Planning for the Trip and the Party

I wish I could schedule the iris blossoms to coincide with the fireflies and the firefly party.  Usually, by the time anyone comes for a visit, the iris have already finished, so we are the only ones to enjoy them.  Brandon and I have checked a few big things off of our spring-time, pre-party to-do list, including a new chicken coop door and replacing the sand in the pool filter.  

The coop door is now easily latched, so while Brandon and I are on our up-coming trip, the chicken sitters (hi, Mom! hi, Kathy!) won't have to struggle to close it. 

The pool filter required one hundred and fifty pounds of new sand!  Before the new sand could go in, Brandon had to use the shop vacuum to suck all the old stinky sand out.  

It took a while to remove the old sand, as he had to keep emptying the shop vac when it would fill, but the filter sand was changed, the pool cover was removed, the pump is working, and we dumped a fortune's worth of pool start-up chemicals in the water, per the lady at the pool store's advice.  In three days, the pool will be officially opened!  Now, if only the sun would shine...

Brandon is keeping the mowing under control and I've been working to weed the herb spiral and tidy the greenhouse.  It's nice to have a party deadline to encourage us to tidy up.  We've been moving all the old lumber, bricks, fencing, and other building supplies we've piled on the concrete slab near the greenhouse.  It's been a handy place to store things for many years, but by finding new homes for all that junk, we now have a conveniently paved surface near the smoker that's less of an eyesore.  

We bought some square bales of hay so while we are gone it will be easier for someone to feed a flake of hay to the goats and donkeys without using the pitch fork.  You can see a few of the rose bushes that we transplanted to the front of the workshop barn in the photo above.  These get full sun, and they've lost more leaves than the bushes planted in the shade.  

I'll only be away from home for a couple of days, so it shouldn't be too hard for someone else to hold down the fort.  If you ask Brandon, the only critical thing that needs to be done is to feed the dog - he thinks the rest can fend for themselves.  I'll be glad to have someone there to open and close the chicken coops, because my roosters fight if they stay closed up together too long, but I can't leave the doors open at night because of predators.  I saw a skunk run under the wood pile one night last week.  

It's also good to have someone there in case one of the little goats gets their head stuck in the fence.  It hasn't happened lately, but I think a trapped goat could perish in the sun if no one was there to notice.  

And someone needs to gather the eggs.  We have so many layers right now that the eggs start to pile up in the nest if they aren't collected every day.  The sage is blooming in the herb spiral.  Sage and oregano survived the winter and look good already.  I'm hoping the basil and holy basil will come back from seed.  The milkweed is doing very well, and threatens to dominate the spiral.  

I plan to fill everyone's water bowls and hay baskets before I leave, so the animal chores shouldn't be hard to do.  The garden may need to be watered.  Now that the trip is on the horizon, and we've made such good progress on our list, I'm looking forward to traveling with Brandon and leaving all those hungry animals and thirsty plants for someone else to worry about!   

Mustard Greens

This is a mustard green leaf.  This is the first season I've ever tried to grow and eat mustard greens, so I'm still intrigued by this vegetable.  Apparently, mustard greens count as a cruciferous vegetable, and are packed with nutrition.  Folks on the interweb are saying that of all the cruciferous vegetables, mustard greens might even have the most good stuff to prevent cancer.  Cool.   

We have been making slow progress to move the saturated bales of straw from around the house foundation.  Brandon put four or five bales in the greenhouse, and I used the little patties of wet and moldy straw to pave around the beds of greens.  They work wonders to smash down all the weeds and make a nice place to walk, although it's heavy work to move them.  I can only lift a thin wedge in each hand, so I have to make lots of trips to the bale and back.  

I like the way the mustard green leaves grow broad and flat, and they are easy to pick off of each plant.  

I swish them in water to make sure there isn't any gritty dirt on the leaves.  Gritty greens are the worst!

