TBA Farms

Winter, Every Few Days

2012-01-24T18:06:00.001-05:00

Winter this year is aloof. Last year, she showed up via snow squall in early December and ruled the Hill with an iron fist until the never-ending rains descended on us in March. It was a fairly taxing year, weather-wise, for us growers and makers. This year, Winter arrives every few days, bringing icy cold winds and heavy frosts with her, only to run off overnight, leaving a muddy, damp thaw in her wake. I look at dripping icicles and wonder what we could have done to chase her off so soon. While it is nice to have a 40-degree-day as a reprieve every week, it also means that what should be solid ground is mud, which is subsequently tracked by hooves into (supposedly) dry bedding areas, and which complicates moving anything with wheels. We are getting a taste of what fellow farmers in the Pacific Northwest have to deal with in winter, and it is leading us to miss our two or three months of frozen ground.

Growers.

The pigs seem to appreciate the frequent balmy days. Despite us giving them a nice, cozy, hay-filled stall indoors, a contingent of growers has taken up residence under the barn.

Grower Lookout Guarding Catacombs

Besides hollowing out those cozy catacombs and then jamming themselves in, baby sausage style, the 25 of them have also been happy to play in the muddy yard, mining for yummy minerals or trying to make it to China. They are between 8- and 150 pounds now, a first group born in early August and another group (bought in) born in late September.

Pigscape Under Barn.

Backup has arrived.

The 21 young weaners, born at the end of November and weaned earlier this month, are in a little, all-indoor pen for now; they are still too small to compete with the bigger growers for food, and to handle the fences and the cold nights outdoors (chances are they would be relegated to sleeping outside as the bigger ones would claim the indoor pen and the coveted under barn catacombs).

"Piglet" by Andy B.

Little Red and Missy are stuck in a deep-bedded pen indoors, taking a forced month off to recover their condition after birthing and nursing so many needies. Actually, Missy looks fine, and did throughout nursing, but Little Red's army of hungry mouths drank up her fat stores until her backbone showed. She went from being the fattest sow on-farm to the boniest in the space of one month. In mid-February they will both go back with the general population of breeders.

The breeders have been having their own dramas. We moved Victoria and Stripe in with the boar and the other girls (Spot, Scar, Tramp Stamp and Chilly) in late December, and they really had to go through some hazing. The Big Girls (Spot and Scar) are pretty far along in their pregnancies, and have been very territorial over sleeping nests and food. Victoria had a twelve inch gash down her side that would have required major medical attention were she a human; as is, we were worried enough to try (and fail*) to get some antibiotics injected into her. When we went to Florida for a week (more on that later), we hoped she wouldn't take a turn for the worse and end up sausage. Upon our return, however, we could barely even find a scar, such is the amazing healing prowess of the pig. She and Stripe still get picked on (Stripe regularly has a little slice in her side or chunk missing from a shoulder), but either they are getting better at staying away, or the Big Girls are finally resigned to their presence in the herd, because the bouts seem fewer these days.

Tramp Stamp and Spotbelly

Meanwhile, both Spot and the boar have been acting a bit lame. Spot's front left hoof pad is torn up a bit...nothing too serious, but it is always a little worrisome when a giant, pregnant sow has a hoof injury. The boar likewise seems to be having some tender back hooves. We've changed up their rations, just in case there was some sort of nutritional deficiency. They are both On Watch (something always is), but we don't think it is majorly troublesome.

The chickens, as always, are behaving bizarrely. I will never for the life of me understand the motivations of chickens. Why did the chicken cross the road? A good question indeed, and I understand why someone might wonder. Why do some of them form seemingly random political alliances? Why did Bernard II, Son of Bernie, roost in the apple tree with two hens one cold night last week before moving them back into the coop? Why did two coop hens, after several pleasant weeks in the coop behind the house, return to the barn to join up with the three Uncatchables? Why does one of the red hens lay her eggs in a small goldenrod thicket in front of the plum tree instead of in a nesting box like everyone else?

So many questions for the chickens. But as always, they refuse to answer, preferring instead to cross the road, or not, leaving it to future philosophical generations to determine their modus operandi.

*Approaching a 300-pound pig with a giant syringe, complete with a thick needle and an intimidating amount of fluid to slowly inject into muscle, is daunting. In fact, I kept thinking, it must be crazy. It must be impossible. How do these injections even exist, I wondered. Why aren't there oral antibiotics available for swine, I mused. Butofcourse -- the factory farm has no difficulty with this. Breeders are kept in teensy cages and crates; they couldn't start and run if their lives depended on it. The growers are fed a heavy ration of antibiotics in their feed, enough to keep the risk on infection from cuts at a minimum. Victoria, however, much as we tried to sneak up on her when she was bedded down in a (large) indoor pen, was always quick enough to start up and dash outside into her (larger) pasture. We figured that this energy meant she would be fine without the injection...luckily we were right. Topical anti-septic spray is the way to go for us.

Head Count

2011-12-04T18:37:00.001-05:00

Along with being OMG-winter-is-here-in-t-minus-one-day-and-we-aren't-ready time, it is Holiday Time. Those sacred days when one is supposed to eschew normal evening activities and instead joyfully whip up a batch of wassail, trim the tree, feel pressing guilt that one may be old enough for Christmas cards to be required, etc (such guilt is successfully drowned in wassail, by the way. a handy holiday tip...).

New October Growers

Don't get me wrong -- I love my wassail and I love my trimming. But also, I need to castrate piglets, winterize the orchard, bed down the garden, etc., with a time limit that is NOW; as for the Big Man's "to do before winter" list...don't even get me started, but it involves a backhoe. We are scrambling, all the while still trying to find our winter gloves and decide what actually needs done before the mud becomes brown cement for three months.

Holiday time is also visiting time, and so, in the interest of both giving visitors-to-be some background information and getting our winter planning ducks in a row, now is the perfect time to remind ourselves just how many of everything we actually have right now. This is actually not an easy question: it changes with births, slaughters, and mishaps with amazing regularity. So let's count.

Little Red family portrait

1 boar, still fat and happy, although stuck outdoors;
8 breeding sows: 4 with the boar on pasture, two nursing new litters in the barn, and two locked away in virginal, boar-free towers;
13 "growers", born from Scar and Spot in August;
12 new additions: grower pigs born in late September and bought in from two local farmers just yesterday, meant to fill a hole (ahem, Little Red's non-existent August litter) in our farrowing schedule as we ramp up;
23 very fresh piglets; thirteen surviving from Little Red's litter of fourteen on the last Sunday in November, and ten surviving from Missy's litter of twelve in the first week of the month (it is possible she had eleven...we've had an extraordinarily difficult time counting her piglets. Missy's also included, just for fun, two piglets that needed some major kitchen counter stitching interventions...one with a gash on her leg, and one with a giant around-the-middle slash that almost had us leaving him for dead. So really I want to make her number 9 because each of those really adds up to .5 viable piglets.) in hay-filled farrowing stalls in the barn.

Surgery mise en place for Missy's piglets

1 rooster, Bernard II son of Bernie, glaring at me from the shadows of the coop;8 hens in the henhouse, four originals from last year and four of the tree-hen's secret eggs, snatched out of their tree;
4 roosters locked in the greenhouse, tilling the manure and waiting to become stew meat;
4 feral chickens still unable to be caught or shot (so far), who actually sleep in turns and have lookouts and sophisticated escape strategies. The roosters are on the "Oh, you have spare time; let's practice your shooting!!" list for the next couple weeks. The hens I am still planning on somehow swooping up to fritter into the coop.

Missy family portrai

1 buck rabbit;
3 lady breeders;
17 that have been recently weaned, growing;
And a box of recently born tiny rabbitlings -- probably 6-12.

That's 55 porkers, 17 cluckers, and somewheres around 27 nose wigglers...PLUS 2 barn cats, 1 house cat, 1 ridiculous dog, and 2 busy humans who just can't wait for winter to finally snuff out 2011's projects and force us to catch up on all the books, tv and movies we've missed in the last 9 months. Just please not until we finish up just these last few projects.

A Eulogy for Bernie

2011-11-29T14:04:00.001-05:00

Folks who have visited the farm have met our rooster, Bernie. Perhaps you were admiring the view when something heavy and sharp suddenly slammed into your thigh. Perhaps you were busy carrying heavy feed buckets when a puffed-up greenish blur blitzed out of a rosebush to attack your boot. Perhaps you tried to fight back, learning only too late that any agression short of a full-fledged punt only made Bernie more excited to fight. Perhaps, then, you will feel some relief to know that Bernie is dead. Long live Bernie.

Frost-hardened Bernie in his milk parlor fortress.

Although I spent much of the spring and summer fantasizing about stewing Bernie up this winter, his death came as something of a shock, and the barnyard is a much more dull and lonely place without him. By August, in fact, I had decided that Bernie added more flavor to life than he would a stew. So it goes.

The Big Man and I learned early on that Bernie was something we had to keep our eyes on when we were on His Side of the Road. First he killed all the other roosters. We collected their corpses with trepidation while watching him patrolling the hillside. Then he moved his hens out of the coop and into the milk barn. From that home base he was able to scale up his bird-on-human attacks, ruling the area from the road to the bottom of the pasture, setting up ambushes, herding his hens, and making life interesting (sometimes terrifying) for the farmers. He chased Big Man through a burdock patch, landed me on my rear in the compost pile, and has been the reason for numerous lost tools as anything within reach has at some time been flung at him in a vain attempt at self preservation.

The Big Man eventually whacked Bernie enough times with shovels and pitchforks to earn some respect, so I spent the entire month of April trying to teach him to similarly respect me. I had six of seven brooms stashed around the barnyard so that I was never more than a few strides away from one. Every time he got within brooms-length of me, I'd let him have it. After four or so good whacks (often I would thwomp him, golf-style, sending him flying a few feet through the air) he would shake his head clear and mosey off in the other direction, keeping one vengeful eye on me.

Getting close enough for a good brooming. Thwock.

Since the brooming, the rooster-on-farmer violence had slowed, with Bernie preferring to play red light, green light. Walking through the barnyard, I would often see him out of the corner of my eye, slowly edging his way toward me, pretending to peck at the ground as he maneuvered. I'd turn toward him and he would instantly freeze, one foot off the ground. If I turned to walk away, I'd hear the "thwap thwap thwap" of him running toward me. Whirl around, and Bernie would freeze mid-stride. He would look at me stunned for a minute with an "oh crap, she caught me!" face, before narrowing his eyes and pretending to peck at the ground, slowly inching forward. I got fairly adept at walking backwards.

A few attack-free days and several nights featuring a Bernie-less top roost confirmed it: Bernie was dead (long live Bernie).

King of the mountain. Bernie is always king of the mountain.

All in all, and it is strange to say, Bernie is sorely missed. I was really starting to enjoy standing on the house side of the road, watching him stalk an unsuspecting farm visitor. And he was such a sweet, puffed-up dad with the 13 hoarded chicks.

We have one of those male chicks in the henhouse now -- Bernard II, Son of Bernie. He's got the same green plumed tail, and (like many roosters) the same severely crazy orange-red eyes. Here's hoping that he got some of Bernie's crazy genes as well.


RIP Bernie. May the wind be ever at your back, and unsuspecting shins ever before you.

Making Up For Lost Time

2011-11-27T16:55:00.001-05:00

Little Red was supposed to have piglets, along with Spot and Scar, in early August. Despite her svelte shape at the time (after all, she hardly showed with her first pregnancy -- we thought she was still 3 weeks out on March 1 and then suddenly she was giving milk), we dutifully frittered her away into a spacious and private farrowing stall on July 27th. In the neighboring stalls, Spot and Scar had their litters right on time. Little Red politely greeted us, piglet-less, with confused grunts every time we went in to poke and prod and otherwise hunt for signs of imminent new life.


One of Spot's or Scar's August piglets today.

On such a mission one day, the boar next door was making quite a commotion. He appeared to be trying to dig through the concrete floor to burrow into Little Red's stall. Odder still, Little Red seemed to be trying to shove her body through a small hole in the wood to get to him. So we took down the temporary wall that had separated them to see what would happen.

Now, according to popular hog knowledge, a female pig will only entertain a boar's advances if she is in heat, and she would not be in heat if she were pregnant.* The second the wall was down, it was clear that she was interested in the boar's advances; meaning that she was not pregnant.


How many can you see? Not enough...

We are not sure why she eschewed having August piglets. The heat in July or the stress of moving her from the far pasture to the barn may have caused a miscarriage, or she might never have recovered enough from nursing her last litter (and then competing with the larger Spot and Scar for food throughout the summer) to get fertile again.

Anyway, in the last two months, we have watched Little Red turn from the smallest sow on the farm into a gentle, russet-colored sphere. She definitely had something in her belly. However, we weren't sure if it was actual piglets or just a lot of grain now that Spot and Scar (still nursing piglets in the barn) were out of the picture, or a combination of both.

Well, today we learned that it was mostly piglets. When the Big Man checked at midnight, it was clear that something was happening. A calm Little Red and nine piglets at 2 AM made him think she was finished. But this morning, FOURTEEN piglets greeted him at chore time.

That is a new farm record -- by a lot. Her first litter was nine. Spot's first was seven and her August batch was also seven. Scar had eight for her first litter and six born alive in August. Now, the heat can account for their small numbers in August, and the March piglets were First Litters for all of the young sows, but fourteen is a more than respectable number any way you parse it.

LR; pile of piglets.

It will be interesting to see how many she can keep alive. We have a heat lamp set up, and they already know how to use it, but fourteen is a fairly big burden on a sow (with only fourteen teats...whereas humans usually have two for each baby and cows have four for one or two calves), and there is already one 'let who seems a little small, tired, cold, and generally uninterested in moving.

Little Red and Tiny Reds

*We are still trying to figure out if this is true. We have no clue. The internets/books seem to think it is so, but we are skeptical because of our logic skills.

THANK YOU, Farm to City Participants

2011-11-21T19:41:00.001-05:00

First of all, we'd like to give a giant and heartfelt THANK YOU to our hosts in Philadelphia and NYC who were so generous to open their homes and ovens to us for a fantastic Farm to City weekend.

An equally giant and heartfelt THANK YOU goes to our illustrious crew of farm sitters, who are slowly but surely chipping away at my ~~certainty~~ fear that everything will run away and/or die the second we step off of TBA lands for any significant period of time. Thanks to you we returned to a farm full of happy, calm beasts, and I have one less excuse to nurture my hermitic instincts.

It was great to meet new people and reconnect with old ones. You were inspiring as always, and provided us with lots to mull over as we plan the next stages of the Farm.

AND, for those who picked up their turkeys: I *think* that I managed to get my admittedly dorky but extremely useful Pastured Turkey Fact Sheet to all of you, but if I missed you, just email us and I can get you a copy (the basic gist being: do not lick your raw turkey /do brine that bitch). Additionally, if you have any other turkey-related questions (like: why did my turkey goody bag include two hearts/livers? etc.) feel free to email them and we can illuminate.

Farm to City This Weekend

2011-11-15T14:31:00.001-05:00

For those east-coast dwellers not on our email dislist*, let it be known that we are bringing the Farm to Philadelphia and New York City this weekend in the form of a good old fashioned cookout.

We'll be serving up samples of our sausages, chicken, vegetables and sundry other projects. Some adult libations will be offered, but we encourage visitors to contribute on that front.

ALL ARE WELCOME. Bring your friends and neighbors. We're a more-the-merrier type of operation, and we love meeting new people.

Food offerings will start around 8:00 PM, but feel free to come early and stay late.

Farm to Philly will be this Friday, November 18th, in West Philadelphia (please email tbafarms@gmail.com for the address)

Farm to NYC will be this Saturday, November 19th, in the East Village (please email tbafarms@gmail.com for the address)

In addition to samples and fun, we will have lots for sale if you want to take home your very own bit of the farm:

Turkeys: As of press time, a couple of these most iconic of holiday birds are still available at $4/pound. Pasture-raised, antibiotic free and all that jazz. Let us know asap if you want to reserve one.
Rabbit: is available sold whole, $5/pound. These are a great and healthy alternative to white meat chicken. Delicious braised in a sauce or stew.
Chicken: sold whole at $4/pound. We have them ranging from 3 - 7 pounds.
Pork:
Fresh Ham Roasts $6.5/# These are hams cut into 3 pieces. The butcher recommended it as a more saleable cut than hams, and a few of these will make good roasts, but some of them are like super thick ham steaks, which will roast up fine but look kind of odd.
Pork Chops $7.5/# These are smaller than you're used to, with the bone in. Think Lamb chop sized, very cute, one of our most remarkable and complimented cuts. 2 per package.
Spare Ribs $5.5/# These are quite literally spare ribs, bits of ribs they cut off of other cuts, as opposed to the big thick slabs you're used to at the BBQ joint. Great for braising.
Sausage $8/# Hot or Sweet Italian, cased but not linked.
Fresh Pork Belly $7/# What to make your own bacon? This is what you need. Also common in many Asian dishes. These are whole slabs, approx. 5# each.
Offal $3/# liver, heart, tongue, soup bones.

*Sign up for our email dislist! Just email tbafarms@gmail.com and ask to be added.

Inside-out Sow

2011-11-07T20:04:00.002-05:00

My camera is broken. This is actually fairly lucky for you, readers, because this past weekend we had a notably unattractive health scare with one of our sows: a prolapsed rectum.

Anal prolapse gathers like dark clouds on the horizon...

Situations like that this generally incite a googling frenzy on my part, a frenzy that always results in a feeling of utter disappointment at the lack of DIY vet resources there are out there for the small farmer. This is exacerbated substantially by the lack of actual vets who deal with livestock, on farm, at all. Around us there are a few who deal with cows. Pigs however...while I'm sure there must be someone, he/she is awfully hard to find.

Not to mention that these days, cost margins are so thin that it would take something exceptional for us to even consider calling a vet out to look at our animals. One $100 vet visit, and we would lose our entire profit on a 250-pound meat pig, or have to take a loss on a litter of piglets. The only instances I can see it being justifiable are if there is an outbreak of a disease that threatens the herd, or if one of our best sows, perhaps when pregnant, is afflicted with something that would be an easy fix for a vet but is an utter impossibility for us.

Scar, and friends, before the incident.

This is a real shame. I was recently visiting my family in Ohio, and while staying in my childhood bedroom I rediscovered the joys of All Creatures Great and Small by my man (and subconscious inspiration?) James Herriot. He was a country vet in the 1930s, a time when the practice was just beginning to move from primarily serving farmers and their livestock to servicing the dogs, cats and other house pets of the town-folk. Reading it this time was different, because now I actually do know what it was like to be up in the middle of the night in 0 degree weather with a hand up the birth canal of a struggling mother-to-be and all the frustration/amazement/terror/exhausting delight that comes with it when the little ones inexplicably arrive alive, somehow knowing to head straight toward the warmth and nourishment of the teat within seconds of being born.

Little ones, growing.

Anyway. Scar had a prolapsed rectum. This is an ugly condition wherein what should remain inside (the rectal tissue) is suddenly outside (expelled through the anus). It can be just a bit of material, or a heaping lot. Luckily for us, it was just a bit, and equally lucky for us, the Big Man caught it fast. One of the bigger dangers of a prolapse is that the tissue get caught on something (such as inquiring mouths, or barbed wire, or twigs, or...anything, really) and get cut. According to google, the causes range from hormones to indigestion to an, er, rough, encounter with the boar, to a million other things. It seems to be fairly rare in sows and more of a problem among young male grower pigs. The suggested treatment involved sedating the animal, gently pushing what should be inside back to the inside, and stitching up whatever hole it came out of with a purse-string-suture-type stitch. Or, separating the animal from its curious friends, and crossing ones fingers that would work out.

Luckily, this time, that's exactly what happened. A few hours on her lonesome, and Scar was as good as new. I kept her in for an extra day to make sure that everything was working its way through alright, and returned her to the general population yesterday afternoon. She's doing great.

Missy in the foreground, and an increasingly spherical Little Red (now, amazingly, our largest sow...this time hopefully because she's full of babies) in the rear.

But next time, it might not work itself out so well, and that's made me want to redouble my efforts to become an amateur vet. Anesthesia is now on my 'Controlled Substances to Buy' list. And I will be practicing some purse-string sutures on some unsuspecting fabric this winter, just in case.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T14:21:00.002-04:00

When the Big Man was doing some work on the house a few weeks ago, he uncovered the original wood foundation of the house.

There were several sets of initials carved into the wood, as well as a date: "1864."

After the age of probably seven, I have never really believed in ghosts. However, there is something about October that always gives me pause. Maybe it's the rustling of dry leaves amid the sudden darkness of evening, the strangely personal feel of a gust of wind whipping out of nowhere to lift up a scarf, that rush of adrenaline when one is outside, alone, in the dark, walking towards the lit windows of home, that rush that urgently whispers that something will snatch you before you make it.

Found in the field

Since moving to the farm, the creepiness of the season is far more apparent. Predators who have spent all summer deep in the woods creep back to nibble at the edges of civilization. We've had several chickens go missing in a puff of feathers and drops of blood (leading to the abandonment of the chicken coop by the Bernie and his Coop Hens...but that's another story). Coyotes have been making their strange nighttime warbles more often. For some reason, the more unsavory leftovers from last month's butchering will not remain covered in the barn compost pile. The barn cats seem on high alert, perching themselves on top of the milk parlor roof and in the empty window of the abandoned hand house at dusk every night. Not to mention the cornfields, empty forests, and small unkempt cemeteries in nearly every square mile that completely surround us. All the trappings for a horror story.

