Flower Under-Powered: A Tale of Woe

The poppy seed harvest (such as it is) is now in, and the results are underwhelming, to say the least.

The borage took over the pollinator/botanical beds this year and squeezed out all but 4 poppy plants. I should have knocked the borage back a peg - or five - but just didn't have the heart to do it since our honeybees LOVE the stuff.

Our pollinator bed - borage, poppies, calendula and bachelor buttons.

It's a trade off, I guess.

Sorry, Ukrainian Grammies. I wanted to attempt makivynk this Christmas with all homegrown poppy seeds, but it was not to be. While the recipe calls for a staggering three cups(!) of poppy seeds, I managed to grow just a scant half cup this year.

I *might* be able to eek a lemon poppy seed loaf or two out of this, with a dash leftover to throw in a batch of soap (poppy seeds are the best exfoliants ever), but the makivynk - she will have to wait a while longer.

On the plus side, other Ukrainian favorites grew well this year - beets, cabbage, tomatillos... ok, well pretty much just beets and cabbage. Borshch and holubtsi for everyone! 

A Thousand IOU's

I've mentioned before that creativity is an ephemeral thing for me. When the spirit of the thing is there, I have to write. Likewise, when it's not, I can't. Ergo, the last 6 or 8 months.

Our family, along with another, opened what most folks would define as a "small business" back in March of this year, Eastside Urban Farm & Garden Center. Who is this person who defines a venture of this sort as small?

Without making too many apologies, I'll try to sum up how 2014 has changed my life -
-I went from 14 years as a stay-at-home parent to a business owner who works 60-70 hours per week for embarrassingly low pay. The transition was not a graceful one.
-I went from being that-lady-who-never-forgets-your-birthday/anniversary/kids' names to the mommy/aunt/daughter/friend who bails on events at the last minute/forgets to send a birthday gift/etcetera because she is so exhausted that she literally can't see straight.
-I have zero, I mean ZERO social interaction outside my store.
-My house has become Disneyland for dust mites.
-I have had a very hard time finding the time and energy to do the things which bring peace and health to my family, animals, land and spirit, i.e. - making the majority of my family's foods from scratch, having unhurried bonding time with my kids/husband/critters, being a good and faithful steward to our little farm.

As the demands of the business, the farm and the seasons are constantly changing, I have not yet found a real workable work/life balance. My core goals for myself and my family haven't changed - to live a simple life full of genuine experiences. A few mixed blessings along the way have made it a little harder to achieve that goal, but it remains. I can't say exactly when I'll resurface from this immersive new experience completely to return to something that more resembles my ideal life, but I'm learning and working out how to tread these waters a little more effectively with each passing week.

Stay with me, friends. I'll see you soon-
M

Mid-Winter Whine-o-rama

Every month/season/year I think: The end is right around the corner. Life is about to calm down and I can spend more time knitting/cooking/sleeping/hanging with my husband/kids/critters, etc.

That has yet to actually happen. EVER.

Getting our new business up and running has been a full time-plus undertaking for the past few months now. Meeting with suppliers-bankers-contractors, renovating our space, marketing, hiring employees and doing 90% of the physical labor on the building ourselves... it's kicking our butts a little.

Then we have life on the home front - kidding season, garden planning, fostering dogs, fending off raccoon and coyote attacks, attempting (and failing) to keep my house and yard presentable, seeing my kids for more that 5 minutes per day, etc. Le Fail.

I offer last Friday as an example:
*My oldest stayed home from school sick.
*My youngest came home early from school, sick.
*My big dogs escaped. Thrice. That meant that I had to keep them in the house for the day after escape #3. Guess how productive a gal can be when she's being stalked by two giant, cagey dogs and two needy daughters? Not very.
*Our septic tank filled up so completely that we couldn't run any two of the following at the same time: the shower, toilet, dishwasher, clothes washer. When water did successfully go down the drain, we were "rewarded" with a burp from the toilet. Magical.

So... how's Winter treating you?

My M.I.A. Mea Culpa

I haven't been here much, which is lame. I haven't forgotten that I promised you all a giveaway, but I haven't gotten around to doing it just yet either, which is double lame.

But - I'm here for just a second to give you my paltry reasons why, or perhaps more fittingly, why not.

