Early Spring Farm Checklist - Western Washington Edition

Technically, it's still winter for another eight days, but I've always thought of mid-March as Spring. Maybe it's because I've been seeing Easter stuff for sale in the stores since February 15th, or maybe it's just my boundless optimism? Either way, bring it on!

This list applies to my particular area (Zone 7B per the USDA's Hardiness Zone index), in this particular  year. The duration and severity of seasons never seem to be the same any two years in a row anymore. Luckily, this year seems to be bringing an early (or at least not late!) Spring. Temperatures have been fairly mild, and we haven't had hard frosts or monsoon-type rains for the past month, give or take, which makes this rain belt farm chick pretty optimistic that Spring will arrive on time this year.

And so, the Spring to-do list must be made, then tackled, one item at a time. We're trying our hands at a LOT of new and exciting projects this Spring, including honeybees, pigs and a brand new kitchen garden, so our list is rather mighty. Between the fair weather and my new knee, I have high hopes that we'll be able to pull this ambitious list off and have a super productive year. This will be our first year in which our little farm will be more than a hobby, but an honest to goodness, money-making business. I'm a big bundle of jangled, eager, excited nerves. It's a good kind of crazy. ;)

March To Do's

*Forage - Stinging nettles & dandelions
*Plant - Start lettuces, cruciferous veggies and hardy herbs indoors. Plant peas out as soon as a raised bed is available.
*Buy - Lumber and other building materials for building two Kenyan Top Bar beehives, a shelter for the pig pen, and at least half a dozen raised beds. Buy 3 weaner pigs.
*Sell - List our buck and 2-3 does with kids for sale, eggs
*Fix - Replace hoses that Rex destroyed, touch up paint job on the big coop, paint east-facing side of the coop with chalkboard paint so that eggs and other farmstand offerings can be advertised for sale.
*Clean- Pick up storm-downed tree limbs that have accumulated over the Winter (feed to goats), tidy up yard and porch. Pull weeds if time permits. Muck out goat houses and chicken coops.
*Build - Finish pig pen and shelter.  At least start beehives. Work on getting a few raised beds in for early veggies.


I know that I must be forgetting some stuff here, because this list looks way too manageable. Uhg. I need to be back up to speed, like, yesterday. Oy...

Bottle Feeding a Weak Kid - The Story of Cookie

Cookie was the second born of triplets to Hop, a two year old mini-Lamancha and first time freshener. The buckling that preceded him presented breech, and was stillborn after having been stuck for sometime. Cookie weighed maybe 3 pounds at birth - a petite little thing from the outset. We gave him some colostrum gel, as we do all of our newborns just in case, followed by a couple squirts of nutri-drench straight down the gullet. He seemed small but steady, so we figured that in spite of his rough entry into this world, that his Mama would take care of him and that, eventually, he'd thrive.

Maybe it was because of his extended wait to be born, or because Mama played favorites with her third born buckling, but Cookie simply failed to thrive and grew weaker by inches every day. Hop didn't pay special attention to her weak boy but old maid Auntie Blue would cuddle up to him, and Sidney, our Alpha Alpine, would let any hungry kid nurse whenever, wherever, so we struggled initially with the idea of taking him away from his herd who were clearly doing their level best to foster him, and hedging our bets and bringing him in to be bottle fed. Yesterday afternoon, we finally decided that he needed our intervention, and brought him in from the goat yard in a Tagalongs Girl Scout cookie box. Hence his name.

Finally having picked him up, we saw the he was almost literally skin and bones. If he'd been nursing at all, clearly it hadn't been enough. We mixed up small batches of milk replacer with a shot of nutri-drench in it, and trickled it down his throat. When he pooped twice, we were encouraged that his gut was working, and that the milk was landing in his stomach rather than his lungs, which can happen when a very weak kid is essentially force fed. I toyed with the idea of "tubing" him, since my goat emergency kit came with a weak kid feeding tube set up. I didn't end up doing it, because if you don't know what you're doing (and I don't), you can thread the tube into the trachea rather than the esophagus, and drown the baby with milk.

