Movin' On Up...

Lots of residents of our little farm moved up to bigger quarters today. We moved the chicks to a bigger brooder, one made from an old metal dog crate, and transplanted lots of plants - about 18 cauliflower, 16 broccoli, 2 eggplant and a pepper or two.

I have been killing aphids on the cabbage and pepper plants. They are tiny green bugs that can be easily smooshed between my fingers and the leaf. Hand-picking insects is a good organic method control that is easy and doesn't cost anything, although it does require time.

Well, I've gotta get up early tomorrow morning - Peter and I are going to Foundation Farm and Little Portion - I can't wait!

Molehill sinkholes! Potatoes up!

The bridge that connects our land to the rest of the world

We are on the verge of getting stranded. It has been raining here for 8 days! Our bridge is beginning to wash out. The water has been several feet above the road 3 times in the last 2 days. We just moved one vehicle to the other side of the road so we will be able to get out if the bridge goes out completely (Hopefully that side of the road doesn't wash out as well).

FYI, if molehills fill up with water, they become mudholes that will suck a rainboot in up to the ankle.

We moved the chicken tractor to a drier spot and covered the chicken wire "porch" with a tarp, so they have a place to go when it rains hard. They are still diligently foraging between cloudbursts, probably finding lots of nice drowned worms!

I'm glad our baby plants and baby chicks are so safe and warm indoors with us. The chicks are getting lots of feathers:

I planted potatoes almost 3 weeks ago to "grow out" some excess P and K in a chicken tractor garden bed. It was taking so long for them to come up, I was pretty sure they had rotted or been eaten by moles. Then, yesterday, in the middle of torrential downpours, the potatoes arrived! I love how potatoes come up as full-on plants, unlike plants from seed which emerge as tiny, delicate seedlings.

Chick napping

Beautiful.

This one looks like a Peep.

Two matching ones.

So cute and proud looking!

One of my favorite things about watching the chicks is seeing them fall asleep en masse. One chick's eyes will start to get droopy, and her knees will begin to bend, sinking down, then another joins in, then another, until they are all sinking into sleep. Usually, just before the last one falls asleep they are suddenly awoken by someone doing one of the following:

• Suddenly walking across the heads and backs of the rest of the sleeping chicks,
• Pecking at another chick's eye
• Pecking at another chick's beak
• Pecking at another chick's feathers
• Pecking at a speck on the wall of the brooder
• Pecking at the numbers on the thermometer
• Pecking at the string holding the thermometer

It is kind of like a game - I am silently rooting for them all to be able to be asleep at the same time, and they never quite manage it, but I keep rooting for them anyway.

Watching them fills me with so much love and joy. I think that the loving, caring energy that surrounds backyard/homestead animals every day is a big part of why they are so happy and healthy.

Plants are magic!

Cauliflower

Copia Bi-Color tomato from seeds saved by Bean Mountain Farms

Red and Green Cabbage and Tomato

Basil from seed swap

Beginnings of raised beds - 4'X25' with 2' paths

Despite all my kvetching, the seedlings are doing great and the garden is coming along. Today I will be repotting tomatoes one last time so they can get REALLY BIG before we put them out. The weather is very cool, so we will probably wait a while (until nights stay about 60) to put out the heat-loving crops - tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melon, etc. However, that is good news for the cool-loving plants that we planted a bit late - spinach, kale, pac choi, mesclun, beets, carrots, mache and claytonia. They are all up, and most have gotten their first set of true leaves.

All in all, starting seeds has been a great experience this year. My intention is to become as self-sufficient as possible, and saving seeds and starting plants from seeds are keys to that goal. If I can get to the point of growing all my own seeds and never buying seedlings, my reliance on external inputs will be reduced. The electricity for the grow lights is an external input that cannot be eliminated immediately, but hopefully in a few years we can look into alternative sources of energy.

Today I will be adding epsom salts to the garden beds to provide magnesium, and then we have to wait 2 weeks to plant so it doesn't burn the plants. I will also add lime for calcium, and borax for boron.

Isn't it fascinating that the minerals behave similarly in the soil to the way they behave in our bodies?

