The first birth on the farm

This morning, around 2am, Galloping Gertie the Cow, known as Gigi to her friends, gave birth to a healthy, approximately 50 lb girl. We missed the labor and birth - as you might expect, we were sleeping at that hour - but Gigi woke us around 3am to let us know about it. We went out to her paddock and found the baby calf, and found that the baby had staggered to the other side of the electric fence from Gigi, who was distraught because she couldn't get to her. Orrin brought the calf back to her, but she continued to wander out of Gigi's reach for the rest of the night. The resulting mooing kept me from getting much more sleep, and kept Orrin from getting anymore sleep, as he went out to check on them from time to time. The calf figured out how to nurse around 8 or 8:30 this morning, which is fabulous. It is pretty amazing to witness this little creature, walking, jumping and playing within 12 hours of life!

We were very glad that Gigi was able to give birth without needing any assistance (this was her third baby, by the way, so really she's an old pro). We're also pretty thrilled that she had a little girl, because 1) that mean's we now have a herd of 2 whole cows, and 2) we don't have to figure out how to castrate just yet. However, it does also mean that we will probably have to buy another male for beef at some point in the fall, as Gigi's calf that came with her (named “Beef” to be clear about what's what) won't be big enough to slaughter until the fall of 2012.

Seeing a brand new calf, an hour or so into it's life, not to mention continuing to be around it during the day, is yet another first in the long list of “first's” for me, and for the farm.

The adorable little girl, 7 hours or so into life.

Mom and baby

Oliver provides a little perspective, although they are about 30' away.

Peppers!

We have been watching the soil in the greenhouse and gardens expectantly, hoping to see all our seeds come up. Some things came up quickly (beans, kale), but some things haven't come up in the 3 or 4 weeks since we planted them. Some of the winter squash, and none of zucchini's had come up – until today. And the peppers had been the most disappointing, as I had tried starting some from seed at the beginning of May in a tray, along with tomatoes and eggplants, and not a single pepper germinated. And again, we planted some in the greenhouse at the beginning of June, and none germinated – until today! The very first peppers, red cayenne, finally made an appearance. We had gotten so desperate that we actually purchased starts from a farmer at the farmer's market last week, just to try to improve our chances of having some this year. Maybe they're just really, really slow. So glad to see them all starting to come up now.

A Day In the Life

On this, the longest day of the year, I thought I'd walk through what we did today, so you get an idea of what we're up to.

We all had breakfast and headed outside around 8:15am. I was surprised when I looked at the clock, as that's probably an hour earlier than we're usually ready.

Oliver and I let the 2 laying hens out of their coop, and picked up the morning's egg, still warm.

We pulled and pushed the meat birds coop to fresh grass, and got fresh food and water for both them and the heritage chicks. The meat birds are now 6 weeks old, and are almost as big as the laying hens.

We had a half-full wheelbarrow of rocks, so picked some more rocks out of the garden, to fill it up, and then Orrin and Oliver went down the lane to fill some potholes. I went into the house for a minute to fill a pitcher with water and a couple of tea bags. I set it outside in a sunny spot, to make sun tea on this beautiful, warm, sunny day.

We wandered through the garden, looking expectantly over the beds to see if anything new had come up. Quite a few things are up now, but we've re-seeded some things that didn't come up within a few weeks of planting.

Next we headed up to the cow shed, and literally shoveled shit – cow manure - into our two wheelbarrow's, countless times, trucking back and forth to the compost pile. I admit that I was a bit whiny through the shoveling portion, although it's amazing how much has broken down since they were last in there (a few months ago now),. We've been throwing the pig feed in there so that they've helped to rotate it as well, breaking it down a little quicker. Orrin tells me that now I really am a farmer, since I finally did that job! I figured it's the hazing ritual for farmers.

We went down below the greenhouse and started weeding the sea of oregano that has taken over part of the hillside. I finally had to quit when my hay fever reached an upper limit and I had a huge sneezing fit. Between the cow manure and oregano, we built our compost pile up significantly, which we need. That will be the fertility for the garden.

Oliver and I took a peek at the asparagus patch – 5 plants planted earlier this spring – and saw that they are all looking good. If we're lucky, we'll be able to eat some of it in a few years. It's not a vegetable for those looking for instant gratification!

Moving on to the greenhouse, we watered, admired the tomato, eggplant, cucumber, basil and watermelon plants, and then picked some kale and peas to contribute to lunch.

I went in to make lunch and Oliver and Orrin stayed outside watering and exploring.

After lunch, I blogged the first half of the day, we relaxed a bit on the couch, and then headed back out.

Orrin went to the workroom to try to fix his chainsaw, and Oliver and I hung out for a bit. Oliver went down for a nap shortly after that, and I went back to tackle more of the oregano.

After I filled another couple tubfuls of oregano, I went to work in the greenhouse, periodically checking in on Oliver. In the greenhouse, I picked a few last edible kale leaves off of last year's plants that had gone to seed and were now 4 to 5' tall. They'd been going to seed for a while, and we were still eating them, but finally the heat in the greenhouse started to turn the leaves purple, showing that they were losing their chlorophyll. Plus, they were getting eaten more as they got weaker. Then I cut down all those kale plants, right down to the base, leaving the roots to decompose back into the soil. I fed the plants to the pigs, who scarfed down every last leaf they could find. With those plants gone, there is more room now for the watermelon seeds that had been planted to grow and spread.

In the meantime, Orrin was creating the next cow paddock, which moved the cows right next to the house, along the lane and two sides of the house.

Oliver woke up, and once Orrin finished moving the cows, he and Oliver made some popcorn, and we sat at the table on the back deck, with the cows munching their fresh grass just 3 or 4' away from us.