El numero Uno - Ta Daaaaaah! I'm opening a shop! Or, to be more accurate, Billy and I and two amazing business partners and fellow urban farm nerdz, are opening a shop! The amount of paperwork, legal filings and mandatory workshops that a new business owner has to complete are cray-zay NUTS, but we're getting 'er done, lining them up and knocking them down, etcetera, etcetera.

Eastside Urban Farm & Garden Center plans to open its doors to our farming, homesteading, and DIY'ing friends and neighbors in February 2014. (Hooboy does it feel nice to finally let that cat out of the bag!)

'Tis Bazaar Season - And I know you know what that means. It means I'm the lady who is fervently knitting dishcloths in the waiting room at the orthodontists office, scouring Pinterest for organic soap and sugar scrub recipes and wrapping bars of goaty-good soap waaaay into the small hours.

The Universe has been Ever-so-slightly Uncharitable this week past month or so - Lots and lots of personal craziness has been raining down upon our little family and the families of some of those nearest and dearest to us; more than there is any kind of time to go into detail about here, but suffice it to say that the old adage that "bad things come in threes" - Yeah, I wish. Bad/crappy/really, really, unfortunate things are coming in half-dozens at least, but we're still kickin'. I'm up all night rocking back and forth with worry (while knitting, wrapping soap), but still hanging in there.

And so, you know, ergo, my absence.

I'm going to try to check in more often, and I have a few new knitting patterns to post, I just have to carve out the time. Oh, and the giveaway - DEFINITELY still happening. :)

Thanks for your patience, mis amigos.

August Exhaustion

This morning I woke up to a fiery-hot pain in my shoulder. In fact, my entire right arm feels fit to fall right off. I think I've managed to figure out why...

...I've been knitting. A LOT.

...picking, washing chopping, slicing and grating dozens of pounds of squash.

...cutting and trimming up fifty-bajillion bars of soap.

...hand wrapping and labeling those same fifty-bajillion bars of soap.

Yes, my house is in ruins right now, but aren't my knits and soaps purty?! That 40ish pounds of squash that I put into the freezer last night is a different kind of purty. I feel very pleased with my level of productivity, but madre, my arm! :\

Yo!

Just popping by quick to say Hi, and to mention that I may not be able to post for the next Idontknowhowmany days, because my terminally ill computer has taken a sudden, steep nosedive in which the caps lock, w & q keys have all, rather abruptly, surrendered the burden of this mortal coil and have left me angrily shaking my fist in the general direction of hoever designed this stinking heap of a Helitt-Packard. Once the mystery illness spreads to a vowel, I'm sunk.

Anyhoo - I've been managing to knock out a brief Today's Take post each evening over on Ye Olde Bog Blog, should you be interested in keeping you finger on the pulse of Mudlandia. For instance - on the agenda for this lovely Independence Day? Cleaning chicken coops! The glamour of farm life never ends!

Soap Box Rant - GO!

Smithfield pork is the latest company to fire Paula Deen for her use of racist language. Bravo! There is no room in this growing, changing world for that kind of backwards thinking. However, Smithfield got a little high and mighty with their PR statement confirming the firing -

"Smithfield is determined to be an ethical food industry leader and it is important that our values and those of our spokespeople are properly aligned."

Ethical?! Maybe they forgot about how their CAFO's treat their pigs? (YouTube it - if you dare. It's brutal to watch.) Or how their "swine effluent" (poop and chemical lagoons) do irreparable damage to the ecosystems in the areas that call their ginormous factory farms home? Or, maybe they forgot that they feed obscene amounts of antibiotics and ARSENIC to their swine and eventually, consumers? All above board and a-ok, according to them.

The word/s the Paula Deen used/uses are unforgivably ugly and have no place in our society and earned her her walking papers. The people at Smithfield congratulating themselves as being ethical? It's a flat out lie and damn near as offensive to me. Anything to make a buck, seems to be a mantra that Smithfield and Deen share - maybe they've been "properly aligned" all along?

Not Keeping Up with the Joneses, part deux

Oy.

I'm 80% back to where I was, oh, almost 3 years ago. Back in the Summer good ol' 2010, when we first bought this place, I was kinda kicking butt and taking names farm/garden/house-wise. Between Bill and I, we kept the lawn mowed, the flower beds mostly weeded, and the critters and kids safe, well fed and generally presentable. Darn those were good times!

