November

The hoop-house is done! I started this in July with bending metal pipes into half circles, and then had to set it aside until the first week in November because of work. Luckily in September I had just enough time to plant a little something, beet, carrots, leeks, lettuce, parsnips, etc. so that I'll have fresh greens to harvest through the winter. The design is based off of Elliot Coleman's in four seasons gardening. I used 1 inch conduit and a set of "rails" made of 2x6 so that the hoop-house has two plots it can cover. In the spring I will add folding benches to the north side for seedlings and replace cold-loving greens with tomatoes, cukes, melon, ect. I'll move the hoop-house in Oct and repeat.

Slaughter time is almost here. If you're in the area and interested in being apart of it send me an e-mail. I've mentioned this to a lot of people and tend to get a faces that are an odd mix of sympathy and disgust. So I feel I should explain.. I don't take an pleasure in the act of slaughtering the pigs. In fact from everything I've heard I think it may be quite hard to do. But I eat meat, and I feel that obliges me to take responsibility for that animals life. These pigs have enjoyed free range of a wooded lot, been well fed (to the point of overfeeding), and most importantly been allowed to rut and wallow and otherwise be pigs. They've had good lives, free of hardship. I guess at this point I don't feel all that sorry for them. I'm happy to be taking control over the production of my own food, and to be taking away from those who would do it irresponsibly (CAFO farms). I think that by doing it myself It can be done more humanly than anywhere else. Learning how to do this and opening it to the community is an empowering act. This is knowledge that is almost totally lost, but it connects us in a very basic way to realize this was a life and I am taking it in order to live. It's something that some anonymous person does for us everyday so we won't think about, but I think we lose out for having it locked "safely" behind factory doors. 

anyway Dec 19th is the day, and a forewarning I'm probably going to put some pictures up for those who can't make it but want to see how it's done.

Pigs, Bees, and Garden are all  doing great... Thought I might doing something a little different and stand on my soapbox this month.

To start, a picture of the blueberry field

 on the right the field that was burned 3 months a go 
next to a field (the left) that has not been touched for 4 years

(it's more noticeable if you look at the full sized picture)

What jumps out at me is the number of ragweed, This picture was taken at the beginning of the summer and now the field has gone through a series of changes mostly with large numbers of one plant species or another seeming to take hold. The left side suggests the direction that the field would go without intervention, sapling starting to crowd out the blueberries and under shrubs, the mean hight of the plant life around 2ft. Within another 5 years the right field would be filled with saplings, and the edges would have been moved in, and overall be as grown in as the left. The point is that nature tends to abhor a vacuum. A lot of weeds and invasive species, while interfering with human goals, also seem to be trying to recover bare, disturbed land or filling in empty niches (there are notable exceptions to this where a plant or animal is carving its own new niche, but throwing poison in the waterways hardly seems an acceptable option and is another story altogether). I like to think of flora as a battery. If you start by imagining a cleared to the ground lot, bare earth, and picture how it would look time lapse 20, 60, and 100 years from now. I see small weedy plants giving way to bushes and shrub giving way to sapling to larger trees that soak up the light changing the diversity of the species on the ground. Each new round of plant and companion insect and animal life adding to the life, and potential for life, inherent in the earth. 100 years later we would hope to find a forest with a 60ft canopy using every ray of sunlight available to it. 

In the garden I've planted clusters of vegetable, both to try shade out the weeds and to take every advantage of the sunlight that I have, in crude imitation of shading out, natural competition. It worked better for some vegetables than others. My carrots have so far been the best working example, I allowed them to self-thin and the carrot patch has been weed/work free, I believe that what I suffer in individual size of the carrots or total yield, I will more than make up for in the ratio of effort expanded to yield. Not a method for those perfectionist gardeners who demand neat rows, but it works for me.

This summer has been my first real experience with gardening and with horticulture in general, but has only served to reaffirm my own observations and those of some pretty wise people before me. The more that people try to improve on, take short cuts to, or dissect the natural world; the more humanity just ends up fucking it up.  

August Farm Update

The day job finally slowed down enough to take a few pictures... I havn't done much around the ole' homestead other than cut lots of firewod.  I got a little scared when we had a few, dare I say, fallish nights in the begining of August.  Firewood jumped to the top of the priority list (i didn't have any cut), now it's looking like I should be done chopping by the 1st of sept.

The pigs on a rainy day, 

they're hard to photograph when they're hungry

The bees have had a population explosion

And filled the top box with comb

and built a cool piece of display comb,

filled with honey

The Garden, doing all the better for being totaly ignored

My first Zuke

And my first Cuke

I'm so proud of them both

Farm Update

Not a whole lot has changed in the past month or so.  I've been steadily working more and more at my day job and less and less on the farm.  which works out well because most of the farm work right now involves waiting for things to grow.

