Christmas Day

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Still no pictures - I'll try to get some tomorrow morning.

Spent all of Christmas Day under the cabin insulating the addition floor with fiberglass batts. Fun.

Beautiful sunny weather today - nothing like what it should be for December. Looks like a mild winter.

A lot of things to catch up on - let me start with the birds. Have switched them over to an all-natural diet of sprouted grains and lentils which has worked out very successfully. I take a half-gallon of 7 grain scratch, 1 cup oats, 1/2 cup thistle seed and soak it overnight. It swells up tremendously, then is sprouted for 1 day. I add to this a half pound of well-sprouted lentils with good tails. The birds love it and over the course of the day polish off every morsel.

The lentils are there to raise the protein content [soaking and sprouting the grains may raise their protein content a little also, as scratch is only 8%]. Soaking and sprouting dramatically increases the volume of food, it's more digestible, a whole natural food, and there's less waste as the soaked sprouted grains are much larger and not easily scattered.

I screwed in some small metal containers in the coop and filled them with grit and oyster shell. The birds aren't consuming quite as much grit now that the grains are soaked, but they're definitely hitting the oyster shell hard [we ran out of their old eggshells which we'd roasted and ground, as production's so low], and this makes sense as now that they're off layer pellets they need additional calcium.

Since only Rosy's laying there's plenty of room to experiment with diet without affecting production much. Rosy has continued to lay dependably, a guinea is laying now and has 3 eggs in the coop [unrelated to the diet change], and we're pretty sure the ducks have started laying or are at least looking hard for places to lay and flirting with the idea. The guineas and ducks are all mating like crazy as if it's springtime - probably a combination of the light in the coop and the warm sunny weather we're getting.

I'll have to tinker with the poultry diet and see how it goes - but so far I think it's going great. One of the reasons why I think it's feasible at least for here and now is that the birds free-range add day across several acres, there's still plenty of fresh weeds and grass and grubs to dig up with the mild winter, and the grains and lentils soaked and sprouted are just more usable and energizing than the standard factory fare of layer mash/pellets. I'd always wanted to get the birds on a more natural diet but when the birds were laying well I didn't want to mess with it, and we were also concerned with cost. It's maybe an extra buck or two a week to go all natural - but I think it's worth it. And if we're ever able to get the raw ingredients cheap in huge sacks, it may actually end up cheaper than layer pellets.

Garden in the low tunnels is doing well - little warm for the brassicas, cool for the spinach and downright cold for the chard/beets. The mustard greens are doing fabulously though. Lettuce decent - usually the unheaded frilly types and red lettuces seem far more hardy and are doing best in the tunnels.

The loft ladder's been rebuilt at a steep angle against the east wall. The girls' room is finished, almost totally insulated now. We'll have a living room soon where the old kitchen was. Have a large couch and rug so far, and floor lamp. Still need an armchair, rocking chair, and small coffee table. The last bit of insulation that needs to go in is under the main floor of the cabin. The insulation has made a huge difference in heat retention.

I'm picking up Rachael and Brook on Wednesday and they'll be here for 10 days which is exciting. They haven't been up here since July. They'll be a lot of new things for them to see, the ducks, rooster, low tunnels, how far along the interior of the cabin is, the bunny, and the cow.

Remember the jersey/guernsey cross we were going out to look at in Robbins? It's out in a stall in our barn. We brought her home last Sunday.

Her name is Rita, and she's pretty small for a cow, even a dairy cow, at a little over 800 pounds. We paid $800 for her, dropped a hundred on boards for her stall, and another hundred on large animal paraphenalia as well as feed.

This last week of twice a day milkings of our semi-wild cow is a long story which I'll cover in the next post.
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Christmas Eve

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Brought home what ended up being a rather wild dairy cow a week ago. Very busy trying to gentle her and increase milk production. Will soon have pictures and a full update.
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12/15

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It's so warm up here for the middle of December we're not even running the stove at night. Thunderstorms are forecast for today.

Putting the insulation in is nearly finished. There are a few pieces to put in in the walls, and all that's left is the floors. We're going to use the same R 19 for the floors because even though the framing's thicker and could accomodate R 30 [2x10 floor joists], the floor heat loss ratio is the same as the walls - 10 to 20%. Only the ceiling is higher at 30%. But with the cathedral ceiling and 2x6 rafters R 19 is all we could fit in the ceiling. Using R 19 for the floors instead of R 30 will save us a little money, it's faced which gives us a vapor barrier, and for a horizontal installation stapling it in place is infinitely preferable to using the metal wands [tiger's teeth] which over time cause the insulation to sag between the wands while it's compressed above the wands.

