October Things

My brothers and I celebrated our birthdays this October, and I baked two cakes!  Real cakes, with gluten and sugar and all the bad wonderful tasting things.  The cakes were a treat to eat, and also a treat for me to bake.  We would have needed one hundred and nineteen candles to represent all our years!   

Our traditional October birthday family meal is chili spaghetti, Cincinnati style, topped with shredded cheese, diced onions, and oyster crackers, and served by the fireside.  This year, along with regular spaghetti and gluten free spaghetti, we served spaghetti squash grown in my garden, which has been stored in the root cellar.  

I baked the squash halves at four hundred and sixty degrees for an hour, then scooped out all the squash noodles into the crock pot, topped it with ghee patties, and turned it on low.  It worked pretty good!  I hoped that if I skipped the real noodles and crackers, then I would do less damage to my body when I ate two pieces of cake!  

It's hard for me to believe that October is already over.  October was the check-in on Ernest from the equine adoption agency.  I had to submit a picture of his body, from the side, and a photo of his feet.  In January they will remind me that his vet check-up is due.  If the vet says he's well cared for, then I think the adoption agency will be satisfied that we've provided a good home.  Ernest has settled in well, and feels free to bray for food and attention!  We can tell the two donkeys apart from their bray.  Rufus sounds like a rusty hinge, and Ernest sounds like an old fashioned car horn.  Aa-ooga!  Aa-ooga! 

The new puppy, Sienna, likes to chase the chickens.  Not with intent to eat or kill them, but she enjoys it when they squawk and flutter away. She's a ruckus instigator!  

When the puppy is on the loose, Cogburn, the rooster, clucks and calls all twelve hens together and leads them into the dense weeds in the tree line.  Most of the hens look ragged right now from the fall molt.  They look like scruffy ruffians hiding in the weeds!  

Look, a double rainbow!

The guineas are more brave than the chickens, so they don't run far when Sienna charges through their space.  Wendigo knows to pay attention when the guineas sound the alarm, and you can see her turn her head and prick her ears when they start to call.  She will follow them to the source of their excitement, and I've noticed the puppy following her lead.  Guineas and great pyrenness make a good defensive team.  

Pistol Pete, the ram, is growing a long shaggy neck ruff.  He's very shy and won't let me pet him.  When he sticks his head in his food bowl I sneak a few scratches between his ears.  He gets offended, and ducks his head.  He loves his daily pound of mixed grains, which I call cookies.  Who doesn't love cookies!   

Lambchop, the ewe, hasn't had her baby yet.  When we brought her home, we thought birth was imminent, but she just keeps getting fatter!  Sheep are pregnant for five months, so if her pregnancy started in July, it may be as late as December before we get a new lamb.  The reason the farmer wanted to sell her was because she was pregnant out of season, and will give birth during the cold winter.  My hope is that we can keep her lamb warm and help it survive despite being born in the wrong time of year.  If we can keep it alive, and it's a girl, then we will have another breeder.  Cross your fingers!  Lambchop is getting tamer by the day, and will even stay lying down while I pet her.  She's as soft as a cotton ball.  

Do you know how I can tell it's getting to be winter?  Is it the frost, or the dropped leaves?  Nope.  It's how many pictures I've taken of cozy cats!  

The cats and I are patiently waiting for the first inside fire.  Brandon has accused us of burning all the best, driest wood early in the year last year, so this year I'm wearing an extra sweater, and the cats are curled up somewhere snugly until real winter sets in.  It won't be long!  

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?  

Donkey Adventure and Guinea Family

Rufus and I went on an adventure Sunday morning - we walked out of the fenced in pasture and ate grass on the other side of the fence!  Whoa.  It's true what they say about the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence.  Especially if the grass on the inside has been munched on by a donkey and goats for a few months and it's practically winter.  To get to the fresh green grass, Rufus had to follow me around the barn and step over the scary garden hose, walk past loose chickens, go under the roof overhang near the goats, and tolerate the interest of a giant puppy.   Whew, we made it.  It was a big moment for us.  

Rufus is such a scared-y cat that I wasn't sure how he would respond to being on a lead rope in new territory.  If there was an unexpected noise, would he pull the leash from my hand and take off for the horizon?  Nope.  He was so interested in stuffing his face, that he didn't mind having to follow me around.  He didn't like being led out of sight of his barn and goats, but I figured out not to pull back on the leash when he would get excited, but to gently pull his head to the side, so he danced in a circle around me until he would calm down.  Then I would have to calm down.  How do people do this with big animals?  

Once he was calmly eating in sight of the door to the house, I called Brandon and told him to very quietly come to the door.  The sound of Brandon turning the door knob gave Rufus enough of a fright to send him dancing again.  I can see that I need to work on exposing him to more noises so he isn't so jumpy.  

