Farm Friday

This week has been much slower than previous weeks, due to the fact that we have finished all of our planting. Now we are simply keeping everything watered and weeded. Our green beans are beginning to produce, but otherwise there has been nothing of note.

Have a great weekend,
Sherlock

Farm Friday

I'm happy to be blogging tonight after surviving the hottest week so far this year; the daytime temperatures this week were all in the mid-90s.  With that said, the broiler chicks are very comfortable, and we're not having any more trouble with wet soil.  In fact, I set up our drip irrigation system today.

Our garden consists of 8 60' rows that are 4 feet wide, with 2' paths in between.  Drip irrigation makes watering the garden as simple as filling up a barrel.  We have a 55 gallon barrel, uphill from our garden, which is fitted with a pipe, valve, and filter.  Two header lines run out of the filter and along one side of the garden.  At each bed the header is fitted with one or two 'T' fittings which allow us to connect the driplines.  The driplines themselves are basically just hoses with holes in them, but they are designed to flow evenly and resist clogging.  The lines run the length of the bed and are tied off at the ends.  To water the garden we simply fill the barrel with water and open the valve, and we can calculate how much water we wish to apply.

In the pasture, we have planted popcorn and Southern peas inside a goat-resistant fence (I've learned not to say goat-proof, it's an oxymoron).  We also have some buckwheat planted in the hoophouse as a cover crop and green manure.

This isn't exactly farm-related, but I noticed what seems to be a geological phenomenon in one of our ditches.  This ditch is cut down to the stone underneath, which is sedimentary and really soft.  Normally, the layers run horizontally, but as I was walking by today I noticed a section that is positioned vertically.  I don't see an explanation, because there is horizontal layering on either side, but it's interesting. The first picture shows normal layers, and the second is an overhead shot of the vertical layers.

Tomorrow I'll be selling at the farmers' market for Birdsong Community Farm, so stop by if any of you are passing through. =)

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock

$ 4 txting

As I drove home tonight from a long day of hard, sweaty work in the fields, I was listening to NPR news, as is my wont.  I know that it's liberal, but there isn't any music on the radio fit to listen to. The van was just beginning to cool down to a reasonable 90 degrees when I heard the story: a 15 year old girl has won $50,000 in the national texting championship.  Now, I'm so far behind the technological curve that I can't even see the curve, so it is needless to say that I found it surprising that a championship exists for pressing phone buttons.   

I get paid well for the work I put in, but I'm afraid I would have to work for quite some time before I earned 50 grand.  When I first heard the story, I thought that perhaps I should take up texting as my new career.  Then I remembered that I'm 18 and have only sent 5 text messages before, so I decided that we need to prevent discretion against luddites and create a new championship- one that I would have a chance at. 

*drumroll*  

I reveal here, for the first time ever, my plans for the National Tomato Planting Contest.  I'm still looking for a sponsor to provide the $50K prize, but this contest could be BIG.  Televised, even.  The event would take place next spring, at select farms in our area, and would involve a few rounds of planting tomato transplants.  The contestants must dig the holes, throw in some compost and lime, plant the tomatoes, and water them.  Then, we wait a few weeks to check survivability, compare the survival rate and times, and narrow down the contestants with more rounds until there is a winner.  After it's all over, the farmers provide our community with lots of tomatoes. Not only do we have fun wasting money and competing, but after it's over there is a useful result!   

Farm Friday

This week was a productive one here at the farm, with enough dry weather to get our work done and enough rain to help our seeds to germinate. Everything has been planted now, so we're (very optimistically) looking forward to some summer lettuce, corn, green beans, tomatoes, winter squash, melons, summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, okra, eggplant, popcorn, and black-eyed peas.

My second round of broiler chicks arrived this morning and have settled happily into the brooder.

They can be quite the gluttons 8)

I thought I would add a little education to this post, so I won't be offended if you fall asleep. A large part of the difficulty in creating new pasture is a natural process called ecological succession. Simply put, when land is abandoned, it reverts to it's natural state. Where we live, the land tries to revert to forest; all of this area was solid forest at one time. Thus, in order to create pasture we must move succession backwards, which is always time consuming. Our pasture was planted to crops at one time, then around 30 years ago it was in pasture. It was then abandoned and followed the normal succession for this area: grass>leafy weeds>woody brush>trees. All of these stages can be seen on our land, and even where we have grass there are still some weeds- but the sheep will take care of those.

Grass (a very nice patch, of course:)

Leafy Weeds

Woody Brush

The picture below is a good example of what our farm is like right now. You can see that the woody brush begins as soon as our garden ends; we are still very much in a pioneer stage of taming the land and making it useful. We plan on expanding the garden into that brushy area, which was part of the woods last fall.

I also wanted to mention a documentary (which we have been looking forward to for quite some time) called Food, Inc. The movie includes interviews and commentaries with real-food heroes like Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, and Eric Schlosser, and sets out to reveal the truth about our industrial food system. I look forward to seeing how widespread a reception it gets, as it brings a message which needs to be spread. It has now been released, unfortunately only in a few large cities. Tell everyone whom you know that eats!

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock

Goodbye Goats

Our experience with goats here at Windy Creek Farm started before we even lived on this land. We used our brush goats to clear the pasture in order to clear it for planting to grass (and they do love brush), and to keep it clear as the grass grew. Fortunately Unfortunately, it is time for them to go. They have been causing problems and the pasture doesn't really need them anymore. It's not that I have a problem with goats in general, but lately my goats and I just haven't been able to get along.

The goats wander the whole pasture, including the areas where I move the chicken pens. Goats absolutely love chicken feed. This makes chores difficult, because as soon as I set a bucket down there are at least three goat heads stuck into it. They're even rude enough to stick their heads into the buckets while I'm carrying them. Now, that just gets my goat.

Besides that, they are rough on the chicken pens. Goats get itchy, and they love to rub against the chicken wire on the walls of the pens. As a result, the chicken wire often stretches and comes loose, making repairs necessary. Direct assaults have taken place as well; just a few days ago, the goats broke into the hen pen and ate the feed. The chickens got out, of course, and half of them were killed or eaten by an as yet unknown predator. This dropped my egg production from 12 to 4 per day.

Abigail, whom we bottlefed, was terribly spoiled as a child, and she shows it. She should have been named Nellie. She's small enough to jump out of the fence, and just today she found the garden delightful. She nibbled, more or less destructively, on the beans, corn, and lettuce. I'm sure that she will enjoy her new home at Pa Paw's house- he has a great goat fence.

Worms have been a constant worry with goats until this year. We lost all of last year's kid crop to barberpole worms, a particularly virulent type, but this year the goats have stayed healthy. We did lose one goat kid recently; somehow it strayed onto the county road and was run over.

These are the reasons for selling the goats. All of them will be sold as soon as the kids are weaned, except for our milk goats Patty and Dixie, whom I have not yet convinced my mother to sell. With the goats leaving, we plan to replace them with a more polite, refined animal: sheep. I hope they live up to their reputation.