Fast forward to the present. The yard is straight-up out of control, the girls are old enough to dress and style themselves, for better or worse (trust me, sometimes it's worse!), the house hasn't had a top-to-bottom cleaning since I don't know when, and the laundry... sweet baby jeebus, the laundry.

I feel like I'm treading water. I get the house mostly caught up, then it's time to put the garden in, and the house falls massively behind. Then the reverse happens, it's Autumn, and I can mostly quit stressing about the yard and garden and focus on the house, then a metric crap-ton of leaves fall and the rains hit and turn our yard and garden into muck soup, which will take massive cleanup come Spring...and the cycle continues.

I can't keep up. I can't mentally juggle the nutritional needs of four humans and 50+ critters and keep my carpet vacuumed and have a clean car and volunteer at the girls' schools and make my own cheese and keep my sanity. Something has to give.

So this school year, I didn't volunteer. So far, I haven't made cheese, though that is not something I want to give up, I just can't find the time for it just now, and my loss is the pigs' gain - they're big fans of our goat milk. My car is littered with latte cups and other weird odds and ends, and has a trunk full of clothes that I've been meaning to drop by the Salvation Army for, seriously, months now. On the whole, it doesn't bother me too much, because I know what my priorities are and why, but to the outside observer who doesn't know the backstory on our year of crap, it probably looks like I'm a giant slacker and a half-assed mom, and that bothers me.

So what do I do? Do I run myself ragged trying to keep up appearances when, deep down, I'm not terribly bothered by the fact that I have a dandelion forest in my front yard and a ring-around-the-tub? Or do I focus on the stuff that I feel really satisfies me - canning weird flavors of jam, knitting a million dishcloths, cooking from scratch and having dinner on the beach with my family?

It's no contest. I choose the experience of togetherness over the facade of always having it together.

Now, how do I make myself ok enough with my choice to hold my head up high and not explain or apologize for my messy car, my cluttered porch or my daughter's whack-a-doo self-styled hair? Seriously - how?

Still Soggy

Our raised beds are finally all built, our soil has been delivered, and we have about 1/3 of the beds filled with soil and ready to go. Watch out, garden! Here I co....

Son of a...!

&%#$!!!! 

It is almost June. The only things I have in the garden so far are peas, beets, radishes, lettuce, strawberries and kale. Whoopy-ding-dang-do. Do I even stand a chance of getting tomatoes, melons, corn or zucchini this year? 

Not happy. 

My First Alive Day - 5/15/2013

Normally, I wouldn't want to make a thing out of anything to do with me personally, because I'm just not a big-whoop kinda gal. But today is a pretty major milestone for me - one year since my accident.

For those of you who might not have been around when the accident happened, you can catch yourself up, if you so choose, here.

These past 365 days have felt like a thousand at least. Crawling back toward normalcy has been painfully, frustratingly slow. I have healed from my injuries, but still carry many scars, both physical and emotional. My flashbacks and panic attacks have, mercifully, passed. The first few months after the accident, the sound of a low-flying helicopter or of a buzzing saw or lawnmower induced a heavy-breathing, adrenaline out-of-nowhere anxiety response. The helicopter made sense, but the saw and lawnmower? The best we could figure is that it must have sounded something like the jaws of life did, opening and pulling my car apart.

It took one extremely painful plastic surgery, and three months of daily bandage changes, debriding and antibiotics to put my scalp back together, but I now have no more exposed skull, no more infection, only a few bright-pink patches of scar tissue that my stylist and I are trying to find creative ways to make less noticeable. It is a far better outcome than anybody in their right mind could have imagined upon seeing the mess that was there right after the accident, not to mention the secondary mess made by the staff at the first hospital I was treated at having hastily stapled my scalp back together with large amounts of my hair and the floor of the Mojave desert still caked within my wound. The infection that followed presented a greater and more immediate risk to my health than the accident itself had. The threat of MRSA, a very real and terrifying possibility for someone with a wound that takes 3 months to close, never left my mind. The near-daily wound care appointments and the copious antibiotics kept it at bay though, thankfully. Thank heaven for strong antibiotics! I will say though - three months on antibiotics of any sort, no matter how carefully managed and counter-balanced with probiotics, does NOT do a body good.

