Guineas and Gardens

After all these years, I still have two guinea fowl - both males.  They seldom roost with the chickens, and prefer to sleep in the rafters of the barn.  They make funny whistles and squeaks when I disturb them on my way to close the chicken coop and do my nightly animal checks.  They keep an eye on things around the farm, and Wendigo knows to be alert when the guineas sound the alarm.  My parents are currently raising fifteen guinea keets.  I can't wait to hear them all sounding the alarm at the same time - they are going to make such a racket!  

I'm enjoying the herb spiral near the back door this year.  I forced myself to do some weed management, and I think the plants are enjoying a little elbow room.  The milkweed is dominating the spiral, and I counted over twenty stems, all from that single transplant a few years ago.  I was complaining to a friend that the milkweed was taking over the herbs and turning my spiral into a butterfly garden and he reminded me that it has "weed" in its name for a reason!  

But look, the oregano is holding it's own amidst the forest of milkweed stems.  There's also a volunteer black locust tree that I keep cutting off and letting send up new shoots.  I transplanted some dill from the greenhouse to the very tip of the spiral, and it's getting ready to bloom.  Monarchs love the milkweed and swallowtails love the dill.  I should probably rename the herb spiral the butterfly spiral after all.  

Look, Mom, the lemon balm I transplanted from your garden is really taking off!  The mint is doing pretty good too.  Wouldn't it be nice if the whole spiral was perennial plants, and they came back thick enough to choke out the weeds?  

I pulled all the weeds from the row of green beans in the summer garden.  You can hardly see the bean plants, but they are there, just to the left of the row of mustard greens.  It's past time to harvest mustard greens.  I guess I know what I'll be cooking for dinner!  

I planted onion bulbs in two different areas in the garden.  I asked Brandon yesterday if he could remember what animal stall we emptied onto the north side of the garden, because the onions in that area are three times the size of the other onions.  We think it was really thick goat bedding,  Whatever it is, the plants love it!  

The spaghetti squash and zucchini are also in this part of the garden, and they are thick and dark green.  I put tomato cages, on their sides, over the planted seeds to keep the chickens from scratching them up, and now the plants have grown so much I can't get all the cages up without pulling up the plants!  Doh!  

I managed to get a sunburn on the back of my legs and the top of my feet yesterday while I messed around making a garden fence out of tomato cages.  I used some pieces of deck railing that we salvaged from a friend, and sort of wove the cages together and made a big circle, that's open in one spot for access to the center of the circle.  In theory, chickens can not get to the inside of the circle.

I dumped bedding from the chicken coop into the cages, to suppress weeds, and planted about thirty feet of green beans just on the inside of the circle.  My hope is that the beans will climb the wall of cages, and we can pick from outside and inside the circle.  I didn't stake the cages down, so I anticipate the whole thing being knocked over by a wind, or a goat.  I can't say that I wasn't warned, huh?  

Working on Compost and Sweet Potatoes

 "Should we go work on the compost?" asked Brandon. With those words, I fell in love all over again. 

As Brandon says, everything we want to do requires at least three other things be done first.  The donkey dung is piling up in the donkey fence, which isn't good for fly management.  

Before I can collect it and add it to the compost bin, the finished compost needs to be moved to the garden.  Before it's moved to the garden, I need to figure out where it should go.  

The garden is finally taking the shape that I've been hoping for.  It's early days yet, but we have the first tier of the terraces I would like for this slightly sloped garden space.  To create the terrace, we used old lumber on the downhill side and placed it on edge, to be a retaining wall.  Behind that short retaining wall we piled compost and old hay to make a flattish terrace.  Do you see the row of sweet potatoes?  

Mom and I have both been collecting sweet potatoes and letting them sprout.  I realize it's a bit early for a warm season crop, but I couldn't resist and planted all the sweet potatoes in a long row parallel to the retaining wall.  A few feet behind that, I planted a row of green beans.  I didn't use up all my seeds so I can replant if necessary.  

Look how many tiny sweet potato slips grew on this one!  I had a small tray with several potatoes soaking in shallow water.  It worked wonders to make lots of slips.  

We didn't cover the sweet potato slips with compost, like I planned, but instead buried them in the old hay and used the compost to start the next terrace.  Now I can collect up all the donkey's hard work and make the next batch of compost for the garden.  I recently read that donkey dung was one of the best kinds to use for the garden, because something about the donkey digestion (high acid?) kills all the weed seeds.  Unlike cow dung.  Cool.  I knew those donkeys were pros at their job!  

All About Animals

A friend of mine met a great Pyrenees dog recently, and he was told that it weighed a hundred a fifty pounds!  Oh my.  Wendigo recently had a trip to the vet to be spayed, and at just over six months old, she weighed forty-eight pounds.  She has the sweetest nature, thank goodness, because she is a lot of dog already.  She loves to be loved, and seems happy to let Puck take the lead, even though he barely reaches her knees.  She has a nice deep bark that's she's learning to use when cars pull into the driveway or anything out of the ordinary happens that she thinks we should know about.   

