. I was figuring in December so they would be laying by June. We have been keeping a rooster for the express purpose. The rooster is the rare breed male that Murray McMurray hatchery throws in with orders of hens. I think part of it is the excess males inevitable in a breeding program and part of it is it supplies a little extra warmth in the box of chicks in the mail. As a chick, our little male looked like a Orpington with side stockings. But recently, someone told me he looks like he is a Brahma. They are an alternative meat bird, I guess. The rooster has grown up to be a heavy bird, all right. We'll see how he mixes with Orpington, Rock Bards, NH Reds and Americana.

I was out there trying to take pictures, but it turned out the card wasn't in the camera. Enough reason to run screaming back to old chemical cameras and film I guess.

Freecylce Fish

2008-11-14T19:31:00.001-08:00

This is last years picture of the goldfish we took out of our little artificial pond for the winter. The fish are comets, a common feeder fish that sell for about a dime a piece. We put them in the pond so to eat the mosquito larvae. The pond isn't deep enough for them to winter over, so last year we brought them inside. The fish tank and all of it's peripherals were a score from Freecycle.

These are the same fish this year. I think we lost two or three over the summer, definitely the one brown one. And we might even have a second generation in there, but I am not sure on that. But they are definitely bigger. The picture doesn't do it justice, but the fish might be twice as big. It would make sense, this is their second summer. With our freecyle tank, we'll see how many seasons we can get out of them. Not bad for some fish that were supposed to be someone else's lunch.

Chicken Killing Day

2008-11-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

Lasted weekend was chicken killing day. I read a lot of helpful Fowl killing blogs a day later.

There weren't any chickens harmed in this process, just Guineas. But Guineas are a fair approximation of chickens, in a frantic sort of way. I didn't take any pictures, so the reader is relatively safe.

We use a tried and true process, but that doesn't mean we are good at it. Killing, plucking and processing 9 birds took my wife and I more than two hours. I hate plucking worse than I hate processing, and my wife hates processing. Lucky thing, that. If we were of the same mind it might come to blows before we got done.

The thing that amazed me this year was their crops. In the past, I don't remember remarking on the crops. They must have been there, but they were, well, unremarkable. This year, they had an amazing amount of gravel fulling their crops. My wife points out that we are feed less grain per bird, hence more foraging. More foraging, more gravel, I guess. And the guineas get up late. With our new chickens, if you get up late, you aren't getting any grain. The guineas probably didn't get grain since about July when we let the pullets out to free range.

We don't slaughter for meat, really. We'll eat these birds, for sure. But if it were just for the meat, we wouldn't do it. The meat is at least a little on the tough side and there isn't a whole lot of it. We can probably get an average of one meal from a bird between actual meat and stock and such. Not really worth the effort. But the birds aren't just about meat. Normally we would get eggs and they would be on bug patrol all summer. Part of the reason we are slaughtering is we didn't get eggs. We were only getting eggs from one bird, we think, and she was tricky, changing up her nest sites a lot. So, we weren't willing to carry a large group of males through the winter if there weren't going to be eggs in the bargain. Too much grain for too little benefit. Also, we are tight for coop space. So into the freezer they go.

I'll bet if more people had to slaughter for their own use we'd have a lot more vegetarians. I hate pluckin'.

Getting Cleaned up for work

2008-11-03T19:09:00.000-08:00

I had to do some things this weekend that I really didn't want to. The weather has been been getting colder and it would nice to light a fire in the kitchen stove. But when I looked at the condition of the stove pipe, I knew I couldn't get away with running the stove before cleaning the chimney and stove.

In the stove I found about an inch deep of fly ash under the hob as well as under the oven. No creosote, though.

The meat of the job was cleaning the chimney, though. Not a job I relished.