A friend dropped by to pick up some things that he'd been storing at our place, and we walked around the garden for a bit to show him what was growing. Then Orrin helped him pack up some of this things.

I went and grabbed some of the twine we'd kept from the hay bales that had fed the cows over the winter, and took them to the greenhouse. I tied them between the bracing of the greenhouse, along the length of one of the tomato rows, and then hung twine down to each tomato. As they get bigger, we'll tie the twine to the plant and twist it around the main stem to keep the plant upright.

When I had finished one row, I picked some peas and cut down one of the chard plants that had also gone to seed and was now about 4' tall. Then Oliver and I went into the house to start dinner, while Orrin went to feed the pigs.

When Orrin came back, I directed Oliver his way, and they sat on the porch to watch the cows, while I continued making dinner.

After dinner, I took Oliver to bed while Orrin cleaned up the kitchen. By that time it was about 9pm. We stayed up a little longer and then went to bed. It was a full day and I was tired!

1000 words

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this is my attempt at catching you up with all that we have been doing over the past couple of months - with a picture montage. 

Here's Orrin hoeing up weeds around our newly planted raspberry plants.
This is in the center of the garden, roughly.

This is what the ground looked like prior to picking rocks and making garden beds.

And then the lovely garden bed, post-rock removal, hoeing, raking, and sweating.

One of the movable chicken pens Orrin has made recently. This one houses the meat birds.
And at the time of the picture, Gigi the Cow had been rotated into the same paddock area as the chickens.

Taken from the middle of the garden, a view of the downhill garden beds and our new rhubarb patch.

From the downhill edge of the garden, looking upwards towards all the beds.
Garlic in the foreground.

Lovely Caribe potatoes, our second harvest of the year. We'd have let them percolate a little longer, but we wanted to clear them out of the greenhouse to make more room for the tomatoes to grow.
 

Our 15 heritage chicks; about 4 weeks old. They will start laying in 5 months or so.
This is the brooder that Orrin built. It's the intermediary between the very fresh chicks and getting them out onto green grass.

Oliver catches one of the heritage chicks to pet. We just moved them into their outdoor grass coop today.

Oliver and the 3 pigs. Hard to tell that they're getting big, but they are! The first one will likely become pork around the end of the month.

The biggest pig, and so he'll be the first to go.

The A-frame coop we built for our two full-size laying hens.

And during all this busy-ness, Oliver and I had a birthday. Here we are, after licking the bowl of frosting clean, from the cake that Orrin made us.

Makin' garden beds

When you make garden beds from scratch, in a place where there have never been garden beds before – or at least not in any recent history – there is quite a process to go through to turn plain old ground into a nice, fluffed up, level bed. It's what we are spending a lot of time doing right now, and here's what the process looks like at our place:

1. Set up stakes to mark the corners of the bed. Our beds are 4' wide and 50' long, and in the first row of the garden, we will have 27 beds going up the gently sloped hillside. We stake out 50' up the hill at a time, which works out to 10 beds that have a 1' path in between each one.
2. We then tie string around the 4 corners of one bed, with a knotted loop for each stake that can easily be shifted to the next bed up the hill when we're ready. The string lines show us where the edges of the bed are along the length of it, so the bed stays 4' wide the whole way.
3. Next, we pick any visible rocks off the top of the bed, filling up plastic pots and dumping them into a nearby wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow gets pretty full, we roll it down the driveway (what we call “the lane”), and use the rocks to fill potholes. That will be a never-ending job, so it's a good thing there are so many rocks at our disposal...
4. Back at the garden bed, we hoe up the top few inches of soil to loosen it up, turn the weeds over, and pick out more rocks.
5. At this point, we might leave the bed alone either for a few hours or until the next day, to let the newly-exposed soil dry a bit. Then, we hoe it again, to break up big clumps of soil, and pull the soil in various directions as needed to level the bed. There are quite a few hummocks in our garden area, so there's a fair bit of pulling soil from the high spots to the low spots.
6. We switch to a metal rake (the kind with the hard tines, not the floppy ones used for raking leaves) and do a little more breaking up of clumps and fine-tuning the level of the bed. The rake usually exposes a few more rocks too.
7. At this point, we have a pretty, raised bed, and we then plant seeds or transplant greens from the greenhouse. When we are planting squash, we don't usually bother with the raking stage, as the squash are placed pretty far apart and a little bit of lumpiness won't affect them.

With 27 beds in the first row, we plan to cover crop every other row, because we need to start creating large amounts of compost. This is such an experimental year, as we don't really know how much food to grow to feed ourselves, so the plan is to plant out just about all the seeds we have (and we have a LOT of seeds) and see where that gets us. For example, we have planted 100' of potatoes, made up of about 10 different varieties, for a total of 200 potatoes in the ground (plus another 10 or so in the greenhouse that will be our early potatoes, as some of them are already flowering). We have this idea that we will get to the second row of 27 beds, but with fighting the black flies, doing other things around the farm and taking care of Oliver, it might be a while before we get there. Those beds may be almost exclusively cover crops, or the 2^nd or 3^rd planting of something we've already planted in the first row, to give us later season veggies. As of this writing, we are up to Bed 18 in the first row (what we're calling Row A), but we have skipped most of the cover crop rows for now. We have been starting with the veggie beds and getting those planted as we complete them, because now that it's early June, it's time to get seeds in the ground. Making beds takes time, and we're usually only able to get one completed each day. We managed to get two done the other day, when that was the only thing we focused on that day.

The lettuce, kale and chard transplants that came out of the greenhouse are looking good, but unfortunately the spinach wasn't too happy with transplanting and went to seed.