Calcium, magnesium and boron work synergistically and must be in balance in the body, and the same holds true in the soil. Feeding the soil so the plants feed us seems like a much bigger-picture approach to health than taking chemical or rock forms of vitamins and minerals. Plants CAN eat rocks (unlike people, although some people take calcium supplements made from rocks), so I will employ the plants to do the work for me. When I worked as an account executive (fancy term for sales rep) for New Chapter, I told this story all the time to my customers who were all medical professionals (and to friends, family, neighbors, and anyone who seemed at least vaguely interested). It is the same reason that New Chapter make their calcium supplements from seaweed containing lots of trace minerals biotransformed by nature, and the same reason the seaweed meal nourishes Audrey Hacker's goats so beautifully, and the same reason seaweed meal is good to feed to plants. Seaweed in the form of kelp tablets is even being used to provide an organic form of iodine to help prevent uptake of radioactive iodine into the thyroid gland in the fallout of the Japan nuclear reactor meltdown.

PLANTS DO MAGIC!

http://www.newchapter.com/bone-health

http://herbalsimplicity.com/aboutus.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytonia_perfoliata

http://www.localharvest.org/healthstock-of-tyree-mountain-M28161

Easter Egg Mystery Solved.....

Sooo, we thought the chickens were being "naughty girls" and laying their eggs far and wide, but alas, we were mistaken. Here is a photographical essay to illustrate what really happened to the eggs!

"Where are all the eggs?" says Farmer Rose. "Those hens have been laying 7-9 eggs a day between the 9 of them, and now I find just one egg in the nest box. I think we have to have an Easter Egg Hunt!"

"I will pen up the chickens in their "tractor" (movable coop) so that they will have to lay their eggs in the nest boxes!"

"Hmmmm, the hens have been penned up from 5 o'clock yesterday until 5 o'clock today and there is only one egg in the tractor nest box! Have the hens been holding them in out of spite???"

"I guess I will check in here." (This is the door where we clean out under the roost).

"Fifteen eggs! Enough to account for yesterday and today! Hurray, mystery solved!"

Musings on Death/ Hurray for Organic Chicken Feed!

I have killed all but one of the echinacea. The echinacea that had my heart singing a few short days ago. I feel like Woody Allen in my neuroses over these plants - I feel like a loser, like I can't do anything right, like I am destined for failure. Plants pick up on that and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn't promise you that this blog would be uplifting or informative. It is a narrative of my crazy relationship with farming. That is one reason why I am going to be visiting farms, to give you a diversity of opinions, stories, and experiences from people less neurotic than myself. Next week I am heading over to Foundation Farm and Little Portion Monastery to check out their operations, take some video, and report back to you kind souls.

I think I need to read about Findhorn again and get my energy aligned with the plants in a positive way.http://www.findhorn.org/aboutus/vision/co-creation/

On a happier note, the chicks are so incredibly cute! I just love watching them peep and scurry around and stretch their little necks and tilt their little heads! We got them last Wednesday from Feed, Seed and More in Springdale, a great local business owned by some very nice folks: http://www.feedseedmore.com/products.php?cat=4

And we can now get organic feed for both the chicks and the hens at Ozark Natural Foods (located at 1554 N. College Ave., in the Evelyn Hills shopping center), the only supplier of organic feed in the State of Arkansas and in the region!

Hours of operation: Wednesdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sales are open to both owners and guest shoppers.

The feed is delivered in 1-ton amounts from Thayer Feed in Southeastern Kansas.

How it works: Bring empty containers (trash cans, metal drums, plastic buckets, etc) to the loading dock. Staff will then place the container on our scale, deduct the weight of the container, weigh the amount of feed you choose, then load it into your vehicle. You will be given a ticket with the amount and type of feed, to be paid at the Owner Services Desk inside the store.

There are four types of feed: Starter, Grower, Layer and Scratch. Ingredients for the Layer, Grower and Starter are: corn, roasted soybeans, oats, alfalfa, milo, calcium and a poultry nutritional balancer (a collection of vitamins and minerals that chickens need). The Scratch has only oats, corn and milo.

All ingredients are organic.