I've moved the bookcase over to the northeast corner and built a wood box out of scrap lumber for storing firewood inside relatively close to the cool oven side of the stove.

The next step is building the new loft ladder at a steep angle against the east wall. The ladder will be built of 2x6 boards, and will have a handrail along the wall. Since we're moving the ladder to the loft we need to redesign where furniture is upstairs. Right now we're considering sort of making two rooms up here - a bedroom with bed, dressers, toilet area and computer on the west side, divided by the couch with bookshelves behind it so the east side is sort of a library/plant nursery. We'll have to move everything around to see if it works.

On Monday we drove down to visit a friend who invited us to down to learn how to hand-milk her jersey cow for free. It took Rachel and I a while to get the hang of it, but ultimately we were able to milk out a gallon and a half. The lady sent us home with that milk, another gallon she'd milked out the day before, and one of her roosters for our hens - all for free. We're going to go back down on Sunday and take her some home-made bread and try milking her cow again. Until we have our own cow we're going to exchange some work around her farm for milk.

When I first tried the jersey milk once we got home it was still slightly warm - very rich and creamy, seemed like slightly less sweet than store-bought, with a strong dairy flavor. But once it was completely chilled I tried it again and it was just about the best thing I'd ever tasted. We all did blind taste tests between the organic store-bought milk, and the raw jersey milk. For Rachel and I the difference was unmistakable. The 'cooked' store-bought milk is almost undrinkable in comparison to the raw jersey milk. It tasted old, flat - almost like canned milk in comparison. We've been guzzling the jersey milk with every meal, and making raw smoothies with it. Like any raw food, it's high-enzyme, energizing, and digests effortlessly. I've noticed it even makes any meal far more digestible if we drink the milk with it.

Interesting that in the state of Tennessee raw milk is illegal to trade, sell, or even give away. I guess someday they'll make it even illegal to ingest. Just another example, in a long, long list, of how government is there to hurt you, not help you.

We're going up to Robbins, TN today to look at another cow - this one's a jersey/guernsey mix. The only negative thing about her is that she's currently only producing a gallon a day. We'll have to look at the conditions she's in, her pasture, feed, etc., to see if maybe that could be improved. She was bred to a guernsey bull, and is due to calf July 11th, so if we got a heifer out of it that would be awesome, though it's just as likely it'll be a bull, which only sell for a hundred bucks. The heifer would be worth keeping.

We still haven't named the rooster yet. He's a marin/cuckoo mix, with the same black and white barred coloration as Claudia. We started with putting him in the bobcat cage up in the coop. But he kept calling and terrified all the birds in the run which refused to go in and check him out. We then let the rooster out into the run - and he's a big bird, roughly twice the size of Claudia and Rosy . . . and that didn't go so well.

Claudia went straight to the ground desperate for a rooster and all he did was briefly attack her - maybe confused by her coloring and thinking it was one of his fellow sibling roosters he'd always been competing with for hens. Then one of the white male teenage guineas started attacking him, and he flew and pecked back - no injuries, just a short scrap. But we decided to open the coop door and herd everybody out of the run . . . maybe things would go better out of confinement. A fight between one of our guineas and the rooster in the run would have been the end of the guinea . . . but outside if they don't get along the guineas can at least run or fly off and escape.

We were able to get everybody out of the run except the ducks and the rooster. The ducks simply for sheer stupidity - the rooster because he was terrified of the run door and wouldn't go through it [it's a bit of a tight fit for him also]. He's a good 2' tall.

Eventually the ducks found their way out and only the rooster was left in the run. I locked him out there for the night with food and water so there wouldn't be any fighting with guineas over roost space in the coop. I walked up late to check on him and he was hunched up against the run door for bed and looked pitiful - like he really wished he could go in the coop.

The next day we let everybody out and the rooster quickly found his way out of the run and the coop. He spent most of the morning following the ducks around - I guess they were non-threatening, and he'd built some kind of bond while they were all stuck out in the run.

But eventually he started following our hens around, and the next morning he was mating with Claudia and Rosy right outside the front door. Little Bit's a tiny banty and a little too small for him - though we did hear her squawk once where he may have jumped on her. Sometimes the girls like a break from him and go hide under the cabin. He's a little too tall to follow them in there, so instead he stands guard.

