Flathead Farmer Girl

Terrible blogger, terribly busy.

Sorry everybody.  I say that, imagining the hordes of fans I don't have, checking the site multiple times per day, each time, being let down due to the lack of an update.  Throughout my busy days, I think to myself, "I want to write about this on my blog," but the posts just don't get done.  I will be going out of town for five days to attend my Grandmother's 85th birthday party in Tacoma, Washington.  When I get back, despite having my work load doubled on the day I return (keep reading), I vow to get in a post per week.

On my way back from Tacoma (I will be driving), I am stopping to pick up my first family dairy cow!  I wanted to put about a hundred exclamation points at the end of that sentence.  I'm dreaming of cream...  Thick Jersey cream.  I can hardly wait.  For now, most of the milk will go to feed the 148 chickens I now own.  I had a delivery of 100 more meat chicks on July 10th, plus I've got the 30 pullets (immature hens) and 18 older meat chicks.  The first set of meat chicks will only be alive another few short weeks, and then...off with their heads!  The hundred more will be butchered in mid-October.  Then, I'll have a lot more excess milk to work with, not to mention time, for dabbling in cheese and butter making...just in time for the holidays!

We had another poultry shipping mishap.  Quite awhile back, I ordered 15 white Muscovy ducklings to arrive this past week.  These would be raised for meat, I love duck.  Well, apparently sometime after I ordered, the hatchery changed their policy on shipping and guaranteeing ducklings.  They now only guarantee them to arrive alive if they are shipped overnight.  When we didn't receive the phone call from the post office on the morning scheduled for arrival, Jeremy just drove down to inquire.  The post office is about three minutes away.  They weren't there.  He came home and contacted the hatchery.  They were concerned.  They tracked the package, and it had apparently been misdirected by the USPS.  The woman at the hatchery said that she'd be surprised if any arrived alive 24 hours later, the new scheduled time.

Jeremy did some more asking around at the post office and found out that the actual delivery truck arrives at the post office at around midnight, and that he would be able to go to the back door (only in a small town, huh?) to pick them up even at that hour.  He arranged for that, wanting to give any ducklings as much a chance for survival (until we butcher them) as possible.  Otherwise, they would have sat there for 8 1/2 more hours until the post office opened the next morning.  Only three of fifteen were still alive.  Fairly surprising to me is that four days later, they're still plugging along.  They're pretty cute, but despite that and their heroic story, I'm still going to raise them for meat.  Muscovies are ugly, I don't want them as farm pets.

The hatchery of course insures their shipments and offered to ship out another 15 this week, still not guaranteeing many would show up alive.  The overnight shipping is not available to our area.  Still, if the post office doesn't misdirect them, and if I would decide to pick them up at midnight, that's only 36 hours.  I was given the option of a refund, though, and I took it.  With preparing to go out of town, and with my Mom caring for all the animals while I'm away (while working 3 of the 5 days), and because I'm bringing home a dairy cow, and because if I wereto pick them up at midnight, that would be just several hours before we plan on leaving for our trip, canceling the order just makes sense.  I will have three ducks for the freezer this winter, and can order more ducklings (probably from a closer hatchery) in the early spring.

Jeremy had a good week home.  With a whole week, and with a comparatively short "honey, do" list, he relaxed all his first afternoon home (Saturday), and then we hiked on Sunday.

  

Monday was cold and it rained all day, Tuesday was still quite cold and cloudy.  Monday was a lazy day, Tuesday he eventually went out in the barn to start getting things organized the way he wants them. That just left four more days before his departure Sunday morning.  He finished organizing the barn, which looks fantastic, and he cleared a large pile of debris from the property, making several trips to the dump.

After the large amount of rain we received on Monday (over an inch!) it's been hot hot hot.  The garden has just exploded.  The potato plants are huge and bushy, and today Ethan noticed our first blossoms, formed, but not yet open.  All the other crops that I mentioned in the last post as looking good, now look great, and almost all the others look pretty good now, too.  Of course the ideal growing conditions have favored the weeds as well.  At least when they're big, they're easy to pull out of the moist soil, and the large size makes clearing a bed a quick job for two people.  But, I curse them for eating up so many nutrients in the soil while growing that big.

