Fall To-Do List in Pictures

1. Dry burdock peelings for winter tea.

                          2. Process acorns for flour.

3. Keep shelling acorns.


               4. Bottle hard cider for sanity.

5. Pressure can more bony pickerel and pike for winter fish sticks.


                          6. Plant garlic bed.










7. Process meat chickens.


                  
                            8. Breed goats.









9. Finish trim on the new barn.


10. Replant sunchokes and try sprouting asparagus from seed.









 11. Encourage a Kindergartener.

12. Relax with a dew filled spider web.

There's No Time Like the Present...Nah, there's just no time

If August hasn't kicked my butt, then September is definitely going to smack me around a bit.  Aside from harvesting every day, canning tomatoes and freezing veg like Armageddon is near, and on top of the usual milking/feeding chores, we were gifted with two more milking goats.  Thelma and Louise were sold as kids by our farm and cared for by a very sweet friend, who has more important duties now than to milk a couple of unruly first-freshening goats.  These girls have GREAT potential as second fresheners, with long easily-expressing teats, they could be better than our top producers, their half-sisters Cordial and Constance.  For now, though, they really just want to mule kick me in the face.  My milking helper actually brought her biking helmet out of storage to approach these girls for the morning chore.  Every first-freshener has a breaking period, but for it to be this late on a strong, heavy gal is wearing me out.

To make matters worse, my neighbor helper is taking a week off this month, just before my inlaws AND great-inlaws arrive for a visit.  We have three family birthdays to celebrate in September, meaning gifts and homemade cake, at a minimum.  The meat birds are going to ice camp, etc.  AND for some reason, we now have a newly hatched chick (singular...no friends) chirping in my ear at the moment for my 5 yr-old to scratch her (fingers crossed that it's not a damn rooster) head.  Oh...and my newly 2 yr-old daughter needs weaning and shots.  Insert curse words and beer here!!   Come on winter, I really can't wait to sit down!

Thelma

Louise

            

Guineas' Farewell Extravaganza

Our first attempt at raising French Guineas was a mild success.  It was not warm and fuzzy, but cool and easy for me to manipulate a sharp blade across their necks.  On one hand these semi-wild birds were quite excellent in that they require very little feed input, but their management, for me, has had severe drawbacks.  I've read that they obtain 90% of their diet from forage, which I believe considering how little commercial turkey food they consumed.  We started them to control the tick population on our wooded property.  They have a wide range, eating greenery and bugs along the way.  Their antics are endearing as they are curious creatures of habit.  I never minded having them in the yard.  Even the noise was tolerable.  They are hardy and have out-flown a neighbor fox on several occasions.

Putting them away for the night was where our story becomes ridiculous.  I discovered that they wouldn't return to their coop in the evenings to roost.  In the beginning, I tried chasing them in, which was fairly useless and frustrating.  Then I would entice them with dinner, shaking a coffee can of pellets and rounding them up from the neighbor's yard.  They liked to be together, follow the leader and do whatever the hell they pleased.  If lead bird wasn't ready, then they would all walk up to the door, check out the situation and then turn away, one at a time.  All I could do was wait, coerce and curse.  If I left the door open with food in the coop, then they would go in to eat and be back outside before I could close the door.  Leaving it up to them was not an option, because they would choose to roost in the trees and be taken in the night, by predators, one at a time.  Every day has been a struggle for me.  I let them out in the morning with full knowledge that it might take me 2 hours to get them back in at night.  I've chased and caught the noncommittal stragglers in a fishing net for the past week.  This exhaustion weighs on my energy to do other chores, like milk and feed our 12 goats, 2 pigs, 10 layer chickens, 26 meat chickens, cat, two children, and a hungry full-time working husband.   

So on the hottest day of the year, I am more than happy to put an end to our Guinea adventure by killing, scalding, plucking, gutting, and freezing them all.  All except for the one bird that flew over my head and scratched my back on her way to freedom.  If she returns to live with the chickens, we will extend a rare pardon and try Guinea eggs.  I think she's seen enough and will take her chances in the wild.  Good luck and good riddance!

Bats and Beaks

As the evenings became crisp last fall, we removed the air conditioning unit from our bedroom window in preparation for a long winter.  Looking back now, I remember finding what appeared to be extra large mouse poops on the underside of the exterior portion.  It seemed odd, but I wasn't going to rule out giant mice on our rooftop.  Two years ago, there was one mouse in particular who used to roll acorns across our bedroom ceiling and then down the gutter drain spout.  I was very pregnant at the time and not sleeping well, so the sound was deafening to tired ears and completely inexplicable.