So we kept him warm and continued to feed him as much as he'd take - usually not more than a half an ounce - and he'd swallow the majority of it by sheer reflex. Every once in a while, he'd muster up enough strength to be slightly combative with me. We also took that as a good sign. He slept fitfully, nestled inside his cookie box, waking at random intervals to utter a few pathetic moans before drifting back into sleep.

He made it through the night. We thought we'd turned a corner.

Come morning, his breathing remained fast and shallow, and he wouldn't take milk like he had the night before. Most of it was just dribbling right back out of his mouth. I called my goat-wise cousin to see if she thought it was time to tube him. She came over within the hour and ran through a checklist of symptoms and potential cures. We'd warmed him up, fed him and kept his bum-bum from pasting up, but it wasn't enough. Before we could try anything else, our little guy just stopped breathing and slipped away. We don't know if he had a congenital issue that rendered him unable to thrive, if he'd caught a bug of some sort that slowly drained his very limited resources, or if he'd just been rejected by his dam, and hadn't ever had a good feeding, and burned through his reserves. We don't know, which is one of the worst things that can happen when you lose livestock. It shatters your peace of mind. I don't know if whatever took him was contagious, and the rest of our herd is in danger of sharing the same fate, or if he would have survived if I would have plucked up the courage to tube him last night.

Live and learn, I guess. The trouble is that I'm not sure that I've learned anything from Cookie's illness and passing. I don't know what I could or should have done differently or better. Maybe there wasn't anything I could do, and that is the lesson?

The New Kids of Goatlandia

Hop's babies -

 Little Girl

 Baby Boy

Hop's little buckling. He's a spirited little dude!

Hop's boy, Hop, Chardonnay & Valentina. We think that Teeny may have 3 or 4 babies on board!

Liberty's Babies -

Baby Boy (in back), Baby Girl (in front)

Little Man (in the foreground), Little Girl (in back)

Sidney's Kids-

 Sidney and her buckling

Sid being hounded by her twins and one of Liberty's kids.

"Helllppp Meeeeee!"

Sophie's Kids -

Soph's boy

Sophie's big girl with Hop's little girl

A Heap o' napping Kids :)

Spring has Sprung and the Babies are Booming!

All signs seem to point to an early Spring this year -

The Forsythia has just started blooming, and the Snowdrops have been up for a few weeks.

Scarlet has personally tended this impromptu clump of snowdrops for a few years now, calling them her "fairy forest". 

The years first kidding went off without a hitch by first-time freshener, Valentina. She delivered twins, a boy and a girl, on the sly. Scarlet and her Grammy discovered the babies yesterday upon a visit to the back forty.  We think that they were delivered the day before.

Lunch!

Our newest blue-eyed babies, little girl (in the back) and baby buckling (in front)

I was relieved to have a lactating doe and a pair of healthy babies join our herd, but also a little bummed that this year will be the first time that I haven't been able to attend the births. Being a goat midwife is one of the sweetest gigs on this farm, and we may have as many as seven more does due to deliver any day. Heal fast, bionic knee! My girls need me!

For all that I'm missing out on, I should be able to manage at least a few early Spring farm chores, like starting seedlings on the heat mats and under grow lights, in anticipation of the new raised-bed garden that Bill is firing himself up to build.

I'll also hit up some of my usual, easy-to-reach spots to see if the stinging nettles have started to pop up yet. Nettles are some of the first greens of Spring, and we're all in need of a little spring green tonic to chase away the months of grey. With the hens now laying well again, I anticipate that we'll have some nettle egg noodles for dinner soon.  

Another sure sign that Spring is near? The frogs o' the bog, singing their little green heads off. The collective sound of a thousand or so frogs singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? in unison is pretty intense, though they blend together to make a sort of wall of white noise (This is a wav file of somebody else's frogs. Ours sound like this times about fifty.) It's one of those sounds that might make for a great track on a nature cd, along with waves crashing and rain falling on a tin roof. One of the previous owners of this house once told me that someone associated with some tv or movie production came out and recorded our frogs for use on some soundtrack. I have famous frogs!