Prices:

Grower and Starter: 47 cents/lb

Layer: 42 cents/lb

Scratch: 35 cents/lb

And yes, I will plant more echinacea. I just took out some more seeds that were in my freezer in peat moss from the seed swap back in February. I will move forward and forgive myself my mistakes and see them as necessary steps on the road to self-sufficiency in food and medicine!

Easter Egg Hunt!

We moved the chicken tractor yesterday because it was getting STINKY, and so the chickens have more shade for the summer, and to try to move their focus away from the back porch (AKA their latrine). However, chickens aren't really into change - they won't go into the tractor voluntarily now, and based on the number of eggs in the tractor nest boxes, they apparently have decided they don't want to lay eggs in this drastically different location (i.e., the same house 20 feet away from where it was before). Sooo, we have to figure out where they are hiding eggs now. Last year we kept finding hiding places in weird spots, such as under the corner of a tarp - there were 20 there by the time I discovered it! The eggs we find on our hunt will be brown, but by the fall we will have some pastel blue and green eggs because 5 of our new chicks are Araucanas (also called Easter Eggers)!

Chick Casualty

We had a chick drown last night. We had never lost a chick before in the 3 years we have been raising them. I had read to put rocks in the waterer to prevent drowning, but I always figured the water was shallow enough that they weren't at risk. Now there are rocks in the waterer to keep the water shallow enough that they can't drown.

Some death does come with the territory of raising food - some accidental, like the drowning, some intentional (i.e. harvesting animals and plants to eat) and some to support the cause of feeding predators, whether insect, avian, or mammal. We are sheltered from real death to a large extent in our society - fictionalized death we have plenty of in movies and TV. Somehow experiencing death adds to the realness and trueness of life.

Windy!

Photo Credit: Penny Gray

It is blowing like crazy out there tonight! 40 mile gusts! And today I went with a group of women homesteaders to the top of Tyree Mountain in Prairie Grove to Audrey Hacker's farm, Healthstock/Horned H Ranch, where the wind always blows. It blows away chicken hoop houses, dries out the soil, and dries out the garden plants. It was cold and rainy and downright uncomfortable, but our spirits were warm with the peace and harmony with the animals and the earth that we felt on their land.

Audrey Hacker is the real deal (and her whole family is too)! They raise their animals in a way that is both deeply intuitive and scientifically precise. On this windy mountaintop it is very difficult to grow vegetables because of the drought conditions, much dryer than surrounding lowlands with significantly less rainfall. They do, however, raise or hunt all their own meat. Their freezer is currently full of venison, pork, and beef and chicken from their farm.

Their beautiful, healthy, completely free-range herd of goats exude a joyful goat-ness. The small flock of chickens keeps the hay bedding where the goats sleep at night in the barn fluffed up and free of parasites. Audrey practices rotational grazing, with each animal either correcting an issue left behind by the previous (ie consuming parasites) or reaping the benefits of an improvement made by previous animals, or being on the other end of either of those transactions for the following species.

Audrey demonstrated and gave detail on making a mineral mix for goats to compensate for the lack of copper, trace minerals, salt, and minerals in general in Arkansas soil. She attributes the hardiness and excellent health of her goats to being free to choose their food over a large area, being in harsh weather, and her supplementing their trace minerals with a mixture of dolomite, sulfur, copper and seaweed that the goats love to eat.

She has a practical, down-to-earth attitude about things such as chicken breeds - use the breeds that are bred for high meat production, rather than heritage breeds which have been of necessity selected for higher egg laying because of the mathematics of operating a hatchery, so therefore meatiness is really hard to find in heritage breeds. However, when the Cornish Cross (the typical hybrid we see in grocery stores) are fed on healthy feed, as well as pasture containing not only a wide variety of greens, but also insects and seeds for protein, fresh air (not ammoniated chicken house air) exercise, and adequate space, they do not suffer the same issues such as heart attack (sometimes called "flip") and broken legs as hybrid birds do when confined, and provide a nice large delicious carcass with high quality meat on the bones.

We were also enlightened about the existence of two great resources:

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/

and http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/magazine.htm

We hope to go back soon and work on projects like lacto-fermenting vegetables, pressure canning, processing chickens, and trimming goats' hooves.

