Terrabyte Farm

Spring has come fully to our farm. Everything is in bloom and the trees are just about to change from the fuzzy green of new buds to the fully leafed out splendor that will let us know summer is on its way. We are finally beginning our transition from the constant influx of new animals, new plants, massive projects to the daily maintenance of what we have. It is nice to be switching gears, the last few months have been intense to say the least.

Over the last week week we have been very busy with lots of little tasks. Here is a rundown:

Turkeys:
Jackson and I finally moved our two mother turkeys to find that the ten eggs they were brooding a few weeks ago were down to only two; one that was clearly spoiled and one with a partially hatched chick. We don’t know what happened to the other eggs, our best guess is that maybe the baby pigs ate them during one of their breakouts or some sort of predator got to them. We cleaned up the turkeys nest and dismantled it and the tom got busy right away mating with the hens, so we will try again to raise turkey poults. This time we will probably take half the eggs and put them under one of our broody hens to hatch in the coop. The turkeys stay in the barn which is less of a controlled space.

On that note, I think we will feel like we have moved up a level as farmers once we have seen an animal through its entire process, from mating, through gestation, to birth, and then to either butchering or mating again. We have mated the rabbits again, so they might be our first fruitful attempt. It is hard enough keeping baby animals alive, but breeding them as well adds another layer of difficulty. I sometimes think about if we had to not only raise our own meat, but also were completely reliant on breeding and not able to go online an order whatever we want from the hatchery or get an animal from craigslist what we would do.

Meat chicks:

Speaking of difficult to raise baby animals, our meat chicks and turkeys are on a bit of a suicide run. We have moved all of the latest set of turkeys, chicks, ducks, and geese out to the coops. The ducks and geese are in our old chicken coop, and the meat birds and male RI Reds are in one half of the brooder while the pullets are in the other. The meat chicks have been piling up on each other, every few days I got out in the morning to find one dead on the bottom of the pile. I have checked their heat lamp, and it is warm enough, plus they always have access to food and water. They seem emotionally disturbed. The pullets (which are all heritage breeds, not the genetic cross breeds that the meat chicks are) all behave like nice normal baby chicks. One explanation could be in their odd breeding, our favorite author, High Fearnley-Whittingstall has a new book that we just got called The Meat Book, which is wonderful and talks a lot about meat production in the UK and US. Apparently, these suicide piles are fairly common with the commercial breeds of chicken as they are completely and utterly stupid. Needless to say, as nice as it is to get a 4-5lb chicken in just 6-8 weeks, we will not be getting this type of bird again, but will stick to the tried and true heritage breeds. What do we care if it takes 12-16 weeks to get the chicken to its proper weight?

We also butchered the last seven meat chicks from our previous set.  I boned them, froze the breasts, and made an Italian sausage with smoked paprika that was very tasty.  I promise to do a blog post on the cost of raising chickens very soon.

Cows:

Our two cows are still pregnant. Their sisters had their calves last week, so it really could be any day now. They are first-time mothers, so like with humans, it typically takes a little longer. Every morning I run out to the barn to see if we have any additions, but nothing yet. Dexters are the best birthing cows, sometimes having a human around actually makes things worse, so we are trying to just let the heiffers do their thing. If we don’t have calves in a week, we may call a vet around for an ultrasound.

Mother’s Day:

We had a lovely Mother’s day. The kids and Mike made me breakfast, and then we went and completely mucked out the cows stall. It was my present to them, if they do decide to birth in there, I want it to be completely clean and tidy. We also did some general organizing in the barn. Mike and Jackson helped me plant a nice big herb bed out front and we used some of our rocks to make a stone wall. We also went to Manchester and had pizza dinner with my parents at our favorite pizza place.

Plants and Garden:

The garden is really coming along. The kids and I planted 50 ft rows of greens (lettuce, chard, spinach, etc), root crops (carrots, beets, turnips, etc), peas, onions and shallots, and an additional three 50 ft rows of potatoes. The strawberries and asparagus we planted last month are all doing well and getting big. We also have been fertilizing and mulching all of our fruit trees and berry bushes, we are almost done with that task. They all look good, only a handful of things aren’t leafing out or blooming and considering we have well on one hundred plants that we put in, I think that is pretty good. We expect some losses, but right now it doesn’t look like we have many.

One funny story is about the garlic we planted lat fall. I had ordered garlic to put in, not knowing if we would be moving or not. We moved it with us from Manchester to here and it sat in the garage for a while. One day I finally decided to plant it and dug a bed out of the way of where we wanted to put other things. This was last November, a little late to be putting in garlic. The ground was IMPOSSIBLE to dig, like digging through gravel. I know we had rocky soil, but this was crazy. I planted the garlic and then covered it with a wheel barrel full of rabbit manure and hay. Well, this spring, amazingly, everything sprouted. I was telling my neighbor about it, and she said that I had planted my garlic bed square in the middle of the old farm cart path!!! I really was digging through gravel. The rest of our soil is rocky, but more like great big granite boulders than little pea gravel. The garlic looks great, so hopefully we will get a good crop. We have about 100 plants, so it should be plenty for us to eat and save some for next year.

We have had a massive failure in our attempt to grow seedlings this year.  We had put our newly spouted seeds out on the porch for some good sun and they got blown over by the wind.  I think the universe is trying to send me a sign.  We will hopefully be putting up our grow tunnel in the next few weeks, I plan to start some herb seeds and maybe get in a fall crop of veggies.  I went to a few local nurseries to buy tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc to plant.  I am happy to support these small family owned ventures and also, the plants looked great.  Hopefully by this weekend they will all be in the ground.

Cooking:

We have been eating more wild food, this week it was nettles.  We made nettle soup and then creamed settles that we turned into a cheesy nettle dip.  We have tons of nettles growing along the edge of our barn, they will sting pretty badly, but if you wear gloves when you cut them you are fine.  Then, wash them well and boil them and the sting goes away.  You can treat them just like you would spinach in a recipe and they are very good for you and very delicious.  We also got asparagus from this local grower, it will be a few years before we can harvest the asparagus we planted as it needs to establish itself first.  I will be making roasted asparagus and and asparagus frittata.

Upcoming:

This weekend we will be getting two packages of bees for our two hives (delayed from last week due to the slow hatching of the bees).  We will also take our two pigs to the butcher and bring home to angora goats, Flora and her neutered brother Clem.  Hopefully they will make short work of all of the prickers in the fields and around the edges of the property.  Plus, we will get two lovely fleeces from each goat/year.  We will be watching our seedlings emerge and starting to check out some of the local farmers markets which will be starting up in the next few weeks.  We got another set of chicks as well, our last set of chicks for this year.  I am getting some Dark Cornish that I plan to cross with our other breeds for meat as well as some Leghorns for the superior egg production and Blue Cochins for their wonderful mothering instincts.