Some of the smaller, slower to resolve things left over from my accident are a wicked case of anemia that has been dogging me now for the entire past year, regardless of how many protein/vitamin/mineral supplements that I eat/drink/swallow.  Maybe the worst thing of all though are the brain issues. By brain issues, I mean the classic Traumatic Brain Injury complaints - amnesia, irritability (stemming in part from my lost ability to multitask and concentrate well), poor short-term memory and poor word-recall. I have good days and bad days. Being tired seems to aggravate my symptoms, and by the end of the day, I find myself fishing for simple words. For someone who has always been a voracious reader, and who fancies herself a bit of a word-nerd, it is particularly painful to be without words.

So I didn't get out of this mess unscathed, but I did get out of it. I'm here with my husband and my kids because I couldn't give in to it all and leave them. I've been working my way back toward being fully-functional one inch at a time. I'm getting there.

So, scars and all, I want to celebrate. My homegirls, my sister and I plan to go out tomorrow for a drink to mark my now having one year "post" under my belt. I never took my life for granted, but seeing it almost go, followed by a year of kicking my own butt to get back where I need to be, and watching my husband cover for me with our girls, our farm and a zillion other little and not-so-little things while I took the time to get myself back together, well, it increases your appreciation for what is real and good and true in your life, exponentially.

Tomorrow we'll bust out the champagne and rock out some karaoke, because that's my happiness in a nutshell - being free and silly and fearless and sappy with the people I love - and I absolutely plan to take advantage of every single second I'm given with them.

Rainy Days and Mondays... A Whiny Rant from Farmer Crankenpants

Today has not been my day.

I suffer from insomnia, so I'd only had about 4 hours of sleep before the tsunami of poo, also known as Monday, decided to slap me awake(ish).

The first thing was a phone call, bright and early, from an uncharacteristically chipper gal at the post office. I wouldn't have even picked up, tired as I was, but Scarlet was still home and so she answered, then handed me the phone while I was still 90% unconscious. "Good morning! Your chickens are here!" Awww... what the crap?! I had the chicks' arrival written down on my calender as being slated for Friday. The run that these little guys would be moving in to in the coop hadn't even been set up yet. Oy.

So I drag my buns out of bed. I make myself a ginormous iced coffee. I have about two swigs of it before I get a call from the garden supply company that is delivering the 25 cubic feet (yards? Whatever. A smallish mountain.) of soil that will be going into our new raised beds. The driver is running a touch late - is it ok if he comes in 30 minutes? I say sure, but I have to run to the post office super quick to pick up my box of chickens first. "Your what?" Having to explain interstate chicken delivery to a stranger who seems to have decided, rather hastily, that I'm half batshizz crazy... Just. Not. Helping.

After the call, I threw on some clothes and put a very sad Penny into her kennel, then ran to the post office to pick up my chicks. The only bright spot in my post office jaunt was getting to show a little kid my package o' peepers. The surprise and delight on his face when he saw and heard the chickies going bananas was awesome. It's one of the aspects of farming in the city that I straight-up live for. Watching a kid break into a smile when they see a baby goat go bouncing by, or just after they pull up and take a chomp out of their first bright purple carrot, dirt and all - it makes me so dang happy.

Alas, the happiness was fleeting.

About 30 seconds after I pull into the driveway, the dirt delivery guy shows up. I have a package of shivering, mildly-traumatized poultry that need dealing with, and now this fella who needs my input on where to heap my dirt. I gave him two potential choices - both were rejected. He wanted to dump the dirt a little further into the yard. You got it, chief. Go nuts! I leave him to it, and go to put my peepers in the coop.

I no sooner unpack my peepers than I notice that we have a jailbreak unfolding. The chicks are still small enough that they can get through the holes in the chicken wire, and have wandered into neighboring runs. Crap. I round up my freshly liberated chicks and ponder a plan B.

I slap a temporary home for them together in a galvanized water trough. I stash them in our back room, hopefully securing them by closing the the two doors that separate them from the range of Penny the Huntress, freelance chicken murderer.

Sweet. I have two seconds to sit down and chug my nearly-forgotten cup of coffee. Then I realize that I've nearly forgotten something else that is kinda critical - that I need to show the chicks how to drink their water. It's been so long since we've had baby chicks here that I didn't even remember that chickies don't come with that knowledge. I went to check on my peeps only to find that - yep - these guys and gals were going to need a little help in the drinking department.