He's become a great friendly rooster, following and guarding the hens, eating grain we throw from the front door, and no conflict with the guineas whatsoever. The first night in the coop he followed the girls up and climbed up beside them. With him towering there on the roost, the guineas milled and called and were reluctant to go in the coop and roost beside him. But eventually they did and there were no problems.

The rooster crows quite a bit, especially in the morning. It was really neat the first morning when he was stuck out in the run - there was a heavy fog, the lights were on in the coop, and he was crowing loud and clear through the fog . . . I didn't even hear it till I opened the front door now that the cabin's so sealed up.

The ducks are now herded down to their pens with their nest box as they should start laying soon, if they aren't already [the squirrel could have been stealing a guinea egg]. The drakes are constantly pouncing the females, so they're definitely sexually mature. I have to say raising 3 types of poultry, that the ducks are basically pigs with bills. They eat constantly, and make a huge muddy mess wherever they go, and shit everywhere. And as far as intelligence goes . . . they're on the bottom of the list. They're very entertaining to watch if there's a pool of water around, but otherwise they just don't have the big personalities of chickens. Of course if they start laying well my opinion of them will dramatically improve . . .

Already getting windy and stormy today - 70% chance of rain.
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12/11

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It's been an incredibly busy week - let me try to summarize it all.

The birds have been out free-ranging with no losses so far. The trap is set out beside the run and I just noticed the other day the bait is missing - something must have run off with it without setting off the trip plate.

The 11 low tunnels we have up are working great. We've had hard frost every night - low to mid-twenties, but the plants are fine. They take a good bit of monitoring though on sunny days to make sure the tunnels are well ventilated. The chenille method allows us to tug up the sides, and the tension on the twine generally holds them in place - though adding a few clothespins to hold up the plastic always helps. No matter how cold and windy it is, if it's sunny the tunnels quickly get up to 80 degrees. And once the sun begins to go down, the temperature in the tunnels plunges fast. Usually they need opened a couple of hours after sunrise, and closed a couple of hours before sunset.

We had our first snowfall last week. The snow covered everything, but there wasn't much accumulation before it started to melt away. By the next day it was mostly gone.

About 3/4ths of the cabin is now insulated. It makes a huge difference in heat retention inside. If Rachel's baking and needs the stove good and hot, the cabin gets so warm especially up in the loft we open a few windows. We have a fan upstairs above the stove we run constantly to blow the hot rising air back down into the kitchen and addition. It actually works pretty well - without it most of the heat just sits up in the loft and downstairs is far cooler.

Only the southeast facing wall and floors still need insulated.

I've built an improved kitchen counter over on the northwest side of the cabin. I put in the large cast iron sink that's been sitting under the building for years - it's not hooked up to running water, but we just bucket in rainwater for wash and drinking, and will put graywater buckets under the sink for drainage. The garden out under low tunnels still hasn't needed any watering yet, so the graywater/duckwater mix for now is going out to the perennials in rotation.

Once the new kitchen's finished, I can move the loft ladder over against the southeast wall at a steep angle with a handrail - more of a stairway. This will be far more convenient than the ladder we have now which is out in the middle by the stove and vertical. Rachel fell from the ladder the other day and her back landed right on the corner of the wood stove - her back hurt for a couple of days and she had quite a bruise but she's okay.

All of the perennials are protected in some way from deer pruning. I ended up stringing fishing line for the large lower blueberries, strung between sapling stakes pounded into the ground every 10 to 20 feet or so. So far it's worked great, though the bottom runs of line I put in to keep the chickens out occasionally rip loose - probably the chickens.

Almost all the caution tape is up around the property - there's only one small section to finish along the road. There's no question it works. We haven't heard or seen any deer since it went up. One of the A frame bird netted setups over the blueberries up at the swales got torn and blown down - I thought maybe a deer had trampled it but after checking it out it was more likely just the wind. It took a only a few minutes to set back up.

We looked at a couple of jersey cows the other day a few miles down the road. One was very gentle and 5 years old but dry and bred just a couple of months ago. The guy doesn't really want to sell them and wants a $1,000 per cow. We're going to keep looking online a while longer till we get the pasture fence up around the lush hillside down from the barn - the pasture is about half an acre and will include some of the creek and woods and will also be used for free-ranging the birds. Rachel found a woman online about an hour from here on a family cow forum who's invited us down Monday morning to learn how to hand-milk . . . this is very generous and helpful as neither of us have ever had a cow though Rachel has milked goats.

There was some interesting mouse drama last Thursday. Rachel and I were out cutting and splitting wood in the front yard. One of the logs was hollow. Once we'd carted up the wood in the wheelbarrow to the front door we kept hearing squeaking sounds while unloading it. We eventually found two baby mice who'd been nesting in one of the hollow logs.