Another friend of mine said he thought of me when he was watching Charlette's Web with his kids. All those animals in the same barn brought to mind our little barn, crammed full of fuzzy animals.  I like that comparison.  The animals in Charlette's barn seemed happy with their home.   I like the picture above because I can see the goats in the distance, the donkey in his stall, my pretty white farm puppy, and some of my flock, all interested in my work of cleaning dirty bedding from the goat stall.  The chickens, in particular, really understand how exciting it is to have cart loads of urine soaked hay for the garden compost.  Thank you goats!

Do you get bored with so many posts and pictures about my animals?  I scrolled through my recent blog posts, and I realize how much I dwell on my new animal friends.  But, so much of my free time and though it dedicated to figuring out how to keep them happy and healthy, that it's what's on my mind, in my photo album, and what spills into this journal.  There are other aspects to my life, I'm sure, I just can't remember what they are right now because I'm... awe.... look at Rufus!  He looks like he's meditating.

When I sat down on the ground to join his meditations, he laid down and stretched is face toward me so I could pick a bur from his cheek.  I've never laid down with a donkey before, have you?

Hello, Peaches.  You're looking stylish with your fancy sheep halter.  She loves her halter because it means she gets to come outside of the fence and eat fresh weeds and grass.  

I've started letting the River boys come out of the pasture while I have Peaches on a leash.  So far, they stick near Peaches and I, and when it's time to go back to their stall they follow us right in.  On their first day Wendigo was so excited that they were free that she wouldn't stop jumping up and down near them trying to entice them to play.  They didn't want to play, and Dark River rammed her in the side.  It wasn't until I saw her go sprawling in the grass that I remembered that she recently had surgery, and getting rammed by a goat was probably on the list of things I wasn't supposed to let her do.  She had to get rammed once more before she started taking them seriously, but I think she's figured out that if she will stay seated or lay down, the goats calm down and ignore her.  She sometimes learns things the hard way, but at least she learns, right?  

Rufus is the Cutest

Isn't Rufus adorable?  I know everybody thinks their donkey is the cutest donkey, but I really think my donkey might actually be the cutest of them all.  

He's got the softest nose.  And the fuzziest face.  And, he takes a good selfie!  

His teeth are a little scary sometimes, but even though I continue to get warnings from people about how mean an intact male donkey can be, he's never tried to hurt me.  He's still very young though.  The good thing about a donkey is that they show all their emotion with their ears, so I can tell when he gets wound up or nervous.  I saw him bite Peaches right on the face when she was being obnoxious and sticking her face in his pen and crying for his food.  He tucked his ears flat against his head, tucked his tail between his back legs, and grabbed her whole snout in his teeth and pulled hard.  She cried.  She also stopped being so obnoxious.  

The goats and the donkey all hang out together in the barn, but I always keep the gate between their stalls closed, and they take turns with the pasture.  Most of the time, if Rufus has his freedom to roam, he hangs near the barn with the goats, and they do the same thing.  Only twice have they all been together without a fence separating them, and both times Rufus chased the goats into the barn while they ran for their lives and cried.  I'm not sure what his motives are.  I think he just enjoys chasing them, but they don't seem to enjoy being chased!  For now, we follow the good fences make good neighbors policy.  

Since we only have one fenced in pasture right now, our workday routine is for the goats to have their door open to the pasture as I leave for work, and then Rufus gets his door open when I get home and the goats get shut in and fed some hay for dinner.  This allows Rufus all evening, night, and early morning to graze, and the goats can graze during the day, which is usually when Rufus is snoozing in the shade anyway.  Whenever I feel sorry for Rufus locked in his stall, I remind myself that his stall is a similar size to my office, and I don't even have a window!  We have plans to build a dedicated yard so he has more room when he's put up, and also have plans for him to have a donkey buddy too.  It's a good thing he's patient.    

What a belly!  I don't know why I was worried that giving him wormer would be hard to do.  He was calm when I squirted the apple flavored worm medicine on his tongue, and didn't try to spit it out.  I read that a wormy donkey will look pot bellied.  Maybe I should give him a second dose!

There are some advantages to sharing the pasture like he's doing with the goats.  Apparently, goat parasites are not the same as donkey parasites.  And the parasites are deposited on the grass in the manure.  If they both eat the grass, they will eat each others parasites and reduce each others exposure.  Gross.  Also, keeping Rufus put up during the day means that it's super easy to collect his manure for the garden, since he leaves it in the stall instead of out in the field.  I was bragging to a work friend about how great it is to get an entire scoop of manure everyday for my garden compost, and he said "You are so weird."  He has no idea!

The Garden Fence and Compost Bravery

I like to find lady bugs in the garden.  They are promoted as being good insect predators, but unfortunately they only eat soft bodied bugs, like aphids, so they aren't helping much with the hard bodied flea beetles that are taking bites from my potatoes.    

I don't have to worry so much about chickens taking bites of my future garden plants now that Brandon and my dad have finished building a chicken proof fence around the rest of the garden.  A few years ago we built a fence around my parents garden, and we learned from that one that the fence material needs to have very small holes, like chicken wire, so it can keep out rabbits, groundhogs, and little chickens.  