Check out the rocket scientist STANDING in the water, just chillin'. 

I'm about to sit down and starting teaching these chicks, one by one, the dip/scoop/tilt-the-head-back drinking method when there is a knock at the door. It's the dirt delivery guy. His truck is stuck. Super.

I go outside to help him find some wood scraps and gravel to throw under his truck tires. In my haste, I fail to secure the front door completely. To Rex, that is an as good as an engraved invitation to take the heck off.  Out-muther-frackin'-standing! Cue the parade of helpful neighbors driving/biking/jogging by who stop to let me know that "Your dog is out!". You don't say! Is that why I have a leash in one hand, a chunk of ham for a bribe in the other, and a completely humorless/borderline apoplectic look on my face? Thanks so much!

To recap, I have - 

a) thirsty, travel-weary chicks who can't drink until I show them how,

b) a d-bag escape artist dog who thinks that my limping down the road after him - IN THE RAIN - is some sort of great sport, 

c) a tiny terror of a dog who is just waiting for her opportunity to devour the thirsty baby chickens the first time I space out and leave a door open,

d) a dump truck in my front yard that is digging some fabulous, giant holes with its slipping and spinning tires and still not going anywhere. 

e) zero point zero percent blood sugar/circulating caffeine in my system.

Can I dig a hole and crawl into it now? 

Finally, finally, the dirt-guy got his truck out, Rex wandered back up to the porch and eventually back into the house, the chickies seem to have settled in a little - drinking lessons are still forthcoming, Penny hasn't visited death upon anyone/anything yet today, and I've made a dent in my great, highly-tragic caffeine deficit. 

Still, I think this will be a PB&Js for dinner kinda night. And woe unto the child who dares complain - WOE UNTO THEM. 

Serenity now!

Dog Shaming

My pups are angels, angels I tell you, 99% of the time. But when they go rogue, boy do they ever. 

At least Rex has the grace to look abashed for his antics. Penny, god love her, as usual, looks clueless as to why Mama's miffed. Chickens aren't chew toys, Pen. 

It seems that it may be my lot in life to be surrounded by adorable hooligans. 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?

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. :)

Ma Vie en Gris

I'm 99.9% convinced that Winter is trying to kill me.

In years past, I've hit the wall with Winter weather much later in the game than this, say February or March (or April or May), which usually has more to do with the color outside, or lack thereof, than the actual weather itself. I'm a Washingtonian born and raised, so three feet of rainfall in a season doesn't tend to make me turn a hair. However, the ceaseless grey chips away at my normally sunny demeanor after day 100 or so. I've bought therapy lights (not a very viable route for those of us with light-induced migraines, I'm afraid), taken fists full of B and D vitamins, upped my exercise, all to relatively little avail.

My theory on the death-by-grey phenomenon is in part owing to my being moderately synesthetic. Color is tied very closely to emotion in my addled brain, and even if it weren't, 100 days of blah would kick just about anybody in the butt. So, the grey literally plays hell with my emotional state. It sucks.

But this year it isn't the grey that's doing me in. We've actually had quite a few uncharacteristically beautiful, clear and sunny January days. It's worth noting that those days have been SO DAMN COLD AND DRY that I get a static electric zap every time I pet Rexy and that the freezing fog has been jamming every lock and latch on this place, but other than that, lovely. Those inconveniences are minor compared with what the dry cold does to my joints. My already crappy knees are so swollen and stiff this past week, that I've been sitting on my butt instead of taking care of my family and farm. Again, it sucks.

I never could wrap my mind around those old folks who would say that they could feel the weather in their bones, but let me tell you, now I'm all like Preach it, Granny! I can tell when the barometer is about to swing madly one way or the other, and I can tell with absolute certainty, even before I get out of bed or peek out a window, whether or not we've had an overnight freeze, all because of my rickety knees. What the heck is this crap?!? I'm thirty seven! :(

So, I'll probably be in a mood to varying degrees for, oh, the next 3 months or so. Sorry 'bout that. The painkillers, the heat packs, they help but they don't fix, and I'm kinda pissed about it. I have a lot that I'd like to be doing for my kids, my hub and my farm, but right now I'm lucky if I can slow-mo hustle my butt from the couch to the front door fast enough to let Penny-poo out in time to tinkle. We presently have a collective 50% success rate.

