Weasel vs. chicken

Yesterday we sold the truck, which we'd been trying to do for months. We didn't even get a full day to bask in the euphoria of getting a decent price for it, as we were awoken at 3:30 this morning to the sound of screaming chickens. Orrin raced outside and found that three roosters were dead inside the movable coop. He came back in to tell me and a little while later there was more squawking. He went back out and a fourth bird had been partially dragged out of a small hole between the coop and the ground. At that point he saw that it was a weasel. There were two remaining roosters, plus the A-frame coop that had 14 birds in it (mostly chickens and a couple roosters), so he stayed awake the rest of the night, sitting inside the house and listening for any other sounds from the chickens, in case he needed to run back out there to scare off the weasel. Fortunately, there were no further incidences.

In the morning, Orrin saw the weasel come up from the pond and try to get into the coop again. Apparently, he wanted to finish the meal he'd begun in the middle of the night. We'll probably have to get a trap to catch it, now that it knows there are chickens here. In the meantime, Orrin spent part of the day moving the A-frame coop up above the garden beds in Row B, so that it's now far away from the pond. The pond is a safe place for the weasel, so we hope that by increasing the distance to food, it will decrease his interest in coming after the chickens. Then Orrin added some additional planks on to the bottom of the coop to raise it up about 6”, so he could add another roost. We had to put the remaining two roosters in with the rest, so it's getting a bit crowded. These birds are still quite young (except for the two layers that we'd gotten from friends earlier in the summer), and so the chickens aren't yet laying and the roosters aren't yet agro. In fact, one of the birds that was killed we were not sure if it was a rooster or a chicken, because it was still so young.

This evening, we had the adventure of trying to herd the chickens up from their old area, through the garden and into their new area. As we learned in ultimate frisbee, you can't have a good zone defense without at least 3 players, so we probably looked pretty silly trying to get 16 birds to head in a specific direction. The first time we tried, most of them had peeled off in random directions and we were left with 4 or 5 birds close to the newly fenced area, but we still couldn't convince them to head in the right direction. A second try at herding was also futile. In the end, they all headed back down to their old stomping grounds and, since it was getting dark they were trying to hunker down in the tall grass and weeds. We slowly managed to catch a couple at a time, sort of like this: slowly corner a few, lunge, grab, and if we were lucky, stand up with a chicken. Several times they slipped through our fingers. Plus, they were pretty wound up from us chasing them around, not realizing that we were actually trying to put them in a safe place. You can't say that us country folk don't know how to have a good time on a Saturday night!

While it was crummy that the weasel killed some birds, it was fortunate that it killed roosters and not hens. The roosters would have been dog food anyway, and in this scenario ended up feeding the pigs (also a good thing, because we are desperately trying to fatten up the pigs). And also, by moving the chicken enclosure up to the top half of the Row B garden area, the chickens will help fertilize the soil that we will not have time to cover crop this year. Not such a bad scenario, after all. It also makes us realize that we may have to get a livestock guard dog sooner than next spring.

Now, it's time to go get caught up on my sleep. Orrin's already passed out from being up since 3:30 this morning.

A September Pictorial

Here's a pictorial of the farm this month. I imagine that in future year's the novelty will wear off, but since this is the first year, I'm pretty excited about all the thing's that are growing right now.

Bell peppers in the greenhouse. A little late this year, hopefully
they still have time to ripen.

Our favorite eating tomato (vs canning or drying) - Black Russian.

Whitey in front, Isabel behind. He's up to around 150 lb now we think, hopefully
the 30 lbs of apples we're feeding them will fatten them up a bit. 

Laying hens and soon-to-be layer's. Hopefully the newbie's will
start laying in the next month or two.

One of the apple tree's that Orrin pruned last winter, and has a ton of apples on it.
They're pretty tasty now, almost fully ripe.

Farmer Orrin dumping some weeds onto a compost pile.

Our work so far on Row B. We've completed 7 beds and Orrin
is halfway through Bed 8 (left side). We are cover cropping them and
then putting a layer of hay down on top to mulch each bed.