Gardening is hard!

Chickens helping remove bugs and weed seeds from newly-tilled bed

Gardening can be really difficult, frustrating, exhausting and overwhelming! The work is hot, tiring, and often physically painful. We have to juggle so many different pieces - seeds, planting times, soil amendments, garden layout, seedlings, building beds, fencing, mulch, tools, where are my gloves, how can I garden when the lawn needs mowing, and why don't I just give up and go inside and write a blog post? Oh yeah, and how am I going to have time to garden, raise animals, and make an Ozark Local Foods website when I barely have time for everything else that I still have to keep doing (cooking, cleaning, driving, complaining, eating, sleeping, and occasionally yelling at Rose to make sure she keeps homeschooling herself)? And how can I make raised beds when the #$%& shovel hits a rock every time it goes 4 inches into the soil!?!?!? Tilling was supposed to make everything easier, not harder! Till once then superior no-till methods forever after was the idea... Well, I am going to do it! No matter how difficult and tiring it is, it is worth it and I will do it. I know all of you will support me too and keep me going when I want to give up, and in return I will entertain you with funny stories and pretty pictures, like the picture above and this semi-funny story. The other day I went outside to mow with our spiffy new push mower. I thought about picking up the rocks that I had thrown out as I made the spots for the trees, but it somehow didn't seem that important (or fun) so I just went along and started mowing. At one point I hit a rock, and I was pretty sure I heard it hit the side of the house. A minute later, Rose was yelling, "Mom, a rock just came through my window!" Luckily she was in the other room on the computer using Khan Academy (awesome website BTW) and did not get hurt. The moral of the story: Always listen to your intuition, and always pick up rocks before mowing.) PS I spent the next 3 hours removing everything from every inch of Rose's room (have you seen her room? There was a lot of stuff to sort through!) and removing shards of glass. At least I didn't have to mow.

Seedlings

.Friday April 8^th

Planted cold weather crops (a little late but it is still cool here – well, typical drastic variations in weather – hot one day then cold the next):

Spinach (4 varieties)

Redbor kale

Mesclun

Claytonia - AKA miner’s lettuce – a succulent, delicious wild edible that I was introduced to and devoured in salads when I was at the California School of Herbal Studies

Mâché

Danvers Half-long and kaleidoscope color mix carrots

More peas where peas didn't germinate interplanted with Gilfeather turnips - a delicacy which originated in Wardsboro VT where our daughter was born (at home in a big red farmhouse). Here is a description of them from Slow Food USA:

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/ark_product_detail/gilfeather_turnip/

And a story about the Gilfeather Festival:

http://www.theheartofnewengland.com/travel/vt/turnip-festival.html

Monday 4/11 The Gaia herbs echinacea that I striated in the freezer in a plastic bag with peat moss germinated!

Planted 40 in small peat pots covered with a thin layer of soil. Growing echinacea feels like the fulfillment of many years of planning and dreaming. By growing our medicine I will be creating a level of self-sufficiency for my family’s health that is very liberating and empowering. The plants take several years to mature so it is also another long-term commitment to the land and the homestead, like the fruit trees. I am not generally a patient person but this I can do!

Tuesday April 12 transplanted peppers (Yolo Wonder), tomatoes (Rutgers, Red Cherry, Copia Bicolor and Break o’Day). Used a variation on Calvin Bey’s tomato starting mix – limestone, compost, diatomaceous earth, Nitron’s Nature meal for plants and A-23 enzyme preparation to help nutrients in compost and soil break down and be released.

Mold on outside of peat pots from lack of air flow. Removed and discarded peat pots. Apparently this is normal/common, but I found dissenting opinions on whether or not it is detrimental to the plants so I erred on the side of caution.

Transplanted cabbage (Red Acre and Late Flat Dutch) and the Lemon-lime basil that Rose picked out. Thinned the basil and had a tiny delicious treat!

I transplanted the Red Acre cabbage into larger pots, but there were extras left over so I decided as an experiment to plant them in a bed that has excess phosphorous and potassium and see how they do (and if the chickens eat them!) I’ll keep you posted on the results.

More photos and updates soon...