I'm going to try to channel my frustration over the things that I can't do into kicking ass at the things that I can. For starters, I'm a dag-gum knitting machine lately. Sure, my kids are eating leftover leftovers, but their heads, hands and necks are gonna look fly in their spankin' new knitwear. And I'm reading up on all things swine. That's right, people of Olympia, if you went to the library looking for a book on rearing pigs, you're out of luck, 'cuz I've got all four of them right here. I suspect that our library system may actually have more books on underwater basketweaving than they have on pigs, but I know that by the time we urban farm nerds are through, Backyard Poultry magazine will have the same circulation as Us Weekly up in this piece. ;)

So there it is - I'm a beyotch because the evil, rotten weather is making my broken parts more... brokended? But, I'm going to try to put on my best grin and bear it mug and make the best that I can of my crappy situation. In the mean time, if you have any organic pig-rearing books to recommend, or excess uber-soft yarn that needs knitting up, hook a sister up - I'm in the market. ;)

The Patchwork Farm Girl

If you had to choose: More years out of your life, or more life out of your years, which would it be?

These are the choices I'm thinking hard on just now.

At this moment, I'm leaning toward adding life to my years. I finally decided that enough was enough - I'm going ahead with the knee replacement. I know it won't bring back the knee of my misspent youth, but I can at least get my rump off of the couch and actively participate in our daily farm life to a greater extent than I do now. How much use and pain relief I'll get from my prosthesis is a mystery. It's a case-by-case thing.

When the pain and swelling get so bad now, that standing long enough to cook my kids breakfast ends up trashing my knee for the day, the idea of a knee replacement seems like a Godsend.

But there's a heck of a lot more to the process than just replacing a broken part and getting on with life. There are a lot of potential complications, firstly, that my prosthesis will expire before I do, necessitating a second fairly involved surgery, and the possible removal of even more pieces of my leg bones.

*Shudder*

Secondly, I have to be extra careful about preventing and quickly treating infection in my body for the rest of my life, lest the infection become blood-borne and travel to my new knee, necessitating surgical intervention to disinfect or possibly replace the parts. What does that mean for me? Antibiotics before every dental visit, seeing my doctor sooner rather than later anytime I suspect that I have a sinus infection, or any other otherwise-small bacterial infection. I'm not a fan of taking antibiotics, so this caveat is no small impediment for me.

Thirdly, my body and my family have already been through the ringer this year. Our car accident in May broke my arm and my thumb, spawned a pair of brain bleeds, gave me a wicked, lingering concussion, erased a good chunk of my memory, and cost me about 20% of my scalp, which took three months to re-grow, even after plastic surgery. Should I really even think about putting my body and my poor, put-upon husband through another round of incapacity?

And lastly, though this is a fix of sorts, my life won't be quite the same anymore. On my list of permanent can'ts are things like running, jumping and jogging, or anything else that could be considered a high-impact activity. Not that those figure greatly into my daily life, but still, when someone tells you that you can't do something, you grieve the loss of that freedom a little. They're also pretty adamant that I avoid falling down on my new knee. Now that could be a problem for me. Gravity and I don't always get along so well. Soon, I'll have to be extra-extra careful not to wipe out in a giant pile of chicken crap or step into a molehill, since apparently, I've not been precisely fastidious in avoiding these pratfalls up until now. I'm glad that someone out there has faith in my ability to pull my shizz together!

So, there it is. The good, the bad, the annoying and the practically-impossible, all laid out just like that. If I had a sincere love of couch surfing and piling evermore crap on my husband's to-do list, I could ride this messed-up knee thing all the way down the line. But I don't. We bought a farm because I wanted to work a farm, not play armchair quarterback to my poor, overburdened hubbin. So in spite of all the downsides, can'ts and possible complications, I feel like my only real move here is to take a chance on this procedure.

The length of time I have here on earth is completely uncertain, as my brush with mortality in the high desert taught me well. I have to be decisive and take the best advantage I can of what lies directly in front me, and that is working this farm, building a family business and experiencing life and exploring the world with my husband and daughters. And the knee I have now won't get me there, so in the end I guess there really isn't much of a choice...

I'm gonna do it.