I can wad up a big bunch and sort of roll it into a tube, and slice the tub into thin strips with my knife.  This makes nice cut pieces to cook, so no one has to chew a whole leaf at one time.  Someone asked me if I really eat six cups of greens a day.  Yes, I try too.  I measured this mess of greens, and it was eight cups raw.  Brandon and I each ate half, so just for dinner we ate four cups each, and that's not even including the onion and radish that I cooked with it.  

The onions and radish cook for a while in the coconut oil before I add the chopped mustard greens, which take only moments to cook down. 

For this batch I added sea salt, onion and garlic powder, and big drizzle of Braggs liquid amino acids, which gives it a soy sauce flavor. 

My twelve year old self would have been disappointed with mustard greens, baked chicken, and sweet potato for dinner, but the middle aged me thinks its delicious!  

New Babies!

On Friday night as I was closing the chicken coops, I could hear Noobi making a repetitive goat call in a quite voice, which I've never heard before.  Sure enough, she was delivering kidding! We have two new babies!  

They are both girls, and have the sweetest little faces.  Noobi is a good mom too, and is fascinated by her babies.  She keeps calling to them in that little voice, which I never heard Peaches do. 

Brandon and I sat peeking through the little window to the goat stall with our headlamps on and and watched Noobi deliver the second kid.  It was real gross, but Noobi didn't seem to be in any distress.  She walked around with a hoof poking out for a few minutes, then had an expression of deep concentration before a slippery wet baby fell to the ground.  The baby started to grunt and sneeze and Noobi licked all the slime away so it could move and breath well.  

The babies looked like they were all legs and ears, and Noobi couldn't decide which one to focus on so she went back and forth between them calling and licking.  

The next morning I made sure to see them nurse, and by the end of the day they were wobbling around on their little legs with some energy, and I started to feel confident that were strong enough to survive.  

The joke is that if it works, it's called line-breeding, and if it doesn't work, it's called in-breeding.  You might be able to see in the photo above, but one of the babies has a noticeable under bite.  We pried her mouth open and examined how her upper and lower jaw line up, and we think that her mouth will work to eat grass and chew.  She doesn't have any trouble nursing.  The other baby has a slight over-bite, but it's not noticeable unless you look in her mouth.   

I was curious to try line-breeding to help me decide the fate of Little Buck.  I don't like the idea of making goats that might have trouble eating though, so I don't think I will risk it again.  As Brandon and I watched the new mother with her little babies, we laughed because all of a sudden, we have nine goats.  Nine!  

Peaches and her two kids have been very respectful of the new mother and her space.  Peaches keeps her kids out on the pasture during the day, and at night she takes one corner of the stall and snuggles with her babies, and Noobi takes another corner.  Its very peaceful to see the mothers slowly chewing their cud while their little ones snuggle close.  

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!  

The Lawn with Chickens and Iris

All of the lawn was mowed at the same time!  And it was trimmed.  It took Brandon nearly all day on Sunday, working on and off at it.  He keeps expanding the area he mows, and even has a few places we refer to as auxiliary yards - near the road, under the zip-line, behind the hammock.  Plus the nature trail that wiggles it's way around the property boundaries and animal fences.  

Because the chickens will dig up any mulch that we use, most of my little fruit trees and other trees I'm encouraging to grow do not have a ring of mulch around the base to suppress the weeds.  This means the tall grass at the trunk of the tree gets trimmed with the weed-eater, and the base of the tree gets nicked and scarred.  I worry that this will kill the trees, but I don't worry about it enough to take on trimming them by hand.  Hopefully the repeated abuse will create a super tough bark scar that can withstand the whipping string trimmer.  

The iris are blooming!  