Wendigo got bored with watching Rufus chew and decided it would be fun to run and jump and play with Rufus.  Rufus thought a game of chase would be great fun too, but since I was attached to his face, I wasn't in to it.  I tied Rufus to the fence while I put Wendigo up.  Rufus and I have been practicing being tied to the fence, and I thought we had that down pat and I didn't have to so careful about tying his head super close to the post.  As you can see, he only had about two feet of rope or less, but he managed to put his leg over the rope, turn in a somersault, and end up on the ground on his shoulders with his feet all tied up on top!  Like a donkey pretzel!  I never knew he was so flexible.  I was still standing there with my jaw dropped wondering what to do, when he slowly untangled himself and stood back up with one leg draped over the rope.  He let me lift his leg over the rope and stood there calmly while I worked on the too tight knot in the rope.  My horse owning friend showed me a slip knot to use in case something like that happens again.  I thought I was going to have to cut the leash the knot was so tight.  

After Rufus was returned to the safety of his pasture, I stopped to appreciate the serenity of the guinea family lounging in the grass.  You can see the baby nestled between his two moms.  The dads are on guard too, and they keep the moms and the baby in their sight at all times.  The guineas are different than chickens in this way.  The raising of chicken babies seems to be solely the responsibility of the mom who sat on the eggs, but the guineas work together as a flock to care for their chick.  

Mrs. Hall?  Is that you? 

How to Catch Guinea Keets

Guess what!  The guineas had babies!  Lots of babies...  

On Friday morning it was cool and misty, and I was outside in my pajamas and raincoat tending the flock, when the two guinea hens, who have been absent for nearly a month, brought their entire brood into the open for me to see.  Oh my goodness, look at all those babies!  They look like tiny brown chipmunks swarming behind their mothers, peeping and crawling through the grass.  The wet grass.  Wet grass is not good for babies. 

If you want to annoy your office mates, watch the video above of the keets following their mothers.

With encouragement from mom, I gathered up some gear, locked up the dogs, and went out to capture some of the babies.  I needed the encouragement because even though I've been told many times that guineas hatched in the wild rarely survive, I wasn't sure I wanted to take on guinea parenting again.  If I save the babies, then I would have more guineas!  I like my guineas.  All four of them.  There were more than thirty babies!  Mom suggested I sell them on Craigslist, and reluctantly said she would take them if I couldn't sell them.  Uh huh.  

To prepare for capturing the keets, mom and I searched the interweb, and found reassuring posts from people saying that they weren't hard to catch during their first day, since they can't fly yet.  Someone else said they post people around the edges of the field, and work together to make sure none of them escape.  Someone else even said the keets were so dumb, they would hide in tin cans and you could scoop them up.  Since I was hunting keets solo, and couldn't imagine how to entice them into enough tin cans, I came up with my own technique, and as a public service to anyone else who finds themselves tramping through the wet weeds in their PJ's trying to find helpful advice from google on their smart phones, I will describe my experience.  

I put a small carboard box inside a pillow case.  I wasn't sure if I could close a box fast enough to keep the captured ones inside, so the soft pillow case functioned as a lid that I could easily stick my hand into without worrying about escapes.  

I brought my butterfly net, and used it to place over the keets at the back of the flock, since the parents kept the keets out of my reach.  The hens and the males worked together to keep the flock of keets moving away from me, but as long as I moved slow and didn't get too close, they didn't attack me and I was able to pick off the keets in the back of the flock without scattering everyone into the weeds.  The parents had so many to keep up with, they focused on keeping the keets on the ground moving and didn't try to recapture those I picked up.  The net would scare some of them into the weeds, and I could listen for their peeps and find them while the parents gathered the rest of the brood back together.  

Aren't their little orange feet adorable?  I stopped collecting after I had gathered up about thirteen.  The parents were getting more and more worked up the louder my box of keets got.  Besides, thirteen extra guineas is plenty - what if no one wants to buy them?!  I left the parents with more than twenty, but it rained for a long time on Friday night, and by Saturday morning they had only five left.  Brandon and I decided to collect the remaining five and put them in the brooder box.  I didn't put the dogs up that time, and when the parents heard their keets give cries of distress, they attacked Wendigo and pulled her hair and flogged her with their wings!   We quickly gave two of the keets back, and the parents calmed down and herded them away.  

Guinea pie?  I put the keets in a small brooder in the house, and they enjoyed cuddling inside the pie plate I put their food in.  They really like to eat chopped boiled egg, and they like their brooder really warm.  Before I figured out how to get their box above ninety-five degrees, they made so much noise!   They have a musical, high pitched call, and have the ability to harmonize.  The pulsing sound is so intense that I could feel it in my eardrums and chest, and sometimes couldn't tell if it was my heart beat.  I've experienced the same overwhelming sensation at ponds in the spring, when the frogs are calling so loud that you can feel the pulse of their call more than you can hear it.  With a heat lamp and a thermometer I got them toasty warm, and then they were content and quiet.  

I listed them on Craigslist on Friday, and by Saturday morning was getting calls!  Thank goodness there are crazies people who want guineas!  I told someone that if they would take them all on Sunday, they could have all sixteen guineas for fifty dollars.  He seemed happy with that, and he and his young daughter showed up right on time.  I already spent the money on goat supplies.  Yes - I said goat!