Waste

I've always been a frugal creature; not one to waste unnecessarily, and a bit of a pack rat when it comes to anything I perceive as potentially having a little life left in it. It's a blessing and a curse, really, in terms of the oddments and "junk" that I stockpile save. It is a relatively small percentage of the time that I end up doing anything with those spare buttons that come with my husband's work shirts, as he usually manages to wear the shirts out well before the buttons can go missing, but, even still, I can't just throw them away. I just... can't.

So I'm the first to admit that there can be too much of a good thing in terms of saving stuff. The HUGE exception to that rule in my book is food. There is always a body - be it human, chicken, ruminant, insect or microbe - that could use up that food's energy to a productive end and, in many cases, also produce a useful by-product (eggs, milk, compost, penicillin) besides. Therefore it pains me when I see any food irretrievably wasted.

To clarify exactly what I mean by irretrievably wasted, I'd define it like this - Useful potential energy that is irresponsibly cast off in such a way that renders it permanently unavailable for use by another living thing. Humans are the only ones who make waste like this.

If your family doesn't finish their dinner, saving the leftovers, composting them or sharing the food with critters would all be viable non-waste alternatives for taking advantage of the potential energy that is the raison d'etre, the very definition of food, and therefore a reasonable use of the food's energetic potential. Really, just about anything besides entombing it in non-biodegradable packaging and burying it 50 feet deep under thousands of tons of other trash, making it totally impossible to ever degrade, would be a reasonable use of the food energy. It's actually pretty easy to do.

Even so, it isn't unheard of to read tales of gross mismanagement of perfectly edible produce, as detailed in this story about an "unauthorized" public garden that was needlessly destroyed days before being harvested. As if that weren't tragedy enough, the ruined crops were then taken to a landfill and disposed of. I mean... why?

Irretrievable waste is hands-down the most complete waste of food, but there are others, though much less egregious, that still get under my skin. 

A major frustration that I'm experiencing a lot lately has to do with unharvested fruit trees. Washington state is known the world over for it's amazing apples. They grow almost effortlessly here, which is no doubt part of the reason that they are nearly as ubiquitous in our neighborhoods, parks and woodlands as the Douglas Fir is. But maybe having affordable, world-class apples available at the supermarket year-round has caused us to overlook the miracle of free food growing in our own front yards?

In Autumn, you can't help but notice all of the beautiful apples, pears, walnuts and hazelnuts hanging heavy in the trees, begging to be picked. And yet a vast majority of the time, the fruit will be left to drop and rot, perfect fodder for squirrels, yellow jackets and hungry deer, but seen as somehow less than their shiny supermarket counterparts, and therefore unfit and unworthy of human consumption. Have we lost our minds?

Yet another article (I've been reading a lot...) discusses just how much food we Americans waste on account of our acquired snobbiness and our reckless there's always more where that came from attitude. To illustrate just how insanely, ridiculously picky we've become as food shoppers, the article offers this bit of advice to producers and retailers for taking better advantage of "imperfect" produce -

Companies should look for alternatives in their supply chain, such as making so-called baby carrots out of carrots too bent to be sold whole at the retail level.

*Shakes Head* This is for real. People are going without and we're splitting hairs over carrot presentability. Phase two of my emotional reaction to this article (after weeping interspersed with multiple face-palms) was anger. I'm pissed, and that makes me loud, especially when it comes to things I feel passionately about. Taking care of people is one of those things.

I am only one person, but I am 100% responsible for choosing the food eaten by 4 people, 2 dogs, 20 chickens, 9 goats, 2 bunnies, 2 parakeets and one sassy turtle, therefore, my resolve to use food responsibly and with thanks has an impact that should not be, and indeed, is not taken lightly. I can participate in the system that keeps these problems going, or I can refuse, and take care of my family and farm on terms that both my head and my heart can live with.

Therefore, I resolve to grow, buy and use food even more responsibly than I have. I will buy less, grow and forage more, preserve more and use the food we do buy, find and grow as fully as can be done, and with all the respect it deserves.

Please join me.

Not Keeping Up with the Joneses

My last post was my best effort at focusing on the positive. I really do believe that positivity has the power to make my life and the lives of those around me better. But sometimes the Pollyanna Sunshine well runs dry, and I find myself irritable and somewhat behind the eight-ball in terms of my life's forward progression.

Well, I'm kinda there right now.