I've been chipping away at this post for long enough now that an additional FIVE kids have arrived since I started. HOLY GOAT FERTILITY, BATMAN!

Gotta go pace a hole in the rug over these babies that I can't see. :\ More pics forthcoming asap!

Alien Angry Girl vs. Predator

Y'all know my Rexy-boy, right?

First week home, January 2012

Rex is a Great Pyrenees/Pyr mix of some sort. His pink nose is the big giveaway that he's probably not a pure Pyr, but his personality and instincts are ALL PYR, for better or for worse. As you probably know, if you've read this blog much, Great Pyrenees are a breed of Livestock Guardian Dogs, or LGDs. LGD's are 99% instinct, having been bred for a thousand years for single purpose - to protect their charges. Noble though they are, this take-charge attitude also has a downside - intense pigheadedness. LGD's are notorious for disrespecting personal space and property lines, answering instead to their highly tuned senses and instincts about where their dominion begins and ends, and who/what poses a potential threat to their humans and critters.

Knowing this full well, we shored up our fencing before we even adopted Rex. Much like a toddler will gleefully hone in on the one thing that you missed in an otherwise airtight, baby-proofed room, Rex let us know pretty quickly that anything short of chain-link and barbed wire would not deter him from exploring the whole of North Olympia at his leisure. So we patched, and re-fenced and fortified until, at last, it seemed like we'd tightened up our borders sufficiently.

Every once in a while, the lines were still breached. Usually, a careless kid or a half-frozen gate latch was to blame, but lately, Rex was escaping like clockwork from parts unknown. We wouldn't realize that he'd even gotten out until he pranced his fluffy butt right past the front window, proud as could be, right down the middle of the road.

And of course, he does not come to his name once he has tasted sweet, sweet freedom. Instead, he looks at you over his shoulder, does a playful bounce, then takes the hell off, like it's a game. It is infuriating.

So after he'd demolished and weaseled out of the fence about a dozen times this week, we felt that we were out of options, and had to install a run. Today was his first day on the chain gang, and he was none too thrilled about it.

Who would think to take advantage of the fact that our guardian was tethered and effectively useless? Why Mr. Coyote, of course! 

At a quarter after twelve this afternoon, just as I was getting ready to go and get my hair cut, I heard an almighty ruckus erupt in the chicken yard, followed by a trio of panicked hens running across the driveway. Uh-oh.

So I run to the chicken yard in time to see a young coyote hauling ass through our bog. $%@*!!!

The chickens are in the driveway, perched on top of the fence, and running around bocking like mad. I try to take a quick inventory of who's there. I'm not seeing Sir Peckins, Gracie or Cotton. After another minute of searching, I find poor Cotton, our only Cochin hen.

Cotton, in happier times.

Determined not to let the @$$hole coyote have what is left of her, I scoop up her still-warm, fluffy little body and bring her back to the driveway, where I stash her away in an unused trash bin until Bill and the girls can come home and bury her. I still can't find Gracie or Peck.

I attempted to round up the rest of the chickens, but even with the bribe of fresh bread, they won't come into the coop where I can lock them up safe. Then I think, my goats!

Kidding time is potentially close, so my does are extra fat and unwieldy, and at any given moment, there may be babies on the ground and the smells that accompany a birth that would serve as a powerful attractant to a carnivorous predator. Great.

So I fetch Rexy off of his run and onto a leash, and we slip and stumble our way through the mud, up to the goats' pasture. Nine out of nine. All present and accounted for. Whew.

I'm reluctant to go back inside while this jerk of a coyote still lurks around who knows where, but my knees are beyond trashed from the unexpected scrambling and trudging along side of and being pulled by 75 pounds of excited dog. I decide to check the chickens just one last time. As I try, once again, completely fruitlessly, to round up the chickens, from about 9 feet up in a cedar tree I hear a flutter and then see Miss Gracie descending. Oh thank you, patron saint of chickens, whoever you are.