Pool Hole and So Many Eggs

This may look like a large hole and an even larger pile of dirt, but in truth, this is a swimming pool and an entire summers worth of good times, hopefully for years to come. You have to use your imagination to put in the twenty-five foot pool with deep blue sparkling water and surrounding deck and landscaping, and then imagine yourself leisurely floating in the evening sun with a tasty beverage in hand while waiting for the lightning bugs to put on their show in the surrounding fields.  When I imagine this, it helps to suppress the sense of panic I get when I see what a huge disturbance we've made to our yard.  Oh my - that's a really big hole!  Are we sure we know what we are doing? 

You may remember that I have been slowing removing top soil from the pool location to add to the tight clay soil in my garden beds.  It was apparent that I was never going to be able to move dirt fast enough for the pool to go up this summer, so we decided to rent a bobcat to speed up the process.  Poor Brandon went to fetch the machine on a Friday afternoon so we could stretch the eight hour run time rental over the weekend, and when he arrived home with the machine in tow, he was visibly stressed and announced "I will never do that again!"  Our truck isn't made to pull that much weight, and the roads to our house are challenging even without a giant trailer.  He was already dreading the trip to return it. 

Neither of us had ever operated a bobcat before, and the guy at the rental place warned that the hardest and scariest part is backing the thing off the trailer, especially if you don't know how to drive it yet.  He wasn't joking either.  

It didn't take Brandon long to figure out how to use the machine.  When he managed to really scoop up a giant load of dirt the first time we were quite excited.  The machine has two handles for directing the wheels that are very responsive to touch.  I had to laugh when we were trying to back it down the ramps from the trailer because every time Brandon would look over his shoulder to see my frantic hand motions (it's loud, so he couldn't hear my directions) the machine would turn with his head.  And always the wrong way!

The bucket on the front is operated by foot peddles, so it took a little practice to get the machine to move forward while the bucket scooped at the right depth.  

The machine keeps track of how many hours you are using it, and we paid two hundred and fifty-five dollars for eight hours.  Brandon used it for a couple of hours on Friday, and really started to get the hang of it.  After five hours on Saturday, he said he dreamed that he was driving it at night, and even felt like he was riding it when he wasn't.  We ended up going over our rental time by an hour, on Sunday, but decided it was worth the extra fee so we could avoid as much shovel and wheel barrow time as possible.  By the end, we were glad to be done.  Nine hours of digging is plenty for one weekend.  

My photos from the weekend are all of digging and eggs.  Hey Brandon, look how many chicken eggs I found in the nest boxes!  He seems a little preoccupied right now...    

You would think that people intent on digging a giant hole would have some sort of plan for all that dirt.  We didn't really.  We thought it would be nice to use the dirt to build a berm and create a pond.  But where?  The machine doesn't move very fast, and we could tell our progress digging was slower than we thought it would be, so we didn't want to drive the dirt very far from where we were excavating.  While Brandon was digging, I put on my boots and spent some time in the nearby field thinking about a pond.  

Wait, what's that in the tall vegetation?  

It's a guinea nest!  I've been wondering if they are laying eggs.  Is this just one of the hens eggs, or is there another nest somewhere?  

Although we think we came up with a plan for a pond, we decided to stockpile the dirt in a long row near the pool and garden for now, since we could tell building a pond was a task for another day.  Brandon piled the topsoil on one end so we know where to go when we need good dirt for something.  

Fifteen guinea eggs in the nest.  The eggs are a little smaller than chicken eggs, and a little more tapered in appearance.  

The dirt in our stock pile area just kept getting higher and the pile kept getting longer!  It's dense clay too, so it's in hard blocks, almost like bricks.  It's not going to be good dirt for growing things.  It's located down hill from the garden, so I'm hoping it will capture moisture on the uphill side, and make nice moist soil for growing things.  Maybe even a little band of wetland will form on one side - it is a giant clay berm, after all.  

I did a float test on the guinea eggs to make sure they were still fresh.  They all sank like rocks to the bottom of the bowl, so I know they aren't so old they have air pockets in them.  

Some of them are speckled, or striped.  The shells are incredibly hard to break, which may be because the guineas are so young.  We ate some for breakfast this morning, and they taste just like chicken eggs to me.  

Toward the end of the digging, we used a borrowed laser level to get it as flat as we possibly could.  We did a little clean up with some hand tools, and raked it smooth.  I worry that the tall wall might slip if the ground gets really saturated, and dump dirt on the side of the pool.  It's such a hard clay that it's hard to imagine it going anywhere.  It rained last night, and now there's a giant shallow puddle in the bottom of the hole.  We have plans for a french drain, but haven't decided yet if we need a retaining wall on the cut.  

Newt likes to imagine herself floating in the pool too, although I think she finds the dirt to be more relaxing than the water.  

Well, we've definitely made a mark on the landscape with our giant dirt mound.  Thousands of years from now some archaeologist is going to be quite confused by this, I'm sure.  If Brandon ever gets up the nerve to rent the bobcat again, we have plenty of material to build a pond berm.  Maybe I can figure out how to grow something interesting on it.  If I incorporate some organic matter, I could build one of those permaculture mounds (hugelkulture?), or make a giant raised bed strawberry patch.  So many options to consider while I float in my swimming pool!