The chimney comes out of the center of the Elle, the middle of the ridge line. Just guessing, but I think the ridge line is about 30 feet above ground. Thirty feet up in a 45 degree slate roof isn't really my favorite place to spend a Sunday afternoon. I am not fond of heights without a safety. I've done some rock climbing, but always with a safety. I didn't much like standing on that peak with nothing to hold onto but the chimney. This kind of work it pays to do slowly and careful.

That's a pail full of creosote we shoveled out of the thimble. I bet things flow a little better without that inch of crust caking the inside of the stove pipe.

Annual MVM Harvest Festival

2008-10-19T19:17:00.000-07:00

Things are getting cold.

A week and a half ago we got our first hard frosts. Three or four in a row. We had been having glorious late fall warm days up until then. A week ago Friday there was ice in the buckets, first of the year.

The cool weather coincided with our annual harvest party dinner. Every Year, as long as I have owned the house, we have hosted a Harvest Festival Potluck dinner. Fall is my favorite time of year, the best time for parties. It's always inviting to go into a house on a cool fall evening that smells of roast turkey and other season favorites. A lot of the food was local, but we failed in our quest for a local turkey. The closest we came was someone an hour away who could order us a "local" turkey that has been frozen since last thanksgiving. We'd be meeting the delivery truck there, less than three days before the party. And it would be a big turkey. It was going to be dicey as to whether it would thaw in time, and I didn't like the idea of all that driving around for a "local" bird. So, we went to fancy coop (not our regular coop) and got what we could get. That's the one downfall of our timing, it's not close enough to get in on the turkey mania.

It's gotten cold enough that we have recovered the greenhouse. My wife has been growing peppers and other warm crops in the green house all summer. We opened up the ends for ventilation and pollination but kept the body of it on to control the soil moisture and elevate the temperature. It worked out well, giving us the best crop of Anaheim and Jalapeno peppers yet. But with the hard frost we needed to close it in and get the winter layer of plastic on. We still have almost two months of greens to go for this year. Then the greenhouse will serve as a place to winter over cold hardy plants until early next spring. The greenhouse will warm up a month before the surrounding garden, giving us a leg up.

Since that frost we have had heavy rains. The leaves are down. We raked the neighbors lawn yesterday and filled our leaf bins. It's really fall now, no more swimming down by the river.

Evil Weed

2008-10-15T19:09:00.001-07:00

Have you seen this viney plant growing at the edges of mowed areas or sprouting in disturbed areas?

THIS IS EVIL WEED!!!

That's black swallow wart, an alien invasive from Spain / Italy that has taken root in the eastern United States over the last ten years.

This plant spreads by both rhizome and seed. It grows vigorously when in full sun, climbing and smothering other plants. And here and in the North East, it has no natural predator.

Black Swallow Wart is very difficult to destroy because of its vigor, ability to smother other plants and develop from cut roots.

Black Swallow Wart is in the same family as Milkweed, and has a similar toxin that discourages browsing animals from controlling it. Worse, it attracts native insects that do eat milkweed mistake it for milkweed and lay there eggs there, but the larva cannot survive eating Black Swallow Wart.

BSW has small dark flowers in July and develops seed pods in August. If those pods are allowed to mature, they will spread on the wind by the thousands.

Mowing the plants in late July helps to prevent the spread by seed, but it does not control the plant. It will spread by rhizome.

We are trying to control ours through weeding, smothering and cutting. We have not been at it long enough to know if we are having any success. I suspect that given the pervasiveness of this plant on our land, it will always be a problem for us that takes continual maintenance. But hopefully we can gain some control over it and recover some productivity of our land.

Bringing in the hay

2008-10-07T19:00:00.001-07:00

We finally got the word from the farm we buy alfalfa hay from that it was ready. It has not been a great year for hay and there was some doubt if we would get any alfalfa this year. During the dark months of winter, this alfalfa will help us keep our does in good condition.

And that new trailer has already come in handy, pulling home 52 bales. The best I had done in the van was 24 bales. I got so much on the trailer that I hardly had to load the van.