And as I'm about to give up and head on in to ice down my knee and call my neighboring farmers with a warning about the coyote, a shrill and fervent bocking erupts from behind the coop. I check to see if the damn coyote is back, and instead I see an out-of-sorts Sir Peckins, frantically making his way back from the far end of the chicken yard. The bastard coyote only got the one hen then, and in the end, he won't really get her, as we'll bury her deep under the big alder tree.

It's slightly nuts how such a physically and emotionally exhausting half hour can run you through the entire spectrum of emotions - anger, fear, sadness, determination, relief, thankfulness - and, for all it takes from you, leaves you more certain than ever that you are in the very heartbeat of your calling. To know this property and my critters are the things that I know and that working with them gets my blood pumping with purpose gives me another level of peacefulness and determination in going into this surgery and following through with the rehab and PT that it is going to take to get me well and truly on my feet again and outside working my farm. 

Bring it on. :)

The Frets of a Feeble Farmer

Our herd of nine goats - 5 mini-Lamancha does, 1 mini-mancha buck, 1 Nigerian Dwarf doe and 2 Alpine does - has had me hand-wringing worried as of late.

Let me digress a tad. Because of the state of my knees, I can't make the walk to the upper pasture and back, especially in mud season. So I haven't been up to visit my babies in a long while, and it really, really sucks. I miss these sweet faces!

Valentina, Blue & Chardonnay, February 2012

So the daily visitor to Goatlandia for the past 9-months-plus has been Bill, exclusively. And the goaties love their Papa.

The daily love-in/treat shakedown.

In fact, they even know the sound of Billy's truck pulling into the driveway and start bleating to beat the band when they think Pops is home and headed their way with chow. He does right by them and they love him for it. 

Alas, Billy is a dude. 

Now, at the risk of coming across as some sexist Neaderthal, I'll attempt to explain how this hinders him ever so slightly as a goatherd. He takes amazing care of our guy and gals, but as a fella himself, lacks that sixth sense about babies and critters that I feel is inextricably tied to the X chromosome. It's a nurturing/intuition/mothering thing that goes bone-deep. I don't know how to explain it really, but I know when something is a little off with one of my goats (or dogs, or hens), even when they're "fine". It's a skill that I unfortunately have not been able to translate to the world of plants and my garden is living (half-dead) proof. I can also usually tell by one means or another if and when my girls are pregnant. Unfortunately, since I haven't had a face-to-face with my gals in a while, and can only see them from a distance out the window, I have no idea whatsoever who might or might not be pregnant, and I'm worried. In fact, I don't know whether anyone is pregnant so we might be looking at a very dry year.

This past Fall and Winter we finally found a profitable way to use our goat milk in soapmaking. There are a lot of very talented craftspeople and artisanal products made and sold here in Olympia, including a good number of small-batch soaps, but our beautiful, organic goat milk was the ingredient in ours that set us apart. In fact, we sold out of it! And now that we have a product that sells and have begun to build a knowledge base about making and marketing it, we're looking at the possibility of not having our magic ingredient available to us for drinking, cheesemaking, soapmaking or as a protein-rich food for the hogs that we'll soon have. The loss of it would be pretty major for us.

I started wondering if Buckley, our lone buck, did, in fact, have "the goods" or not. Billy and I talked about what our next steps would be if it turned out that Buckley was sterile. Our only viable option would be to cull him. Neither of us were looking forward to that possibility.

Well, a reprieve came in my inbox yesterday in the form of an email from my friend, B. The mini Lamancha does that she bought from us last year, and boarded here for a few weeks this Summer, were both successfully bred by none other than Buckley himself. Fritzen delivered healthy twin girls yesterday, Blackey & Wobble.

Wobble is the tan gal in front, and Blackey is the girl way in back. The mini-Lamancha breed is achieved by crossing a standard Lamancha with a Nigerian Dwarf. Blackey somehow ended up with tons of the Nigerian traits, including her long ears and frosted nose. My more experienced fellow goat ladies tell me that long ears can occur about as often in mini-Mancha kids as blue eyes can, as much as 25% of the time. But this is the first long eared baby mini-Mancha that we've had, out of 10 born. 