The lower beds in Row A. Dry beans (lower left) are almost ready to be picked,
and we've planted some new greens in the bare-looking bed (in the middle of the pic).

The upper half of Row A. The tall greenery are cover crops that we'd planted in every
other row this year to improve the soil. There are also squash and pumpkin plants throughout.

The second of our two heads of cauliflower. 4 or 5" across. Not huge, but I'm happy it's there.
The first one was a pretty good size, and downright tasty.

Buttercup squash. So delicious, they taste like sweet potatoes to me.

Spaghetti squash.

Baby Pam Pumpkin

Rouge Vif D'etamps pumpkin. It looks a lot like a wheel of cheese.

Part of the hillside that's been "sheep'ed", ie chomped down to the ground.
And anything they didn't eat, Orrin cut down with his new fancy scythe.

A beautiful Barbarella eggplant. One of the veggie's I have most been looking forward to this year.
We've eaten one so far (a Nadia), and should have 5 more before the season ends.

Preserving - and Eating - our Farm-grown food

We've been preserving lots of food lately, and I am starting to feel rather squirrel-like as I pack the pantry and freezer with our farm-grown food. In the last week we've canned cucumber's into dill pickles (they had been fermenting on the counter for 3 weeks beforehand), canned apple butter with the first of our apples, canned a second batch of crushed tomatoes, dried apples and tomatoes, and sliced and froze another 8 or 9 lbs of peaches (from a friend's yard, not our's). There is another round of cucumber's ready to be pickled, and in another few day's I should have enough tomatoes to either do a batch of salsa or a batch of ketchup. Since I don't need much ketchup for the year, maybe I can do a small batch of each. We also have an incredible amount of apple's that are about to ripen - of around 100 trees throughout our property, a high percentage of them are loaded with apples. We'll be pressing lots into juice and experimenting with apple syrup and hard cider.

We harvested one of our Moons and Stars watermelon's yesterday, and took it to a birthday party. It's our largest watermelon of the season, weighing in at 20 lb! We've got a thing or two to learn about how to tell when a watermelon (or melon in general) is ripe. We thought that if you knocked on it and it sounds hollow then it's ready, but it turns out that “hollowness” is a pretty subjective sound. We picked this melon and found that it was just a pale pink inside. A little bit of googling determined that these types of watermelon can grow to be 40 lbs and should be darker pink/red inside. It didn't taste terrible - but it wasn't great either - but it was such a disappointment to feel like such a large melon went to waste because it was picked too early. We'll chalk it up to experience and allow the remaining two watermelon's to stay on the vine a little longer.

Admiring our 20 lb watermelon.

I'm also pretty excited that we recently harvested our first (of two) cauliflower's. We planted 10 or 15, of which 5 or 6 plants actually grew, resulting in only two vegetables to actually eat. Not a great return, but it makes those veggies very valuable! We ate it very simply - lightly steamed the first head and ate it with seasoned salt and butter. Delicious! We'll eat the second head soon, but it's a little smaller so we wanted to give it another week or so to grow.

Bubbling Honeydew... not recommended!

We grew a variety of honeydew called Snow Leopard. They grow to be the standard size, maybe 7” long and kind of oval. They have thin dark green stripes on a pale green background. When the pale green turns to bright white, that's when you know they are pretty ripe. We found that waiting a few days after they turn white makes them really sweet. For some reason, we had left one on the vine for maybe a week or more after turning white. I guess we thought, it can only get sweeter, right? Yesterday I went out there, and saw that instead of being white, it had turned almost opaque. I picked it up and smelled it, and it didn't smell so good anymore. I took it into the house and Orrin started to cut into it – and it actually bubbled! We'd left it for so long that it was fermenting on the vine. So sad, for us anyways. I'm sure the pigs will enjoy their treat.

You win some, you lose some.