Then, of course, I have been reading and watching some creepy seasonal fare, and imaginations are bigger, louder, and less polite in the country. It is hard to believe sometimes that the young city couple in the 150-year-old farmhouse aren't going to be featured in a ghost story told by wriggling ten-year-olds around a campfire in 2050.

Red piglet knows something you don't know...

So far, of course, the initial carvers have not bothered us. But we will take special care to tread lightly on their floors in the hopes of keeping restful spirits at rest.

Because you just know that in 1864 people did not leave their homes to die, or their properties to be buried...

Thanksgiving Turkeys For Sale!!

2011-10-20T07:28:00.000-04:00

Inquisitive Turkey

So, with thanksgiving near we wanted to inform you, our faithful readers, of the details on our turkeys. We've been raising a batch of Broad Breasted Bronze Turkeys since the beginning of July in the same tractors/pens we use for chickens. These birds are very similar to the industry standard breed, the Broad Breasted White, but we chose the brown birds due to their more natural appearance (most fowl raised for eating are white so that the consumer won't notice stray feathers that weren't caught by the plucker.) They're not fed any antibiotics and are moved daily so they can eat as much grass as they can stand.

Fancy Bird Housing

We do have a target weight (15-20# hens and 20-25# toms) for these turkeys but we're not sure when we'll reach it. How does this effect you? Well if we're on target we might be able to kill these turkeys just days before Thanksgiving, which means we'd be able to provide you with fresh, never frozen, turkeys. More than likely we'll need to kill these birds earlier, in which case we'd have to freeze them.

I'd be interested to hear from people on whether a fresh bird is that important. I have a hard time believing that any bird you buy from a major grocer "fresh" was not previously frozen, as the shelf life is only 3 days. There is no way a grocery store can get their act together enough to get the birds that fast, considering how difficult it may be for us.

Too Inquisitive Turkey

The birds are going to be priced the same as our chickens, $4 per pound, with free delivery to NYC, Philadelphia, and Youngstown, OH. We have a limited supply (25 for sure reservations and a waiting list, as we're not sure how many of the original 32 will be alive.) Get them while the gettin's good, and don't forget about Christmas and your everyday turkey consumption!

2011 To Do List Update: Chickens

2011-09-29T21:33:00.001-04:00

Our update continues with chicken raising/killing/processing/selling. At the outset of the spring, we decided to raise just one batch of 50 chickens to see how it went, along with one batch of 30 turkeys. Accordingly, we built two chicken tractors to keep them secure in the pasture, and brooded up the 80 birds in the barn.

Then 200 more chickens fell in our collective lap, all ready to be processed within the same week. And so we did what any suddenly chicken overwhelmed farmers would do: assembled a team of farm veterans for some marathon processing events.

Luckily, chicken processing equipment was included at bargain pricing along with the chickens, so building it wasn't necessary.

The kill floor

The group processed three batches of approximately 70 chickens each during the week. The first round took the five of us six hours - about as much time with your hand inside a chicken as is enjoyable. After all that practice, the Big Man and I, just the two of us, were streamlined enough to do the last batch of 65 in a 3 hour Saturday session, with another 2 lazy hours the next day to weigh, label and bag.

As for the experience. As with any process that involves dispatching life, it is strenuous and messy in both the physical and spiritual sense. Chickens, however, are comparatively easy. They are not cute. They are not anything close to intelligent. They are unpleasant to work with and enjoy pecking at the hands that feed them.

The process itself, the way we set it up, was quick and simple (once we cleared the learning curve). The birds die in kill cones, throats slit, upside-down so they bleed out as completely as possible. Then they are dunked in scalding water to loosen the feathers. I had been warned by both my grandmothers that chicken plucking is possibly the worst, stinkiest pasttime in the world, but I did not find it to be the case. Perhaps because we weren't doing it by hand -- we had a plucker that, with the flip of a switch and a few quick whirls, did it for us.

Then extrananeous bits are chopped off, an incision is made, and the innards become outards. The evisceration is where a backlog can build up. If everything goes well it takes between 2 and 3 minutes, but sometimes the esophogas breaks and the crop must be fished out from the top end, which slows things up considerably. Then a quick spray of water into the cavity and a rinse outside, and into the icewater bath. It is work, certainly, but it is the kind of work that can accompany good conversation. And a chicken goes from chicken to meat on ice in under ten minutes.

2011 To Do List Update: The Downstairs Remodel

2011-09-27T19:56:00.000-04:00

I thought it might be useful (harrowing?) to check in with our 2011 To Do List over the next few posts. First up: the downstairs remodel.

This encompasses a few items from the list; namely: reinsulating the first floor, new drywall, refinishing the first floor floors, new exterior house doors, moving the kitchen into the old dining room, and turning the old kitchen into a mudroom. Plus some things that weren't on the list -- knocking out walls, building new walls, installing new beams, finding appliances, leveling the floor, fixing the rot on the sill, new support posts in the basement, rewiring, painting....

So far (amazingly enough), all of those items have been accomplished except for the kitchen to mudroom swap (and that is nigh on underway). Here are some pictures of the transformation.

old dining room; also tool storage facility

living room, gutted; new doors, purchased

Big Man's ceiling shoes

Floor fixing involved cutting out rough patches and exposing a lovely beam

Patched floors - the light pine was later stained to blend in a bit more with the other woods

Finished room with floor, paint, boots. Not pictured: LOTS OF INSULATION

Taping out potential counters in the new kitchen

Building the "temp" kitchen (we decided to work with moveable/cheap counters for the first few months. Turns out, designing a kitchen is Complicated. How much counter top does it take to break down a whole pig? Do we ever NEED to break down a whole pig in the kitchen? But wouldn't it be cool if we could? How much room do we need to not bicker while making dinner? Or is bickering while making dinner an inherent part of our relationship? Discuss.*)

"Temp" counters installed, holding things

Oh, that little thing?? Just my ten burner two oven stove. No big.

* Seriously. Everyone who has visited and cooked in the kitchen, or merely navigated themselves around it, or even just eyed these pictures or had a kitchen redesign themselves and have some wisdom to impart, is encouraged, nay, IMPLORED, to speak up. A lot of y'all are very gifted with aesthetic observations.

The Slow Death Known as Autumn

2011-09-22T11:50:00.006-04:00

Astonishingly, the calendar seems to think that it is September 22. I tried to tell it that it must be mistaken, three weeks can't have rushed by like that, but it has stubbornly held its ground. The crunch of leaves underfoot and the crisp acid tang in the air have finally convinced me that it is, indeed, September 22, and Summer Is Over.

Fall happened quickly here. Within the space of one week, my garden necessities went from sunhats and quarts of cucumber ice water to rubber boots and sweaters, and post-garden activities switched abruptly from evening dip in the lake to evenings indoors, simmering canning pots and sipping red wine. Vegetables and meats are now roasted, not grilled.

I notice the change most in the garden, which has a notably different feel. The greens of leaves and vines are fading as pumpkins and tomatoes turn to autumnal oranges, yellows and reds. Now when I empty a bed by harvesting all of its tenants, instead of planting in beets or radishes or beans or lettuces or Experiments, it goes directly into Compost Mode. It gets piled up with grass and garden clippings, leaves, rabbit, chicken, or goat manure if there is any handy, hay, kitchen compost, coffee grounds -- basically anything to build it back up. Late in October, once most of the beds are empty, I will be commandeering some number of pickup truck beds full of horse manure and a round bail of hay to spread over everything. Then everything gets to settle throughout the winter, and the worms have months to tunnel down and up, moving nutrients closer to the surface and keeping the soil breathable and soft, and it is ready to plant (with hopefully much less angst) early next spring: no tilling required.

I suppose that autumn's sneak attack and our vanishing into the September mists for three whole weeks isn't that surprising: Much has been happening. With the help of some veteran farm members, we constructed an assembly line and kill floor for pigs and chickens on the west side of the barn. We then slaughtered and processed 225 chickens. We slaughtered, butchered and sausaged 4 pigs with a charming group of people. We had a lovely Harvest Party. We weaned the piglets and sorted out the new breeders from March's round of pigs (who subsequently unsorted themselves and had to be resorted several times over with various fence repairs). We installed appliances and moved into our new (albeit temporary) kitchen downstairs (ALERT: I have OVENS. As in, plural. AND: at least one of them is actually the exact temperature that you set it to. Also: a dishwasher, a real one that isn't just dish-pan-hands Big Man.) We found a sad tiny dirty loud kitten in a ditch that is now a confused tiny semi-dirty kitten all over the house. Canning, canning, canning. Escaped bunnies. Mysterious chicken behavior. The Boar ruins planning In the Name of Love. Grain prices make grumpy farmers. Details to all of the above will be delivered to you over the next couple weeks.

The Wild Orchard

2011-08-31T21:49:00.006-04:00

Along the walk

Since planting the orchard this spring, I have been doing my best to be patient. The 14 12 10 fruit trees will take anywhere from two to six years to start producing their miraculous pomes and stone fruits, and in the meantime I must satisfy myself with fruit from farm stands and the grocery store. The (surviving) trees are looking strong, adding shiny leaves and setting out branches, but they are all still shorter than I am, and fruit seems to be a long way coming.

Such a large tree!! I wonder what kind it is??

Though I have peaches, plums, ~~cherries~~, and pears, apples are the most exciting for me. I agree that nothing quite matches a ripe sweet peach, eaten in high summer; juice running down to elbows and dribbling off chins, but there is something about apples. And it doesn’t seem to be just me…apples pop up from depictions of the Garden of Eden to Snow White’s poisoned apple. Peaches and such represent the fleeting opulence of mid-summer; apples are for fall, when things begin to slow down and turn inward.

And so recently I have been a bit restless about the diminutive trees in my backyard, and more than a bit jealous of those whose land came with stately ancient apple trees to provide for them the exhilaration that comes along with the swift branch-to-mouth crunch of a fresh apple.

What is that hint of red???? Ursula, fetch me machete!

So there I was, stewing in my barrenness, on a lovely stroll with the Hellhound along our typical route through state land to the lake. I glanced to my left into the light forest and saw a tree several yards in, brazenly displaying bushels of bright red apples. I gawked at this insanity for an inordinate amount of time before giddily plowing through the high grasses to get to it. Nab, crunch, heaven. I was chewing slowly, eyes glassy with pleasure and amazement, when I noticed another tree a few yards further in, laden with green apples. And then another, apples a light pink. And another, and another, and another, each with more enchanting apples than the last, stretching down into and along the gully by the stream. As many as could fit into my stomach were sampled, and as many as could fit into my pockets and shirt were gathered. I was sweaty and elated (one of the common modus operandi at the farm …sweaty/elated. Other most common is sweaty/frustrated.)

This one wasn't ready yet. But soon will be.

Now, after several days of crunching apples from dozens of trees, I can report that these are not your supermarket apples…and I mean that in the best of ways. They are your grandmother’s apples. Meaning, as in so much else, what they lack in visual appeal, predictability, and shine they make up for in flavor. Not for them the hefty supermarket crunch followed by the oddly watery, flavorless supermarket flesh. These apples are crisp and sweet with a quick tart rebuttal, juicy, and some have a subtle wine-like flavor. They are smaller than most supermarket apples (no sprays or orchardists to thin the crops), and most are not pretty in the conventional sense…they have spots and bumps and there is likely a very real chance of finding a worm also enjoying your snack. Their skin is thicker and their bright white flesh turns brown quickly after being exposed to the air. But they are delicious, and fresh, and gathering them up into bushel baskets for fall projects and winter months is absolutely my new favorite hobby….and given that there are dozens of trees in that area, near a bubbling brook and a field of goldenrod, some hidden in thick brush, I will have enough to keep me busy for quite some time.

Apple collecting kit.

And I won’t even have to leave the property if I don’t feel like it. It was with great chagrin that upon my return to the farm I investigated three trees about 20 feet away from the house that I had assumed were crabapple trees, only to find that these, too, were ancient and wild apple trees. I spent a good 25 minutes clambering about on one that is as tall as our house (and that fittingly keeps its giant and delicious apples wayyyyyy up at the top), only to find that, despite my still above-average climbing skills (thanks, tomboy childhood!) there was no way on earth that I could get to these apples, even with such implements that I had access to.

Why yes, that is a Winnie the Pooh band-aid on my finger. We got a knife sharpener! Also, apple from the backyard tree is "actual apple" sized.

Upon even further investigation that evening, I spied with binoculars some half dozen apple trees along our little stream in the pasture…which is fittingly the very same stream that the first grove follows.

My thoughts were: Johnny Appleseed must have walked along this stream, or perhaps a farmer liked to rest under apple trees and near running water 50 years ago, or perhaps the apples drift downstream and seed themselves that way. And: The pigs will be so happy when we fence in the rest of the pasture and they can eat the bee-filled dropped apples. And: I need to spend more time poking about and just looking at things. And mostly: I am going to need more bushel baskets. And then, quietly: How could I possibly have missed these???*

*Theories include: Always distracted by cows on hillside when walking past apple grove, last year was a bad apple year for some reason and there were no/tiny apples, only just now getting used to so much foliage that I can distinguish types, I must spend far too much time daydreaming about that which is not in front of me thus blurring that which is actually in front of me, I am an unobservant nincompoop.

Harvest Party 2011: What you need to know.

2011-08-22T22:13:00.005-04:00

WHO CAN COME: Anybody and everybody; do not be shy. If you are bringing a crew we would sincerely appreciate it if you'd email us with an approximate head count and a when(ish) as to your arrival.

WHEN: The main event is Saturday evening, but there will be goings on from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, September 9-11, 2011. If your schedule allows, there is a setup crew that will be on-farm for the whole week before for some hard work and good times. "Come early and stay late" is the general rule.

WHAT TO BRING: A tent along with sleeping accoutrement (IF you do not have a tent: fear not; we will have extra room in several. Just let us know so we can pencil you in), rain/mud boots, warm clothes AND a bathing suit if you like lake swimming, a side-dish to share if you are near, able, and interested, snacks, a chair or something equivalent for sitting in or on, a plate/silverware and a cup/glass/mug. This is basically camping with (some) amenities, and less bears.

WHAT THERE IS TO DO: There is a lot to learn about here at the farm, so keep an open mind and ask a lot of questions. There's a lake to swim in and walk around, a garden to dig in, piles of various things to move if sweating is your goal, and a fire pit for hanging out and warming up around if socializing is your goal. This year we are excited to have some events to keep everybody entertained, including a bit of hillbilly gambling, obstacle courses with prizes, lawn games, and many more surprises.

DOGS: are welcome, as long as they are well-mannered and well-monitored. We have a garden with no fence, lots of chickens and turkeys on pasture and some free-ranging around, electric fences, other dogs, cats in the house, barn and yard, a road with fast-moving cars and slow-moving, catchable tractors, and freshly done wood floors.

KIDS: please see "dogs" above. (Only *sort of* kidding. We love kids, and kids love the farm, but our operation is not what anyone would call play-safe). We will have a couple bedrooms available for those with young youngsters who may prefer a roof roof instead of a tent roof; just give us a heads up asap that you are interested so we can gauge availability.

FOOD: All of it will be provided, along with drink. There will be a suggested donation of $35/day, $70/weekend to cover costs, but if you don't have it PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't let that stop you from coming; it all works out in the end. On that note, if you see this weekend as one of the funnest things you did all year feel free to augment or tip; we love monetary feedback.

RIDES: If you need a ride, please get in touch with us. If you are driving from a major city, and will have room for a passenger or two, please get in touch with us. We will try to hook you up. If you are flying in, please get in touch with us re: arrangements to get you from your airport of choice to the farm. We will hook you up.

FOR SALE: We will have pork for sale by the cut. We will have whole pastured chickens as well. All meat will be vacuum sealed and frozen; all you would need to transport it is an ice chest, and we'll even give you some ice. Relatedly, we will have some ice chests for sale. We will perhaps have some mustards for sale. We will be taking orders for spring pork as well as Thanksgiving turkeys.

Again, please RSVP if possible. We are trying to get a rough head count so we can be prepared.

The Blur of August

2011-08-16T20:56:00.011-04:00

Team Mom, season two. Now that they're together they get to switch off nursing duties, and the piglets get to make a bigger, warmer pile of themselves to sleep in. If only we all had a partner to help with all of our chores.

A few days ago, a purposeful gaggle of geese flew over the farm. Noble creatures, these. And as I looked up at them, despite my t-shirt, all I could think was:

Sorry about that. But: it is coming. And that means we are busy little bees.

The meat chickens are busy eating an absurd amount of food, constantly.

For the garden, this means harvesting, with the resulting canning, pickling, freezing, fermenting and infusing (cucumber gin, anyone? cucumber anything, anyone?). Because this winter our goal is not merely "survive," but "survive in style," I have been making a variety of colorful relishes, chutneys, pickles and pesto to eat during the Dark Days, to remind us of the busy warm green days ahead of (and behind) us. The garden has been very helpful in this regard and has been bestowing upon us bushels and bushels of everything from basil to zucchini.* It is keeping me hopping in a vague panic-mode, as it should in August.

The innocent lushness of the garden conceals the grueling hours of labor saving its bounty entails...why, oh why must the garden grow so quickly??? (a/k/a thank god the garden finally grew)

I only have a few more rounds of planting, and then I am devoted entirely the mad dash to save it all up. It is very satisfying work to sweat it out in the evening with all four burners going (canning pot, brine, lids, overflow jars), thinking of how lovely it will be to eat the beets alongside a pan-seared pork chop, to dollop the pesto on top of a bowl a stew, to add the dilled carrots to brown rice as the snow blusters about on top of the slumbering garden outside.

A couple weeks' worth of variety. Nom.

The geese also mean that we really need to be pushing hard on the downstairs remodel. I assume I've mentioned that we are redoing the entire first floor of the farm house. Turns out, this takes a fair amount of time and work, in an already busy season. But, thanks to a fairly regular supply of helpers throughout the summer, the drywall is not only up but painted, concealing behind it actual INSULATION (as I said: "survive in style".) with a greater 'r value' than the mice, mice nests, and dead mice that removed, and we are remarkably on schedule to have a buttoned up, cozy little house by the time snow flies. Right now there is some very careful woodwork going on to repair the numerous holes in the floors left from walls that we and owners previous have removed and heating registers that haven't existed for years, and then we move on to a delightful few days of sanding and polyurethane, in which the dog will sleep in the car and we will travel upstairs via a ladder to a bedroom window. Just like Romeo and Juliet.

Oh, hello, new downstairs for grownups!! (almost).

Then there has been the seasonal increase in the spatter of unavoidable surprises that are such an integral part to farming, stealing precious hours and afternoons away. Little Red mysteriously failed to have piglets; the breeding schedule must be reshuffled and her farrowing stall dismantled so she can move back in with the boar. A farmer friend suddenly decides to leave the game; we end up with one of his sows and several hundred of his chickens, making for more breeding reshuffling and a lot of mowing with the tractor that needs done to get ready for birds. Concurrently, a tree branch decides to thrust itself into the radiator of the tractor; it is taken to a man named "Randy" who tries to fix it for five (5) full days before determining that it is irreparably damaged, thus leading to evenings hunting for a replacement part and an entire afternoon of driving to retrieve it. The turkeys break out of their brooder on a Sunday morning; they must be wrangled and moved into their outside pasture pen when we weren't planning on it. And so on.

Little Red, Borst, and the new sow, Missy.

All of this, on top of the the regular, expected pace of things. Spot's and Scar's new piglets are growing like weeds; this past Sunday morning they were wrangled, castrated (to answer your questions: no, not an especially lovely process. But not as bad as you might think, either - so long as you have hearing protection.), and moved into the outdoor pen with their grumpy mothers (who are thankfully mellowing out now that they have company and sunshine). The weeds have been growing like weeds; the fence-line must be weed-whacked. Bunnies are having (and not eating!) baby bunnies, the garlic bed needs compost added to it, the fruit trees need monitored for Japanese beetles, the grower pigs need buckets upon buckets carried to them, next years garden must begin to be thought of, fuel must be stored up, and so on.

Cooler nights; clearer evenings, better bedroom views.

But, as much as the geese and the cooler evenings mean that we have to hurryuppleaseitstime, they also mean that calmer evenings are ahead, evenings in which one can dote on a simmering pot of stew, where the only real chores are to make sure everyone is cozy, fed and watered, where the pace of growing slows down enough that one can pause, breathe, and spend an entire month's worth of evenings reading a book, and an entire month's worth of Sunday mornings reading the entire New York Times over lazy cups of coffee, when I can finally pop open the jars I've been sweating over and savor the results.

* Everything EXCEPT tomatoes, which are currently large, glorious, and stubbornly green. And it's not just me! My gardening forum is awash with impatient, miserable New England gardeners, waiting in vain for their heirlooms to ripen up. It seems it has been a slow summer at providing the "growing degree days" necessary to ripen the big heirlooms and beefsteaks; next year I will have to make sure to plant a few extra-early varieties so I won't have to have a minor temper tantrum every time I drive past the farmer's stand that has tomatoes starting in late July. Yes: next year begins the Quest for the July Tomato.

The Almost Feral Piglets

2011-08-01T20:44:00.004-04:00

It rained early this morning, which would have been lovely if the Big Man and I weren't plowing through the fields around the barn, straining our ears for the sounds of an agitated, very pregnant, escape artist sow.

Let me explain. The large ladies, growing ever larger in their final days* were moved into their farrowing pens in the middle of last week. They were given lots of hay to fashion their nests out of, on-demand water, and all the grain they could eat in what are likely the coolest square feet on the entire farm. Of course, they hate it*, and spend their time angrily complaining at us whenever they hear us in the barn. I'm sorry you are so pregnant, we say. I'm sorry it is July and you are so pregnant. Please eat something; you'll feel better. Ruff roof rufffff, they say, grumbling, taking a mouthful, spitting it out when we turn our backs. RUufuf. Let us out. Get these out of me.