Getting the hay into the barn was a chore last year. We brought it in through the hay door in the back of the barn. That meant we had to unload the truck, cart the hay around to the back of the barn, carry it into the shed and then pull it up into the second floor without the benefit of an overhead pulley. This year I built a gantry that pokes out through a second story window and we can back the van or trailer under it to load the bales directly into the loft. What took a half a day before we now do in an hour or so.

We're not ready for winter yet, but we do have enough hay to carry us through the next twelve months. The hay is dry, under cover and easy for us to get out to our animals. It feels good to have that out of our way and ready to move on to new things.

The Joads or Two trailers for the price of one

2008-10-04T17:38:00.001-07:00

Does this look like something you would stake your life on? I suppose if you were driving behind me you were if you knew it or not. I borrowed a friends trailer a while ago and dragged it through three states. Lucky for both of us, I dragged it empty. I didn't a load in it until I got home and then it was behind the van.

It's a little embarrassing, but I just assumed it was Honda original equipment and I trusted that idea. Now that I have looked at it more than cursorily, I have come to realize it is just bolted through the tow loop. A rusty tow loop. An originally flimsy, now rusty tow loop that has driven for more 200 thousand miles and close to two decades. And by the looks of my fenders, this car spent most of its life on salty roads in the north east. Lets all just feel better that I didn't try to pull my new trailer full of trailer home through three states. It might have gone fine. Or it might have ended in a blaze of fire, twisted steel and broken glass. One or the other.

This is my new trailer. Full of trailer It came with a very nice pile of compost. And some started seedlings. The seller did me a great favor allowing me to purchase it. I am not kidding.

That's a second trailer upside down on the trailer. A friend, upon seeing my new trailer on the way home, realized immediately that his father's old Studebaker pickup bed trailer would look perfect pitched on top. I forgot to load the kiddy pool and child's bike he also offered.

I did not try to pull that load behind the Honda. My new trailer is well built. That's a polite way of saying it's heavy set. Husky. When speaking of a trailer, though it doesn't have the negative connotation it might otherwise.

The new trailer came with stake rack sides. The we swollen and a bear to get out of their sockets to load the second trailer. But they will be really helpful to bring bulky loads like compost home with. It also came with that dancer XS that is hanging from the ceiling of the van. The XS is a smaller version of Perception Kayaks popular dancer white water kayak. It will be a great boat to use when my son is ready to get out on the water. Vans are a great vehicle for the right application.

Toiling and tilling

2008-09-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working in the back field. We have about four acres of level land there. I think it has been used for pasture and one previous owner told me he tried to grow corn. We're working towards a large propagation area for vegetables and goat pasture.

The soil is not full of clay. That's to good part. It's pretty sandy, not a lot of organic matter, certainly not any depth to the soil. It is going to take a lot of amendment to make it productive. That's some nicely aged cow manure in a pile on the left. We spread a layer of black plastic to smother that area on the right. We let it cook for about a month under the August sun. It did a pretty good job on the vegetation.

The next step was the scarifying blades on my box blade. I used it to break up any roots. I was also working on an area of pasture that needs remediation after the logging. Partly because it got torn up. But we also have a infestation of evil weed. It's a climbing vine, an alien evasive from Italy called black swallow wart. The pasture is on the perimeter of the field and the logger pulled a few trees out of it. And with his skidder, it didn't seem to take much effort.

This is what the ground looked like when I got done with the scarifying blades. I decided that even after the boxblade, there are too many roots to till. I didn't want to risk my new tiller on the first day.

Those are the tines of the tiller. It did a great job on the soil, breaking up the sod, cutting roots.

Here is the results of my tilling.

Apple Picking

2008-09-15T17:54:00.001-07:00

This is the Apple tree that came with the house I bought...

The farmhouse we live and work in was built in 1893 and the family that built the house produced cider from their orchard. This is the last tree I have left on my land from them. It's a very old tree and it doesn't produce every year. But this is a good year.