We've also begun moving the soggy bales of straw from around the house foundation to the garden to use as mulch.  Those bales are so heavy!  Before we placed the straw bales to block the breeze from entering under the house through the gaps in the foundation rocks, I read someone's advice on the interweb, and they said cleaning up the bales of straw was such a big job they would never do it again.  Now I know what they are talking about!  Brandon estimates that each bale weighs over three hundred pounds.  It's a soggy bundle that's hard to maneuver onto the dolly, and the weight causes the dolly wheels to sink into the soft earth.  Also, the siding behind the bales turned green with algae.  I think this will be encouragement for us to chink the foundation before the next winter.  Our pipes never froze this winter, so at least the straw worked. 

In the background of this photo you can see some of the rose bushes that we transplanted from a friends landscaping.  They are red "knock-out" roses, which I think I've seen around hotels and restaurants.  They didn't have much dirt on their roots when we picked them up, and had been out of the ground for more than a day by the time we got them planted.  

The roses were wilted, so I trimmed them back by more than half, and after nearly a week in the ground, I'm starting to see some life in most of them.  We planted roses in the front of the house, the workshop, and the studio building, so if we ever do get red flowers, they should be very visible from the approach to the house.  I hope it's worth putting thorns in our yard! 

It seems that it rains nearly every weekend lately, but Sunday was a perfect spring day.  Cool but dry and sunny.  We mowed, trimmed, gardened, and even hung all the towels out on the line to dry.  We are getting excited for the annual firefly festival farm party, and made a list of things we would like to accomplish before the big day.  I think any spare time we have next weekend will be dedicated to the pool.  It's almost pool time!  

Naps, and Greens with Eggs

I caught Brandon and Wendigo taking a nap in the grass.  They share the ability to catch a nap just about anywhere.  Sometimes I forget how big Wendigo is, and then I see her with Brandon and realize that she is a huge dog!  

I'm pretty sure all my animals nap the whole time I'm at work, and then when they hear my car pull in the driveway they wake up and go into frantic for food mode.  If I didn't know better, I would think they were starving all day long and they barely made it until the evening without wasting away.  They give themselves away on the weekends, because I see them lounging in the sun and relaxing the day away instead of foraging for food.  Their stomachs are on timers, and they know when breakfast and dinner is served.  

The greenhouse greens grew beautifully, despite never being thinned.  I have dense rows of green leaves, and have been able to try cooked turnip greens, radish greens, and even mustard greens, plus lettuce salads with dill, onion, pea shoots, and radish.  

Some of the radishes split in the center, most likely from uneven watering.  The greenhouse gets so warm that the raised beds dry out easily, and then I soak them with the garden hose.  It's funny to me to water the garden while it's raining.  The beds on the side of the greenhouse get plenty of rain, but the bed in the center still needs me to water it.  

The bunching onions that Tamara shared with me have been making tasty small onions for months already.  I've been chopping them for the skillet or a salad.  Tamara, how do I save some bulbs for planting later? 

Isn't the green leaf lettuce pretty?  It's so tender it practically melts in my mouth.  Because the plants are so dense, the under leaves are pale and thin.  I've found a few snails lately, so I'm being aggressive with my harvest.  I don't want to share with the snails. 

My asparagus bed is a weedy mess, and most of the spears have grown into fronds, but I still manage to find a few to add to our garden harvest.  If I pick and prep the food, and have it ready in the refrigerator, we usually find a way to work it into our meals.  We have a health goal of eating six to eight cups of vegetables each day, so we really have to include vegetables in every meal to get it all in.  Breakfast salad is actually pretty good!  

I like to chop a bit of everything...

and cook until tender in coconut oil in an iron skillet...

then add a giant bowl of chopped greens and cook just until it wilts.  I like the turnip greens, but they have stalky stems that I have to remove or Brandon accuses me of feeding him sticks.  The mustard greens don't have the stems, and make nice flat leaves that are easy to stack and chop.  The flavor of the mustard greens if more intense, but we like it.  When I served the first batch Brandon said, "These greens have the taste of the greens I remember hating when I was a kid."  Ha! 

And of course, the final touch is to add eggs and stir until done.  If we don't make a plan for dinner, then it's likely we are having greens and eggs.  Again.