5/21

We got some rain today, a couple of barrels' worth, which is good because the forecast is for a string of hot sunny 90 degree days. Even the nights will barely get below 70. I'll leave the light off in the chick pen where we're raising 7 Aracaunas so they get used to the dark. Once they're a little bigger they can come out and join the rest of the birds in the coop and free-range outside. We tried it today and they just got mercilessly picked on. Especially by the sexlinks - though even the roosters got in a few jabs.

We've finally got most of the garden planted. The melons and winter squash are being planted in hills outside the garden because the vines take up so much space. The soil is hard and clayey, so we're using the same technique we started for breaking ground for perennials. Remove the sod, break up the subsoil, remove rocks, and line the bottom of the hole with the sod upside down. Then I mix in a good proportion of compost into the soil we plant with, berm the downhill side, and heavily, heavily mulch around the planting hole. The roots have plenty of nutrients in the hole, as they spread they hit the topsoil at the bottom, and the heavy mulch around the perimeter starts to soften the soil and invite worms so the roots can over time penetrate it as well. It's worked very well on late-season bare-root transplants which have a very hard time getting established. If the melons don't grow well at least the planting holes will be well prepared for future fruit trees.

The mower's got a bent crankshaft and will be out a few weeks to be repaired. Without grass clippings for mulch we've gone to the poor-quality horse nettle-filled hay we got 2 round bales of early in the year. A lot of future pasture needs mowed, especially to keep the ragwort down, but it'll have to wait.

Our Nubian goat Mabel has turned out to be an incredible milker. She's a first freshener and milked out nearly 3/4 of a gallon today [right where our dairy cow Rita was before we sold her]. Though we don't really have room for her doeling, Mabel's production is so extraordinary we're going to keep her. Her name is Josey.

We were never able to get the Welsh Harlequin ducks we wanted, so we're hoping to breed the ducks we have. The two hens are Rouens, the drake is an Indian Runner. The Rouens are fabulous layers, a huge egg from each nearly every day. I'd let the eggs pile up in their nest box in the coop hoping one would be inclined to get broody and hatch them out. I gave them a week, then started the tedious business of marking the eggs with pencil and removing them in order on a daily basis. I finally got tired of this, and with the baby goats romping in the coop and likely to bust the eggs, I took them out and put the wooden eggs back in. Almost immediately a duck goes broody. It's not the first time - I think this one just prefers to sit on the wooden eggs. Now neither duck is laying because I guess once one duck goes broody and stops, it's contagious. So I'm slowly removing the wooden eggs so she's got nothing to sit on. Eventually she'll go back to laying. And we'll try again.

We've got several large projects that all need done at once. The big [i.e. expensive] one is a metal roof for the barn. Right now it's just got 30lb roofing felt well overlapped and buttoncapped - which held together perfectly over the winter. But now that we're collecting water off the barn, with the tarpaper it comes out all sudsy like detergent. It's fine for washing clothes but that's about it. With the animals, wash, rinsing fodder, irrigating pasture and garden, the cabin is not providing enough water. We could invest a grand in filtering the    iron out of the wellwater, but that's a hassle, we'll have all that iron backwash, still have to shock the well for iron bacteria, and be left with a very hard water nonetheless. Since the barn must have a roof anyway, it makes more sense to burn the grand there. And it's also an off-grid solution which is always appealing to us here.

Other projects are finishing siding the barn - I've got two sides on the upper story to do. But the guy at the mill says not till next week will he even start cutting the boards. We need to get another pasture up as the goats are taking a toll on 1/2 acre pasture #1, but till we can clear a path for the fence line with the mower we can't even start that. Maybe we'll try to get the weedwhacker working.

The 50" high 7 strand electric fence with foot-high plastic mesh along the bottom is working beautifully. No predators in, no goats or birds out. The charger is a 50 mile 6.3 joule workhorse and keeps a constant 16,000 volts on the line. Haven't tested the shock yet - but the goats won't go near it after 2 shocks. The chickens avoid it, and even the guineas especially on a wet day leave it alone. We've got 5 grounding rods in now and the ground seems as good as it can be with such a large charger.

The cabin also needs sided, but that's more of a fall project. I'll seal the siding on the barn for now, finish planting the curcubits, and order the metal for the barn roof. Then we'll add several barrels at each downspout and our water problems should be over.

Ash-gray blister beetles were nearly wiping out our autumn olives. Then we saw them moving to the goumis and devouring them. Since our late frost killed our fig and mulberries down to the ground through defoliation,  I was worried the same would happen to the goumis and autumn olives. I sprayed both with an 'organic' spray containing spinosad. Within a week all the beetles were gone. They are now putting out new growth. No question it works. Hopefully we won't have to use it in the garden to contain another outbreak. [though we did use a little on the chard that was covered in blister beetles, but it's since been pulled and put in the compost bin].

We're going with low to no bedding through the summer in the goat stalls to keep the flies down. Their stalls are cleaned out daily. Goat manure is a cold fertilizer, so this bedding goes straight out as mulch around the lower blueberries.

There's an interesting Welfare story I'd thought I'd share for anyone living this sort of lifestyle with kids and concerned Social Services might come down hard on what they're doing.

Ever since Patty and I separated, she's done everything in her power to keep me from seeing the kids [Rachael and Brooke]. She also tried to screw me out of the Tennessee property but failed there. The girls have come up a few occasions and stayed a week or two. Usually the outcome is that Brooke refuses to go back to Atlanta and wants to live with me up here. This of course her mother won't allow.