The air conditioner usually sees a few weeks of use every year.  Last night we decided the uncomfortable warmth was enough reason to pop out the screen and hoist the heavy machine halfway through the window opening to find some relief in a cool sleep.  We stuffed some old shirts into the spaces on either side of the unit to keep the bugs out of our bedroom.  Everyone slept well and would have woken feeling rested, except....I heard some flapping at about 3am.  Now, if this had been a rhythmic noise I would not have heard it.  Random flapping, on the other hand, is reason for alarm.  About an hour later my husband woke me up to say a bat had just brushed by his sleeping face.  We both army-rolled out of bed and spent the next half-hour catching and later safely releasing a very large brown bat.  What is it about bats that is so creepy?  I've been face-to-face with bear and moose, but this little flapping bat had me ducking with closed eyes.  I wish they would go live in the bat box we built instead of roosting on the air conditioner.  There must be something attractive about its vibration, like hundreds of friends flapping their wings as if to say, "come join the party!"

After the bat episode, I was too awake to go back to bed.  So, I began contemplating our bird issue.  We have too many foul spread around in separate housing and I need to consolidate before winter.  There are old layers (3) and a rooster living in the coop who are on yard duty, the younger layers (2) and pullets (4) are occupying a goat stall that I need available for breeding season, the Guineas (12) have a shed of their own, we have a batch of meat chickens (25) in a garage brooder, and finally there are two newly hatched chicks from our incubator project.  We'll see who makes the cut.

RI Red and Copper Maran cross

   These two are adorable already.  I've never watched an egg hatch and shared my daughter's amazement in the process.  There's nothing quite like reality to stave off kids' boredom. 

Ramblings from the Farm

These are baby Oyster mushrooms in the early fruiting stage.  In the past few days, since taking this picture, they have changed yet again.  I'm so curious to watch these phases take place and will be guessing at when to harvest them, especially considering how we have neither grown nor eaten this type of mushroom EVER!  My husband has refused to eat mushrooms of any kind, for as long as I've known him.  I'm hoping to convert him with these tasty homegrown delights.







 We took another gamble this week by installing new bees (a 5-frame nuc) in our hive, which saw only two months of occupancy nearly two years ago.  I was sad and tired of seeing if sit empty in the garage.  The Italian package originally installed were mostly drowned by my inept attempt at feeding and then finished off by our voracious dragonflies.  The nuc I placed a week ago seems healthy and vigorous.  As I was opening the cardboard package, several frames tipped over onto the ground.  A simple adjustment from vertical to horizontal positioning was enough to warrant an attack directed at me.  Several made their way under my shirt, which I had neglected to tuck in, stinging me on the belly.  So as my visiting mother and children watched from a window of our house, I high-stepped and cursed my way across the yard in a sprint, covered in angry bees.  Lesson learned.

Remarkably, all of our tomatoes have begun to set fruit.  These are Sungold cherry tomatoes.

And blueberries are coming along ahead of schedule.

We also added a Copper Maran rooster to our older laying crew.  "Harold" is quite handsome and friendly.  He took his male duties very seriously and we collected six fertilized eggs from our Rhode Island Red hen, immediately.  My nearly-five-year-old was too excited about the prospect of hatching chicks to let this project slide.  So, we a built a cardboard box incubator using an old desk lamp, a wire rack from the toaster oven, and a recycled refrigerator shelf. 

Poor Harold lost his gorgeous tail to a fox the same day I took this photo.  Since then, he has been severely depressed and failed to crow at dawn.  I'm actually looking forward to his recovery.  I miss all the racket and farmyard reminder to get moving out of bed.

Blighted and the Light

Several weekends ago, I spent my Saturday pulling all our tomatoes out and burying them in a giant pile.  Last weekend, I killed, plucked and eviscerated our twenty remaining meat chickens.  Talk about grisly work.  For some reason, ripping the tomato plants out was more difficult a chore, psychologically, than butchering.  I certainly had more in common with the animal than the plant, so this emotion surprised me.  The only explanation I have for my reaction is that I failed the diseased tomatoes and instead of watching them continue to blacken and spread late blight to my neighbors, I felt unwillingly compelled to destroy them thus ending our tomato season.  On the other hand the chickens were healthy, thriving and happy, but their end means our freezer will feed us for another year.

Early Thanks

I'm sure that I'm not alone when I say this is my favorite time of year.  For starters, I begin to mentally let go of the garden and simply appreciate every day that it produces food.  My expectations fall away and the worry fades.  We won't break any production records this year, but it was more than enough.  And if one crop failed then another was there to fill any void.  I've put up enough food to relax and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from eating what is available one day to the next.

The evenings are crisp, leaves threaten to burst into the brilliant reds and oranges that so many travel here to appreciate.  We have a sugar maple just outside our living room bay window that is the bell-ringer every year along with the tall oaks that pound out the shortening days with their acorn percussion.