My sister, Shauna, has been an incredible help in the garden, getting out there to weed, and motivating me to do so more than I've been able to motivate myself.  We harvested cherries one evening.  I weighed our paper bags afterward, and they came to 20 pounds.  I processed quite a few, probably 2/3, into pitted, frozen cherries, but the other 1/3 are still sitting on the counter.  If I don't get to them tomorrow, I'm sure they'll be mush by the end of the day.  We only picked as far up as we could reach from the ground and on small step ladders.  The cherries were very good, but would have been even better in another day or two.  We didn't have the ability to get up higher, and we were getting kinks in our necks, so we quit for the evening, planning on finding a taller ladder and tackling the high ones the next day.

We didn't get the chance.  The birds got to them early the next morning, and the tree was practically bare when I happened to look at it later in the day.  I'm nowhere near devastated, as I said, I haven't even finished processing the ones we did get.  I'm just making a mental note for next year, when I'm hopefully more prepared for processing, to get a net over that tree to protect them from birds.  As it was, they had already destroyed, by taking small bites, about 1/3 of the cherries in the lower branches that we harvested.  I really don't mind sharing such a bountiful crop, but in our self-sustaining future, three 1-gallon freezer bags won't get a family very far.

 I made a clafoutis, which is a French fruit flan traditionally made with cherries, and plan to make a Black Forrest Cake with some of the frozen ones next time Jeremy's home.

My next post will be typed with sore forearms, I'm sure, as it will be after my first few attempts at hand milking!  Yikes!

Hooray for the garden!

Hooray for cherries!

Hooray for potatoes (yeah, I know I need to weed)!

 

Hooray for cauliflower and broccoli!

 

Hooray for tomatoes!

 

And hooray for onions!

 

The cherries should be ready to eat in another few days.  They are currently not sour, but still not sweet.  Jeremy will be home this weekend, just in time to enjoy them.  The broccoli and cauliflower plants are huge, but still not showing any sign of producing the edible flower.  The tomato plants are looking lovely in bloom.  Mmmmmmm...B.L.T.'s  The onions are looking pretty good, the tallest ones are about a foot tall.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our long days will give them the boost they need to mature in time before the frosts set in.

The rest of the garden doesn't seem to be doing all that well, including: cucumbers (due to bugs mostly), shallots, carrots, herbs, eggplant (bugs again), greens (chard, kale and lettuce), squashes (took a long time to germinate, but may take off still), watermelon, radishes, and green beans.  Who knows, maybe we'll just have a bumper crop all at the end of the summer. 

At least some of the most important storage type crops seem to be doing well.  I can hardly wait to try the La Ratt potatoes, a french fingerling that is revered by top chefs.  The potatoes and onions, and enough tomatoes for canning would be a fair success, I suppose.  This first year is full of failure, so I'll look at any harvested crops as a success.

One of the top things to do on Jeremy's list is putting in a drip irrigation system in the garden.  That'll probably help out a lot because giving everything a good long soak has proved rather challenging with just a gun at the end of a hose.  We had bought two soaker hoses that we could just move around and do the whole garden with.  They worked great for a use or two and then moving them around kinked them, cracked them, and made them completely useless.  Do not buy a soaker hose by Orbit!  They're junk!

Sugar's super sweet.

We've added a third to our mini herd of mini nubians.  Her name is Sugar.

  She is actually Oscar and Sylvia's sister.  The woman who reserved her never came through on the purchase, and so the breeder offered her to us.  We've had her now for just over a week.  Poor thing is definitely at the bottom of the totem pole, and Oscar can be really mean to her, butting her out of the way when he doesn't want her there.  She clings to humans, and followed Ethan around everywhere he went that first evening we arrived home with her.

 

 

 

 

 

We think she's beautiful, and has made a nice addition to our little farm.  Now for a buck... 

Titus coming home.

This is how his arrival went.  We have a long driveway, and I thought maybe it would be good to stop at the end of it when we arrived with him, let him out, and then walk the perimeter with him right away.  This type of dog needs to know what his territory is, and never be introduced to a place that won't be his to "protect" (in other words, no taking him to the lake like a normal, pet dog).  He wouldn't get out, not even for a treat.  His expression said, "what do you people want from me?"  So, plan "B" was to back the truck up near the gate of the goat pen.  As soon as he heard the goats, he jumped right down.  I think livestock guarding dogs are so incredible!  He went right in with them, with an expression that said, "Oh, I see what I'm supposed to do." 