Rachel put them in a small plastic container with bedding inside to keep them warm. They were still blind but had fur - so were about 2 weeks old. We set the container up under one of the lamps to keep them warm.

We went to Gwen's play at the school and stopped on the way home for ingredients for a baby mouse formula Rachel found online. At home Rachel worked with trying to feed them using a dropper - she got them to take a little milk though they were pretty stubborn and resistant. It was amazing how frisky and active they got once warm even though still blind.

I went downstairs and saw a mouse shooting around under the couch, and asked upstairs - "Are the baby mice where they should be?" They were and it was the mother darting around looking for her babies.

So we took the baby mice and set them on the bedding in front of the wood pile. We then all backed off to watch from a distance. The mother kept darting around everywhere looking for her babies. Eventually she went back to the wood pile and found them. She grabbed one and rushed into the hollow log they'd been living in. Then she found the other and took that one in. She grabbed all the bedding and packed it in around them. After an hour or so we took the log and set it in one of our plastic bins with a big piece of insulation, and carried it down outside to where we'd gotten the log from.

Country living . . .
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12/4

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A spell of beautiful warm fall weather has hit and should last a few days though the rest of it should be rain starting tomorrow.

It turns out the 'wild guineas' are actually owned by a neighbor and they roost in one of his pines at night. So we'll stop trying to catch them. But it's still good they spend so much time here and hopefully they'll interbreed with ours.

We've been extremely busy lately, finishing the low tunnels over the garden [11 total] and insulating the walls of the addition. Every time we put more insulation in we notice a big rise in retained temperature inside. We need to insulate the rest of the cabin before we can start working on siding the barn.

Before the last string of freezing nights we drained the well water out of the hose and overflow tank and shut the well-pump off. Dishes are now done inside with hot water from the wood stove. The garden plants in the tunnels have very little need of watering and the perennials are going dormant so we don't have much need for graywater right now. It's always best to wash out the toilet buckets with the jet from the hose, but for winter we'll just have to rinse them out with buckets of rainwater and air them sufficiently.

I cleaned the coop out and got nearly 3 full wheelbarrows for the compost bin. We'd put in an underlayer of sawdust with a grass/leaf mulch on top, which works very well, but we're down to only 3 bags of sawdust for the toilets so I just did 2 wheelbarrows of grass/leaf clippings for fresh bedding in the coop. I put dried hay in all the nest boxes. Rosy is still laying dependably, but her eggs are about all we're getting. The ducks are definitely sexually mature, but either laying sporadically or the squirrel is stealing them. We've gone back to free-ranging as we were unable to trap the bobcat and he seems to have disappeared for the moment, though the same neighbor who owns the guineas says a bobcat wiped out his chickens.

We did catch Claudia [our barred rock chicken] in the bobcat trap however. We happened to be up at the coop when she wandered in to it and set it off. I guess she'd thought of checking out the chicken bait, but once the trap door shut she just started pacing and complaining till we let her out.

We got a lot of wood cut and split yesterday from small standing dead trees and dead boughs well off the ground. Some of it burns very well, some okay. Rachel started using a creosote remover product to keep down a buildup of creosote in the chimney since we're not burning ideal wood - just whatever we come across that looks dead and reasonably dry. It seems to have helped and the creosote layer in the chimney is only a paper thin film.

A few days ago I put in bird netting over all the blueberry bushes up at the swales [there are 21 plants]. The easiest way to do it ended up being driving a 6' sapling at either end of each bed [there are 5 to 6 shrubs per bed] - which is two saplings for each 30' bed. I predrill a hole for the sapling by pounding in some PVC pipe then remove it. I drive in the sapling at an angle away from the bed so tension doesn't bow it in, then run masonry line or twine between the two saplings and pull it very tight. I cut a small notch towards the top of each sapling so the line doesn't slide up or down. Then I just lay the bird netting over this sort of like an A frame tent. One 15' x 45' piece covers each bed to the ground from the line on either side well - I used one piece per bed. This will not only protect the shrubs from being bitten down by deer [something that's kept them stunted the last few years], but also from our own chickens wandering in and digging up all the mulch and dust-bathing in cavities around the plants, and also any birds trying to steal the berries of course. The last thing I need to do is give them a very thick leaf mulch.

Today we'll get the rest of the caution tape up - it seems to be working and we haven't noticed any deer.

Very windy this morning - usually a sign of a storm on the way.
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