It is hard to explain the noise coming out of her mouth right now. It is not a happy noise.

Anyway, Scar started giving milk last night, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief...the end is in sight. The Big Man is a chivalrous man, and he volunteered to do the 11 PM and 3 AM checks. I was to do the 6:30 check this morning. All was calm during the wee hours.

The boar gets all the freedom and none of the responsibility...a porcine Don Draper. Thankfully none of the sows are Betty.

As I, bleary eyed, in old capri pants and sneakers without socks, crossed the road to check on Scar this morning, Lisa Marie bolted out of the hayloft. She gave me an oddly meaningful look. Wait till you see this, the look said. She rushed purposefully into the lower barn.

I glanced at the chicken coop as I walked by. It seemed odd that their water bowl was right by the door...hadn't I put it on the other side? I paused for a moment, and saw a piglet pass through the tall grass on the other side of the fence. Well that's strange, I mused. They are supposed to be penned at the other end of the pasture...I wonder why they broke out. Something was likewise amiss when I walked into the barn through the open doors. The meat chicks, (there are 70), were not in their brooder, but were instead sprawled happily on the floor beside it, eating a mound of feed that had been knocked out of their feeder. Huh, thought my sleepy mind. That is also odd. So many odd things all happening at once. I walked past them to peek into Scar's stall. I stared at the pile of hay. I stared at the walls. I stared again at the pile of hay. I stared at the closed and latched stall door. And then once more at the hay.

The 600 pound pig was not there. I looked at the open barn doors. Oh. no.

The chicks cheeped disapprovingly as I raced through the barn to get the Big Man.

Now, 600 pounds is large, but 600 pounds in the entire outside is not large at all. And we are not talking the fenced-in pasture here...she was out in The Entire Outside. One suddenly realizes how tall, how dense the growth in the fields is. How scrubby the neighbor's property is. How many impenetrable thickets scatter the land. How far a sow could probably go if she were trotting along the road. How extremely large The Entire Outside is, even if one were 600 pounds.

Large Outside > Large Lady

We found her after 45 minutes or so, down in the valley behind the pasture. She had hollowed out a nice little spot under a crab apple tree, and was ripping maniacally at grass to fill it up. Getting her up to the barn was a whole separate adventure (there is quite a volume of lore on how, exactly, to get a pig to go where you want it to go, which apparently indicates that they are near impossible to get where you want them...and our experience bears this out so far), but we succeeded in the end with the help of an exceptionally timely neighbor friend passing by.

She was hot, literally steaming, and stressed, and her low, full belly got scratched up by the brush, as did my silly little ankles. But she was back in the fold.

Happily so, because late in the afternoon, she started having piglets, and, as with the last time, she needed some gentle gloved assistance getting a couple of the youngsters out. She's still ongoing, we think, with six squirmers thus far bothering at her scratched belly. Hopefully they know to be gentle.

Five are hungry, one is sleepy.

*Except for Little Red. She maintains her svelte physique to the point that the Big Man is worried that she is not pregnant, or is at least two weeks away. Which she also did last time, managing to somehow hide 9 piglets in a belly that never really got big, and drop them quickly onto the ground, sans assistance and with very little warning, the very same day as the giant, super-pregnant Spot did last March.

*Except for Little Red. She gets extra eggs from the chicken coop, and beet greens from the garden, and what must be a welcome reprieve from the constant complaining of the big ladies, and the constant advances from the boar, who cannot figure out why no one has been interested in him for the past 112 days or so.

The Pigs' Garden

2011-07-19T21:05:00.005-04:00

First off, sorry posts have been a bit straggly and irregular this summer; I am not writing as much as I'd like. I may have declined to explain that aside from being farmers and homesteaders this summer we are Big Man and Johnson, Professional Home Renovation Specialists: First Floor Edition. Thus far, this has included ripping off all the old drywall on the first floor, removing walls, building walls, installing giant steel and wooden beams in treacherous ways that I will in no way be describing to my parents (sorry), ripping up old flooring, repairing rot along the sill, rewiring, raising windows to accommodate future counter tops, jacking up and leveling the floor, removing and installing doors, patching holes in the floor and the walls, and insulating. It is all very exciting, and is teaching me yet again about the glory that is a cool end-of-the-day shower.

Anyway, on to the farm.

It is time for a garden update. Not of my garden, which for reasons of my sanity is off the table for discussion currently (unless someone can tell me WHY my IDIOT tomatoes are refusing to set fruit, and why in general EVERYTHING seems to be moving two weeks slower this year than last year despite getting in the ground the exact same weekend with the exact same soil amendments and the exact same irrigation system), but of the pigs' garden.

This is the compost pile on the west side of the barn. It's where we put all the hay that was used during the Feb-March farrowings earlier this year. You may notice the giant squash plant growing in the middle. Also notable is the large stalk of corn, and the little clump of oats growing on the left.

I do not know why they planted their crops in an area where only Scar, a brief escapee, has ever visited, but so they did.

This is the "sacrificial pen" behind the barn. It's the spot that gets heavy use during the winter months, and fairly regular use throughout the other seasons. It's called a "sacrificial pen" because we don't manage it like we do the rest of the pasture (which, to be honest, we aren't really "managing" at this point..we are more "muddling through and trying to figure out what the land needs from us to remain verdant"), we just use it as a hard-fenced area to train young ones to the electric fence, and as a spot to stick animals when we need to interact with them more regularly. It gets far too much hoof traffic to keep the soil light and fluffy, and I'd hazard to guess that it gets far too much nitrogen from animal "outputs" and not enough of anything else to keep the soil balanced and healthy. I assumed it would be a brown patch of hard-baked dirt for the rest of its life with us.

Well, shows how much I know. Besides the corn, oats and squash popping up here as well (the pigs got a fair bit of my absurdly prolific zukes last year when I got tired of them, and the oats and corn are from their feed), I found a few tomato plants in the mix from my generous sharing of end-of-the-season green tomatoes last year (before I discovered how much I care for green tomato salsa, chutney and preserves). I had always assumed tomato plants were fussy little things this far north (see: this year's garden), and was startled to see them happily growing after sitting as a seed in a pile of poop all winter long. Yet another example of Big Man's admonishment to all my frettings: Things Want To Live.

My 2012 garden plan is now: eat tomatoes. Poop outside. Repeat next year.

The Large Ladies have recently been moved into their garden with their male escort, and I was pleased that it was full of greens for them to frolic in. Their time is very close, the sun is very hot, and we wanted them in a sheltered, shady spot close by to our watchful eyes and their farrowing stalls. The fresh, organic garden access is a bonus, although it seems that they are much more interested in lounging among the greens than eating them to the soil line, so it is even possible that they will end up with some of their very own squash and tomatoes -- pig-raised for pig eatin'. Perhaps they were planning ahead for all the new little mouths they will have to feed...*

Also, brought to you by popular demand -- some pictures of cheepy new additions and a baby bunny:

Turkey, Meat Chicken that will only be cute for about 3 more days

Yes; it is exactly as soft as it looks.

And, for those interested in the Sneaky Hen's Chicks: they are growing very fast, as babies of all species apparently do. Last week they moved into the nesting boxes, as in the above picture, and just tonight, she managed to move them....yes. Into the secessionist hen tree. Because if you can't win converts to your cause: make them.

*"Piglet Watch!" proclaims the calendar this coming Sunday. "112 days," it announces a mere week from today. Ho boy.

Life Happens, and also, Sometimes Not.

2011-07-06T20:44:00.004-04:00

Almost by definition, farmers deal in life and death in near equal shares. The boar meets the sow; "piglet watch!" is penciled on the calendar 112 days later. Piglets are born, the miracle of life is observed and relished; a slaughter date is penciled in some months out. Thanksgiving turkeys are hatched in July to be of an appropriate eating poundage in November.

Surprise Life, Doting Mother on the lookout

Some lives and deaths, of course, are not the calendared type. A chicken secretly hatches a brood, and thirteen unexpected souls are added to the farm. Accidents happen; predators happen. It all contributes to an oddly satisfying balance -- there is unexpected life, and there is unexpected death, and so it goes.

Electron Cloud?

Sometimes, Nature times these events poetically, apparently to appeal to the human sense of drama. Such a thing happened last Thursday. On the same day that we solved the Mystery of the Disappearing Eggs, there was a bloodbath in the leporaria.

A month ago, determined to move away from the Big Three of Amurican Indistural Meat Production (the beef-chicken-pork trifecta), we got some breeding rabbits and put them in a very elegant and classy antique hutch in the barn.* We had them in separate cages at first, but the buck (following in the tradition, begun by the boar, of the male animals determining that neither our best laid plans nor our best laid fencing are enough to discourage them in their pursuits of female companionship) determined that he needed a lady, now, and he managed to bust out the wall that separated them. So, we put them all in together on a full level of the contraption. They seemed to like that.

Of course, 30 days later (as the calendar dutifully noted for us) the fruits of their labor were ready to show up,** and show up they did. Brown Bunny had seven happy little squirmers, which she nervously protected from us in a tall pile of fluff, maniacally wiggling her nose whenever we got near to them. They are a week old now, which means they have grown in their soft coats of fur, but have not yet opened their eyes. Their ears seem to grow faster than any other part of them.

Baby bunnies can be very cute

And then, Top Floor Gray Bunny had her set. And something went wrong. There was a mighty gnashing of teeth on her part, and Big Man had to carry out one of the jobs that farmers have to do occasionally and do not ever enjoy -- putting an animal (or six) out of its misery. Two uninjured kits hung on for a few days, but it seems that she declined to feed them, and they departed a couple days ago.

Top Floor Gray Bunny makes mustache joke, eats young

We aren't sure what went wrong. It might have been that she didn't have a nesting box and couldn't handle mobile youngsters. They might have been sick or non-viable, and she was trying to carry out the unsavory job of ending little lives for us. Perhaps she was not comfortable yet in her new surroundings (one of the reasons we didn't want to breed them right away) and had a panic attack. We'll never know (rodent brains are different than people brains, or even chicken brains), but we will be watching her closely to see if Attempt Two goes any differently, and doing all we can to stack the odds in her favor.

*They are in cages, albeit antique cages. We do not like that they are in cages. It goes against several of the things that we feel obligated to provide for our animals (sunshine, community, conditions close to those they would experience in nature....). Should we decide to scale up rabbit production, we will absolutely look into other management techniques, but rabbits present a unique challenge due to their burrowing prowess. The Romans used to build extensive rabbit gardens, with large and intense partially buried cement walls. Queen Elizabeth I had "warren islands" filled with rabbits for plucking up and placing on the royal table. Daniel Salatin, son of Joel Salatin, pastured meat enthusiast, does his rabbits in moveable outdoor pens like chicken tractors, but with slatted floors. Even so, for the 12 weeks of their lives the meat rabbits are only on pasture for the last five, and then only if they happen to be coming of age during the pleasant weather of summer or fall.

**Everything you've heard about rabbit reproduction is correct. They are professionals. One doe produces enough kits (babies) in a year to equal an entire cow's worth of meat, each female of which can go on to produce her own cow's worth of meat by 6 months of age. Multiply that out for just a couple generations and it is suddenly understandable that various locales throughout human history have had to deal with rabbit overpopulation.

Missing Eggs Found

2011-06-30T21:03:00.005-04:00

The chickens' egg production has dropped dramatically over the past month. We attributed this to the end of the bounty of "spring flush," and the loss of one of our greatest layers to a speedy haying truck a few weeks ago.* Well, it seems that the loner Spangled hen had more going on than, as I hypothesized in my last post, a grudge against Bernie and a penchant for solo exploration.

eggs with feet!

She had a mound of eggs, thirteen or so, hidden away somewhere. She hatched them, kept them secret and safe there for a couple days, and debuted them this morning.

In some ways, she is an excellent and intelligent mother. She spent all day explaining the world to them by example, as good parents do. Eat this, she said, pecking at the ground. This is water; we drink it, she intoned. Here is grass, that is also good to eat. Be a little nervous around the other chickens. Watch out for barn cats. Stay together. Follow me, and hide under me when I tell you to. Be quiet at night.

She is making a different kind of sound, just like the sows when they had piglets. A very constant, low, beguiling sort of cluck. She can fit all thirteen(ish) under her at once, like a clown car.

In other ways, she is very stupid, as chickens are. She spent awhile trying to convince them to roost with her in the tree. Here! she would cluck, flying up. Now you!!

They would panic miserably at the base of the tree, of course.

Then she determined that the coop, which she has always eschewed, would be a nice place for them at night, and she moved them in this evening. Again, she spent a long time confused about why they would not join her in the top row of nesting boxes. I built a ground floor nesting box for them out of a wooden crate and a lot of hay, which she got them into before, alas, abandoning them for a higher box. But when I closed up the coop (we usually don't, but LM the barn cat, as well as her protege the Black Kitten, had been showing some interest in batting at them with their paws earlier), the chicks were in a happy looking quiet pile in their box, with the Spangled two rows above them (although I could only count eight chicks in there at bedtime, and there were thirteen(ish) earlier...but there is a good chance some were underneath the others, or snug in the hay).

Hey, get up here!

The other chickens aren't quite sure what to make of it. When it was time for them to go into the coop at dusk they awkwardly milled about outside the door for about an hour, peering in casually or pretending to peck at food while warily eyeing the squirming, cheeping pile of browny-black fluff in the corner. Bernie made a new sort of embarrassed father cluck, but seemed a bit squeamish about any sort of acknowledgement that he might have had a part in this. I assume he will be a sort of uber-detached Don Draper character. But at least he is not, as I would have expected, violently pecking their baby eyes out.

wtf??

Regardless, of the many, many things that can go wrong (barn cats, chicken politics that often involve Murder and Exile, drownings, chillings, lost chicks, and SO ON) we are leaving them up to her. It will be an interesting experiment.

interested?

*In an eerily gorgeous scene, white chicken instantly became an overwhelming wave of white feathers rolling towards us in the air, slowly settling lightly on the road, only to be spun up again and again into the air all afternoon as cars tooled past. Other bits of her remained too, and a small group of chickadees quickly found the gizzard and delicately picked out all the corn pieces, loudly and repeatedly proclaiming their fortune to each other. Life goes on here, and quickly.

Dispatch from Chickenland

2011-06-21T23:16:00.002-04:00

A number of you have shown an inordinate amount of interest in and affection for the motley crew of chickens living on the farm – their schisms, the power struggles and murders, their forcible occupation of the barn after abandoning their winter coop in the pasture, their disdain for the gorgeous new coop the Big Man built for them this spring.

It is time for a follow-up.

Bernie the Rooster, victor over all other roosters, horrid creature, dictator, rules the hens with an iron fist. His first lazy crows at 4:30, his more demanding summons at sunup, echo off the valley. He has at last moved his followers out of the barn and into the coop to sleep, finally tiring of our regular evening assaults with brooms. He leads them out once it is light, and has an established rotation of the yard around the barn and the nearby pasture, guiding them from hand house to rosebush to compost pile to the cool spring/antiquated piping system behind the barn, crowing to gather them together and pouncing on any that fail to stay in line.

He always makes sure to have them near the gate at chore time, so he can actively protect them from me. I am, you see, terrifying. I simply must be, given his aggressive defense. My stature and the aura of power that I no doubt exude make him understand the enormity of the threat I pose to his hapless ladies. Or perhaps it is the WMD that I carry around with me at all times. Or maybe he thinks I am some giant hen who somehow escaped his wrath and needs to be brought back in line and into the coop. And so, as I walk through the gate (always carrying something heavy), he watches warily from the weeds. As soon as my back is turned, he scampers closer, the feathers around his neck flaring out and his eyes sinking into an odd, blood-thirsty mist. I whirl toward him (lightning reflexes, I have) and he freezes, one foot in the air. The feathers slowly deflate as he innocently pecks at the dirt. As soon as I turn away, of course, the flare-feathered scampering resumes, and we play this frustrating game of red-light green-light until I finally get a bit dizzy, put down my load and toss enough rocks his way to bother the hens and send him off to comfort them.

Thus, he is destined for the stock pot sometime before snow sets in. My nerves simply can’t take him through the winter, and I am tired of explaining to people how actually frightening an animal that is maybe 8 pounds can be to an intelligent and capable lady. Skeptics are invited to come visit and walk broom-free with bare legs through the barnyard.

One hen has declined to be a part of his populace. She wanders on her own all day, pecking about further west than the others, and roosts in the tree behind the barn at night. I suspect she is one of the original defectors, part of the first group to leave the coop with the modern game rooster (RIP) this spring. Probably she was in love with him and can’t stand to be near his murderer. At night she is joined by another Dutch Everyday hen, who, for reasons similar or different, also prefers roosting in the tree to roosting in the coop.

The other aberrance is Shelf Chicken. All the hens, tree roosting or not, still lay their eggs in the coop. Except for Shelf Chicken, who is a very broody hen. She does not want you to take her eggs. Her eggs are her precious and she will protect them. She protects them by laying them over the side of the metal shelf where she roosts. They fall to the metal shelf a foot below and break, slowly cooking throughout the day to form a mass that cannot be scraped up.

She sits a foot above them, keeping them warm and safe. For a while we assumed that she moved into the coop at night, but recently we began noticing her there at roosting time, flattening herself out as much as possible behind the tools to avoid detection.

She must keep those eggs safe, day and night!

Although she did manage to protect this one from us, somehow laying it in the middle of a 6 inch piece of pipe.

Clever girl.

TBA Farms Fall Festival, 2011

2011-06-16T21:56:00.002-04:00

Well, it is that time of the year again ... already time for a save-the-date for our Fall Festival! This month is absolutely flying by, a whirl of planting, greening, rainy weekends, foggy mornings, spectacular thunder and life whizzing up from the ground, out of the blossoms, scampering across the pasture and past our eyes in a heartbeat. The grass is growing like piglets, the piglets are growing like weeds, and everything else is enjoying the long days and cool nights to the fullest.

After much hemming and hawing we have set the date for our fall harvest party: September 9th - September 11th. The event will be much more spectacular than last year's, although the basic format is unchanged. Why so fabulous you ask? Well, here's just a partial list of the new and exciting things that we've added to the farm:

Rabbits
Piglets (a fresh batch will be born in early August)
Turkeys (reserve early for Thanksgiving (available fresh) or Christmas)
A significant garden expansion (4 times the size, including some that will hopefully be for sale)
An orchard, full of possibilities
Hops
A big new (to us) truck
A first floor renovation, complete with a new kitchen (hopefully, trying not to count our chickens as they say)

And the biggest of all, PORK FOR SALE!! As you know we're selling pork by the 1/4, 1/2 or whole this fall, processed by a local butcher or you can do it yourself, the very same Fesitivus Weekend. Many of you have expressed interest and it has come time for us to ask for deposits, $50 for a 1/4 or 1/2 and $100 for a whole, payable by check (preferable) or Paypal (through our website, TBAFarms.com) When submitting your deposit please indicate whether you plan on Slaughtering/Butchering Your Own (SbYO) or would like it processed for you. We do still have a few animals available, so if you've been on the fence now is the time to jump off. We may also process a few animals through a USDA butcher if you'd like to buy by the cut, but be aware that prices for these individual cuts will be higher due to the costs associated. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. If you'd like to SbYO please plan on arriving on Friday, hopefully in the early afternoon, but if it's not possible don't let that deter you. We can make most anything work.

For those of you who were unable to attend last year or are new friends of the farm, our Fall Festival is a time when people come together on the farm to complete a few large scale tasks, eat, drink and be merry. We have a few bedrooms available for those who absolutely need them but the majority of people stay in tents, and we have indoor space for tents in the case of rain or other inclement weather. Dogs are welcome, strangers are welcome, most everything and everyone are welcome. Bring your mud boots just in case, your swim trunks (since it will be so much warmer this year), and your can-do spirit. There is a small charge (we suggest ~$30/day, ~$60 for the weekend) to cover our costs of providing you with food and drink, but don't let that deter you if you're can't scrape up the jingle. We'd rather have your company than your money. If you're coming from Philadelphia or NYC and are looking for a ride we can find you one when the date gets closer. We spend the week prior getting ready, and if you're available for that we'd love to have you, we'll feed the heck out of you in exchange for your labor.

Finally, finally, finally.

2011-06-01T21:45:00.004-04:00

Fanfare, please: I have been able to plant. That which should have been in by and on the last frost date -- from romanesco to watermelons to heirloom tomatoes to artichokes -- is in the ground.

Pepper patch. 8 varieties.

The seedlings are admittedly not much to look at, but if weather and fate cooperate, in a shockingly short time, the garden will go from mostly brown to entirely green.

[The below paragraph was written this afternoon, before I inspected the garden this evening. I wanted to illustrate that I am an optimistic lady, and that I was logically basing this year's plans on last year's success, and not continuing to be someone who assumes nothing will work out, which I sometimes do, sometimes, yes, but not usually. Anyway :] (that is not an emoticon. punctuation. a colon and then the bracket indicating "end ramble".)

I am trying a slightly different approach this year because of the wild success of last year. Last year I just planted as many plants as I could fit in the garden, assuming lots would die off from being eaten by every small mammal in the county, every insect in the hemisphere, and diseases as yet unknown to botanists. Of course, not a single plant I planted in the garden failed to produce (except for melons, which I have de-classified as "garden plants" and re-classified as "miraculously challenging, fickle aliens that will only grow 5% of the time for 5% of people, probably people who tithe/meditate/keep kosher." My self-esteem requires that at this point. Atheists and agnostics have to buy their melons.) and it ended up being too jungular for me to give any plant the attention it needed to really thrive, let alone to paw through all the overgrown foliage to find all the fruits. This year I am giving everybody more space, and (hopefully!!) more attention.