We introduced him to everyone here that evening, he was calm, if a bit disinterested.  Actually, there was one point that evening when he was lying outside the gate to the goat pen, and a few people were walking up to him at once from different directions from a distance of about 50'.  That put him on edge, and he charged Jeremy, barking.  Of course everyone backed off for awhile.  At the very end of the day, we took him and the goats for the tour of the perimeter of the property, and it went very well.  He is so alert, looking all around and checking things out in a way completely different from other dogs.  He notices things other dogs wouldn't. 

The next day, Saturday, I was walking past the goat pen during the afternoon and he woke up and charged the fence barking, growling, and baring his teeth.  Needless to say, I was scared.  He is a very intimidating animal.  I thought, "how am I going to get to the goats if he is this protective of them?  I don't want to be here without Jeremy with a ferocious dog like this."  Jeremy and I talked and I told him we'd made yet another huge dog mistake.  He called the woman we'd bought him from and told her that we needed to return him.  

She was very nice, and said that it would be fine to return him, but that if we would just give it more time, we'd see progress.  She also said, that these dogs are nocturnal, they are active and on guard all night.  When I woke him up in the middle of the day, he was still in unfamiliar territory, with an unfamiliar person approaching his goats, and he acted the only way he knew for sure he should act.  She said, "I bet he was fine yesterday evening and this morning while he was wide awake," and that he would be good again that evening.  It was true, he had been nice during those times.  I thought about it the rest of the afternoon since we weren't going to be taking him back until the next day. Her advice really made sense, and I decided I was willing to try it out.  The first test was that evening.  After our meeting that afternoon, would he still be grumpy?  Or, would it be as she said, and would he be more calm?  He did growl a little bit when we went to open the gate, but we had his bowl of food, and were shaking it to let him know it was dinner time, all the while talking to him in a friendly tone.  We opened the gate and let him out, and the time we spent with him that evening went fine.

Each day, Titus became more and more comfortable and loving during our morning and evening sessions.  By sessions, I mean, in the evening we let him out of the goat pen so that he can patrol the entire property through the night.  This is also the time when we feed him.  We had been letting the goats out for a wander during that 30-40 minutes also, but I stopped doing that because they were wreaking havoc on my garden, which is just 15 feet away from their pen...I was too afraid to reprimand them in front of Titus!  In the morning, we came and spent another 15-20 minutes with him, scratching his belly, before putting him in the goat pen for his day of sleep.  As I said, with each session we seemed to be earning more and more of his trust.  Our hearts just melted the first time he rolled over on his back to get his belly scratched.  He had been a pretty serious dog for the two days before that.
 
He's now very comfortable with me and the rest of my family, he really liked Jeremy before he left last Monday, too.  So comfortable in fact that he's starting to become a naughty dog.  He's become very playful with both me and the goats.  He, according to what I've read, is not at all to be allowed to play with the livestock, and I shouldn't play with him, either.  His normal greeting for me is to bounce me.  He comes galloping up to me and then jumps up on his back legs and bounces me with his front paws.

 

He also seems to know that he shouldn't be in the garden, but does it anyway.

  

There goes 50 carrot seeds.

 

He's just a puppy still, at one year old, and so it's to be expected.  He had been used to five other dogs to play with at his old home.  I am very glad that we were able to get a dog like this at this age.  He was exposed to lots of different types of livestock, and worked with proven livestock guardian dogs for almost an entire year before coming to us.  He'll be out of his puppy stage in a fairly short amount of time.

In the meantime, he is doing his job, and very well.  Either the first or second night after Jeremy left, I was awakened by Titus barking at 1 AM.  That was the first time.  I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs.  This was a pretty serious and ferocious sounding bark, Titus doesn't really ever bark for the heck of it (thank goodness).  In those first couple of seconds after being woke up, I heard two other unidentifiable noises through my window.  One sounded like sheet metal being dragged across dry grass, a "shooooooosh"ing noise.  The other sounded like a man's voice.  Scary.  I looked out all the windows around the house, Titus' big white shape shows up pretty well in the dark, but I couldn't see him anywhere.  I went back upstairs, and didn't hear another peep the rest of the night.

Last night, he woke me up again.  My bedroom window is open all night, and through it I could hear his bark, and could tell he was moving quickly from the way the sound changed.  This time, I didn't even bother to see what time it was, with Titus on the job, I'm sure everything is going to be okay. 

