An Unexpected Surprise

Baby goat kids, about 14 hrs old. They are seriously adorable. We haven't come up with a name for the girl yet. We won't name the boy - we don't want to get too attached to what will probably become food.

 And then we had a bit of a surprise yesterday morning. Around 6:30 am, we hear a cow making some strange grunting noises, and are wondering what's going on out there. Orrin jumps out of bed and heads outside. Around 7am, I'm too curious to stay in bed any longer, and head out to find out what the situation is. Turns out that Buttercup, the Dexter cow, has just had a baby. First off, we'd been told that she wasn't due until August, so this is a bit of a surprise. The baby is just fine, not a preemie at all, so the previous folks possibly didn't realize when she'd actually been bred. But the second thing is that this is Buttercup's first baby, and she's very young, not even a year and a half old (or so we've been told). So that means she was bred when she was 6 months old, which is pretty darn early for a cow. And she's just had a calf and is kind of going a little crazy now, probably because she's the equivalent of a teenage mom. Fortunately, she settled down after a little while, and the calf has been nursing, so she's turning out to be a pretty good mom.

Here she is, about a day old, little Charlotte.

And here's Momma Buttercup, probably wondering how this happened to her...

Kidlets!

I came home from work tonight, changed from “Office Worker Tracy” to “Farmer Tracy” and went out to help move the sheep/goat fence. I found Tiffany, the goat, lying on her side with two little legs sticking out of her hind end, and making some strange goat grunts. About a half hour later, she gave birth to a little boy. And then another half hour later or so, unexpectedly, she gave birth to a little girl! The boy came out pretty easily on his own, but the girls head was out first, when her feet were still inside (it's an easier birth if the front feet come out first and the head is between them), so Orrin had to reach in and find one of the legs to help her come out easier. They are nursing and look healthy. 

Year 1 of our CSA begins

I'm excited that we now have reached our quota for CSA members for this year. It's not many, but it's a huge step for us. I love that these people want to buy food from us, and help support what we're doing. Now the hard work begins, as we are responsible for growing and raising food to feed people, people that we know personally.

We've planted a lot of everything that makes sense right now in the main garden, for this time of year. Things like kale, chard, lettuce, spinach, arugula, turnips, beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, peas, and potatoes. Next we'll start succession planting, to keep a steady supply of food maturing throughout the summer and fall. We just planted over 70 tomato seeds and 24 sweet pepper seeds in soil blocks yesterday, which will be planted in the greenhouse once the weather is consistently warm enough for those types of vegetables. 

We hope to start providing food to our members in July, when we think a greater quantity of food will be ready to harvest.

Catching up

Things are pretty hectic for me now, and I don't think it'll be changing anytime soon, so you probably won't be seeing many entries from here for the foreseeable future. I now have two part-time jobs that add up to one full-time job, plus teaching a yoga class a week. When I'm not working off the farm, I'm generally helping Orrin on the farm, wherever he needs help. He works hard all day, every day, and is finding that he is able to get more done these days as Oliver is getting more independent.

Orrin's moving the cows daily now, which is a job he can do by himself. But it takes both of us to roll up and move the electric-netting fence for the sheep and goats each day, so that's usually the first thing to be done when I get home in the evening. May is also a big gardening month, as we are prepping new and existing garden beds, picking rocks, planting seeds, weeding and watering the greenhouse, etc. About a month ago we had planted about 200 onion seeds into soil blocks. Most of them grew well, and we just transplanted them into the main garden a few days ago. Lots of other seed varieties went into the ground early last week, preceding several days of rain. More rain is on the way later this coming week, so his plan is to get a bunch more seeds in the ground. We'll be planting out about 26 beds this year, 4' wide by 50' long. In a rougher section of the garden, where there are still quite a few roots in the ground, we plan to skip making garden beds for this year, but will probably plant winter squash and beans there, along with a bit of corn. We've counted 9 potato plants up in the garden at this point, which were planted a few weeks ago.

Several babies have been born in the last month. The buff orpington chicken, who was sitting on 5 eggs up in the cow shed, had 4 babies hatch. One died, but the 3 remaining seem healthy and are doing well.

Taffy, the Jacob ewe, had a baby girl on April 24. We've named her Delilah.

Yesterday Orrin and Oliver picked up 50 day-old meat chicks at the local feed store. They will be ready to butcher in about 9 weeks.

I've been talking up our farm to folks, trying to line up a few members for our CSA (community-supported agriculture) program. There are two people who want to do this with us, and we're hoping for one or two more. We want to start small, to make sure we have enough food to feed everyone (them AND us), and because we know we'll make mistakes along the way as we figure out what we're doing. Our plan is a year-round CSA that will include 3 kinds of meat, eggs, vegetables, and some fruit. We'll add more varieties of fruits and vegetables as the years go by. Our inspiration comes from Kristin Kimball's book “The Dirty Life”, where she farms in upstate New York.

Chicks hatching in an incubator, in early April. The top-most just hatched,
the other two were around a day old.

Zoe sunning herself on the deck.

Oliver, taking the job of holding a chick very seriously.

The buff who sat on eggs in the cow shed (in the background). One of the chicks is peeking out,
the others are tucked in underneath her.

Beautiful rhubarb, the first fruit of the season.

Taffy with her new baby, Delilah. She was probably an hour or two old at the time.

Oliver, feeding weeds to the laying hens. It was so awesome to see him doing this.

A very large bale of hay. It feeds cows, sheep, goats and pigs.

Delilah, one week old.