[Ah, such a good impulse. Unfortunately, this evening when I trounced out to water the plant babes, I noticed that TWO of my paste tomato plants had been EATEN TO THE GROUND by something HORRID. I do not know if being eaten to the ground kills tomato seedlings. Probably yes. However, my recent experiences with fruit tree pruning make me feel like no. Either way, I immediately did that thing I do where I panic and overcompensate, and instantly planted a vast amount of backup plants, now assuming that 25% of everything in the garden will die. Fingers crossed that it will end up similar to bringing an umbrella when rain is predicted, thereby ensuring a completely dry day.]

Anyway, all can heave a sigh of slight relief; the garden is underway. The peas that I thankfully slipped in in mid-April have flowers!! The endive, arugula and beets that I planted on Saturday are already sprouting!!! But work is never over....in the related Gargantuan and Crazy Planting Projects category, this weekend I have to get the Three Sisters pasture experiment underway.

The piglets have been cleaning that spot out for me recently. They are doing a good job - tilling and weed killing and fertilizing.

Lawn Boers

2011-05-29T18:11:00.008-04:00

Can you find our new helpers?

Last year, when we first got our riding lawn mower, it was one of the chores we really loved. After all, this was our first Lawn since becoming Adults, and for some reason riding around on a lawn tractor felt Adult and Amurican. It was fun to put on flip flops and a sun hat, open a soda or a beer, and cruise around the yard, accomplishing something while sitting.

As the summer wore on, the novelty wore off. We had More Important Projects to focus on. The garden quickly ate up all my "free" farm time, and a series of big projects -- building the pasture fence, nursing a sick piggo back to butchering weight, buying and rehabbing a tractor, canning, brewing, dealing with the oddness of the barn well, building shelving and organizing the barn, chasing turkeys and unsuccessfully trying to police ducks and geese -- made the prospect of parking oneself on a mower for a couple hours on a nice day seem fairly absurd.

How about now?

The weather this spring was the final nail in the coffin. I mentioned last week that we were growing slowly frustrated with our waterlogged hill that made plowing, planting and mowing impossible. A couple of times I ruefully thought that if we had an ox, or a mule team, or a draft horse, we could manage to move a plow through the garden.

And so it was natural that we now find ourselves with two munchy little helpers, Goat with No Ears and Goat with Giant Ears. We named them after two totally normal goats in an "Animal Freak Show" that the Big Man and I paid $1 to visit a few summers ago. Goat with No Ears actually has tiny ears, being a cross between a no-eared breed (LaMancha) and a normal-eared breed (Boer). Goat with Giant Ears basically just has normal ears.

There they are!!!

Goat with No Ears is very sweet, although he seems a bit frail for my liking. Goat with Giant Ears is stubborn. He never wants to walk with you on his leash from the barn stall to the lawn, or from the lawn to the stall, instead preferring to lay spread eagled on the ground and be dragged. They really like each other, and even though Goat with No Ears is much smaller and has a smokers cough, Goat with Giant Ears always hides behind him (see above) and bleats plaintively whenever he is out of sight. Goat with No Ears is perfectly happy being patted on the head and rubbed on the nose, while Goat with Giant ears leaps 5 feet in a random direction if you get near him (although, to give credit where credit is due, I did accidentally un-clip Goat with Giant Ears when he was in the lawn (a totally understandable mistake!!!), and the Big Man was somehow able to sneak up behind him and grab him by the leg as he tried to leap away. Thank GOD our grass was so long. Like the savanna.)

They are really a bit small to keep up with the grass…but they will grow, and in Busy Season as we are, we'll take all the help we can get.

The Grandma Lois Memorial Garden Season is off to a good start with a bumper crop of lilacs.

More posting soon – this is an extra busy weekend here at the farm, and I'm behind on posts anyway, so they will be often but brief this coming week or two. Goings on include the garden, which is going in thanks to an intricate system of drainage trenches that a frustrated and panicky me hacked out of the earth yesterday, the piglets, who have unlearned the electric fence due to a long power outage last week, leading us to spend hours variously amused and frustrated chasing them about the pasture, sometimes during severe thunderstorms, some funny-nosed and quiet creatures that we've acquired, and a sick chicken that we've placed in solitary confinement for Rest and Observation. Details coming soon.

Again, re: the Garden. Sigh.

2011-05-18T20:38:00.003-04:00

I always have such high, organized hopes for punctuality in the garden.

And yet, here is the list of things that should be planted in the garden and are not: beets, onions, potatoes, salsify, scorzonera, tendersweet cabbage, parsnips, artichokes, carrots and beans.

I am doing a good bit better than last year, in that the garden is plowed and manure has already been dumped. And I have managed to secret some peas and shallots into the back corner, and they're already coming up, and looking promising.

However, we are still waiting for the universe to dry out enough to allow the garden to be tilled, so it looks like I will end up planting around the same time as I did last year. Buh. We are giving the onions a head start, however, with a bread tray full of seedlings in the guest bedroom, and the greenhouse (should we manage to reassemble it after its horrid, depressing flop (yes, everybody - always stake your greenhouse. ALWAYS.)) should extend the season for some of the more delicate plants (red peppers this year are a tier-one mission). Not a disaster, but an annoyance, in other words. We will not suffer much for produce, but my fingernails daily complain at being too immaculate, my straw hat sits forlorn, and I come home from work only to fritter the daylight hours away watching drops fall and lurking about the barn with the cats, moody and pent-up.

Relatedly, the rain has made the front yard into a jungle still too damp to mow down. Oh my, whatever shall we do with all that grass? (Coming Soon.)

And, in the For Sale Now category (because to be sustainable, somewhat unfortunately, you have to make money) we still have a very few pigs available for 2011. Amazing pork chops included:

And an overabundance of eggs (11 a day!) has forced me to start pushing them onto the unsuspecting populace as soon as I gather some egg cartons. Gray, large, white, medium, beige, small. All incredible, and recommended to be poached over anything and everything (think spicy tomato soups, sauteed vegetables, fried rice, carbonara pasta dishes, burgers, crusty toast, dressed salads, etc...). Unwashed and untreated, like the French do, from our very own frustratingly feral chickens (their consumption of chicken feed is down to about a cup a week for the whole dozen...they seem to eat pretty much only what they forage and hunt on pasture). Anyone who doesn't mind buying eggs in paper bags is welcome to have them ASAP: $3 a dozen.

Piglets Starting to Look Like Pigs; Chickens still Clueless and Ungrateful

2011-05-05T16:39:00.003-04:00

A brief post before we exit the scene for a much-needed extra-long weekend in the sun of Nashville.

Big Man built a mighty fine chicken coop for the chickens.

It has cozy nesting boxes, more than enough room for roosting, a luxurious carpet of hay, a feeder and fresh water, and windows on all four sides that can be closed for chilly nights or rainy days. We locked the 9 that we could catch in there for four days to get them sensing that it was their home, and not the milk room of the barn. We also cleared out all the scrap metal that they had been roosting on in there.

If I were a chicken, I would love the coop, I thought.

Well, I am apparently not a chicken. They still prefer the dusty, drafty barn full of cats that any day now will attempt to net themselves a large and delicious prize. Every dusk, we troop down to the barn, armed with brooms, to swat them out, lock the piglets in, and herd them into the general vicinity of the coop. 10 of them will always end up in the coop. But two of the original Splinter Group from the Long Chicken Winter War of 2011 still refuse, instead roosting in the tree behind the barn. Ah well, feral chickens.

Meanwhile, in somewhat less annoying animal news, the piglets look great. They, like the chickens, run wild over the land despite our best efforts with some temporary fencing to keep them a bit more central, so they have lost their foraging privileges until they learn to respect the temp fence some more, or until we figure out a better, safer way to rotate small ones through the pasture.

House arrest is nice and sunny.

2011 Garden

2011-04-29T20:36:00.003-04:00

It is the end of April, and I am happy to report that the 2011 garden is off to .... well, it's off to SOME sort of a start, and that's saying something with this Spring's impolite behavior. Actual in-the-garden projects are behind, due to the staggering Wet that we've been dealing with. If it weren't such an obviously horrible thing for their pocketbooks and souls, it might be a solace to see that most local farmers, fully equipped with many-wheeled, many-armed tractors have also been forced to bide their time, waiting for mud to become dirt. It is one of those occasions where our behindness is not a function of inexperience or quirky equipment, but just the way the world is for everyone right now.

It seems we might be waiting a while, as each evening has been bringing with it a thunderstorm and drenching rains. And so, the garden remains untilled, the beds un-re-shaped and un-manured, the potatoes and beets un-in.

We've taken some evasive action -- the Big Man planted a few hundred onions in soil blocks, which he placed in my Brand New Swoon-Worthy Greenhouse!

And we've moved the planned potato bed from the area behind the house, which we can't clean out until it DRIES out, and into the area of the pasture that the pigs have already tilled for us. Mud does not stall their motors, it seems. In fact, farm draft horses have been looking mighty fine these past few weeks....

Seedlings, of course, are motoring along in their cozy, moisture controlled soil blocks, blissfully unaware of the morass outside, and their pleasant view from the guestroom window.

The peas that I optimistically planted 10 days ago have poked out of the ground, and some fresh green shoots have poked out of some of the soggy fruit trees!

So it seems that Spring has Sprung, and thus begins the hectic tizzy of farming season. Pigs to move and grow, grains to plant, sausages to grill, sunburns to fend off, dirt to wedge under fingernails, weeds to battle, lakes to swim in. It's a good sort of tizzy, provided that one insists on a lazy Sunday here and there, with poached eggs and too much newspaper, and some evenings off to simply sit on the hillside, and watch the clouds float by over the goldenrod.

Just watched the Government stock the lake

2011-04-20T12:29:00.004-04:00

Sportsmen?

We have a lake right behind our house, Nanticoke lake, and it's part of a MUA. what is a MUA you ask? I hadn't heard of them before we moved here, but it is a Multiple Use Area. Basically a state maintained area that is primarily for sportmanship (hunting fishing, etc.) but you can also swim or picnic there if you like. Pretty cool, and it's nice that the state is supportive of the predominant pastime in our area.

Well, Nanticoke lake is not natural, it is a dammed lake. It's got some Bass in it but the big draw for the local sportsmen is that the government stocks it with trout. Trout can't live in there year round (it gets too warm in the summer) so it's basically shooting fish in a barrel. Since the trout grew up in a tank about 100 miles from here, and the Gov't didn't give them a map, they have little idea where to hide in Nanticoke lake.

Now, I was familiar with this practice before moving here, it is commonplace across the country in fact, but I had never seen it actually go down, until today.

The Gov't drives their truck'o'fish down to the park, then off loads the fish into trashcans full of water on the back of an ATV. Then they drive down the access road with the fish and dump them into the lake. Pretty much how you'd expect it to go down, except I haven't mentioned the 14 "sportsmen" who are standing there, waiting for the fish to hit the lake, so that they can then catch them with their rods and reels. It was an amazing sight, especially because all these guys are in camo, presumably so the Gov't won't notice them.

I'm all for hunting and fishing, but this is just silly. It is exacerbated by the fact that I can't go to the same lake during Canada Geese season and shoot any of the birds that wallow about on the shores of the lake, because it's unsportsmanlike (apparently they have to be in the air?) These are the same geese that land in a park in NYC and are offed by the same Gov't by the tens of thousands.

I Can dig a hole in the ground, build a fort like I wanted to do when I was 8, set up a bunch of spy cameras to see the world above (again, like I wanted to do when I was 8) put out 2,000+ fake geese, and pop my silly sportsmen head out of the hole and shoot like a maniac at flying geese. did I mention I made the fort in the middle of a corn field, full of bird food?

Fort

If I can sneak up on an animal that can fly, and get close enough to shoot it dead, I have to believe I'm more of a sportsman than the guy in the fort. Apparently not.

Too Many Books and the Ensuing Pessimistic Spiral of Doom

2011-04-18T20:32:00.006-04:00

I have a book called The Apple Grower that describes planting trees this way: "The planting of a tree is a sacred act. Each time we open up the earth, layer out the developing roots, and tamp the soil back in place we embrace our mutual destiny with trees...."

It’s a long book, full of lovely pictures of a bearded man tenderly interacting with his fruit trees. Many of the pages are spent discussing in remarkable detail the beneficial microbes, insects, mycorrhizal communities and ground covers that make an orchard thrive. It is all very specific.

We plated our 14 fruit trees on Sunday, and it was not in any way a spiritual experience, except perhaps in that way that some rituals are meant to push you to a point where you are totally broken down so that you can be rebuilt and made stronger.

There was hail, sleet, snow AND rain. Wind gusts of 50 mph (“Plant on a calm, quiet, partly cloudy day", specified the directions that came with the trees, seemingly oblivious to the region's Aprils). The rich “channery silt loam” soil of the farm gave way after 10 inches to clay, which meant that our 18" deep holes, in the completely saturated mid-April conditions in upstate NY, filled with water that did not drain. Even the channery silt loam soil that we were back-filling with was, by this point, just mud that stuck to shovels, boots and gloves. In other words, nothing like Book Soil. Book Soil must be somehow loose and loamy (even down to 18 inches!) and moist but not sodden (even in April!). I required several pep-talks from the Big Man (by this time very practiced in pep-talks).

But, by the end of the (extremely long) day, the sun came out, the trees all stood and had remained standing in the gusts, the weather report predicted drizzles instead of downpours that might give the soil a chance to dry out and the pep-talks had worked their magic. Trees want to live, just like the garden plants that I was so nervous about last year (reading too many garden books), the piglets that I was convinced were too small and silly to survive (reading too many pig blogs and books) and the uber-free-range chickens who, really at this point, are nearly feral and don’t seem to need us at all (reading too many magazine articles about chickening). Eight to ten inches of good, loose-ish topsoil, upon completing some research, is actually outstanding; the average is 2-8 inches. The numerous rocks in our ground, the existing roots of goldenrod, field brush and hay and the sloped planting site should help the drainage. It might not have been quite a spiritual communing, but it is extremely fulfilling to look out the back window and see rows of trees willing to give it a go.

We also planted hops! For making beer to drown our muddy sorrows in.

Hocking Our Wares

2011-04-11T08:21:00.005-04:00

The time has come for us to sell you food, real deal food, grown in the mud and rocks of our rolling hill. Specifically, we'd like to sell you pork. While we may have a few other offerings throughout the season (We're in the midst of scaling up our garden and planning for some meat chicken production this Summer), hocking pork is on the top of our To-Do list.

There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which are ???????. No, the big, dark cloud looming over our pork is processing. You see, there are but a few businesses that can take our pigs and turn them into the cuts of pork you're so used to dealing with. Some of them are USDA inspected, but most are not. This presents it's own set of challenges, both logistically and legally, but I think we're up to the task.

As I write this I'm having trouble sticking to the point and not going into the nitty gritty of why meat processing is so convoluted and confusing, but that will be fodder for a few blog posts in the near future. To keep it as straightforward as possible I will lead with an anecdote:

Last Summer when we found ourselves with both chickens and pigs in the pasture we took a clear stance: Intervene as little as possible. We were only able to do this because of the small numbers of stock we owned and it proved to be fruitful. We chose not to build a well fortified bunker for the fowl to keep them safe from the pigs; building a bunker takes time, and dealing with birds inside one is less than ideal. While we lost a few animals as we learned the perfect level of protection, we also found out exactly how little we had to do in order to meet our goal. Why is this applicable, you ask?

Because small scale meat processing in America runs a similar gamut, from multimillion dollar compounds that process thousands of animals a day all the way down to people raising their own chickens and popping their heads off in the privacy of their own back yard, and you can just imagine which of these is more accessible to us. As farmers we are forced to spend some of our time marketing our product, a part of our business that we enjoy immensely, when it's in moderation. The trick here is to strike a balance, and much like the bird-pig-cohabitation-algorithm, we're going to try and start on the end of the spectrum that's easiest for us (again, an explanation as to why it's easier for us will be written in the near future.)

This fall we would like to sell 12-15 market weight hogs. We're writing to you now to see who might be interested in these schemes.

First, we'd like to offer you the opportunity to come to the farm and slaughter and butcher your own pork. We're planning another big gathering in the fall (late September, early October) and I've set a goal to sell 5 pigs to people who are interested in participating in the processing. We slaughtered and butchered a few pigs last year and it was fun, interesting, rewarding and educational. I have to believe that having more people involved would only intensify all those adjectives. We will start with live pigs "on the hoof" and end with vacuum packed (hopefully) cuts for you to take home with you. If you're interested in the butchering but not the slaughtering, let me know as it may be easy to set up. We may be able to make sausage and cure hams and bacons, but if it doesn't work out you will surely go home with the know-how to do it on your own time. The process takes 4-6 hours and the time would be spread over a few days and a few people in order to keep it relaxed. If you want your pork with the skin on this is your only option, no local processors have the appropriate equipment.

The pricing for this is as follows:
$2.75/LB hanging weight per whole pig
$3.00/LB hanging weight per half pig
$50/participant, 3 person per pig maximum, $100 per pig minimum

If you're not interested in all the blood and gore we can have the pigs processed for you. These pigs should be available for slaughter somewhere between September 15th and November 15th. If you want cuts smoked that process takes two weeks and can be done local to us or to you. If you're in a nearby major city (Phila, NYC) we may be able to get the meat to you so you don't have to come up here. We apologize for the vagueness of all this, but being our first year of pork production we have a very limited supply and the calendar is very fluid. If you need a specific date, delivery to you, whatever, please let us know when you express your interest. Flexibility on your end this year is greatly appreciated.

The pricing for this is as follows:
$3.00/LB hanging weight per whole pig + processing costs
$3.25/LB hanging weight per half pig + processing costs
We can have your pig processed at a number of local shops and the pricing will vary. You will be able to choose what cuts you'd like, how you'd like them packaged, whether or not you'd like your hams and bacon smoked, what kind of sausage you'd like and how much, as well as a few other variables. Bare bones local processing should cost $60-80 per half, the full monty (smoked hams and bacon, lots of sausage, etc) will run you another $30-$50 per half. If you're interested in USDA inspected processing that can be arranged, but the price is substantially higher.

What is a hanging weight, you ask? The Hanging weight is the weight of your pig without guts, skin, head or feet. A butcher hog is slaughtered somewhere between 200 and 250 pounds, although they taste just as good at any weight. The hanging weight is typically 70-74% of this (160# for 225# live weight). If you only want the commercial cuts, stuff you'd find in the grocery store, you'll be taking home ~70% of the hanging weight,(112# or ~$5.20/LB in your freezer max including processing). If you choose to take the mainstream but less common stuff (soup bones, stew meat, lard, etc) you can approach 90% of your hanging weight, and if you take the odder stuff (head, heart, liver, etc.) you can end up taking home more than the hanging weight (This is especially true if you choose to slaughter/butcher yourself, if done right you could end up paying as little as $3.25/LB in your freezer.)

A fellow farmer and blogger has done a nice write up on how this all breaks down.
how much pork is in a half pig?

Everything is first come first serve, and once we have it pinned down a bit we will be asking for deposits. It goes without saying that this is all experimental. If you see something you like but you want to tweak it a bit, let me know. If you're interested but you think a half is too much for you let me know, I may be able to find someone to split it with you, if we weren't flexible we wouldn't have lasted a week. You can contact us either through the comments or via E-mail to TBAFarms@gmail.com.

Finally, if you're still with me, you should know that this time of year is very busy for us up here at TBA. If you're the type who wants to visit and sweat we have lots to do between now and June 1st, we'd love to see you, as would the piglets who get bigger every day.

Refugees and the New World with Others

2011-03-28T22:24:00.003-04:00

In the odd world of chicken relations, the war is over; only sparsely feathered refugees remain.

Victory was predictable and swift. The leghorn rooster, with his overwhelming force and entrenched power structure, quickly stifled the rebellion led by the newly empowered modern game rooster with his small and ragtag force of young hens. There was no no-fly zone established, no aid to the splinter group, no delicate diplomatic workings behind the scene. In fact, when the rebels attempted to move into the barn and secure the stockpile of resources therein, we put the barn on lock-down, chasing out illegal infiltrators with long poles and loud screams. You see, even tacitly allowing them to use our territory to further their cause, we felt, would signal a level of support for the rebels that we worried would be misinterpreted. The leghorn, it is important to remember, had the best egg-layers on his side, and we have become so spoiled with a readily available and seemingly endless supply of eggs. A sunday without omelets seems so bleak, so un-American...

And thus, early one morning, the modern game rooster was found dead, unceremoniously dumped in a box of trash. His followers were nonchalantly grazing about with the leghorn, taking care to stay in line. He watched them all with his haughty, glinting eyes, as he is wont to do.

But while one might suppose that "to the victor go the spoils," these heartless winners have forsaken their homeland, the coop, instead electing to move into the fittingly apocalyptic environs of the milk room of the barn, which we had been using to store scrap metal. So there they roost, at dusk, on an old grill, a pile of thin metal bars, a heap of wire, peering out of glassless windows when anybody slinks by. It is unsettling, but we still get our eggs.

Chickens are interesting because of how cruelly foreign they are in instinct and philosophy; pigs are interesting because of how accessible their motivations are.