A few days after we brought him home, my Mom and I were getting ready to go to bed.  My Mom said, "I'm in the habit of locking all the doors at night, but I guess with Titus here, that's probably not necessary."  Not that I'm a fearful, "what if" type of person, but it is nice knowing he's out there on guard.  Last night, he "protected" me from the cats.  I thought they had been getting closer and closer to becoming friends after their behavior over the previous days, but last night was a step backwards.  Titus and I were hanging out in the back yard, and one of the cats happened to be near by.  We were only about 15 feet apart, and Titus put himself between me and the cat, so close he was touching me with his hindquarters, and began to bark pretty ferociously at the cat.  It was really interesting, but very uncomfortable to be so close to him while he was barking that way.  I guess I'm part of his herd.

I say that Titus is still here on a trial basis, but everything seems to be going well, and I'm 99.9% sure we'll keep him.

Titus

We now own a livestock guarding dog, his name is Titus.  A few months ago, I was on a website for a farm in Washington, I think I had been searching for a certain type of geese, to the side of the home page was a button for "Maremmas."  Not knowing what that was, I clicked it.  It took me to a page with a photo of the most adorable fluffy white puppies I'd ever seen.  I read the short description about this breed of livestock guarding dogs.  Livestock guardian dogs?  Never heard of them.  Herding, yes, guarding, no.

I think I spent the rest of that day learning about them on the internet, probably most of the next day, too.  I was fascinated.  The Maremma is the Italian breed of a certain type of dog that has very similar counterparts all over Europe, with different names depending on which country their from.  The Great Pyrenees is the French version.

We live in an area that has a fair amount of open space around, but we're certainly not "out in the country."  Quite often, a lone dog, or a pack of two or three would come trampling through the property.  Before the fence that is.  Still, if a dog wanted to, it would have no trouble either digging under to get to the animals or getting in where the fence crosses the creek.  It's actually quite easy to get under at that one point.  I've said before that our neighbors had chickens and ducks that were killed by roaming dogs.  Maybe we don't have a coyote, fox, or bear problem, but we still have a potential problem.

I was hooked, I wanted one of these amazing animals on my farm and on my side!  Then I came to a website that said Maremmas are serious working dogs, and they don't belong on a little 5 acre hobby farm.  "Okay," I thought, "we'll just get an electric fence and call it good.  I don't want to torture a dog that would normally be living on a huge ranch."  Plus, breeders were asking around $700 for a pup. That was the end of that idea, I thought.

A couple weeks ago, Jeremy was browsing craig's list, looking under the farm section for our area.  Although it's against the site's rules to post pets for sale, Titus, or rather, his brother Rambo was hidden in an ad for goats.  Rambo was a one year old Maremma-Great Pyrenees cross with just a pinch of Anatolian Shepard taking away from the Great Pyrenees (1/16).  Somehow, I was convinced that we should drive all the way to this farm about 2 and a half hours away to take a look at him.  And this was when Jeremy was only going to be home for three days, not the full week as it turned out...valuable time!

We canceled our initial appointment, and then rescheduled for this past Friday.  We arrived to a farm in the woods tucked into a little canyon in the mountains.  A couple live there, and the wife has herds of goats, alpacas and sheep that she raises for their wool or hair.  There were SIX livestock guarding dogs (l-g-d's) on their farm.  Three were Great Pyrenees (one being the father), one Maremma(the mother), and two of her one year old pups.  She had advertised Rambo as being available, but they also let us look at Braveheart.  Rambo wouldn't have anything to do with us, and wouldn't even let his owner catch him to take a look at him.  Braveheart on the other hand was asleep in the open barn and when the three of us woke him up by entering the adjacent pen housing sheep and ducks at that moment, he rolled over on his back.  A big difference between the two dogs.

We were there for close to an hour, observing all the animals and talking to the woman.  I didn't have the greatest feeling.  Because, although Braveheart was at ease enough with his owner around to roll over on his back, he was still wary enough of me to growl a little bit when he was finally up to a sitting position.  And this was the friendlier of the two!  The mother, a purebred Maremma was locked in the house, barking almost the entire time, she's that protective.  Jeremy really wanted to leave with a dog, though, and we had driven two and a half hours to get there, so I caved.  I really am a dog lover, too.