B says that her cry is even different sounding - loud and whiny like a Nigerian. Genetics are fascinating!

B's other doe, Oreo, is due any day. :)

Anyway - there is hope yet that at least one of our eight lovely ladies may give us babies and milk this year. I think I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and truck my tushie on up the hill, wonky knee and all, and give my girls a thorough once-over to see who, if anyone, might be in the family way. I think that Bill had pretty much resigned himself to the fact that we wouldn't be milking anybody this year when B's email came. Now he's worried that we could end up with babies and milk times eight!

Aye, chihuahua. 

In the event that rampant fecundity ends up being the way that this all shakes out, this year Bill won't be alone in caring for our girls. I'm getting a brand spankin' new knee next week, and after a month or two (or three) of rehab and therapy, I'll hopefully be able to get right back in the trenches! I suspect that I may actually be the first person on earth who looks forward to mucking out a chicken coop or cleaning birth goo off of a newborn goat, but I do. I totally do. 

Farm chick Chelle will shortly be back in the saddle again. :)

The Birth of a Food Nerd

As an adult, have you tasted a food that you haven't eaten in a long time, and experienced a sort of sensory-fueled time warp that brought you back to some sunny day in your childhood?

I have a lot of food associations, both good and bad. I remember that Grandma Gwen loved deviled ham on Wonder bread, which, to me, looked and smelled like nothing so much as a square of cat food-smothered foam rubber. Blech.

But Grandma was raised in the long shadow of the Great Depression, and probably gained a fondness for potted meats and smelly cheeses from both her mother's German heritage and her exceptional resourcefulness. Feeding 15 people on a lumberjack's wages required a little creativity and an open mind when it came to meal planning.

But food at Grandma Gwen's house wasn't always so odd, in fact, looking back now, I see that we routinely ate like kings, without having any notion of our privilege.

That time-travelling bite that I mentioned earlier? That's what brought this whole train of thought about. I popped a handful of hazelnuts while standing in my kitchen the other day and felt instantly present in my Grandma's back yard, circa 1982, cracking open the few filberts that we were able to pick just ahead of the hungry, cranky Stellar's Jays. We had a system that we'd learned from the birds - if you dropped the hulled nut against the porch, and it bounced, it was empty inside - move on. If it landed with plunk, there was a nut inside. We used a caveman-style approach from there and clobbered them with rocks until they either gave up their goods or went shooting off into God-knows-where from an ill-placed whack.

We had similar semi-feral country kid gorge-fests on English Walnuts, crab apples (big mistake!), red huckleberries, black caps and blackberries. Sometimes we'd be sent out with a dented old MJB coffee can and told to fill 'er up with blackberries or huckleberries, with the promised payoff of pie for dessert.

Besides what we could glean ourselves, we were also spoiled with the fish and game that Grandpa brought home. A Navy man and a Pisces, Grandpa had an incredible affinity for fishing. He was an avid fisherman, bringing home limits of salmon and steelhead, which he'd smoke or Grandma would bake or fry-up for dinner. We had salmon so often that we kids actually grew tired of it and would say "Again?!" when told that salmon was on the menu for supper.

Grandpa fishing for tuna(?) off the coast of Guam, 1957/58.

We also regularly enjoyed venison, catfish, trout and occasionally, crawdads that we kids took great fun in catching from the nearby icy-cold Nisqually river. The kind of groceries that would set you back a pretty penny these days were standard fare for us. If you'd have said to me then that king salmon and hazelnuts were considered "fancy", I'd have had a hearty chuckle at your expense.

Along with all of the great foods that I experienced as a kid were also those not-so-great foods of a 1980's latchkey kid - Salisbury steak dinners, blue box mac & cheese, Fruity Pebbles, etc. And to some extent, I'm sure that those foods would evoke memories for me too, though not necessarily great ones. I'm glad that I spent time outside of my neighborhood experiencing wild food in situ, because those are the flavors and experiences that have stuck with me, and shaped my foodie-geek palate. I love rustic. I love full flavor. I have a special place in my heart for DIY, "seed-to-skillet" food, and I have my Grandparents to thank for that.