We picket about 40 pounds today. They aren't super pretty. They've got some lumps. But they taste pretty good. And they are ours.

A gratuitous picture of the boy being cute

And with the wife...

I was hoping someone out there could help me identify the variety of this tree. Any guesses?

Are there other aspects of the tree that would help identify it?

After picking apples this afternoon and blueberries on Saturday, my wife suggested pie for dinner. Sometimes you just have to say what the heck....

Friends with Benefits

2008-09-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

That's my dependable old Audiovox 9155 cell phone. Well, at least it was old dependable. I got it in 2003, to replace another old Audiovox phone. Audiovox is not exactly a chic brand, but these phones have treated me well. It has a larger battery than most and I think better reception. And I haven't had to sign a contract to get a new phone.

But the point of this is that the most used buttons have started to not function reliably. The button is a typical printed circuit keypad, pushing the button forces a conductive layer down on a parallel set of contacts closing the circuit. Similar to TV remotes and many other devices. I tried cleaning it, but no avail.

I looked at the new phones Verizon would give me for signing a new contract. But I couldn't find one I felt it was worth signing a contract for. Instead, I bought the same model phone off eBay and scavenged parts out of it. That's the donor phone on the right.

I am not much of an electrical engineer. Luckily, someone else did all the engineering on this. I just had to take it apart and replace the offending keypad with the one from the eBay phone. I think it involve five small screws and some snap fit joints.

I am really happy I don't have to get a new phone. Learn how to program it, transfer my numbers, etc. And the phones I would have considered, I think Verizon would have tried to make me up my service level for anyway. I am a little concerned though. There used to be hundreds of auctions on eBay for compatible batteries. Now there are only a few. The next time I need to replace the battery, I may not be able to. But I think I probably have a year and half to three years (depending on how good the battery from the donor phone turns out to be). But then I probably will have to bite the bullet and get a new phone. Till then I guess I am foot loose and fancy free...

And in other news, we got about ten yards of poop.

We need to improve the soil in the backfield. We called around and compost was available for $55 a yard, minimum of 10 yards plus delivery. Luckily, my wife has a friend who found us a source of organic cow manure. And we didn't have to put all ten yards in the van! The friend had access to a small dump truck and we got the bulk of it that way. We got maybe two yards of old, dry, well composted manure into the back of the van (on a tarp) and onto a small trailer a friend loaned us. The rest came in the dump truck. Friends with benefits.

Here are some pictures from our first trip away from the house as a family since we got the goats a year and half ago.

More Eggs

2008-08-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

More of those pretty powder blue eggs.

See what I mean?

That's a full size egg from either a Orpington or Australorp on the right. It must be twice as big as the pullet egg from an araucana. That's what got me going this morning. Look at those little itty bitty yolks. Their so cute next to the big one. I made a mess of the Guinea egg on right, though. They have such thick shells and membranes it's tough to get them out of the shell. I often use the heal of a knife and I went a little too deep with it, apparently.

I like our eggs. Most particularly as Wavos Rancheros. Sorry about the anglicizing there. Fresh eggs lightly fried on a crispy tortia with beans, salsa (or picante) and sour cream. It's hard to cook the egg enough without over doing it. One of the things I dislike is wasting a perfectly good farm fresh egg by over cooking it. An egg with the yolk firm and solid, or worse yet, dry, is overcooked in my book.

No Wav-Os this morning, though. My secret for getting eggs the way I like them is a little steam. I cover the pan with a big pot lid while I cook them sunny side up. Then, with them about half done and the pan well warmed up, I add a little water to the pan and cover it up. Trapping the steam cooks the top half of the egg before the bottom scorches. That's the idea, anyway. I like my whites cooked but not over done with the yokes still a little runny. Especially if I have some hot buttered toast to spread the yoke on. I am sure you know what I mean.