Some of you reading this may remember the puppy fiasco from a few short months ago.  After that experience, I vowed to never purchase a dog again.  I still feel strongly about that, as far as a pet dog is concerned.  Braveheart, now Titus, is not a pet.  He is a working dog.  This dog has been bred to live out on it's own with the flock, and to make decisions on it's own for thousands of years.  There won't be any "Sit!  Stay!  Fetch!" with this dog.  In fact, I read that we aren't supposed to play with him, or treat him like a pet dog at all.  Obedience training wouldn't work with him, they are very independently thinking dogs.

Here are a few photos.  I will write a post about our first days home with Titus tomorrow.

 

 

 

The big move.

One of the most important things on Jeremy's "honey-do-list" was to get the mobile chicken coops mobilized.  My poultry management plan involves letting the egg hens and the meat birds have access to the outdoors.  But, a poultry yard soon turns into a packed dirt patch with all that trampling and pecking activity.  This set-up can be less healthy than just keeping the chickens in their coop.  Properly maintained, the litter in a coop can be self-sanitizing and even begins to compost.  One unchanging yard is a direct route to parasite trouble.

My plan is to move the coops as often as necessary to give the chickens good pasture daily.  I bought 2-160' electric poultry fences that are made of plastic netting.  They are designed to be easily moved.  I will surround each of the two flocks with one of these fences, giving them each 1600 square feet to range on.  The electric fence was purchased to provide an extra layer of protection against predators.  I guess I might be going overboard on this issue, as you'll all find out about with my next post, but after losing a few chicks to a predator close to home, I'm taking the "better safe than sorry" approach.  It's not very much fun to find one of your animals dead due to predation.  A little chicken is fairly easy to get over, but I couldn't imagine losing little Oscar or Sylvia (our goats).

First, Jeremy finished the meat chicks coop and they were moved out of the shack that I had built, to it.  Boots had found her way into that little coop I'd made, too, and ate two chicks.  I caught her in the act of eating the second one, and found two others who had had her teeth sunken into their backs.  I put one down, and the other died through the night.

Next, Jeremy built each flock a fully enclosed, yet mobile run out of boards, chicken wire, and literally thousands of staples.  Now the chickens, who are still small enough to get through the holes in the electric poultry netting, can be outside all day without my supervision.  I'm hoping they'll have grown enough to discontinue the use of the runs within about two weeks.  The runs will then be stored for future batches of chicks.  Moving the runs is done every other day because it's such a small area and gets easily trampled.

Next, we moved the coops.  We had wanted to put wheels at the back of each coop to ease towing, but ditched the idea as we came to realize it would be extremely expensive.  The coop design we used was meant to be dragged on skids anyway.  So, we hitched them up to the truck with three double lengths of mule tape (an extremely strong sort of rope) and went for it.  The skids started digging into the earth and wouldn't budge.  We had hoped we could skip the step of cutting off the front corners of the skid boards because it meant we'd need to get the coops jacked up somehow.

Off to Sears to buy a jack, and then finally the project that I thought would take a quick 45 minutes in the morning, was done by mid afternoon.  Almost everything we're doing involves so much trial and error.  Next year is going to be so easy!

In the previous photo, you can see the solar panel and the batter it charges, for use in electrifying the fence.  In the next photo, you can see the poultry netting on the ground. I have it down now because I plan to mow today, but I'd had it up around both coops and runs, and turned on the last few days.

Husband home, garden in.

I'm back, after almost three weeks without a post.  Sorry to any of you who have been curious for an update.  My husband Jeremy was gone for the entire month of May, and I think I had become a bit depressed.  My symptom was lack of desire to do the things I needed to do, or, no self-motivation.  May was on the whole a very windy month that started out with about two weeks of chilly weather, and ended with two weeks of pretty hot, but still windy, weather.  It wasn't very pleasant for being outside.  But, that's just an excuse.

My sister, Shauna, and I did get out in the garden a few times, getting a total of 5 of the eventual 31 garden beds prepped and planted. 

Two beds were tomatoes and the other three were onions.  I started my onions indoors from seed, but have since learned that it's nearly impossible to grow onions from seed here because we have such a short growing season.  Instead, I'm supposed to grow them from "sets."  As far as I can understand, an onion set is just a baby onion that has gone dormant, been dug up, and then is planted the following spring with plenty of time to finish maturing.  This is the kind of thing that bugs me.  Although I know I won't ever become totally self-sufficient (as I always say, I can't live without chocolate, and I can't grow it here), I will be trying to save seed for my next garden.  If onion seedlings won't mature in time (we'll see), can I grow my own "sets?"