Last Friday we moved all the sows and piglets into the large stall, with a door, always open, to the outside pen. Chaos immediately took control, as giant, agitated sows circled each other, braying and barking in a show of force to claim the best territory. Piglets were overwhelmed and confused by the sudden explosion of teats and teat competitors, and swarmed on any prone lady who happened to leave a hint of teat exposed. In the ensuing competition, ears, cheeks and backs were bloodied. Squeals reverberated in the barn rafters, much to the annoyance of snoozing barn cats. Every possible relationship had to be tested: friend, foe, accomplice, snuggle buddy, flirting buddy, wrestling buddy.

As of today, thankfully, things have calmed considerably. Besides settling into an uneasy but stable hierarchy, the sows have figured out that nursing in sync saves them from the starving mob, and the piglets have found distraction in ripping off bits of bushes to teethe on and batter back and forth, and they are still very much in the run-in-circles-then-sleep-all-afternoon stage. Piglets who prefer to snooze complacently found each other; piglets who prefer non-stop contact sport found each other. Despite the unseasonable (horrid) March temperatures we've had, there is a determined corp that ventures outside to nap and nurse in the sun afternoons. A good portion of them delight in moving dirt around with their noses, for no reason but the pure joy of molding the landscape. They are almost as interested in corn and oats as they are in milk...they grow up so fast.

Open Finances, 2010

2011-03-17T03:30:00.001-04:00

As tax time approaches it seems fitting to revisit our finances. This post documents the spending we have done to support ourselves as individuals, and has nothing to do with our investment in the farm or our property, although it does include routine maintenance. As an example, it does not include the new duct work for our heater, but it does include two new toilet seats that replaced broken ones (they don't make 'em like they used to, especially considering one of the new ones has already been broken.) There are a few areas that are hazy, and those will be addressed later, feel free to ask for clarification or anything else in the comments.

A breakdown by category, from simple to complex.

Eating out ($468): We only do this on special occasions or when we're having a particularly bad day, and considering it's statistical insignificance I'm not complaining.

Garden ($299): This is one of those categories that's confusingly documented. The garden was split into recurring costs (seeds, soil amendments, etc.) and infrastructure (fencing, trellis, etc.) In theory we can get a lot of the recurring stuff down to nothing, producing our own manure, saving seed, etc., which is why I chose to keep track of those things here. As it stands I think we got our money's worth out of the garden, even including the $620 we spent on irrigation, tiller repair and other infrastructure costs.

Taxes/Insurance ($3693): Unfortunately these costs are fixed, and climbing. Our homeowners/auto policy went up 10% this year, so I called around to other underwriters and found it was still the cheapest. Our taxes are low for the region, although we will qualify for an agricultural assessment, and the associated reduction, once we produce more than $5,000 in goods, which may be this year!

Utilities ($2,586): This represents our costs in electricity, phone, internet and propane. Notice we don't pay for water or sewer, as we have our own well and septic system, albeit a pretty outdated one. We were able to get our phone costs down substantially in 2010 by switching from one Iphone (~$95/month) to two disposable "burner" cell phones ($3/month) and an internet based landline, ($7/month, now free through Google.) We plan to install a passive solar hot water heater within the next few years to cut down on those costs, but the others are pretty much fixed.

Things you can buy at Target ($1998): This category is self explanatory. Clothes, dishes, dog food, soap, etc all ends up here. Also, Christmas gifts which take up a fair portion, along with home maintenance costs like gasoline for the lawn mower, and medication. Not much we can do here either.

Diesel fuel ($1702) and WVO/Auto Maintenance($2754): These categories are a constant source of contemplation for me. We use diesel fuel for a few different things, starting and stopping both of our vehicles, running the tractor, and starting our heater each morning. To Illustrate, another graph (please excuse my rounding):

Diesel Usage:

Maintenance Costs:

These variables need a bit of explaining: Guaranteed costs are those that we'd spend regardless of what cars we owned: oil changes, windshield wipers, fluids, etc, along with tractor maintenance. Grease costs are those costs associated with filtering and storing Waste Vegetable Oil for fuel. Suburban and Benz are the costs associated with those specific vehicles and their well thought out or poor designs. WVOBurban is a subset of costs that are both WVO and Suburban related, due to the Suburban's distaste for WVO. This number is included because if we just ran on regular fuel the cost wouldn't exist, but it's also the Suburban's fault as a more robustly designed vehicle wouldn't need these repairs. It is also important to note that these costs are for parts and supplies only, as I do all of our repair work myself. As you can see, the Benz is a lot better designed than the Suburban, as after 30 years it only had $111 of unexpected maintenance needed.

All together we spent $3,323 on fuel this year, and if we had just used Diesel we'd have spent $5,687 which represents a savings of $2,365, or $200 a month. Of course this does not include all our labor, which I'd estimate at 15 hours a month. I could see costs in the "Grease" and "WVOBurban" categories going down, but I could also see them staying the same. Any way you slice it $210/car/month isn't too bad, I know people who spend that much filling their tanks. Another way to look at would be that anything we could do to drive less would lower this expense as well, especially if we could get down to one car. Currently I'm shopping for a pickup truck with a much more robust WVO friendly engine, a 1994-1998.5 Dodge with a Cummins engine. We really need a pick up to cart around stuff, and 4WD to get to the places the stuff is.

Debt ($11,855): This ones a doozy. This number represents the minimum we are expected to pay each year, between our mortgage and student loans. This represents 25% of our pre-tax income!! While most of it is at favorable interest rates, we push all of our available cash into this category, in addition to the minimum payments we put $8,000 towards Becky's student loans in 2010, which is nothing to laugh at.

Groceries, including adult beverages ($5295): Without doing a full analysis I'm willing to bet that 1/3 of this is just adult beverages. We like our drink at TBA farms, and with all the entertaining we find ourselves surrounded by alcohol consumption. We do make as much of our own beer and wine as we can, and we have plans to scale up in 2011. This doesn't necessarily save us a lot of money, but it does allow us to have much nicer beer and wine for a much lower cost. Meat and produce that we have grown here on the farm is not included in this category, and while produce can be seen roughly in the Garden category the meat is not accounted for. This year as we begin to sell meat I'll be able to put a price on it, and most likely it will get it's own new exciting heading.

In summary, I'm proud of how we've managed our money. We went without in some cases, and when it was time to treat ourselves we did it sparingly. We cut what few costs were left to cut, and in 2011 I hope to keep going, with significant cuts in WVO/Diesel costs, and groceries. Our minimum debt payments have been reduced as well, so we hope to pay off even more principal.

As a reward for those who have made it this far, videos of piglets nursing violently and trying to crowd surf!!

Nursing with furvor

Surfing the crowd

The End of the 'lets and Separatist Chickens in the Snow

2011-03-07T19:04:00.007-05:00

Separatist chickens seek the feed bin in the barn

Piglet season for this spring is officially OVER.

The svelte Little Red astounded all, when, miraculously, she started producing milk last Wednesday, not even 24 hours after the giant and obviously pregnant Spot popped out seven little piggies. Turns out she was not three weeks out, as assumed, but Imminent. A stall was hastily constructed for her, and, at 8 PM that same day, I noticed a strange piece of poop in the hay behind her that turned out to be a just-born piglet. She was the first pig that I was able to observe after having only one (Scar had had 4, and Spot, all 7, by the time we showed up), and she seemed a bit mystified by the affair. There was some confused hopping and wary stares on her part, as the little thing staggered around and mewed. Hay was shuffled into protective mountains as Little Red attempted some distance, but the living poop seemed intent on following her. Eventually she put her nose on it long enough to become oddly interested in the survival of such a little, shrill thing, and she let it curl up under her armpit to nurse, although she still made sure to keep her head buried in the hay so it wouldn't bother her too much.

No matter the heat lamp; Little Red's piglets prefer to cuddle, and she prefers to let them.

She also seemed to be more comfortable without a human presence, so we huddled in the house with some stew (it was a -4 night) and watched 80s flicks ("Number Five ALIVE!!!!"), running down to check on her every half hour. For the first couple checks, there were no new 'lets, and we wondered if she had indeed only had one in her petite belly. But a check around 9:30 found 3 more, and the 10:30 check another four, with a ninth completing the brood at 11:30. Nary a bruise, nary a scrape, no help with the birth, and the largest litter with the shortest and calmest labor.

One died in the first night, but it was cold, and they are squiggly little paper ribcages, so we don't hold it against her.

Her eight have now made it past the 4-day threshold of "probably viable beings". Meanwhile, Scar's ten-day-old brood are getting downright plump and mischievous.

Watch the background piglet go nuts 20 seconds in.

Most amazingly, Spot's doomed brood has mostly healed of its chills, listless legs, confusion, bruises and scrapes. The piglet with the stitches is still an iffy little thing, not growing as fast as the others, not healing as fast as we'd like; but the cold piglet, the one with splayed back legs and horrid sense of direction, and the one with the cut on its neck have all recovered into normal little squealers. We are keeping our eyes on her stitches and neosporin and antiseptic spray constantly in our pockets.

Stitches is the small pink spotted pig, Cold pig is the black pig to the far right, bunny feet is the orange-pink pig with the subtle color band in the middle, and the one with the cut neck is the pink one in the back.

Meanwhile, in chicken land, a splinter group has developed. Six chickens have moved out of the coop to haunt the barn and its environs. We are not sure what spurred the walkout, but even when locked out of the barn and thrown back into the coop, during a blizzard, the separatist chickens forged their way back up to the pen behind the barn for the night, and developed little ice cubes that encased their combs until the sun warmed them up late morning. I think it must be some sort of power struggle between the roosters, with the Separatists breaking off with the smaller rooster to start a new colony. All well and good, I mean, we support democracy here on the farm, but we continue to sponsor the coop chickens with our resource drops of feed and water. It does, after all, serve our interests in the region; but we watch the splinter group warily, and with interest.

A lookout Separatist Chicken roosts in a tree at twilight.

The Perfect, and the Less So

2011-03-01T06:54:00.007-05:00

Scar had her piglets last Thursday.

She had 8 perfectly healthy little ones. She started farrowing, very conveniently, when I was on my way home from work. She looked perfectly normal when the Big Man did his 3:30 check; by the 5:30 check there were four piglets nursing.

She was very gentle with them, even as she struggled to get the rest out.

A long pause between numbers four and five meant that the shoulder high glove and baby oil were called into service; a little one was found, and the presence of a hand where it shouldn't be inspired Scar to push all the harder. Another followed that one quickly. Then she quieted, and we watched her for a while and went up to make dinner.

When the Big Man went down to check about half an hour later, number seven was sitting on her head. Number eight popped out within ten minutes.

nursing is hard work for sleepy babies

Amazingly, they all knew to turn toward her belly as soon as they were out; not one turned toward her back. Scar managed to keep them all alive through the night, even though the power went out and the piglets were thus without a heat lamp. The Stupid One predictably died the next night (having failed to understand the extremely critical difference between lying next to warm mum, and trying to burrow completely under 450 pound crushing mum) but the other seven are strong, alert, healthy, and definitively out of the thickest part of the woods. It was a perfect first farrowing experience, for farmers and pigs. And, Scar seems like the perfect mom, very responsive to any distress noises, gentle, and smart at orienting her teats toward the heat lamp for easy, cozy access.

And then, Spot had piglets.

She must have started about 1:00 or 1:30 this morning, because when the Big Man went down just after 3:00, there were seven piglets milling about. One was in a corner, near death with cold. One had a giant gash on its upper back leg (its future ham). Another had a smaller, but still deep, cut on its neck. One didn't seem to be able to use its back legs properly, and, like Stupid Pig, preferred to try burrowing directly under mom to any other course of action.

Spot's deep in the woods brood

This is a lot to take in at such an impolite hour.

Our first step was the cold pig. She looked dead, tongue out a little and everything, but like Wesley of the Princess Bride she was only Mostly Dead, which is indeed a very different thing. Ten minutes in a pot full of warm water in the kitchen sink revived her (just like this); another forty minutes in a box, wrapped in a blanket on a heating pad, seemed to do the rest. (She is the white-faced black pig in the photo above.)

Then there was some light surgery on the kitchen counter -- out came the Big Man's sewing kit. The leg was stitched up pretty quickly, and looked a lot better, but this piggy is definitely on watch. We're going to keep our eyes on the wound for signs of infection, and get some antibiotics on hand just in case. But for now, he's just as active, whiny and hungry as the rest.

The pig with the smaller cut, and the splay-legged new Stupid Pig, are on their own for now. There's not much we can do with them, save a 24-hour watch to continually yank Stupid Pig out from the crevasses made by mom and the floor, and the cut is too small to effectively be sewn. But, there will be many walks to the barn today.

Spot seems to be okay, but she's on watch as well. She seemed too tired to remake her nest after birthing, so her stall is a bit disorganized and damp. It's hard to tell how much redecorating intervention is necessary -- damp is definitely not good, but fluffy hay isn't necessary good either as it's hard for the piglets to navigate through. For now, at least, the piglets are nested under the heat lamp while mom undertakes the odd and somewhat unsavory task of eating the afterbirth, and the more normal task of trying to get some brief shut eye. The deepest part of the woods for these little guys is not going to be over for a few days yet.

The Waiting Game

2011-02-23T19:01:00.005-05:00

Late Monday morning I got a call at work from the Big Man -- Scar was producing milk.

Of late, we have been occasionally googling "signs of farrowing" and phrases similar, somewhat lazily. We knew that producing milk was a "24 hour, 48 hour max!!" sign. An "imminent farrowing!" sign. Blood pressures rose. Close family and friends were informed. Scar was immediately moved to an abandoned horse stall that we filled with fresh hay, a piglet creep was built and installed, a heat lamp plugged in, and mandatory every-3-hour checks were instituted.

For good measure, we moved the gigantic Spot into the neighboring stall as well. Shortly after the move, she began to exhibit a "discharge", which is often referred to as a "few days" sign. Scar had been exhibiting the same for a couple days.

And, 50+ hours later, we are still waiting.

"Signs of farrowing!!!!" has become an obsessive google. Leg position and breathing patterns have become notable. Water and food consumption is discussed and dissected.

At the 7:30 PM check, all is quiet. No agitation, no stretched back legs, no huffing. "Narf" Scar grunts softly to Spot, through the wall. "Narfnarf" replies Spot, through the wall. At the pre-bedtime check, huffing! from Scar. Curious grunting from Spot. At the 1:00 AM check, only the placid sonata of "narfs". At the 4:00 AM check, restlessness, stretched out back legs and barking!! from Scar. But at the 7:00 AM check, only regular, hungry piggos.

So, we obsessively google, and we annoyingly recite to ourselves that "every pregnancy is different" when the googling continues to point to "imminent piglets!!!" about 36 hours ago, and we keep with the 3-hour checks. We hypothesize that perhaps the extreme cold of the last couple nights, combined with the stress of being separated from one's sister and sleeping buddy for the first time ever may have (fortuitously, as far as the weather goes) pushed actual labor back a couple days.

All googling aside, the fact is that we are now at 112 days from their first exposure to the boar, and 112 days is the magic number threshold for Extremely Possible Piglets, the spread being 112-115 days in the vast majority of pregnancies. With first time moms (gilts) tending toward the lower end.

The three-hour checks will continue....

A Mystery is Explained, or Maybe Deepened

2011-02-13T18:09:00.005-05:00

Last summer I wrote about the mysterious spring that the pigs dug up shortly after we moved them on to the pasture. The mysterious part about the spring was that some days it flowed profusely, and some days it was completely dry. It was also oddly coordinated with the barn well -- on days when the spring flowed heavily, the well would dry up if we needed to take more than 5 gallons out of it. Both flowed sporadically, but always one or the other, never at the same time. We discussed lots of theories, none of them entirely satisfactory, and then winter came, the spring was buried, and we moved on.

Until this past week, when the Big Man walked into our barn one afternoon to find water bubbling out of a crack in the concrete. And, the well did not flow, although this time you could hear water moving. Suspiciously familiar.

The new theory is that there is an entire plumbing system that we are not aware of that plugs into the well. For reasons not entirely clear to me, (but are I believe entirely clear to the Big Man, who was, in all truth, explaining his theory and How Wells Generally Work to me without any visual aids at all, which means I retained somewhere around 50% actual facts and invent the rest to round out my understanding), sometimes this alternate universe plumbing system is able to steal the water from our universe's system, sucking it out of the pressure tank or stealing it at a secret elbow, and squirrels it away to a broken pipe somewhere below the table saw, or perhaps to a broken pipe somewhere near the "spring" head.

The unfortunately placed new "spring"

All to say that Big Man has scheduled some chilly time this week for Digging and Investigation. Because pregnant gilts drink a lot of water, more pigs are on the way, and hauling 5 gallon buckets down from the house is not a sustainable solution. Hopefully his theory holds true, and some re-plumbing and inspection can make the barn well endlessly more reliable (although the pigs will miss their little stream wallow when the spring runs).

Of course, none of this explains why this new "spring" started up in the middle of a decidedly below freezing week, or whether or not there is an underground cavern under the barn, nor can we discern any logical reason why the plumbing system that we are theorizing would exist. Mysteries remain.

Not mysterious at all, however, is the delicious bacon (along with numerous other pig parts) that we've been working through this winter. Stump most certainly did not die in vain.

Off to the Races

2011-02-07T08:42:00.003-05:00

The Boar has the Tiniest Nipples

Step up and try your hand at the latest and greatest game here at TBA farms:

Who's gonna pop when?!?
What all's in there?!?

Little red

These are the questions Johnson and I have been asking ourselves and each other for the past month. We have three sows, Little Red, Scar, and Spot Belly (we didn't set out to name them, but when you only have 3 it just happens.) All three are supposed to be pregnant, they've been in with the boar for over three months now and we've seen signs of action to say the least, although we've never walked in on them. We had initially planned to put them in together 12/1/10, but The Boar had different plans and made the decision for us 11/3/10, leaving a tell-tale stain on Scar's hind parts. We did the math and decided it wasn't the end of the world, by the time they'd farrow it'd be warm enough to avoid catastrophe.

Little Red's nipples

Most pig farms keep each sow in it's own little confinement pen and when they want her "serviced" they'll facilitate some face time with a boar. They'll watch and maybe help, and make sure they go at it at least 2 times in 24 hours, and of course record the date. We didn't do any of that.

Scar

Here's what we do know, though. A pig goes into heat every 21 days. A pig's gestation period is 114 days on average. If the boar was lucky enough to catch one in heat his first day out, and that gilt came to term 5 days early we'd have piglets on 2/21/11. If the boar missed the heat cycle by a day and the gilt came to term 5 days late, we'd have piglets on 3/24/10. That gives us a 31 day window to work with.

Scar's Nipples

We're not dealing with a pig in a poke either, we can get up close and look at these girls. At this point Johnson and I agree that Spot Belly is the furthest along, Scar is second and Little Red is holding up the rear, but who really knows? We can also inspect their teats, a pig supposedly "bags up" 7-10 days prior to farrowing. You can see in the pictures that their nipples are becoming much more 3 dimensional, although I don't think anybody's bagged up yet.

Spot Belly

The even wilder card is how many piglets we're going to get. Spot Belly is totally gigantic right now, but I don't have much experience to go on. Are their 16 in there? or just 1 gigantic piglet? Little red doesn't look that big, but she's not a huge pig either, so maybe she'll have a whole pile of svelte little piglets. Gilts (lady pigs who have never had piglets) are known to give smaller litters, and the USDA average litter is ~10 piglets.

Spot Belly's Nipples

Now you know everything we know. Dare to put your money where your mouth is? You guess the answer to any or all of 6 questions and if you're right, you win!! I'll keep track of who's betting on this spreadsheet(updated daily), and each of the six pots will be split among those who guessed correctly, proportional to the amount of their bet. If you choose to spend your winnings on TBA farms products we'll give you a 25% bonus. How do we raise money with this gimmick? Well, we're definitely going to bet right along with you, but we're also going to take a cut of the total before we divy it up among the winners. You're welcome to bet up to the date that each pig farrows, so even if you pick and your day flies by you can hedge later on.

In order to place your bets, just fill out the form below. You don't have to put something in every field, but I'd suggest diversifying. You can send us the funds one of two ways: click on the "donate" button in our sidebar and pay with a credit card or Paypal account, or mail us a check, our address can also be found in the sidebar. Either way, fill out the form below as it'll just be easier for me. If I don't receive payment within 10 days of bet placement I will cancel your bet. Be sure to keep tabs on the spreadsheet to see the group's opinions. If any of the pigs fail to pop within the allotted time frame all related bets will be canceled.
-------------------------------------------------

Loading...

The new face of small scale financing

2011-02-06T13:02:00.004-05:00

It seems like every time I look up there's a new way for small start-ups to raise funds. Peer-to-peer lending, micro-loans, group funded philanthropy, you name it someone's made it possible. We have a number of friends and acquaintances who've made use of Kickstarter, and I have to say the theory behind it is wonderful, especially if you've got a great new product in mind but you don't have the funds to produce it en masse. In my mind, the biggest downside to these funding methods is the various cuts taken along the way, a successful Kickstarter campaign can lose 10% to these middlemen. I am fully aware that these are the costs of doing business, Johnson and I were just discussing how the price of basically everything is 3% higher than it needs to be because of the proliferation of credit cards, and you can't often save that money by using cash.

You know me though, I can't just use a good thing, I have to tweak it a bit and make it my own. In recent months I've considered a number of Kickstarter proposals that could benefit our farm and homestead, ideas like a 0 mile meal, where absolutely everything would be grown here on our property, or a pre-buy for our fledgling pastured chicken operation. One of the great tenets of Kickstarter is that those who are funded should provide an incentive for the funder. Tech startups provide pre-buys, artists offer original work, and restaurants give coupons and gift certificates.