Metal posts were driven into the ground with a heavy fence post driver, in a big rectangle around the area where Jamie and I rolled out old carpet last summer.  The carpet has smothered all the vegetation, and underneath is bare soil waiting to be planted.  We're late putting in the garden this year because it doesn't do much good to plant seeds if the chickens can spend their free time digging them back up!   Now that we have a chicken wire fence, it's time to plant some seeds!

Fence building day wasn't all work and no play.  The zip-line is visible from the garden area, so we could see my nieces zipping along the line when Uncle Jamie would give them a big push.   

Before we built the fence, I screwed up my courage, and broke into the oldest compost pile to see if it was ready to be deployed in the garden.  This is compost made from the woodchips from our composting toilet.  It's been outside, exposed to the elements since the winter, and is the oldest off the compost collection.  Over time, the pile shrank to about half it's starting size, and the grass downhill of the pile is the greenest and lushest grass in the entire yard.  

I used a pitchfork to move it into the wheel barrel.  The chickens have been denied access to this compost, so they were extra excited when I removed the ring of chicken wire and began to fork it up.  I'm happy to report that nothing was gross.  No toilet paper or anything that didn't just look like decomposing wood chips - and I looked very closely, since I'm still learning about this.  It smelled fine, and was absolutely full of earthworms and sow bugs.  My plan is to only use it for chicken food crops right now, just for my own peace of mind.  I have black oil sunflowers, livestock field peas, and grain sorghum seeds to plant, with the hope of growing some of my own chicken food.  

At some point last winter I covered the compost heap with straw, and these yellow mushrooms were growing out of the straw.  

They were fragile, but pretty.  I don't know what they are, but there's got to a be good joke about mushrooms growing on humanure, right? 

Tamara, do you know what these are?  

I pulled back some of the carpet and spread the compost and let the chickens enjoy themselves searching out the earthworms.  This area has peas planted in it now, and the chickens didn't manage to eat all of the seeds before the fence went up, so I have a smattering of pea plants that are about four inches tall.  I'm not sure how peas will do in the heat of the summer - I guess I'll find out soon!  

Compost Tour

I've never had enough compost to give a tour of it before.  But in these days of a composting toilet, there's plenty!   Lucky you, right?  

Don't worry, I won't show you anything gross.  I think the key with composting like we are doing, is to make it as invisible as possible.  We've had the composting toilet for four months now, and are still happy with the system.  If you remember, our composting toilet is simple - it's a bucket in a box, and the box has a toilet seat on the lid.  The lid of the box is hinged, so the bucket can be easily lifted out.   Since our bathroom has an exterior door, it's easy to carry the bucket outside.  Wood chips are added to the bucket each time it's used, and the bucket gets emptied every day into one of our big compost bins and then rinsed out.  The big bins are stashed at the back of the back yard, near the tree line.  

The brown bin on the far left is just an upside down plastic trash can with the bottom cut to make a lid/flap.  The black bin is an official composting bin that a friend gave us.  It's a nice one, with air vents, a door on the side, and vented locking lid.  The green one on the right was recently given to us by another friend (apparently we have lots of friends who think they want to compost their kitchen scraps, but don't stick with it) and it's made from a big trash bin provided by the city trash service.  All of these are open on the bottom so the compost has contact with the soil.  I like that they are animal proof, so we don't have to worry about critters or chickens spreading the compost around.    I do think our wood chips would break down faster if they were more exposed to the elements though. 

We've experimented with the type of wood chips to use, and the placement of the bins, and found that even though it's a longer walk to the bins when they are far from the house, we like keeping the compost tucked away where we don't have to walk near it when we are in the backyard.  The only time we ever had a stinky bin was when we dumped a fifty pound bag of moldy chicken feed in the bin.  Pshew!  That was the last time we put the bin close to the house.  

We filled the first bin with wood chips and moldy chicken food (the black bin), but then decided we wanted to move the bin farther from the house.  What to do with the contents of the bin?  We decided to just pick up the bin, let the contents remain on the ground, put a fence around it that was chicken proof, and cover the whole pile with some straw.  Now that these chips are exposed to the rain and sun, I think they will break down faster.  I don't want to try to spread it around my fruit trees or yard until I'm sure there are no bits of toilet paper.  This could take a year or more, I think.  We'll see.  

We've been buying our wood chips from Tractor Supply, which is where we go to get chicken food anyway, and they come in big square bags that hold about five and half cubic feet for around five bucks.  I think we're working on our fourth bag, so it's working out to be one bag per month, and we aren't stingy with the chips.  We tried cedar chips because we thought they might smell nice, but found that we prefer the cheaper pine chips - the fine ones.  The big flaky ones work too, but I think it may take them longer to decompose.  

We don't put kitchen scraps or yard waste in the same compost bins as the wood chips from the toilet.  Right now I'm using the piece of metal barrel that we cut from the top of the rocket mass stove barrel as the kitchen scrap compost.  It's like a buffet for the chickens.  They can get in there a scratch around for tasty bits, but don't spread it around as much as when I just dumped it in a pile.  

The kitchen scrap compost is looking very nice, if I do say so myself!  I think I could lift up the metal barrel, and easily scoop up the compost.