The Elusive Sugar Maple

This afternoon we spent a few hours tromping through the woods, in search of the elusive Sugar Maple. You'd think in a 90-acre parcel of land that we'd be able to find quite a few, but sadly, when the property was logged 15 or 20 years ago, they must have cut most of them down. Maybe sugar maples are a high-quality wood, but those loggers had their priorities all wrong. I mean, wood or maple syrup? To me, there's no competition - the syrup wins every time. But regardless, we hiked all around with baling twine (twine from hay bales are plentiful when you have animals, and this is one of the many ways we have come up with to re-use them), just hoping to find some sugar maples that we could tie a piece of twine around to mark it, so we knew what to look for in February, when it's time to tap.

Orrin's recently figured out the difference between the sugar maple leaves and the red maple leaves, so that's what we were looking at. The leaf shape is very similar between the two, but the red maple leaves have little serrations all around the outside edges, and the sugar maples have smooth edges. Ambitiously, I had grabbed 20 lengths of twine, hoping to find that many trees to tag. I jokingly said that we couldn't go home until we'd found 20, but we didn't quite get there. We managed to find 16 sugar maples, although most of them are pretty small trees, since they've mostly just been growing in the last 15 years or so. Apparently it's not recommended to tap trees that are less than 10” in diameter, so that rules out a number of them for next year. Although, we might fudge it on a few of them that are close because, well, we really like maple syrup. We did manage to find 2 rather large trees that we could put a couple taps into each when the time comes. They must have been deep enough into the woods that the loggers didn't find them. Lucky us!

I don't have a problem. Really. I could quit my maple syrup habit any time I want to.

Harvest Time

It's harvest time! I've been looking forward to this season all year. Finally, I feel rich because we have so much fresh food to eat, a freezer that's getting filled, and pantry shelves getting stocked. In the past few weeks I've made a second batch of basil pesto, canned 33 lbs of tomatoes (which resulted in 15 liter and 4 pint jars filled) and dehydrated about 12 lbs; I've got cucumber's fermenting (to be canned into dill pickles next week); we've picked about 30 lbs of blackberries from the hillside above the garden (which is a one-time deal, as that area will all be pasture next year); sliced and froze 6 lbs of peaches that we got from a friend (traded for with Orrin's fruit tree pruning earlier this year); and froze 30 lbs of local, organic blueberries (which we decided to buy this year, since our plants are just getting established). We've also eaten two of our honeydew's and two watermelon's. The honeydew's were both super sweet. The first watermelon we picked too early and it was just starting to turn red inside (that was a week and a half ago). We just had another one yesterday, and it was delicious. It looks like we'll have two more honeydew's and five more watermelon's.

The lovely tomatoes in our greenhouse 

15 lbs of tomatoes, before canning them.

My first tomato canning experience

Additionally, Orrin, Zane, James, and his sons Jacob and Christopher, along with a neighbor (who's large, heavy-duty truck we rented for the occasion), gathered 300 bales of hay from a nearby farm and socked it away in the (future) yoga studio for feeding the animal's this winter. Orrin had pre-arranged to go get these bales directly off the fields, once the farmer had cut and baled them. Fortunately, the field was just a few kilometer's away, and our neighbor's truck could carry 100 bales at a time, so they were able to get all 3 loads completed in less than 4 hours. It's nice when new adventure's take less time than anticipated!

Orrin and Christopher tossing hay bales into the yoga studio, where
Zane, James and Jacob are stacking them.

Today, along with canning tomatoes and slicing peaches, we prepared another 50' garden bed. Orrin recently completed two more beds at the top of Row A, which gets us to 28 beds in that row. The bed we worked on today is Bed 2 in Row B. We'd love to complete all of Row B before winter, so that we can cover crop it and have it more fertile for next year's garden (in preparation for starting to sell more food), but I don't think we'll get it done. We'll just keep working on it as we can. We alternate between working on the garden and working on the other house, because both are a priority. We've gotten 5 windows installed upstairs in the other house, and there are 5 more upstairs and 2 or 3 small windows down in the basement.