While we have plenty to offer, meat, produce, a damn good time, I'm hesitant to put these on a pedestal. As food growers we don't strive for consumers to buy our products for special occasions, but instead to elevate their consumption as a whole and work towards eating and purchasing more locally, and more communally. Now, just because it's a goal doesn't mean we expect to fully attain it, after all we still buy a lot of our food from Wegman's, and we haven't put as much energy as I'd like towards buying locally. Lofty goals are necessary to make big impacts, just ask Coca Cola, who at one point had a corporate goal that people would drink more Coke products than they drank water (a goal attained in Mexico.)

So, how else can a poor farmer raise funds? It just so happens that something else has been in the news a lot recently. Lotteries are one of the oldest tricks in the book for fundraising, used for everything from bolstering the nation's education funds to providing arms for the Civil War. Often referred to as a regressive tax, gambling persists for a number of reasons, the most of which is obvious: It's fun. Our lives are especially filled with uncertainty: Did the pigs eat all the chicken's food today? Will the well be frozen? Is there an impending snowpocalypse? One question in particular has pervaded our thoughts here at TBA farms, and soon I will invite you to answer it along with us.

Stay tuned....

Exciting things to come

2011-02-01T13:00:00.002-05:00

I just finished picking out Hop Rhizomes from Midwest Supplies, the place we get most of our homebrew ingredients and supplies from. A few friends have started homebrewing recently, and I can't help but take a little credit for the inspiration. Growing our own hops will save us a boat load of money, hops have been especially pricey lately due to some major catastrophes in the small world of hop growers. One area has a flood, another producer has a barn burn down, and prices almost tripled, as well as rationing. It seems to be on the mend, but I am pleased to be free of that economy soon. Combined with maintaining our own yeast, I hope to cut our beer prices in half.

I purchased 5 varieties, one Rhizome each of Williamette, Magnum, Cascade, Fuggles, and Golding. These should be well rounded enough to provide a number of flavor profiles for my recipes. Each plant is expected to grow over 15' tall and 10' in diameter, producing a literal boatload of hops. The first year is thin, as usual, but since each 5 gallon batch of beer only uses 2-5 ounces I bet I'll get some use out of them this season.

This is but one of our experiments this year in permaculture, and the biggest hurdle so far has been figuring out where to put all of these plants. Johnson's got 13 or 15 fruit trees on the way too, and that doesn't even begin to touch on berries and other viney stuff. I'm sure she'll enlighten you soon...

Lessons Learned

2011-01-29T18:26:00.004-05:00

A couple weeks ago, though all was cozy in the farmhouse, something was amiss in the pigpen. The boar, hungriest of hungries, was ambivalent about food. Otherwise, he seemed fine -- no wounds, no odd excretions, no discernible eye/ear or throat problems, no major lethargy. It's true that he seemed more interested in sleeping than the diligently curious ladies, but he also was spotted rooting through the snow and ice in the far corner of the pasture, and always got out of bed to fondly poke at my kneecaps.

Aha! Fond sweet nuzzles instead of diving into the feed pile....we'd seen this before. It was more than reminiscent of Stump in the first stage of her worm issue. Mentally checking a calendar, we noted that it had been eight months since their last shot, so we thought it best to give them all their boosters.

So, it turns out that it is difficult to stick a needle into the neck of an agile muscly beast of over 300 pounds. The Big Man was able to get the sleepy boar quite easily, and curious friendly Spotbelly with minimal trauma. For the two more skittish ladies, Scar and Little Red, he had to build a pig snare, a simple contraption that loops over the top bit of the nose and keeps the thrashing and jogging about to an absolute minimum. Even so, he still needed me, a full sheet of plywood, and a lot of wrestling to get Little Red.

And, just a couple days later, the boar was back on his feet, eating with reckless abandon. Last year, Stump was set back a good two months from the worms; the boar maybe lost two days of not eating to full capacity -- a gigantic difference. A life threatening issue last season becomes a mere hour-long chore the next. That's the direction we want the learning curve to keep moving.

And, in a vegetables and greens note, after last year I have determined the value of having TWO garden maps, for, really, two gardens -- one in spring at planting, and one in mid-summer, when the fall crops will need to be planted and moved out. With better planning (not to mention the fairly ginormous Garden Enlargement Project 2011, which adds a separate bed for storage crops and moves corn, squash and pole beans to the pasture), I feel confident that I can triple the garden output next year, which would put us nearly all the way towards self-sustaining ourselves through the year, vegetable-wise, not to mention doing a good bit to add to the pigs' winter diet with bins of farm-grown winter squash and dried corn to help hold them over.

Many hands make light work

2011-01-20T18:34:00.008-05:00

If you were here for our big gathering in October you surely heard me constantly marveling at how much we were able to do and how effortless it was. It seemed that no matter what needed to be lifted, moved, cleaned, or eaten there were plenty of people ready, willing, and able.

The next time we do this, tentatively scheduled for earlier fall '11, I'd like to put fish on the menu. The early crew can make the baskets and once we have quorum we can clean out Nanticoke Lake. If we move with enough speed and stealth we might get a beaver!!

Dead Chicken

2011-01-16T16:17:00.006-05:00

Although we have several black and white chickens, I instantly knew which one was the mangled, frozen body that I found outside the chicken coop this morning. It was Little Man, the poor fancy chicken who had been the flock outcast since he was a tiny chick. From the day I first had to separate him from the other chicks in the brooder because his back had been pecked bloody, he constantly had peck wounds on his back and butt. His tail never grew in; its feathers were constantly yanked out by either himself or someone higher in, as they tellingly say, the pecking order.

Who, me?

Being one who generally believes in the good in others, when I first saw him I thought a hungry predator had finally found the chickens. But, upon further inspection, I realized that his entire body was there, very bloodied but completely intact. When I opened the window of the coop to check for eggs, several hens wandered out the door for their breakfast, politely ignoring Little Man's corpse in the snow. Usually curious about anything new or amiss in their area, they studiously avoided even glancing toward the crime scene. And to think, I had been worried that they would be startled and appalled to discover their coop-mate so cruelly dispensed with. They cooed to each other righteously.

Brooding blizzard sunrise

I'm not sure if it was the rest of the flock, or just one or both of the other roosters, but this crime certainly seems like an inside job. All the snow and harsh winds recently have meant that the chickens have been forced to spend most of their time huddled together in the coop. I guess, finally, pathetic bloody Little Man was too much for them, a respectable bunch, to accept. If we were more experienced farmers, we would have seen this end as unavoidable, and we would have womanned-up and done the job ourselves back at chicken killing time. As it is, mob rule won out over the little guy. I'll miss his goofy muppet head bopping about by itself in the high grass, and I think he was our most famous chicken (having both inspired artwork and getting a shout-out on NPR), but it will be somewhat of a relief to have an outcast-free (and thus, fully feathered) chicken flock.

New Years Diet Advice from the Animals

2011-01-10T19:53:00.002-05:00

[Caution, NPR listeners: there are some nicely informative pictures of internal organs in this post, so if you are faint of stomach, as they coincidentally say, or are eating a tender and juicy anything, please stop with the eating for one quick moment.]

I've mentioned before about how, if I may say so, it is strangely lovely (or at least, strangely interesting) to be able to inspect all the internal organs of an animal that you've raised, and plan to eat.

One of the inspections that I am most intrigued by is cutting open the stomach to see what the animal has been eating.

Above is the stomach of the volunteer, Skittish Pig, who sacrificed herself to the fence and the pleasure of many of our closest friends and family members at our First Annual(?!) Many Named Multi Themed Party Event.

As you can see, it is mostly foraged greens, rounded out with a small helping of mostly whole grains.

This is a crop from one of the turkeys, killed the week before Thanksgiving. (I meant to look up what, exactly, a crop was, and how it works, but I spent all day doing estate taxes at work, and if I have to work through anything that reads remotely like Form 1041-I (which at this point is all words, ever), I will probably dissolve into an unbecoming puddle of self-pity. So, instead, I am going to salvage my evening and let you know that my imagination figures that this is where gobbled food goes before it is either regurgitated to be chewed at a later time, or where it hangs out for a while before some really bad ass chemicals come and help break it down there a bit before letting it pass on to the next stop. You can decide which you think. Or, obviously, look it up for yourselves.)

Anyway, the crop exhibits roughly the same mix of greens and whole grains, albeit in a more recognizable state.

So, in these odd, culturally mandated weeks of regret and atonement after the just-one-more-spritzer/sugar plum/whatnot-on-a-toothpick month of December, perhaps we should take a page out of the animals' books -- whole grains and lots of greens, not to mention naps whenever you feel like it, deciding not to leave the house when it is very snowy or a bit too breezy, and lots of socialization and snuggling before an early bedtime. They seem to have it pretty well figured out, actually. If I had to pick one, I suppose my New Years Resolution would be to live more like them.

To Do list for 2011

2011-01-03T19:52:00.007-05:00

Time to start getting excited for warmer weather and all the impending progress. Off the top of my head we're shooting for:

Doubling the garden
Building a root cellar
Reinsulating the first floor of the house, complete with new drywall
Refinishing the first floor's floors
New doors for the house
Build chicken processing equipment
Build chicken "tractors"
Raise test batches (400 total, maybe?) of meat chickens
PIGLETS!!!
Beehives
Mushroom cultivation
New roof for the house, if we can afford it
New geese
Greenhouse / Hoophouse
Pig slaughtering equipment/streamlining
Redesign grease collection pump
Move kitchen to where the dining room is
Turn kitchen into a mudroom
Scale up beer making
Charcuterie
Growing cover crops and forage crops for livestock
Person door on the west side of the barn
Sell pigs in various forms

It looks awfully long, but when I look back what we accomplished in 2010 it seems quite doable, especially since many hands make light work and all.

Complications from a Cold

2010-12-18T12:47:00.005-05:00

Sorry for the lapse in posting; we've been a bit under the weather (and I mean that literally) here at the farm these past couple weeks. Winter, this year, was unusually ambitious in our area, spiraling temperatures 20 degrees lower than average and dumping over a foot of snow on our blustery hill, snow which mounded up into thigh-high drifts exactly where I need to walk (or, worse, drive), up the side of the chicken coop, and into the pig pen. Old cars, like old bones, refuse to start up quickly in the morning (or at all). Hands can't tinker without gloves for more than 30 seconds without getting cold and numb, which in turn leads to a dropped nut or bolt into the snow, lost until spring. The barn well freezes every few days despite a heat lamp, the pigs' water tub needs bashed violently with a hammer multiple times a day, the murderer has moved back in upstairs, and there is of course much fretting on my part about the comfort of our outdoor beasts, be they cloven-hoofed, feather-coated or feline.

But, it turns out that humans' ridiculously small window of comfort (40 to 90 degrees or so, I figure) does not translate to all other animals. After all, I don't worry about the chickadees, or the rabbits, or whatever it is that has moved back in above the kitchen. In fact, after two weeks of prolonged frigid temperatures, everyone seems to be doing just fine. The pigs bury themselves in their hay pile inside, mounded up, and do a lot of sleeping. But they also manage to still root about in the muddiest, unfrozen bits of the pasture, seemingly oblivious to any need for smart wool, hot chocolate with a pinch of bourbon, or heated blankets.

The chickens spend most of their time in the coop, skittering out once in a while to eat and poke about in the snow. But, three more hens started laying, bringing the tally to two white egg layers, one rosy-brown, one olive brown, one slate gray. No frozen toes, and no requests for hot noodle soups.

Even the kale, irresponsibly left in the garden, is still good. I snap off some leaves in the morning, put them in a colander in the sink, and by dinner time they are perfectly fresh.

Of course, the quick winter, and the resulting loss of a month or so of tinkering time, means some less elegant cold-weather solutions. Instead of rigging up a solar water trough for the animals, we have to break the ice on their bucket with a hammer twice a day, dump it to smash out all the ice every few days, and refill it one bucket at a time. We have to slog down through the snow-blown pasture to the chicken coop, since we didn't get to move it up closer to the barn. Instead of having the time to build the barn cats cozy winter boxes, I had to cobble some together out of plywood, plastic tubs, hay and woodchips. But none of this is really the end of the world, especially given the small scale of our operation currently. It feels sometimes like we were unprepared for the winter -- probably because we were, a little bit. A large chunk of our pre-winter projects didn't pan out, because of mud, and engines and pumps and mysteriously pressurized fuel tanks, and a general lack of time. But because we are lucky humans, with smart wool socks, and hot chocolate with maybe an occasional pinch of bourbon, and noodle soups, we are doing okay with what we did manage to get done. We are contentedly resigned to hunkering down and trying not to drop too many things in the snow.

TBA farms on NPR

2010-12-15T09:56:00.002-05:00

Listen to the piece here. We met with Adam Davidson back in late October, hopefully he'll be back some time as a customer.

Puffy, Muddy.

2010-11-30T09:39:00.009-05:00

So far, the lovely hen who has started laying has given us three eggs in five days. We think it is only one hen laying -- all the eggs are identical. I spent some time this morning trying to determine if one of them was more puffed up than usual, being haughty, but they were all equally puffed, equally haughty.

Since the laying has started, I've been tinkering with the chicken coop, trying to make it cozier and thus the nesting boxes more alluring to the ladies. I spent the morning at work trying to balance an account, but failed, I'm sure because I was severely distracted mentally designing a secret swinging trap door to allow easier human access to eggs, while maintaining a cozy clean little spot for hens. I can almost see the Big Man's rueful grimace at this. I am mostly sure that the phrase "designing a secret swinging trap door" would never leave the lips of anyone with any real building experience. Ah well.

Photog by Gigi Gatewood, professional artiste

In further happy bird news (and I say this quietly, so that god, or fate, or whoever it is with the twisted sense of humor who likes to make people regret sentences just like this one, won't hear) the waterfowl-munching predator seems to have moved on. I have an aunt who has shot her share of foxes with .22's (hi, jo!) and she said that her foxes usually come back every 3 or 4 days for a new kill. A fox was the prime suspect. We are now 8 days death free (I want to make a sign, like the have in factories. "Days without on farm mysterious maulings or accidental deaths: 8").

Mostly we've been spending the last couple weeks frantically trying to get things buttoned up for the winter, and being stymied at every step by nothing more complicated or nefarious than mud. We have plied our gigantic-tractor-having neighbors with budweiser, so that our regular-sized tractor can be extracted from the swamp that appeared overnight in the middle of the pasture, as well as the suburban that, turns out, cannot tow a tractor out of the mud, preferring instead to lazily bury itself to the axle in said mud. We are downsizing our "to do before winter" list, and that's fine.

Also, finally, here is a link to some pictures of the Feast, taken by Nick Johnson, a stellar individual and equally stellar photographer.

I got one!!!

2010-11-27T11:59:00.002-05:00

The first egg, I got it.

It's dirty, it'll take them (or her, since I only found one) a bit to figure out the nesting boxes, as opposed to laying them in the mud. Also, I didn't go down there yesterday, so it may have been there overnight, and as such may have frozen. I figure it'd be cracked if that were the case, but who knows. I will wash it and save it in the refrigerator for Johnson.

So, to date that's $278 for 10 small chickens for eating, and one egg. It's a rough number, as the other fowl must eat the chicken's food, but now they're all gone so maybe I can pin it down better. We will do better next year.

Crime Scenes (and a lack thereof)

2010-11-20T09:14:00.003-05:00

Crime scenes are a fairly common event on the farm. There was the murder of the noble Hyena Cat. There was the (murder/suicide?) of Skittish pig. There was a missing mallard (the leading theory still, optimistically, that she flew south for the winter, and will return happy and fat in the spring). A drowned duck. A drowned turkey. A turkey with a limp, suddenly in three motionless pieces. Not to mention that a pig was shot, and a duck and ten chickens had their heads cut off. Some deaths became mysteries; some became food, some became compost, and some became art.

Photo by Nick Johnson, Professional Photographer

Two mysteries in the past couple weeks. First, one of the two surviving ducks*, a cute little Buff Orpington, disappeared. It was obvious that something dramatic had happened, both because the morning of her disappearance her entire team (which includes the geese and the turkeys, as well as the other duck) was found milling about agitatedly in a spot they'd never been before, and because of the amount of downy, waterproof feathers strewn about near the feeder down in the pasture.

It made a bit of sense. The chickens hole up in their coop at night. The turkeys sleep in a pile or a line, off the ground. The waterfowl simply sleep in a pile in the weeds. The compost pile had been dug through. The top two wires of the fence gate had been unattached. A rather obvious predator/prey situation.

And then a goose went missing. In the middle of the day. Leaving not one feather, not one head or foot, not one spec of blood as a clue. Ditches were searched. Potential nesting places were sought. Lisa Marie, the barn cat, was eyed warily. Nichol Fritz, the invisible barn cat, was scowled at in absentia. In the end it seemed unlikely that a cat would be responsible. Especially since there are other, far, far more obvious candidates.

It makes no sense, really. But farmers can easily drive themselves crazy over-analyzing a crime scene, wondering what happened to this piglet or that sheep. And it's important to make little changes to improve the mortality rate at the farm, but a fair amount of death and mystery is unavoidable, and one of the challenges of farming is finding a good middle ground between caring for your animals and letting nature take its course. So, for now, the goose becomes just another mystery. And we have only two funny, odd water birds remaining. Who are about to get more lonely still.

*We have done horribly with ducks. Out of seven ordered, one was dead on arrival, one died two hours after arriving, one drowned as a youngster, one disappeared without a trace, one sacrificed itself to the freezer, one disappeared in a flurry of feathers, and one is lonely.

Farm Ninjas

2010-11-11T18:29:00.007-05:00

First of all, a brief belated statement on the First Ever TBA Farms Grow-It Kill-It Eat-It Jazz-Run Cold-Toes Pass-the-Whiskey Festival: A gigantic THANK YOU to all who attended -- your interest, support, questions and ideas were nothing short of inspiring (new business plan, coming soon!). It was amazing to see folks from all walks of our lives mingling over chicken killing, brussels harvesting, (endless) chopping, pit digging, pig roasting, table setting, and, finally, feasting. There were fireworks and America and sequins and oratory. And we have only you amazing folks to thank for that. You can all come back any time.

And, I swear that I will gather pictures together soon (ahem, all who took pictures: can I steal them from facebook?? Can you email them to me????)

But, among all the excited ruminating on the Feast and our parsing of ideas and future plannings, as those who lingered know, life moves on quickly at the farm.

The boar, no longer content with his monk's existence, pulled a Great Escape-inspired tunneling maneuver sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday. I managed to lure him back in, but not before (and don't ask how I know this) he had clearly done, well, exactly what we want him to do, with one of the Big Pig ladies. He just got to it about a month early. Big Man and I spent the rest of the week wondering how fruitful his exploit had been, and hemming and hawing over whether to stick to the original plan or to just go all in and shoot for a cluster of piglets, albeit a month too soon in the spring.

But then he solved the problem for us, by getting out again on Saturday morning. This is what the fence looked like after we fixed it:

It was clear that nothing short of castration would keep him away from the Juliets. So, the new release date for piglets appears to be late February, 2011. And I suppose we need to start bustling about, stockpiling pickles, watermelons and a variety of ice creams for expectant ladies.

Also in the leitmotif of things growing where you can't see them, Garden 2011 has officially started. Garlic.

Admittedly, not much to look at yet, and neither are the presumed piglets. But it's somehow very satisfying to have things already growing, just as the rest of us are retiring for a semi-hibernation full of casseroles, novels and network tv.

The Death of Stump

2010-11-03T20:16:00.007-04:00

So it goes.

The body becomes meat bizarrely quickly, practically as soon as you get it upside-down. Legs become hams, feet become trotters, backs become back fat. The air smells like meat. Once the animal is cut open, onlookers are amazed to see how tenderloin fits into the pork chop, how French butchery keeps the muscle groups together, how these pork chops are so strikingly different from the shrink-wrapped boneless varieties in supermarkets.

I, erstwhile Friend of Stump, experienced it all with an odd sense of detachment. Stump was eating, Stump was shot; Stump moved and then stopped moving; Stump was Stump, then Stump was an interesting event. Adrenaline prevents processing the event as it is happening. One hopes for a clean kill, and one is happy that one is provided.

After adrenaline, with a freezer full of incredibly delicious-looking cuts of meat, I try to decide how I feel about the whole thing. This, I am still in the middle of. I think of how, until a scant two hundred years or so ago, this is how most everyone procured meat -- through witnessing (if not actually themselves enacting) the death of a very large mammal. In slaughtering Stump it was the very mammal, in fact, that people dissect to learn about what humans look like inside. During pig dissection in high school, I had actual nightmares that consisted of fetal pigs raining down on me, in a fetal pig coated waste land.

So, I kind of expected the worst.

Instead, I feel oddly vindicated. Here is this pig, one of six original pigs, that I made oatmeal for, carried daily apples to, nursed back to health -- she was actually the first pig that we named. She died quickly and perfectly. She became an entire winter's worth of pork. Out of 210 pounds, only the digestive system and three quarters of a 5 gallon bucket became trash. And not even that -- those bits will compost in a pile of hay, and be added to my garden in years future. Turns out, the only part of the Stump to meat process that I keep dwelling on, is how odd and unfortunate it is that we had to do it in a small group of five (utterly amazing) folks, and how I kept getting this nagging feeling that we were doing something incorrect by driving a pig around chained to the tractor bucket, dipping it in a scalding bucket over a wood fire near the road, and butchering it on a wooden table in the barn. When really, this is much closer to the way it should be. The eater should see the animal alive, and inspect all the innermost bits, and be expected to provide a swift and painless kill. Friends should do this together, learning and talking and sorting through both thoughts and cartilage, and the process should eventually become ritual.