My girls are amazing, but this Summer vacation has been rather taxing on my relationship with them. We haven't been able to do a lot of our Summer norms, like cabin camping, fishing and going to the beach, because I was physically very weak and unable to drive for most of the Summer. That alone has thrown us all way off our game. On top of that, I'm struggling with a pretty heavy case of post-concussion syndrome, which has affected my memory and my ability to organize my thoughts. Add a highly emotional tweenager, a sensitive 9 year old girl, an emotionally needy, 75-pound pooch and a small working farm to the mix and you have the ultra hot mess that is me right now. Blurrrrg...

So I'm a little extra irritable, a little more raw than usual. I am looking forward to my girls' return to school with unparalleled joy. I just need a little quiet time to hear my own thoughts, you know? And as soon as that is done, or maybe while that is being done, I also need to make up for 3 months of not doing much. This house is a wreck.

Now, to be fair, my husband kicked butt while he was at the helm during my convalescence. He took care of the girls, the farm, the day-to-day odds and ends that are too numerous to name, and me and my very specialized needs, completely. Honest to God, I have no idea how he did it. He assumed the role of me, while also continuing to be him, and caregiver to a mostly disabled (albeit, temporarily, thankfully) adult. That is a tall effing order.

As a consequence of the hubster having a VERY full plate for 3 months, and my varying stages of disability/inability, a whole lot of stuff fell by the wayside, and neither of us had the energy to spare to give a crap about any of it. Laundry piled up, the vacuum sat idle, the weeds grew and grew, and we were just too busy trying to get by to pay it much mind.

To be perfectly honest, my house would probably not pass Martha Stewart's muster on it's finest day. Firstly, because I really do believe that an immaculate home is the sign of a wasted life. I have a million more worthwhile things to do than dust baseboards or flip mattresses. Secondly, because I don't believe that a sanitized home is a healthy home. We live on Boggy Hollow Farm, for crying out loud!  Mud, straw and a little bit of critter poo coming in on shoes and dog paws are just par for the course. Jars and crocks of homemade vinegar, pickles, sauerkraut and wine scattered here and there throughout our house offer proof that friendly bacteria and yeasts are welcome in this home.

We also are very into the up-cycling and re-purposing thang, which means that we hang on to useful objects, rather than throw them away, which can create a problem of its own - epic clutter.

But being able to logically rationalize having a non-sterile, occasionally-cluttered household doesn't negate my desperate, mental need for order and simplification. I wish that I didn't care at all that there is a mountain of laundry with my name on it, stains on the carpet (who in their right mind puts off-white carpet in a FARM HOUSE?!?), or over-filled junk drawers that hardly close, but I do, damn it, I do.

It isn't for the sake of keeping up with the modern ideal of what a "nice" home looks like - I forsook that pipe dream a looooong time ago - it's that I occasionally see my own environment with fresh eyes, as a visitor might see it, and am embarrassed and stressed out by my surroundings. I've said it before, physical clutter equals mental clutter in my head, and so I have a really hard time functioning in a chaotic environment. By the same token, it's also mentally and physically exhausting to even think about attempting to sort through four humans and forty(?) pets/animals worth of crap and deciding what stays and what goes. It's frugal/upcycling/we-might-need-that-again-someday! girl vs. emotionally-divorced crap-purger lady. Nobody wins. :(

So, I'm ok with a messier, less sterile, slightly more devil-may-care home environment than the average household seems to be, but I'm at a loss for how to reconcile that with the comfort that an organized and clean house brings to it's inhabitants. The promise of simplicity in urban homesteading is occasionally a bit of a tease - real food, real work, real experiences - all good things - at the "expense" of convenience, free time and rest. The more homesteading things that we make a part of our daily lives; home cheese making, brewing, garden-to-table cooking, animal husbandry, etc., the further away from convenience, free time and rest that we grow. I know that it's worth while. But - it is just exhausting. The whole "having a foot in two worlds" business - being a farmer and an urban mom - regularly kicks my ass.

We aren't keeping up with the Joneses. We aren't keeping up, period. We're getting by, sometimes, barely. I have a lot to think on about how to make our home/farm life mesh better with our city/social life, and the reasons why I need to impose some amount of order on this semi-chaotic life that I created.

Oy.

This is why I need thinky-quiet time. And wine. Lots and lots of wine.