The boy, on the other hand only likes whites. I have to scramble his to get him to eat the whole thing. If I don't, I might get a peice of yoke in his mouth, but he'll just make a really cute face while he pushes it back out with his tongue. It's cute, but for nutritional value, I like him to eat the whole thing. He ate three little pullet eggs this morning. That aboy!

Pocket lint

2008-08-22T16:56:00.001-07:00

I don't know about you, but emptying my pockets at the end of the day can be a hazardous endeavor. I am apt to have all kinds of sharps in there. Most common are drywall screws, but there could be all kinds of fencing cuttings or drill bits or other metal scraps. It occasionally makes sitting down awkward also.

WWOOF

2008-08-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

So, who has experience with a WWOOFer? I bumped into this on another Blog and am investigating. From what I read, it is a loose organization that hooks up volunteers who are interested in organic agriculture and self sufficientcy with farms willing to host them in exchange for labor. There's supposed to be some exchange of knowledge in there, also. I am not sure the model would work for us or not. It would seem a natural fit since we are working hard to develop a sustainable way of life and we already offer short term low detail housing. But the fact that part of our cash income is derived from that housing situation might make it mutually exclusive. If we were to trade some of that income generating housing for labor, it would put a crimp in our cash flow. But it's an interesting idea and worth hearing more about.

So has anybody else heard of this? Had experience with it?

Blue Booby Eggs

2008-08-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

These are eggs from our chickens. Those three little ones on the top left are from the pullets we bought as day old chicks this spring. They are a pretty pastel blue, from Araucana pullets. I think we have one of the three laying. We got 25 female chicks (plus a free rare breed male plus a free random male to make sure there were enough to stay warm in the box) from Murray McMurray Hatchery in March. I wasn't expecting to see any eggs from them until September, so these little blue beauties are all Bonus.

In there also are eggs from our 3+ year old Orpingtons, A 2 year old Australorp and the guinea egg in the upper left corner. We are transitioning from our original flock that has dwindled down to the new birds we got this year. We have a bunch of new guineas that we hatched last year. But from the number of eggs we are getting, it seems we have a lot of cocks and maybe only one hen. We might just cull the guineas this fall. I like them for tick control, but they are noisey and proan to mischief. The Wife does not like them getting into her garden.

The Chicken and the Egg

2008-07-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

I was reading on the Granny Miller Blog today (just a kindred blog I enjoy checking on occasion). She was relating how someone asked if raising meat chickens made financial sense with the cost of chicken in the store. Granny Miller (not her real name) talked about what chickens cost to raise. That's a common topic around our household also. We keep goats for milk, Chickens for eggs, and garden intensively for vegetables. Being the person I am, I track how much we spend on various pursuits and balance it against benefit. I once explained to my frien Steve the perato chart I created to display how much I spend on vehicle travel and how his bar for Mainting freindships compared to other expense categories. He was disgusted with me for knowing how many miles I drive to keep him as a friend, but, that's just the sort of friend I am. Maybe someday I will write another post about my OCD box, but for now, I will get back to the cicken and the egg. Just trust me when I say if I offer you a glass of goat milk at my table, savor it. That milk might be some of the most expensive milk you have ever had.

I was going to write Granny Miller a comment commiserating about the price of storebought eggs versus home laid eggs. But it got a little elaborate and I decided to post about it here instead.

I have had chickens and guineas for eggs, bug reduction and some meat for about five years. This year I had to order some new laying hens because my flock is dwindling down and we don't get enough eggs in the winter.