The pigs have put on 30+ pounds and are growing strong.  It took about a week for them to become aware of the electric fence, but now they are good and trained.  I can open the gate and not even food will get them to cross the line where the wire usually is.  They are on a strict diet of catering scraps and hay, fed once a day, so they end up foraging quite a bit too. 

From top to bottom: Don Juan, Joe McCarthy, and Pope Benidict... My chauvinist Pigs

The garden is starting to look greenish, and I've had my first meal from it

Bottom to top: Parsnips, carrots, beets, lots of greens, and more greens

Last but not least the bees, they are doing surprisingly well despite the 6 weeks of rain we've had.  surviving and making honey.

Chauvinist Pigs!

The pigs are here. After asking everybody I saw for the past month, I finaly found someone who had pigglets. So away I went on saturday to Lee, NH to pick up three piglets. A ways from here, I know, but the people at the farm were really friendly and some fantastic heritage breed pigs. The piglets are a Tamworth X Large Black cross. The pigs were amazingly well behaved on the trip home, they pretty much slept the whole way. Providing them with plenty of energy to give me an important farm-life lesson when we got home.

The pigs being all innocent and cute and the like

The plan - barrier of electric fence straight into the pen and a ramp out of the car

(this is one of those moments you say to yourself "this is either going to go very very wrong or very very right")

"it's going to work...I'm so smart"

...in the following seconds I throw down the camera and spent the next four hours trying to chase down piglets through the woods.  luckly right around dusk they came back to the car where they spent the night.

The next day I put up some weld wire fence and spent some time assuring the piglet I don't want to hurt them (just eat them, eventually)

Things go much smoother, within seconds of being the pen they were rooting around.

A short video just to give you the full effect.  they make some pretty great noises.

waggle dance

The Bees have made a full recovery and are doing better than ever.

I tried to take a video of the bees doing the waggle dance, my camera doesn't take very good video but here it is. 

I've finally finished the garden!! I fixed the tractor and this weekend spread the compost.  Yesterday I spent four hours planting veggies.  I took a "natural" approach to the bed layout and did a lot of casting seeds about.  

finally done with excavating 

One part mud pit + one part compost = garden

Jared is happy that we are done spreading compost

Tilling soil amendments 

I've also finished the pig pen last week.

They've got about 1500sq ft of woodland to roam around in, complete with solar powered electric fence and metal roofed hovel.  unfortunately the people I was going to get the pigs from have kind of run out, so I'm scrambling to find a new supplier.

Bee-isaster - n. a disaster relating to bees

My bees are dying!.  I went to check on them on thurs. afternoon and where usually I can't see any of the comb this is what I saw.

actually it's a really good picture of what they've been doing the past three weeks what with all the bees out of the way.  The next morning I hurried out and gave them a little sugar snack, my current theroy is that with all the rain and cloud weather we've been having the past week+  they didn't have energy to keep everybody warm,  for the good of the hive the fat was cut.  luckily on friday and today it was nice and sunny and they were flying about like mad, and ignoring the sugar water I put out for them, so I think that the hive is going to make it, but there is a depressing number of dead bees on the floor of the hive right now.

The garden has been coming along, and like everything else taking much longer than I had hoped.  The lateest set back came on wed. afternoon when the dipperstick hydroluic ram quit.  And I only had one more day of digging to go!  now I have to wait for a week or more for a new one to get here.  but here are some pic of the progress so far.

In the mean-time I'll be working on setting up the piggy pen I've already got the bottom strand of electric fence, and the shelter for the pigs done. 

What $72 can get you these days - 3#s of Bees

I got Bees!!!  This morning I got a call around 9 that my bees were ready to be picked up.  Unfortunately I hadn't quite got around to a few all important finishing touches on the hive, like oh say actually setting it up outside or a roof.  So I scrambled around for a couple hours to finish everything up.

improvised cedar shingle roof

All the Parts ready to go

Ready for bees

I went to the apiary ready to drive home in a cloud of bees, but they have the bees in these really nice little boxes, and there's not a spare bee to be found.

The installation was nerve wreaking, you have to open the lid of the bee box and hold on the string that's attached to the queen cage.  needless to say with all the bees flying around and the gloves on I dropped the cage into the bee box (which has a small opening).  eventually I got the cage out and then had to "pour" about three pounds of bees out of the box into the hive.  The bees were very patient with me through all of this. 

Within five min. or so they had settled in to their new home.  I left the queen in the cage for a couple of hours so they wouldn't move out.  

it took a little while for the bees to learn where the entrance is

First floor view

the swarm

I had to force myself not to spend the rest of the day watching them.  I've named the queen Ba‘alat Gebal after the Phoenician Goddess of the city of Byblos.