And also, the teeniest bit of homebrew should perhaps be discreetly poured on the ground, so that even in the midst of the adrenaline, there is the recognition that this is most likely a solemn thing.

Hired Muscle

2010-10-18T21:36:00.008-04:00

And it has come to this: a rather predictable, but completely necessary, troop surge in the second year of the War on Mice. Times were dire.

In the house, tomatoes, set out to ripen, developed mysterious tiny bites, one to two per otherwise prefect tomato.

In the barn, strong feedbags of cracked corn developed mysterious weeping sores. The weeped corn mysteriously disappeared. Things skittered across the floor in broad daylight.

The assumed mouse in the kitchen turned out, when Big Man caught a glipse in the pre-dawn hours one day, to be larger than mouse-sized, and tan. I, choosing not to assess other possibilities, assume it is a chipmunk. Driven to shame and despair that a chipmunk manages to live in the kitchen and share my heirloom tomatoes, drastic steps were needed. Drastic, impossible to photograph steps.

This is Zoë, our new house guardcat. She is a little calico who had somehow been stuck at the SPCA for over a year. Apparently calicos have a bad wrap, but Zoë has been all curious sweetness since we got her. And, she auspiciously likes chasing things that move.

The barn, of course, presents its own, more varied, challenges. There are the mice and voles and chipmunks. Then there are the pigeons, and the shockingly large flock of finches that seem to have made it a daily snacking site. Not to mention the horribly invasive spring barn swallows, the possums, the etc.

For these ruffians, we took cats that most people wouldn't want in their houses. Nichol Fritz is a big gray manx who is exceptionally shy (they kept him in the "shy cat room" at the shelter) and, according to his records, doesn't necessarily prefer a litter box to drapes. Dubious, since he seemed to understand that whole thing in the shelter, but it was probably enough to scare off a year's worth of customers. He is big, healthy, and . . . well, good at hiding.

We also took Lisa Marie, a shaggy lady who is "a total bitch" according to the shelter manager. When the cat-obsessed volunteer objected to this characterization and tried to prove that you just needed to approach her the right way, she scratched the shit out his hand. It seemed to make sense to put a strong, brave, territorial type with a shy and able follower.

So far they have done nothing but sit on the shelving in the corner, trying to blend in with the fuel filters. No one has even ventured near the food, water, tuna (!!!), litterbox and beds we made for them in the stall we plopped them in their first night. In fact, we thought they'd run off when we looked for them in their room the next afternoon, only to find their quarters abandoned. It took us awhile to look at the shelving. A flash camera helps.

Despite their trepidation, it is encouraging that they seem to like being close to one another. We wanted a bonded pair for the barn, and while these two were not siblings or even friends at the shelter, they are at least familiar with one another, and Lisa Marie's presence was enough to coax poor Fritz out of the tiny space he had wedged himself into the first morning to be closer to her. When something terrifying happens (the tractor drives in the barn, for example, or a person shows up) they move closer together.

As for the finches, etc., they haven't yet seemed too concerned about the new feline presence, but hopefully the felines will some day venture down from their shelving units to prowl about like proper carnivores.

Jack Frost (noun): an elfish creature fond of nipping noses

2010-10-14T20:12:00.002-04:00

Other farmers, in some places, call winter the Dark Days. Reading a blog post about "preparing for the Dark Days" in mid-August, I thought this was overly dramatic. Everyone knows that there is less light in winter. Plus, it's only August; pop open a wheat beer and listen to the garden grow. But, apparently, it's true. The days are increasingly dark, and apparently, need to be prepared for starting in mid-August. It appears that the dark is a lot more obvious when your house, and the five other houses that share the valley, are the only light producers (save the moon and stars, of course) around: no streetlights, no rows upon rows of buildings full of restaurants and ostentatiously bright apartments, no endless stream of cars, no traffic lights, and no (if you are in certain Philadelphia neighborhoods) occasional, mildly nerve-wracking, helicopter spotlight. And, a need to be outside -- first thing, before the sun, for a while after work -- just rubs it in. It is dark now, Time to wake up. It is dark, now, Go inside and stop for the day.

This is both nice (oh, to eat dinner before 11!) and somewhat alarming.

Our first frost happened the night of the 9th (a mere six days before I had predicted it. I dutifully noted it: "FIRST FROST!" in my garden notebook). The day before, I spent hours in the garden, harvesting every pepper, ripenable tomato, eggplant, and winter squash (75 pounds of these). And true to last year's legacy of putting in windows the day before the first snow, we blew in a foot and a half of insulation in the attic, just in time to keep us relatively cozy under a frost.Other notables: t he boar and all the roosters have become total jerks. The boar makes all kinds of odd clicking noises, while trying to push you over. He understands that the best way to do this is to slam the weight of his bigger-than-you body into the back of your knees when you are distracted. We are not on good terms right now. The roosters, similarly, have taken to flinging themselves at the back of my legs when I innocently stroll out to throw corn about and hunt for eggs. They remind me of the raptors from Jurassic Park, running about in the weeds, in a team of three, waiting for me to get interested in something else. THWAP!

The frost is like that: a constant reminder biting you on the back of your legs, on the tips of your nose...time to figure out how to water the animals in the winter....time to figure out where to keep the squash...time to buy hay and build a cozy place for geese. And the dark just keeps creeping later, and earlier, eating the useful hours of the day and forcing us to spend time inside, baking casseroles and reading in the dim light.

Sometimes, being lazy is a good thing

2010-09-30T20:51:00.004-04:00

...even for farmers.

Last Saturday I was grumpy over breakfast.

We had spent the weekend before with some of our most practiced and talented Movers of Piles of Trash, moving piles of old hay out of the hayloft. We moved 7 trailer loads of the stuff, shoveling it down from the hayloft into the trailer waiting in the lower barn below.

It was A LOT of hay -- dusty, sweaty and gross, mixed with just enough pigeon poop and rotten dolls to make it particularly unappetizing -- and just when we thought we had hit the homestretch, we realized that the last bay of the barn was actually full of piles of sawdust, carefully concealed under a small layer of hay.

This was discouraging. Old hay is dusty and itchy, but you can push about relatively big piles of it with not too much effort. Sawdust however...this was a shovelful at a time sort of thing. We managed to fill up a trailer with the dust-hay mixture, but could not empty it. It was dusk. We needed our well-deserved sausage and beer.

The trailer sat for the week in the barn, full of Hell. The lower barn itself was coated in a layer of fine dust. The boar was grumpy about it and moved his bed outside.

And I, the next saturday, was equally grumpy over breakfast. I wanted to spend time poking in the garden, investigating bugs and such, and giggling at geese and pigs. Maybe finding the energy to bake a honey cake, or read the Sports section of the Times. Looking into my granola, I warily remembered what it was like to shovel out trailers of trash with the Big Man last fall. There would be no honey cake, and no Times. Only short tempers and protesting shoulders.

What if, I proposed to the seemingly-resigned-to-his-fate Big Man, what if we took the tailgate off the truck, and just drove around really fast over bumps and up hills? I envisioned Mr. Toad's Wild Ride meets hayride.

No reply. Just the tip tip tap of the keyboard.

What if, I tried, we built a ramp to drive the tractor up. A steep ramp! Or, we could get the pigs to push it out!

Tip tip tap.

What if, (getting desperate now), omigod, what if we chained the front of the trailer to the bucket on the tractor, and lifted the bucket up realllllly high?

Silence.

Success. A DIY dump truck.

Lonely Boy

2010-09-23T20:55:00.006-04:00

Life is hard for Romeo, when he is courting Juliet, Juliet, Juliet and Juliet.

We were wondering how we would be able to tell that the Boar had matured enough to be a threat to the, you know, "Midwestern values" of our ladies prematurely. Turns out, he made it pretty clear. He developed a very lovable affection for rubbing their bellies (raw) and trying to, you know, spoon them (when they were trying to go about their lives).

So we, with the help of our versatile (and apparently totally safe for everything but Skittish Pig) electro-net fence, have divided our pigs into three groups.

One is Lonely Boy. He has to live all by himself in the only pen we have that is more than a just a mental barrier. Because, clearly, when you need to rub bellies and spoon, only actual physical barriers can stand the heat. Especially when you love making out so much.

And have such a strong nose.

So then, the welded wire mesh is barely enough. Especially with such tempting getaway sticks on the other side.

He does have an advantage in having the best available scratching post (the door into the barn). Others have to use less hardy means to rub their heads. But the Big Pigs, at least, are very assertive about these rights.

The Juliets have also been separated, according to size. The Littles (Stump and Little Red) are in the pen adjacent to the Boar, with as much food as they can eat 24/7. The Bigs are on a diet. They are at the point where they convert food to body mass at a fairly inefficient rate, so we figured we should turn them out to the pasture for a while. They are already at breeding size, so now we just need to sustain them.

They are doing well at it. Very vocal when they see the Little Juliets getting piles and piles of food. But also content to nap under the burdocks and root up every inch of their space, transforming the matted, overgrown pasture into 8 inches of loose tilled soil. Which is, of course, exactly what we want from them these days.

When the farm gives you lemons...

2010-09-13T19:05:00.005-04:00

Well, we've had our first mammalian death. The backstory is long but integral, so bear with me and we'll get to the juicy stuff soon.

As many of you know, we have two outdoor spaces that are predator proof, the pig pen (1/16th of an acre) and the pasture (4+ acres). In our learning process we always try the thing that is easiest for us first and work backward until we find a happy balance. As soon as we had the pasture up we wanted all the animals to get a chance to live free on the grass, so we moved in the birds and opened the gate for the pigs, providing everyone had free range. It worked fine for a few days, but then the pigs began terrorizing the birds, eating their food, eating one of them (RIP Black Turkey) and generally running amok.

Our long term plan has always been to rotationally graze the pasture, 4 acres is more than 6 pigs need. Electronet fencing is a type of temporary fence that works well for all the species we might want, and it's a perfect blend of rugged and nimble. We'd been holding off to buy it until I could figure out how much we needed, but the pigs poor behavior inspired me to figure that all out. Unfortunately, the fencing arrived on a very rainy Thursday. When the sun came out on Friday I set it up in the pasture, making three separate paddocks so I could divide the pigs up, something we've been meaning to do for a number of reasons. I attempted to separate them into the three groups I wanted, but when that proved too difficult to do alone I just let 'em loose. Later in the afternoon I noticed the boar alone in one of the paddocks (they were all set up but had a short section open) and I decided to close him in. Johnson came home soon after and we set to work canning an epic load of tomatoes --14 quarts, a new record for us. Johnson was excited to see the new fence but the canning has a lot of prep, so she didn't get a chance to look for about 90 minutes. She came back and said the boar had gotten out and some of the fence was down. I went down with her to investigate, and discovered that one of the Tamworth gilts was caught in the fencing, had run for her life and died.

I went into action, and sent Johnson to get a few knives and my rubber boots, since I was already in my messy clothes (surprise surprise!!). Naive Johnson assumed the knives were for cutting the pig free, so she was right surprised when she returned and I was dragging her up the hill already. It was just getting dark, which proved good for photos but aggravating for the Big Man. (A quick note on the photos: I was busy, as you can see. If I had taken them I would have gone for more descriptive clinical images, but Johnson's artistic take really capture the moment, you readers are lucky she was there.)

I've been researching slaughtering and butchering in my free time, so I was pretty much ready for this. I slit the throat to bleed as much as might come out, and started assembling a makeshift table so I didn't have to work in the dirt. Becky set up the hose (constant rinsing is key) and started water on the cooker for the scald and scrape, more on that later.

I needed to gut and clean the carcass in order to save the meat, At that point I wasn't sure what I'd want to do with her in the long term. This pig, from now on known as Skittish Pig, was probably about 110 pounds when she died, which is half the size of a butcher hog. That means she has tiny bacon, tiny pork chops, and tiny everything else, limiting our options.

The most important part of gutting is to remove the digestive system intact, no one wants shit on their meat. I was unable to go through the rear since I didn't have the proper tools, so I elected to go through the middle. The belly is impressively thin, and I knicked an intestine just the teeniest bit as it spilled out of the body cavity. All in all it went well, and it was a nice dry run for the next time as I know exactly what tools I need to make it easier. We opened up her stomach to see what she'd been eating, and it was a healthy mix of grasses and grains. The process was blood free for the most part, something that impressed both of us.

The final step was to scald and scrape the skin. A pig is special among non-avian livestock, as you have an option when it comes to the outside. Some prefer to skin the pig, while others scald the skin with hot water and then scrape off the hair and topmost layer of skin. both are a similar amount of labor, as skinning a pig is much more difficult than skinning a cow or goat, so in my mind it boils down to whether or not you want to eat the skin. Scaling and scraping was the biggest unknown in my research, everybody does it a different way. Some dunk the whole carcass in hot water (150 F) while others ladle much hotter water (210 F) over the animal.

In our haste we did not have the time for the former, so the latter it was. The first couple tries were rough, but I eventually got the hang of it. The process was made even more difficult because I had gutted the pig first, leaving a lot of skin that was on the edge and thus hard to scrape off in long, broad strokes. If I had been there when the pig died I could have scalded and scraped first, but with the delay it was important to get the temperature of the meat down as fast as possible.

All in all it took 4 hours to arrive at the end point, a tidy package in our freezer. Upon further reflection and discussion we agree that there isn't anything we could have done to prevent her passing, accidents and death are inevitable on the farm. We were lucky it happened when it did so that we could salvage something. Even Ursula got a treat, although she wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

I can hear the question on the tip of your tongue: If I come in October can I eat some of this pig? Most likely. At this point we've decided that we still want to remove Stump from the herd, we hope to slaughter and process her the week before the party when we'll have some extra help on hand. Skittish pig is a great size for spit roasting or pit cooking (about 80 lbs. dressed, 60 lbs. of meat), and if you happen to have experience with either please let me know as I'd appreciate some input. The only question left to answer is whether we'll buy another gilt to replace Skittish, or if we'll just breed the three remaining, hopefully we'll have an answer soon..

Planning ahead is what I do best

2010-09-09T19:41:00.004-04:00

So, this thing with the inconvenient name is coming up quick, 7 weeks from Saturday which is nothing in my book.

A few things are up in the air, and I need some input in order to pin them down. First though, a list of new developments/changes that are settled.

-- Remember how I said we'd make a whole bunch of stuff, as much as we could? I listed things like cheese, veggies, beer, cured meat, foraged mushrooms, fruit, etc. Well, some of this is too much, at least this year. At this point we're on track for beer and wine, a ton of produce, and pork. Maybe some chicken, although a two meat meal seems odd. We're not going to push it by trying to make some blue cheese just for this, or take a chance spending a weekend hunting mushrooms when we could jeopardize the bigger picture.

-- Even though the date for dinner is Saturday, October 30th, Becky and I will be taking the week before off to get shit done. A few people that I know of are coming out for the whole week, and if you're lucky enough to be flexible enough to do that we'd sure love to see you. There will be a lot to do, the more the merrier.

-- Exciting group events will be planned for the weekend at least. We're talking haunted auction barns, capture the flag, hay wagon rides, chicken fights in our pond, if it's fun we'll do it.

-- We're going to ask you for money. Not a lot, just enough to cover expenses. If you stay from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon I'd guess it'd be in the $60 range, including all your food, beverage, etc. We're not trying to be inhospitable, just practical. Of course, if the money is an issue for you personally we can work something out. We're going to play it by ear for the week previous, if you work your ass off we'll take care of you.

-- There was a lot of debate here at TBA about where people should sleep. I've mowed a big patch of grass atop our little hill for tents, and it should be possible to drive up there for those with RVs or vans or whatever. Assuming the party is based around the house I figured it'd provide a dry, though potentially breezy, place where people could sleep without being interrupted. If weather is horrible we can stay in the barn, it's water tight although the floor is harder. Beds in the house (we can sleep 8 including the air mattress) are reserved for people who need them. I'm excited to camp out, should be fun. If for some reason you'd prefer to stay nearby in a hotel, there are a few about 25 minutes away. Inquire with us if that is the case.

Things that need to be sorted out:

-- We have no idea how many people are coming, at this point we're guessing somewhere between 20 and 100. If you're coming, please let me or Becky know. If you're bringing people, please let us know. If you're bringing a dog please let us know. If you need a tent, or if you have extra room in a tent, let us know. If you need a sleeping bag or have an extra one, let us know. If you have any bizarre dietary restrictions, let us know.

-- We're going to eat some pork. How much depends on the head count. It's convoluted, but here's the gist. Stump's gotta go. She's growing slower than all the other pigs, and she's obviously not as worm proof. The original plan was to slaughter on 10/1, cure a ham, and eat that. That would necessitate a slaughter weight pig on 10/1 (225-300lbs according to personal preference, I'd like the higher side) where Stump will only be 150 lbs then, if she trends along her weight gain as she has for the last month. The other complicating factor is that I would like to get 6 months worth of pork for us from the same slaughtering event. We could put off Stump's slaughter until 10/28, when she'd be approx. 230 lbs., or the third option is to buy a whole other pig from someone else and slaughter it in addition. Point is, I need a head count, because the total consumption could range from Stump's hams to Stump entirely, and if we need another pig I'd like to buy it sooner than later. I could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say that being a small producer is more complicated.

Water Water, Here or There (but not both, and not when we want it)

2010-09-03T19:59:00.007-04:00

One of the first things the pigs did when we moved them to the pasture was root up a spring. And I mean, they didn't like, FIND a spring. One day there was a hill, and the next day, in the midst of the little tufts that pig rooting creates, there was a flowing spring, running down the hill. The pigs were very pleased with themselves. They line up and lay down with the cold water running under their bellies, head to tail, single file, like sausages. Which, of course, they are.

I was quite pleased with their spring discovery. Especially coming after the troublesome well problems that flared up out of the blue a couple weeks ago. Well, I figured, maybe we can just use the spring.
Except that it didn't flow all the time. Some days it was like a brook, and some days it was just a streak of mud.

Likewise, the well only worked sometimes. Perfect for days, and then all of a sudden -- no pressure. This was especially frustrating because we were trying to move the animals to a new watering system.This is the pig waterer. It is made out of an old tire filled with cement. The Big Man made it. There are apparently some more nuanced facets involved (I am being over-the-shoulder edited as we speak); perhaps the Big Man will elaborate for himself at some point. Anyway, the hope is that we can roll it around to wherever we have the pigs parked, plug 'er in, and the pigs will have fresh clean water. There is a similar contraption for the chickens, which is especially exciting because they tend to, erm, contaminate their water pretty quickly with all their...fertilizer. A couple problems so far. One is that the pigs are not really giving the chickens the appropriate and polite personal space that they need. First, they like to chase them. Second, they discovered that the dripping chicken waterers can be used to make all new wallows around the chicken coop. This results in a muddy patch full of happy pigs outside, and a bunch of riled up chickens squawking in the rafters inside.

Chickens to the left being herded by a piggo, pigs wallowing on the right.

And then the stupid boar figured out that he could go actually inside the chicken coop, tip over their hanging waterer and make a shady all-weather wallow! We hated him for a good hour, but he is just so goofy and cute, with his little man belly.

So we had to re-adjust some plans. Movable electro-netting fence is in the mail, for an impermeable pig-chicken barrier. More on that later.

As for the waterfowl and turkeys, they just drink a LOT. The one gallon waterer they have now lasts only for a couple hours. And the ducks need a deeper water source to keep their beaks clean and clear. All problems to be solved, ideas tested in the next couple weeks. They've been faring pretty well...they can come and go from their little pen, squiggling under the chicken wire in a herd, or flapping over it (turkeys) but the pigs don't think it worth the effort to get through to bother them.

The biggest complication being that sometimes the well flows. And sometimes the spring does. Never both at once. Always one or the other.

We have yet to figure out how, exactly, that works. But it is certainly annoying.

Picture Updates

2010-08-31T17:53:00.004-04:00

Whew, August is a busy time. Sincere apologies for the lapse in blogging; we will strive to do better. As it is, I only have a hot minute before dashing off to herd the chickens around, so just a few photos to show you what we've been up to.

The garden has really been keeping me hopping. Pounds and pounds of carrots, tomatoes, green beans and squash, all of which must be harvested and preserved. The occasional watermelon to satisfy our sweet teeth. A steady supply of lots more to keep us full and happy. And of course, the inevitable and steady supply of weeds. On weekends I enlist the geese to help with that.

We moved the chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys out to the pasture. We still chase the chickens in at dusk, so they get the message that nighttime is for sleeping inside, and not for being owl/coyote/whatever food outside. Although some of the roosters seem confused as to when nighttime ends...last night one woke me up at 3:00 flat. Not even a hint of daybreak then. Usually they hold out for a slightly more reasonable 5:07.

We currently have the turkey/geese/duck team inside a funny little chicken wire pen in the pasture, with a funny little stack of crates to serve as shelter/hangers. After they learn that this is where food and water are, we will free them to the Pasture at Large.

I had assumed that they would be so baffled and amazed to see that there was An Entire Other THING outside of the tub in the barn they had been brooding in for their entire lives, but this guy actually fell asleep as soon as I placed him in the actual world.

I was worried that he was sick or really shell shocked or something, but after a brief couple minutes of shut eye, he was happily poking about.

Other than that, we've been chugging along, enjoying the sky.

And feeling decidedly odd about some strange fleeting longings for fall and winter that have been flitting through my head...when we get to hunker down and eat soups from our canned garden bounty, and passively watch the world from inside, under a blanket instead of spending sweat and blood out in the thick of it all, moving dirt, water and stones to where we want them, politely disagreeing with where mother nature carelessly strew them about.