I ordered 25 chicks from a hatchery. I think with the shipping, they were about $80. Before they went outdoors, we had gone through 50 lbs of food, and we went through another 50 before we divided the flock in half to split with my brother. About a hundred dollars and we had no fatalities, so a about 4 dollars a bird. But they haven't started laying yet (and won't unitl august or september). My experience says 12 chickens will go through $10 worth of food a month. And they might lay reliably for 2-1/2 or three years. So about in the neirborhood of $40 per bird. And they might lay 200-250 eggs per year during those three years. And that doesn't count any money for housing. Those eggs in the store would cost $70 - $80 per chicken (about 225 eggs per year for three years at $1.39 per dozen, what commercial eggs cost that last time I bought eggs). But store bought eggs don't wake you up in the morning to be fed, get killed by racoons, get loose in the garden and dig up your wife's peas, etc. Raising chickens for eggs might be a better deal than chickens for meat, but I think it doesn't figure financially when you compare to commercial eggs.

But Home layed eggs are fresh daily, and for anyone who hasn't compared them, that makes a difference. And, there is a symbiosis between or chickens and our vegetable gardens. The chickens get to eat the garden leavings and kitchen waste. The Chckens eat insects that would be harmful to the garden. The chickens live in the garden over the winter, eating and striping anything left standing and spreading around their manure. When a chicken lives long enough to stop laying, about three years with our breeds, we eat the chicken. And, our chickens are freerange freerange (as opposed to comercial freerange which means loose in a chicken barn with 10,000 other chickens and a window where they can look outside), no antibiotics, etc. So there are some non financial benefits, also. And my chickens keep me off the road, I used to have all sorts of off premises pursuits, but taking care of the animals helped me give that up, saving lots of gas money and discretionary spending.

But it is still a little discouraging to think about how much it costs to raise your own food. The other part that is discouraging is realizing I am still participating in the industrial food market even though I am raising it myself. I am still feeding commercial livestock feed. It comes from a local feed mill, but they buy their grain from anywhere and it is mostly corn. Probably GE corn, certainly corn raised on pesticides and fertilizers derived from petroleum. I want to raise more of my own feed, but right now I am still dependant on foriegn oil. And, no, drilling in ANWR will not help! ;) And with the cost of hay this year, don't get me started with the cost of goats milk.

Logging aftermath

2008-07-08T05:53:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post as it's still cool but going to get hot today. And my laptop threatens to over heat in this weather...

And for Granny Miller, I'll talk about the new pasture grass first.

After the logger got done, the upper field that he used for a log landing was pretty scuffed up. The chains on the skidder had dimpled the ground, dragged logs had churned it and there was some litter from the logs laying around. But it really wasn't too bad. It was still reasonably smooth. Not lawn smooth, but pasture / field smooth. And the skidder chains actually did a pretty good job of preparing a decent seed bed and tearing up the wood litter. And, surprisingly, the equipment had not overly compacted the soil. I moved the biggest debris pieces but that's about it. Above there's a typical area as left by the logger.

In mid June, I got around to scattering some pasture seed. I went with a brand name pasture mix called pasture perfect on the recommendation of my local feed store. I would have liked to seed with native grasses, these are mostly from Oregon, but I really felt compelled to get some thing on the ground now. I will continue to research native grasses, though, and may seed other areas with more local grasses.

To seed, I simply hand spread the seed and then knocked the soil around with a leaf rake to get better soil contact. It wasn't optimal, but I was able to get the seed out there in advance of a couple of days of rain. And the dimpled ground left by the skidder chains accepted the seed well. I wasn't sure how things were going to go and I was worried that it might be too dry, but a week later it looks like we have had pretty good germination. And the temps haven't been too hot and dry. With a little luck these seedlings will take root. Here's a shot of the seedlings carpeting the scuffed ground.

The old road was impassable to my full size van because of steep grades, gullies and it was too narrow in spots. This the road as the logger left it. Reasonably smooth, no ruts. Pretty nice, I could drive a sub compact car in and out of there. But that's really just sand and some clay. I knew looking at it that a good rain storm was going to make a mess of it. I have been waiting impatiently to get some gravel on it to protect it from runoff.

There are some structural problems with the road as it is. The profile of the road allows rain to run down the road, gathering volume and speed. Just as important as the gravel, I need to provide ways to get the water off the road and absorbed into the ground. Otherwise, this is what happens.