Anyway, May was pretty unproductive.  Jeremy arrived home on Thursday, June 4th, and due to a life snafu, was able to stay through the entire following week.  Thank goodness for that!  He was to have only been home for a three day weekend, and we would have never been able to get everything we needed to get accomplished, accomplished if that had remained the case.  I'll write a few posts over the next few days, chronicling our activities, this one is on the garden.

We started out with a weed-ridden dirt patch that, as I explained before, had been rototilled to death over the past 23 years.  Before that, and before my family moved here, it could have been a glorious garden.  Who knows.  It was a lot of work preparing that dirt patch for veggies.  I had decided to go the "raised bed" route.  I had also decided to quit rototilling forever.  Instead, we would be loosening up the soil by way of the broadfork. 

Here's what we did to prepare our 31 garden beds:  Jeremy, being an Engineer, first laid out the beds square and straight.  They are three feet wide by thirteen feet long, with a walkway in between of one and a half feet.  We then took the broadfork to each of the laid out beds.  You can see the broadfork at the end of the bed on the left in the photo above.  The broadfork is inserted into the ground, and then the you pull back and down on the handles.  The multiple tines loosen the soil deep down, without disturbing the layers.  This gives the plant's roots easy access to the deeper layers that remain moist and that are full of minerals and other nutrients that aren't found in the upper layers.

Now that the soil is loose, the weeds are easy to pull, and so we did, breaking up clumps of dirt as we went along.  Next, I spread an entire wheelbarrow-ful of compost on each bed.  Then, we took the top-soil from the path next to that bed and spread it over the compost.  Again, weeds were removed and clumps were broken.  The compost was mixed in a bit by way of a pitch fork, and then finally the top of the bed was smoothed with a wide rake.  Repeat thirty more times, and the deeply aerated, wide/raised bed garden was ready to plant!

Last night, while Jeremy and I prepped beds, Shauna and my nephew Ethan planted potatoes.  The broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, and the rest of the tomatoes were put in a few days earlier.  Tonight, Shauna and I will plant the rest of the beds.  There are a few flats of pathetic seedlings that are stunted and dying for more room to grow that will go in, and the rest are just seeds.  A month from now, those bare beds will be lush with plants. 

The beds were completed this morning.  After getting that last hour and a half of work out of him, I took Jeremy to the airport for his flight that left today at 11:52 AM.  Over the next few days, I'll write about all the other work he accomplished, but this will do for now.  He really did a great job, and I don't know what I would do without him.

Why "Flathead" Farmer Girl?

Well, because I live in The Flathead Valley, named for The Flathead Indians.  The Indians were named "Flathead" by the first white men in the area, of course.  To get my facts straight, I just read up on the reason why they were called "Flathead" on Wikipedia, good thing I did.

Growing up, most probably during Montana History in 7th grade, I learned that they were called that because they literally had flat heads.  During infancy, the babies were carried in backpacks and to secure them in, they were sort of wedged up under a board that would extend out in front of their face and downwards, a bit like the bill of a ball cap.  A baby's head is soft and malleable for awhile and this practice lead to abnormally flattened foreheads.

According to Wikipedia, I was wrong, possibly even about the backpack part.  They were called "Flathead" because they didn't bind their infants' heads the way other area tribes did.  I guess with my backpack idea, the top of the infant's head would become a bit pointed, not flat, and the "Flatheads" had normally shaped, flat-top heads.  But, Wikipedia doesn't say anything about the backpacks, just a practice of head binding.

It's nice to learn something new.

On the farm, nothing much is happening except for slowly getting the garden in.

It's not pretty, but I did it myself.

I got the meat chicks moved into new, temporary quarters outside.  The little coop is not pretty, but I did it myself. They are much happier now, with extra space.  Having them outside simplifies two major tasks involved in their care: ease of changing their water, and ease of letting them outside for recess.  The chicks scratch around in their bedding so much that within minutes of changing their water, they would already have pine shavings and poo in it.  An hour or two later and there wouldn't be a spot to get a drink.  Now, I have their water up on a couple scraps of 2"x4" and the elevation helps tremendously in keeping the water clean.  And, since it's outside, it's just a matter of walking the waterer ten feet to the spigot to change it, instead of bringing it upstairs from the basement spilling the messy contents in splits and splats all along the way.