Pigs on Pasture

2010-08-15T20:53:00.004-04:00

After what must have been torturous weeks pining for the acres of green beyond their little pen, the piggos have found the promised land. A land flowing with burdock and goldenrod, where succulent slugs glisten in the sunlight and the market potential for wallow building is unlimited.

Nom nom nom.

I guess I thought that the freed porkers would happily frolic through the entirety of their new 4 acre pasture, perhaps scouting out the perimeter, meeting new neighbors, sampling the greens in each quadrant before settling in to really root about.

Instead, they have more or less used the pasture as a refrigerator. They hang out in front of the TV in their stall, eating cheap calories and sleeping in. Every couple hours they will scoot out for an hour or so of heavy browsing. Then, full and lazy, more Law and Order and mouthfuls of cheez-e corn puffs. Useless teenagers, every last one of them.

They are getting more adventurous, and I'm sure that they will fan out while still using the barn as a home base. Like, you know, college grads. Especially in this economy.

But of course, what they are doing is entirely prudent. The barn is what they know, it is where their food is, and their water is right outside. They are probably too smart for frolicking. Plus, the pasture is basically a jungle, nearly three feet over their heads. We can only tell where they are by how the greens wiggle. No wonder they still like to veg out in familiar territory.

And it is rather remarkable what they have done to their pen. It was the same overgrown pasture as the rest of our land, now empty for everything but burdock (they seem to like only the roots, so it takes a long time for them to kill them) and the larger bushes and trees. The rest is unearthed rocks, and 8 inches of loose, tilled soil.

It is making me fantasize about next years potentially pig-tilled garden.

Surprise! Projects are Generally Unwelcome

2010-08-11T21:43:00.003-04:00

One of the harder things about this whole farming thing so far is how many unexpected, unplanned-for misadventures pop up to wreak havoc on our beautifully well-laid plans. We had an extended, Big Man-sized weekend planned, which would have included cleaning out the hayloft, moving everybody into the pasture, and probably some well earned time swimming, deciding where the fruit trees will go, hunting tomatoes in the tomato hedge, and making gem sweaters in preparation for the winter, etc.

Instead, yesterday evening presented us with a disturbingly sick goose, a failing well pump in the barn, and a myriad of car problems to be dealt with ASAP.
We were not happy. There were blisters, and a panicked goose in the sink.The goose (so... I am bad at taking pictures of things I'm pretty sure will die, so there is no photo documentation of this event. If I am feeling devious and driven tomorrow, I will douse a goose in water until sad-looking and fill its lungs with death, and recreate the entire event for your edification) problem I think is mostly solved. A night was well-spent on the plant shelving in the guest room, in a plastic tub on a heating pad, in a little nest made of an old bath towel, and all seems to be well. Full re-integration is expected this weekend, after the goose has spent some timeout in the tamer, less wet turkey pen next to the now pool-equipped duck and goose habitat.

In celebration of the fact that the Half-Drowned Goose survived, the garden gave some exciting harvest. The first melon, the first artichoke.

What is going on with the barn well is a mystery. What is clear is that, after about a quart of water, the pressure plummets, and it takes FORTY-TWO MINUTES to fill up the pig water trough. Caveat to fixing this swiftly: we do not know where the well actually is. Some preliminary exploration has revealed an odd, gigantic piece of metal at the end of a PVC pipe. Is our barn water coming from an ancient underground cistern??? Only time will tell.

Thankfully, we did get a hecuva project done over the past few weekends. The six-strand electric fence to the First Pasture is up, connected, and operational. Now, if everything else will stop shamelessly throwing itself at us , perhaps we will have time to move everything into it.

Growing

2010-08-02T22:55:00.005-04:00

Things are getting bigger here at TBA Farms. The ducklings are football sized. The garden, helped in a large part by me not knowing that one could or should trim tomato plants, is a now a jungle garden. There are, in fact, snakes in there. Hopefully helpful snakes.

The garden one month ago

The garden now

Artichokes are currently the Most Fun Thing to watch grow.

The pigs are also growing:Except for Stump...more on her in a later post. The Big Man did some measuring of the pigs this weekend in an attempt to figure out their weights. He estimates the Big Pigs at 140 pounds, give or take, which I thought was quite respectable. The Big Man, however, lover of nothing more than a meaty slice of bacon, was unimpressed, so we now have them on a new food plan, wherein they have a constant supply of grain.
And soon (in a week!?) they will have FOUR WHOLE ACRES to roam. And eat. The fence building is going well -- we have all the posts in, and one of the six wires all hooked up.
Tensioning the wire is really difficult work, so it's a good thing that the Big Man's guns have also been growing.
I swear, he wasn't posing at all. This is just how tensioning the wire looks.

A Brief Introduction to the Barnyard Flock

2010-07-20T21:56:00.001-04:00

The new fluffs, warm box of which arrived last Friday morning.

And here they are in video form.

They are not much like the chicks. There are 2 geese -- huge fluffy, awkward guys, who mind their own business and try not to get in the way. Unless you are in the water pan. Then they will sit on your head. 5 ducks -- 4 yellow, one browny-yellow (there were also two black ones in the box, one DOA and one D shortly thereafter), who confound me by somehow using ALL the water in their waterer to bathe themselves, so that there is no drinking water for everyone else after about 2 hours. I think I fixed this problem, both with a larger, hanging waterer, and with supervised swim-time in a bucket in the barn when I'm feeding the pigs. I also give them the little layer cake pan to splash about in, sometimes, if it's very warm. And 7 turkey poults of various colors and kinds, who want nothing more than to investigate everything, get scooped up by whatever hand is the closest, and try to emulate the bathing ducks, but with waning interest and less success. These guys are fun. The chicks scrambled into corners in a wild, dusty, flapping panic every time a hand entered to feed them or otherwise, you know, bring them life; these guys basically just want to be friends. Not to pick favorites or anything.

A weekend off

2010-07-18T17:11:00.004-04:00

This was a weekend off. This means there were no big projects that we were tackling, no major overhauls or driving trips or barbecues to throw. I figured that I would be able to sit down with cool glass of Pinot and wax long and poetic about how productive, fun and amazing LAST weekend was, from the relaxing, lazy vantage point of THIS weekend.

But then, for some odd reason, I decided I needed to weed the garden. For seven hours. One thing led to another, and I also harvested eight cups of swiss chard, spinach and beet greens to freeze for the winter, ten pounds of turnips, five pounds of beets, enough cucumbers for four quarts of pickles and two heads of cabbage whose ultimate destination is as yet unknown. I ripped out bolted lettuces, which, when added to the weeds, produced 3 giant wheelbarrows full of greens for the pigs. I killed many slugs. I tied up tomatoes, tried to separate squash vines and melon vines, got a bit of a sunburn, found a toad and a snake and lots of spiders. I baked three loaves of bread, and gave the dog a bath.

If I go for the cool glass of Pinot I am fairly certain that I will nod off to sleep with dirty fingernails and write not a thing. So, here are some pictures.

Last weekend's big project involved 6 amazing and helpful guests, and beginning the fence for the first 4 acre pasture. This involved lots of equipment, lots of searching around in the chest-high brush for a tiny iron pin and lots of very well-deserved evening swims in the lake.

We also finished up some major projects, like building a chicken coop.

Out of, you know, whatever was laying around.

They like it, but they haven't quite figured out what the nesting boxes are yet. Or cameras. They don't get those either.

Fruits of this weekend's labor:

We also got some new barnyard additions. I would show you some pictures, but Big Man says they are too gross for human eyes. Plus I am too worn out to walk to the barn right now. I am instead mandating that the rest of the evening rely heavily on bad tv and excellent curry.

Just Makin' Stuff

2010-07-05T20:32:00.008-04:00

We have been busy. The Big Man has been almost exclusively dedicating his time and brain matter to the Puzzle of the Tractor's Hydraulic System...a puzzle that I get briefed on daily but, to be embarassingly honest, do not completely understand. There's valves, and leaks, and, you know, other such mysterious confusions. Hopefully there will soon be a triumphant post straight from the source, because it is pretty interesting. Even if you don't understand it entirely, and especially if you watched MacGyver.

I've been spending LOTS of time in the garden, and in post-garden processing. Turns out that once things are actually growing and making you food, you have to figure out what to do with them.We are absolutely buried in greens...which are somehow hanging on and not bolting, despite the 95 degrees of the last few days. I need to figure out something more than "salad" to do with them, because I am getting tired of salad. Sauteed salad?

The cucumbers are just starting, but with quite a wallop; every time I go out to poke at something I find 7 pickling cucumbers I hadn't noticed that need picked.

So I've been eating many cucumbers, some of which I turn into lightly pickled experiments and foist upon unsuspecting visitors.

We've also been moving along on a number of other "now we make this ourselves" fronts. We have a lot of beer floating around, in various stages of done.

We have a wheat beer and a not-hoppy-enough IPA in the fridge and in our tummies:

We have a dunkelweisen hanging out in bottles in a dark picture-proof corner, carbonating itself. It should be ready to test this weekend.

And we have a belgian tripel and a super hoppy brew (and some wine in the white bucket, too):

Tonight we bottled the Belgian, which involves mostly a lot of cleaning. Clean the bottles, clean the hose, siphon the beer into bottles, cap them, clean them, clean the hose, clean the now empty carboy. The Big Man moves the bottles so fast!

Tonight we started a new batch of beer, a pale ale. Making beer is like making tea, and also like making bread.

Steeping grains, steeping hops, boiling for a long time. And then moving it into a carboy, adding some yeast, and waiting for the yeast to do its magical yeast things.

The beer is worth waiting for. So are the tiniest, cutest watermelons.

Running Up That Hill

2010-06-23T18:57:00.010-04:00

I am afraid to maybe jinx this, but screw fate: I think Stump is going to pull through.

My Sunday post was a little optimistic; we had just received a probable diagnosis, which felt really good. But really, by Sunday, her hips weren't just little points that stuck up on her back, you could see them swooping down her sides. You could count ribs from 20 feet away, and her general pathetic listlessness was getting worse. By Monday I was asking the Big Man what I should do with her body were I to find her dead, and by Tuesday [spoiler alert: I am not a good farmer] I was sitting on the floor of the barn with Stump, drinking an "I am completely distraught and out of my element" beer, having a good cry about the painfully short life she got and trying to work out my feelings of general inadequacy.

Last night I left her locked alone inside, with 2 quartered apples, a pile of rice pudding, some peanuts, a peanut butter/pepto bismol mix, and a pot full of water mixed with pedialyte and red gatorade (the result of a hilarious conversation with a Rite Aid employee). And, miraculously, this morning, the food and drink was mostly gone. I let her out for the day to socialize and forage. This evening after work, I separated her again (she knows to follow me up to the barn after I dump feed for the others; I'd been giving her a few alone hours with special food for a week or so now), gave her some rice pudding and apples, and watched in awe as she ravenously devoured them. It was likely more food than she'd had in a week, gone in 15 minutes flat. I dumped more food in, and when I came back in an hour she was still eating (in the past she would have been too tired after 10 minutes, and I would have found her asleep under a pile of straw).

So, I am exhaling a preliminary "phew".

The new pigs, meanwhile, have emerged from under their thorn bush, but are not yet ready to be friends.

And, in answer to some queries, a brief garden tour:

This is the garden. The white, kaaba-looking structure is for the delicate, delicate eggplants.

Greens. Turns out, I planted too many. Salad is now a requisite with every meal. This is only about a third of them.

Leeks, with cauliflower behind, potatoes to the left, and tomatoes/cucumbers to the right.

Melons! I did an experiment. The ones with black plastic under them are about 2x bigger and infinitely less munched-upon than the ones without. Remember this.

We planted both onions from sets and onions from seed. These are the ones from sets; about 15 inches tall. The ones from seed look like the tiniest blades of grass. But, sets are supposedly more vulnerable to disease, more expensive, and less varieties are available.

Celery. This picture is for my grandmother, all the other ladies that give me a pitying, eyebrows up look when I mention that I'm growing celery, and the 1976 How to Garden book that quoth "Even the most experienced of gardeners do not deign to attempt celery" with no explanation as to why. Because of you, I am expecting this entire row to sink into the earth or become covered in locusts any day now.

Corn plot, with squash scattered throughout, and a slug trap (coffee mug full of beer) in the middle. Slugs, man. So far, my Most Wanted enemy.

Not pictured: broccoli, turnips, radishes, potatoes, thai basil, the herb garden, peas, beans, the garlic plot and brussels sprouts, winter squash, all of which are marvelous, as well as peppers that look boring still and won't grow quickly, carrots that won't germinate, zucchini which for some absurd reason I am the only gardener that might not have enough because WHY WON'T YOU POKE OUT OF THE GROUND, blah blah blah, life is full of disappointments.

New Pigs and Pictures

2010-06-20T13:42:00.005-04:00

Yesterday we picked up 3 more piggos, two Tamworth cross ladies and a Large Black Hog boar. So far they've done nothing but hide together in the far corner of the paddock under the thorn bush. That's ok; they need some time to get used to their new area and their new pen-mates. They seem to have bonded together pretty quickly.

When we were picking up the pigs, we asked the farmer, Tim, about poor Stump, who has only been getting bonier and more pathetic over the past week. He said immediately: "Worm 'em." Right on the spot he gave the three new pigs a deworming shot and showed us how to do it, and he also sent us home with a syringe and enough dewormer for Stump and the two others, who probably have worms too but aren't showing it. All the farmers we've met so far have been incredibly helpful and supportive. Tim actually offered to drive the hour and fifteen minutes to our place when it's time for us to castrate in the spring, to help out and show us how he does it.

It was easy to give Stump the shot, although she did put up a little protest. The other two, however, at about 70 incredibly muscley pounds, took quite a lot of effort to flip over and pin down. They were not pleased. If you've never heard a pig scream, it's pretty difficult to describe. It is the noise, perhaps, for which the term "ear-splitting" was invented, because it actually feels like something in your eardrum is shattering. They put up a big fuss, but after they get the shot they just stand right back up like it was no big deal. Which, of course, it wasn't. So hopefully little bag-of-bones Stump is on the road to recovery...we shall see.

As for Little Man, he healed up good and got chucked back in the brooder with the others on Friday. Even though he's still got some scabs, no one seems to be bothering him at all, and he seems glad to be back.

It is a hot day today. So hot, that Spotbellied spent some time trying to fit herself into their water tub.

So the Big Man dug them a little wallow...

which they really enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the garden is looking good...it's already time to hill the potatoes, my cucumbers and cantaloupe have blossoms, the tomatoes have buds, and the brassica family (cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and brussels) are getting gigantic. I harvested a big bowl of mesclun this morning, along with some garlic scapes and herbs.

Potatoes in the front row, leeks, cauliflower and tiny turnips in the row behind, tomatoes and cucumbers in the back.

This evening, when it (hopefully!) cools off a bit, we're going to finish the trellis in the back row for the cukes, tomatoes, beans and peas.

Stump and Little Man Need Chicken Soup and Daytime TV

2010-06-14T20:44:00.006-04:00

I was going to write a semi-triumphant post about the garden; about how I diagnosed a hungry nighttime enemy and how beer, glorious beer helped me to strike a strong blow in favor of squash leaves and bean leaves everywhere while racking up dozens of slimy bodies that I ruthlessly piled into a mass grave... but unfortunately my evening chores focused instead on a sick lady and a sick little man, and I have only pictures of them to post, so the garden will have to wait for another day (sigh).

First up is Stump.

This is Stump.

The way the piglets were until last week was this: there was the biggest and most beautiful, Spotbellied. There was Stump, whose tail was half gone and who has a thick coat of red fur, no spots and is kind of oddly shaped, but (as it so often goes) has the most personality. And there was Little, who had some spots and a nice shape, but was, you know, very little. Then all of a sudden Little was huge. And Spotbellied was huge. And Stump was not.

Hams! Actual thick, delicious hams, walking around!

Stump has no hams.

It was hard to tell if Stump had gotten smaller or if the other two had just taken off. I spent a lot of time watching them together, and it is true that when i dumped food out for them, Stump tired of gobbling quickly and would wander over to poke about at me, at the ground, at the water. None of this is particularly worrisome, just a sign that Stump is perhaps not the best grower.

Then I noticed some troubling poop. I hear that new parents talk a lot about their baby's poops (is this true? I have it from several sources.), and I think it must be evolution. Poop is full of information. I have been closely monitoring Stump's poop this week to get a handle on the situation, and so far, it is clear that there are no (unmicroscopic) worms involved, but there is sometimes certainly a lack of, shall we say, structure. I thus took it upon myself to clean out and hose down the entire indoor pig stall last night at 9 PM. The girls are now living outside round the clock (I figure more room, more air and more sunshine can only help the situation). I let Stump in for a special her-only feeding session in the evenings. She seems to prefer chicken feed to anything else these days.

It is also awesome to note, that even though the other two are MUCH larger than she is, she can still scare both of them off if she wants a minute at the feed when they are around. I don't know how she can manage, but she kicks ass.

Then, there is this guy:

Little Man.

His problem is not so big, I think. The chicks have been getting feathers, which looks like it must be uncomfortable or something [spoiler alert: I know nothing about chickens. But the way they fuss over their grown-up feathers reminds me of kids getting adult teeth, and it is awkward enough looking to seem slightly painful], and Little Man here seems to have pulled out a few big ones (or someone else did...case still open), leaving an open wound on his wing. And, here's the crazy thing about chickens: all the other ones just want to peck at it. This I did not know (although I suspected), so I brought him up to the house to clean him up a bit, then dumped him back in the brooder, only to see several other chicks start pecking at his bloody bits. So now he is spending the night in a remote location (a/k/a the kitchen table), where he can hopefully mend up before being thrown back in with the horrible, cannibalistic chickens.

The Hospital Wing/Wing Hospital

The thing that keeps me from worrying in both cases is that Stump and Little Man are both still acting completely normally. They have energy, they have (at least some) appetite. I will be nervous when Stump decides not to come nuzzle at me, or not to somehow fight off the comparatively gigantic pigs at the food pile. Or when Little Man doesn't cheep and run around his little convalescent tub when I intrude to refill his water.

So for now we wait, we watch, we segregate a bit, and we be a little more gentle with these two. We'll see.

We only buy things that match our piglets.

2010-06-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

We have purchased a tractor. It was a months long process finding the right one, but so far I am pleased with my ultimate decision.

We wanted a tractor with the following attributes:
Power steering (so it'd be easy to drive on our hilly terrain)
Diesel engine (so we can run it on WVO in the warm months)
Three Point Hitch (so we can use implements)
Power Take Off (so we can use implements that spin)
55+ Horsepower at the PTO (so we can use bigger implements)
A loader/bucket (so we can move shit around that isn't on wheels)

Basically, we need a tractor that is useful in the front and useful in the back. Since we're only going to have one, it needs to wear many hats. A tractor with these qualities is not cheap, I see them on Craig's List for anywhere from $4,000 to $12,000, depending on age, condition, ego, etc. I wanted to spend under $4,000, we have a $10K budget this year for farm/house improvements and it needs to go a long way. We've been going to auctions and I've been religiously checking Craig's List and Ebay within a 2 hour radius, and many machines have slipped through my fingers. At the auctions I'd been the second highest bidder on half a dozen tractors, but my price was firm. Last weekend I went to an auction and bid on an International 674, it was pretty beat up but it had a loader. The tractor ended up selling for $3,500 (I bid up to $3,250.) When it was up, and I had lost, a fellow approached me and said he had an International 574 for sale, but it didn't have a loader. I took his information and went on my way.

The thing about our list of desired attributes is that all of them are inherent to the machine, you can't increase horsepower, you can't add a PTO if the machine doesn't have one, etc. All of them but a loader, that is. Loaders were made at the time both by OEMs (original equipment manufacturers, Ford making loaders for Ford tractors) and by aftermarket companies (Bethlehem Steel making loaders for J. I. Case.) There were also, as can be expected, homebrew loaders, and everything in between. Some loaders can bolt right on to some tractors, and pretty much any loader can be modified to fit pretty much any tractor with enough patience and money, although some might look pretty silly. The other thing is that most of the time the parts cost more than the whole, Loader + Tractor > Tractor that comes with a loader. If I could find a cheap loader that could fit this 574 then it'd be a good buy.

I went through Craig's List and Ebay again and happened upon a nice loader, at the time it was only $10.50. The more I looked at it the more I liked it. The construction is quite rigid, there's plate steel between a pipe frame, whereas many other loaders only have the pipe frame. The bucket tilts and has down pressure (some buckets are a trip style, where the bucket is fixed in one position but you can pull a lever to make it dump it's load, then you have to bring it down to the ground to reset it. Other buckets have hydraulic tilt, but instead of using the hydraulic pressure to push the bucket down they just let gravity do the job. The nice thing about a tilt bucket with down pressure is that if you ever get a flat tire you can use the loader to jack up the front end.) This bucket came off of an International, so while the front brackets may not be perfect, the general fit will be correct. The auction was up at 10 PM on a Wednesday, and as of then I had not seen the tractor. I took my chances and bid on it, thinking worst case I could resell it or even scrap it and recoup the price.

I ended up winning the loader for $220, and on Friday I bought the tractor for $2,850, delivered to our door. The tractor had belonged to the seller's father, who passed away recently. The seller had 5 Ford tractors and wanted to keep it that way. I had to put a new battery in it and rewire the starter, which is pretty minimal. It has a few small hydraulic leaks and a coolant leak but I hope to ferret them out in the coming weekends. All in all, not bad for a 40 year old machine. Johnson's aunt can hopefully haul the loader up here from southern PA and we'll be in business. The immediate tractor projects, fence post digging and brushhogging, are not loader related anyway.