That's a 18" deep gully. The sand has been carried down the road an emptied into the intersection with the town road at the bottom of the hill.

I don't have access to any heavy equipment at the moment, so I dug some quick check dams with a shovel. They are just slashes going diagonal across the road. The idea is to move a little bit of road bed down hill, just enough to form a 4" deep trough with a minimal grade to get the water to the side of the road and into a catch basin. I'll be trying to get the water to absorb into the ground in those catch basins rather than running in a ditch alongside the road.

The road is pretty ugly right now, those check dams are pretty rough and would not withstand traffic. When I have more power at my disposal, I'll do some serious road work trading the hand dug checkdams for "broadbased dips". A broadbased dip is the same idea as the check dam with wider dimensions that allow a vehicle to travel over them without forming ruts that breach the downhill side of the dip. I'll also try to broaden the profile of the road so the steepest grade becomes a little more gentle. And then I'll add gravel. Gravel will be the icing that holds it all together.

End Post

2008-06-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

I've been working on adding new paddocks for the goats. My goal is to have four paddocks down near the house for our milking does. The idea is to be able rotate the goats to prevent parasites from building up. I've been adding a new paddock each month since March. This is the last new one to fence down by the house. The other two were just temporary poly wire and snow fence on fiberglass rods. But today's work is on a permanent high tension 6 wire fence. It's actually an extra wire, I am trying to make it a little more kid proof. No strand fence is going to be completely kid proof, but I want a little more in my favor next time we have little ones.

I like cedar post fences. I was looking over someone Else's blog today and they talked about putting up a fence about this length in a day. I have about four days into this fence now and I was feeling a little self conscious about it. But I realized theirs was on T posts that go up a little quicker than cedar posts.

For an endpost or corner post, I use an outrigger, diagonal and horizontal to make a strong enough anchor to resist the tension of my fence when it is tight. I use two sizes of post, 8-12" end posts for the actual end post and 4-6" diameter line posts for the outrigger, diagonals, horizontals and any intermediary line posts.

This is the diagonal. I angle the ends to match the vertical posts. There's a four inch re bar peg sticking out of it there. I'll drill a mating 1/2" hole in the posts and then fit the peg from the diagonal member. I over size the holes in the post to make it a little easier to get the diagonal in place. Since the diagonal is under compression, the peg doesn't need to be a force fit. I also make the diagonal about 2" longer than the post spacing suggests. Partly that's because it's a lot easier to cut a little more off than put a little back on. But I also want this to be a nice snug fit.

Believe or not, that's an eight foot post, but fully half of it is in the ground. I want it to stay put when I tighten up the wires. When I am taking my time (and when I have enough meat in the post) I like to notch the posts to make sure I get good contact between them and limit the shear put on the connecting pins. Here's the end post with an horizontal notch to match with an opposing notch.

To make the notches, I use a bow saw to cut the ends of the notch, then cut a series of closely spaced cuts the depth of the notch. This helps deal with any knots or twisting grain.

To get the rest out, I use a machete, inserting it into the saw cut and twisting the blade to break out the wood. That gets me most of the way there.

Then a couple of whacks to true up the bottom of the notch.

Here's the horizontal getting pegged to the endpost. That's another re bar peg in there.

A nice heavy hammer with a broad head actually does less damage beating the members together than a framing hammer would. That's an old 8lb mall head on a 24" handle. It can be a lot to handle with one hand, but it packs a wallop and means a lot less swings.

When I fit the horizontal, I fit it with about a 2" interference. I want to use the horizontal to pull the diagonal into place and firm up the structure.

I set up a quick manual winch to pull the outrigger post in that two inches to fit it with the horizontal. I double up a thick rope from the outrigger around the endpost to a strong lever. Using the tension snugs up the diagonal and takes any slack out of the structure. The fence would compress the structure anyway, but that would move the end post and possibly change it's set angle.

That's the finished end post.