So Patty's latest move was to call Welfare on us, about our sawdust toilets in bedrooms and no running water, etc. The idea was that Welfare would come out and deem the place unsuitable for Rachael and Brooke to visit [we'll brush over the irony of how she was perfectly fine with dropping the girls off with me up here for months in tents - but she was busy then living with another man while we were up here, so not so concerned about the kids].

Well two women from Scott County Social Services showed up about a month ago. They checked out the composting toilets, asked how we get water, bathe, etc. As far as indoor plumbing, one lady said, "People have gotten along thousands of years without it." They were friendly, nonchalant . . . didn't really write much down or take pictures. They said we'd get paperwork in the mail to sign stating that they'd been out.

One of the women came back about 2 weeks ago. We sat down with her at the table to fill out paperwork. She was in a hurry to close out the case because she thought everything we were doing here was cool and she wished her supervisor could have come out because he would have thought the place amazing. She was in a big Suburban and when backing down the driveway ran into one of the stakes around the blueberries and tore off part of her bumper. I didn't notice the bumper till later far down the driveway.

The lady came back last week to get her bumper. We showed her the baby goats and the barn. She loves the barn, was full of enthusiasm for everything we're doing. She said, "This is what everybody should be doing, but who has the freakin' time!"

And that was that. Case closed. Brooke and Rachael still won't be allowed to visit this summer, but at least their mother has only herself to blame as to why.

5/14

Onyx delivered a healthy baby doe yesterday afternoon. The people coming to buy her showed up within an hour after she delivered. We didn't hold out for the maximum price on her and her doe, as she had to go, but did double our purchase price. We now have Mable's two bottle babies, the three white bottle babies now a month old, Mable - who's milking out an impressive 1/2 a gallon a day as a Nubian first freshener, and Marley, the loaner doe, who's supplying the babies' milk. Her production has steadily gone down from over 5 quarts to about a gallon a day.

The electric fence is working great and it's a beautiful sight to see all the animals out to pasture - the chicks, hens, roosters, ducks, and goats. We'd tried the rabbit one morning - didn't work out - she spent all day digging out dens in the chicken coop.

We're heavily planting the summer garden now, and having perfect spring weather. The boards will soon arrive to finish siding the barn. The next step is testing the well water and calculating the cost of filtering the iron out - we'll need tons of water for the garden and pool and irrigating the pasture this summer. We may instead invest in a metal roof for the barn, and cheap-as-we-can-go cisterns with a sub-pump to water everything.

5/11

Mabel had her babies this afternoon. An easy delivery. One boy and one girl. She also had 3 cups of colostrum for her first milking. She may wind up a good dairy goat.

The first electric fenced pasture is up and working great. Mabel, the bottle babies, the ducks, chickens and occasionally the rabbit all share it.

I put in one last order of siding for the barn, the upper story sides, and that project's finally finished.

5/3

We had a bunny in the garden this morning. It heard me pointing it out to Rachel through the window, and ran out under the chicken wire gate. I'll have to put something across the bottom to keep it from getting in.

Ash-gray blister beetles are devouring the autumn olive foliage on both trees. There are too many to hand-pick. Once they're finished with the trees they'll move on to the garden just like last year. I'll get one of those 'organic' biological sprays and see if that works.

We've had hot summer weather with no rain the last several days. With gutters on the barn now there's no shortage of rainwater in the barrels. But we'll still need to filter the iron out of the well-water to use it for watering the garden and pasture, as well as filling the pool.

I'm still working on siding the upper story of the barn. The front is done, I'm working on finishing the back - then only the sides are left. It goes very slowly.

Our three bottle baby goats are up in the old coop and are still getting bottles 4 times a day. They guzzle their bottles and are growing fast. They're saanan/lamancha mixes - all white. We have two of the babies' mother here and Rachel milks her twice a day. She was giving up to a gallon and a half for a while, but seems to have settled down to 5 quarts a day - which is still great for a goat. The mother is on loan, and we'll probably keep her till the babies are weaned, maybe even up until it's time to breed her.

We've finally got the electric fence up around our first pasture. We had a problem with the corner posts grounding out the fence, but now that that's fixed, the charger puts out almost 16,000 volts, and our voltmeter blinks out at 9.9 thousand volts on the line. So we've got plenty of voltage. Now we just need to improve the ground. Apparently the recommended grounding system of 3 6' rods 12' apart is not enough for our 6.3 joule 50 mile charger. We're going to pick up 2 9' lengths of 3/4" galvanized pipe to add 2 more rods to the system [the pipe will be easier to drive, go deeper, and have a greater surface area for conductivity than the 5/8" rods]. Once we get the ground right the shock should be tremendous - which is what we need to keep in goats and keep out predators.

The sex links are nearly the size of our banty Little Bit so have been released from their pen and are out in the coop with the big birds. They're still very friendly and come right up to me for a treat when I go in the coop. They can be petted and will perch on me. We did have to put 5 of the 6 up on the roost last night. They know how to roost for sure, and can fly okay, but I think are nervous about going up and by big chickens like Rosy and Claudia who are always nasty to them.

The aracaunas are out of the house now and in the old sex links pen. We lost one the other morning and so have 7. They seem to be doing well but are not nearly as friendly as the sex links.

Today is Mabel's last due date to kid. She's shown all the signs for weeks, and is now a barrel on 4 legs. Onyx looks barely pregnant so maybe the woman we bought them from had her dates wrong.

All our potatoes are planted in heavy mulch, we're planting beans between them to see if that strategy really works to foil the Colorado potato and Mexican beetles.