There's a batch of tomato sauce waiting on the stove top to be milled and canned.  A half bushel of apples is next in line to sauce.  Every morning I pick a quart of fall raspberries with our baby napping on my back.  The goats are, at the same time, at ease that the biting insects have subsided and anxious about the cool mornings as they've begun to come into heat.  The meat chickens are also living one day at a time.  They have grown especially fast this year and will be harvested earlier than planned.

We foraged enough wild grapes to try a first small batch of wine.  Soon our local orchard will begin to press cider, which I buy in 5 gal lots for fermentation into apple wine.  Nothing says autumn like fresh homebrew.  

On loss.

Every farm, however small, suffers losses and recently we have been beset by them. Several weeks ago we lost our favorite doe kid this season, Tripoli. She was gorgeous beyond belief and maybe never suited to this ugly world. After a month of wasting away with diarrhea, she finally passed. I believe now that her dam never fed her those first few days and it took too long for her to show any interest in a bottle. I should have forced a tube down her throat to feed her colostrum after 24hrs, but I mistook her disinterest in eating as a sign that her mother was nursing in private. Combine a first-freshening doe with a freshman mistake in goat husbandry and you get a wasting kid. Despite eating, she never put on weight and took little interest in running and jumping with the others. She was bigger and healthier the day of her birth than any other of her short life.

About one week before Tripoli died, we started losing laying hens to a clever raccoon. One-a-day and with no obvious signs of forced-entry, I began to blame the chickens for cannibalism and a recent change in feed. Even after discovering the thief, we failed to secure the coop against his persistent attacks. With net electric fencing installed, I finally succeeded in trapping the chicken-eater two days ago. I dispatched him and he suffered less than his prey.

Within this short period, we also lost my father to a brain tumor. Where keeping the little farm was once an obstacle to visits with family, it has become a great distraction from the reality of my father's death.

Free-range fiasco

Our first pets were four laying hens that I had waited and planned for months in advance. I was excited to have these birds pecking and scratching away at our yard on insect control, just as Mother Earth News advertised. I wanted to give these animals a better existence than the factory farmer was willing to provide and feel good about where my eggs came from. I have seen miserable caged animals in the laboratory before, with no purpose other than to die. Personally, I believe that they understand their fate. Since leaving the lab behind, I'd prefer to dispatch critters only for my own subsistence with the exception that they are suffering.

It was my first project as a stay-at-home and soon-to-be mom and my very first experience with chickens. I brought the hens home from a local farmer late at night, as they return to roost and are easier to catch in the evening. The next morning I let them begin to roam the yard on my watch. Coincidentally, several hundred feet through the woods our neighbor was repairing some fence rails on his day off...with his birding dog. His dog spotted our White Rock scratching through layers of dead leaves. I heard the scuffle and squawk, then began to waddle at 8 months pregnant in the direction of the noise, making the mistake of leaving the remaining birds unguarded. A few minutes later and less than 24 h after bringing home our new additions, we were down to one hen and even I knew that she would be lonely. I returned to the farmer the very next day to purchase one more hen..."since we liked them so much." I didn't have the heart to tell her the gruesome story.

Since then and many birds later we have lost a total of 4 hens to dogs, 2 to hawks, 2 to fox, and 3 chicks to a raccoon. These do not include the near-miss encounters with a black bear, more hawks and other fox. We have a river corridor wildlife management area and bird sanctuary behind our home. Even the rectangular wire-encased runs that I built have proved insufficient at protecting our birds. The wildlife does quite well, which means free-range poultry is out of the question.

This season we expanded our interests to meat chickens, which proved especially difficult given our predation situation. I built a second coop for the birds to spend the night indoors, but this became problematic for several reasons. First, the birds had to be ushered out into a movable run in the morning and back to the coop at night. This sounds simple enough except that our spring group was comprised of the Cornish Cross commercial breed (this was the only choice our feed store offered), which are notorious for growing so fast that they become unable to walk, aside from other drawbacks. For a month, between when the birds feathered out and their slaughter, I had to catch and hand carry each bird back to the coop because they were unable to do so for themselves. Another problem with this type of management was the crowding that the birds had to endure overnight, not to mention the frequent cleaning that was required almost daily. I began to wonder if I was accomplishing anything more than the factory farm, besides an inefficiency that flirted with ridiculous.

After enjoying roasted homegrown chicken, I can say that we produced something considerably more palatable than what is available at the supermarket. Our birds enjoyed sunlight and dirt baths, but I aim to do better by them next time. My management plan for this fall season will be movable runs (24-30 sq ft) holding no more than 12 birds that are moved twice a day onto new pasture within a perimeter of electric fence for protection at night.