Also, I had been catching each chick and placing them in a plastic tote to bring them upstairs and then outside for recess, now I can just place a ramp at the edge of the deck, fence them in with my little chicken-wire fence, and open the door and let them out.  From then on, I'll just have to open the door and let them out!

How funny.  I just noticed my cat, "Boots," sitting in the door of the second photo.  She is the main suspect in the case of the missing hen chicks.  I've been having a hard time since then giving her affection.  I wonder how long it will take me to get over it.

Please enjoy these two photos of the pink explosion at our house.  This is a crabapple blossom.    I don't know what this shrub is called, but I adore it.  I plan to purchase two more to plant around the house. 

Our new fence, and getting things done.

Last Thursday a local fencing company started on our new perimeter fence.  Thanks to the chapter, "Good Fences Still Make Good Neighbors," from Gene Logsdon's "All Flesh Is Grass," we didn't start loading up the place with animals before this important piece of equipment was in place.  Jeremy had planned on doing it himself during his month off, but we soon realized that that would be impossible.  Luckily, the estimate we got back was more than reasonable, and included a solar-powered automatic gate for our driveway, and so we hired them.

After planting all our fruit trees, Jeremy and I were about to go through a day's worth of potentially very frustrating work building cages around each for protection against deer.  We started making calculations on how much material we would need to buy, and we soon realized that it was adding up to be a very expensive project.  A great idea popped into my head: why don't we just pay the fencing people to add two electric lines to the top of our fence, making it a 6' fence, keeping the deer not only away from the fruit trees, but from my garden, too?  So, we did.

We have 8' posts, sunk 2' into the ground, spaced 8' apart.  Nailed to the posts are heavy wire cattle panels which are 16' long and 52" high.  Above those are strung two electric lines, the top one at about 6".  Hopefully they'll keep the deer out.  The fencing should keep roaming neighborhood dogs out, too (probably our biggest predator concern as our neighbors chickens and ducks were killed by neighbor dogs).  The fencing certainly will keep our livestock in.

I'm very pleased so far with the looks of the fence, although my Mom made a point that the taller posts seem to close things in a bit more than the old, short, barbed wire fence.  I feel that in most lights you can barely see the fence, and in others it remains unobtrusive.  

Over the weekend, with help from my sister and nephew, I planted 8 blackberry canes, 25 raspberry canes, 18 alpine strawberry plants, and four trees (the two Northern Red Oaks, the Ginkgo and the American Elm).  I also got the lemongrass I ordered planted in pots and my citrus trees pruned, watered and fertilized (more on our attempt at growing potted dwarf citrus trees at a future date), and prepared two-13'x3' garden beds for planting.

My garden will consist of many of these beds.  They are all to be deeply aerated by my wonderful broadfork, then I add a layer of compost, then I dig the soil from the path next to it up over the compost to create a raised bed.  I use a pitchfork to work the compost in and then a wide rake to smooth out the top of the bed.

My sister, Shauna, and I then planted tomatoes in one bed (the northernmost to prevent shading by this tall plant of other, smaller plants), and then while she planted onions (grown from seed started in early April, I've got my fingers crossed they'll mature!) in the second bed, I prepared a third bed and planted more onions.  I have one more bed's worth of onion seedlings to plant, and then my potatoes to get in the ground, and I'll feel slightly caught up, or at least on a roll.

It's so warm today, a whopping 83 degrees when I just checked.  On a walk around the pastures earlier, I discovered that many of our recently planted fruit trees are beginning to leaf out.  Well, the buds are just opening, anyway.

Another chick disaster.  This morning, while warming the milk for the goats' bottles, I heard a chick (the meat chicks are still living in the basement) squeak painfully.  I went down to check it out, fearing that the door had been left open and the cat had got in.  I discovered one poor chick, dangling by it's toe (no photo).  These chicks are big enough now that they can pretty much jump out of the stock tanks and this one had tried to jump up onto the chicken wire I have draped over a portion of the tank.  It got high enough to get a toe-hold and then must have run out of steam.  But, it's toe became stuck in a narrow angle where two wires met, and it fell backwards, bending that toe entirely back!

Well, time to figure something else out.  I am in the middle of building them a plywood box on my little deck.  It's warm enough now that if covered at night, and with their heat lamps on still, they'll be fine out there.  It will also make several chores associated with them much easier if they're outside.  I'd better get back to it, I want to put them in there tonight.