Breezy Meadows Orchards & Nursery

(Shoe photo from www.myyardrocks.com)

This Week at the Market + Recipe

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Here is a recipe for a Salad that I have recently acquired an addiction for. It is very simple…
1/4 – 1/2 pound spinach
1/2 cup fresh chevre (goat cheese) or if you like chevre as much as I do put enough in so every bite can have some in it!
1 apple sliced into bight sized cubes
Balsamic Vinegar and Olive oil as dressing
(I use about 2 1/2 tbls of the vinegar and 2 tbls of the oil)
Salt and pepper to taste
Toss all the ingredients together and serve!

Alec made it for us one night and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. We’ve been using Brown’s Orchard apples that still have a crisp bright presence in the salad even after so many months of storage. I hope you get a chance to try it and enjoy it as much as I do. It can also be made with lambs quarter if you feel like eating the weeds from your garden!

This week at the market we will have:

Vegetables
Spinach
Curly Cress
Baby Kale New!
Arugula New!
Radishes

Wild Edibles
Cattail Shoots (tastes like cucumber and is great raw, on salads, or pickled!)
Lambs Quarter New!
Dandelion Tea
Pickled Ramps
Canned Goods
Wood Boiled Maple Syrup
Garden Salsa
Chili Relish
Flowers/Plants
Bouquets
Potted Perennials
—Comfry, Bee Balm, Violets, Pink Ajuga, Holly Hocks, Motherwort.

Hope to see you in Rutland Tomorrow Market starts at 9:00am and ends at 2:00pm.

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Lawn Salad and a New Door

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Time.

I don’t know where it is all going.

The temperature has been rising; we’ve been in the 80’s for several days now. Maybe I’m moving slower in this heat, my winter skin still not fully shed, but my summer brain listing all the beds that need weeding, the plants that need transplanting, the boxes that need making for market, and then I turn around and my house has gone and made a huge mess in protest to my neglect. We had family up this weekend, which was the only reason I remembered the house in the first place.

Oh right…cleaning.

I managed to get it presentable by the time they arrived, there were still a few dishes that needed to be done and some dirt that could have disappeared, but there were lovely flowers on the table and fresh towels in the bathroom. As part of the holiday weekend Josh’s dad took it upon himself to put in a real door out to our garden. I say real door because it has a doorknob unlike the other doors in this house that use weights to keep them closed. The project ended up taking more than just an hour since our house is less than plum, but by the time Monday afternoon rolled around we had a lovely new door out to the front garden. I couldn’t be more thankful for all the work that was done this weekend, we got the door in, Josh’s sister and step mom helped me weed one of my herb beds and prune some of the overzealous lilacs we have growing around the house. I have to say it was a bit of a relief that they were all so eager to work on something, with so much to do it is so nice to have a family that is willing to pitch in even if it is a holiday. I hope they all had fun, and I apologize we didn’t have time for badminton.


Yesterday afternoon Josh and I transplanted our Tomatoes and Peppers into their permanent home atop the hugel bets. Josh declared it to be summer and we rejoiced behind our bug netting hats. We’ve also been reveling in the beginning of produce coming in. Asparagus, radishes, chives, orach, cress, spinach, and the abundance of edible weeds such as lambs quarter, plantain, and my new favorite chickweed. Josh’s sister turned me on to the plant, and its sweet flavor somewhere between a green bean and a pea pod make it an absolute delight to snack on in the garden. We are also playing with cattails.

I’m still not sure the best way to sell them, they have this succulent soft core that goes fairly high up the stock, but to sell just the core would be hard because it is so soft it might not hold up to five hours in the open air. We’ll see what happens. We sold them in bunches of three at the market and just told people to peal the fibrous skin back to find the cucumbery goodness within.
We also had morels at the last farmer’s market, wouldn’t you know my brother has them growing in his yard and around his pond. We were able to harvest ten good-sized morels from his place and then we found another 6 along our driveway. The morel gods have spoken. I made a tasty lawn salad with toasted morels and ricotta cheese, here is the recipe.

4 cups lawn greens (lambs quarter, dandelion greens, plantain)
You can substitute any cooking green like chard or spinach into this
½ cup ricotta cheese
4 ramps (now that they are past you can use 5 scallions or 2 leeks since they have come into season)
2 good sized morel mushrooms
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and Pepper to taste

Rinse all your greens under cold water and make sure you get all the tough stems out. Sauté the ramps (or leeks/scallions) in 1 tablespoon of butter until translucent. Add the greens and sauté them until they are soft and have lost some of their bitterness. (If you are not a fan of bitter greens blanch the dandelion and plantain in boiling water for about 2 minutes before sautéing) Place the greens in a bowl and add the ricotta, salt and pepper and set aside. Chop the morels into rings about as thick as a nickel; place them in the left over tablespoon of butter and sauté until crisp and brown. (You should always cook morels for at least five minutes before consumption never eat them raw). Top the greens with the morels and serve.


We planted our rice amongst the tadpoles, salamanders and frogs in our patty. So far it is growing strong and making a lovely home for our water loving friends.


Potatoes have also gone in, our Adirondack blue potatoes from Fedco had rotted because our house was too warm (keep your potato seeds in a cool dark place!) but we had almost 20 from last year that we didn’t get to eating and had grown long purple spuds, we put them in the ground near our old chicken coop and hope for the best, I do love my purple mashed potatoes.


How is planting going where you live? Have you left the threat of frost behind yet? Did you lose any plants to the huge storms we had last week? Do you know of any other tasty lawn treats you want to share?

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Shhh….. I’m Hunting for Mushrooms

It’s our third week of hunting. We’ve been successful in bringing in the Wild Ramp, The over abundant dandelion, the fiddle head fern, the wood sorrel, the clovers, and even some cattail shoots. Some of these, like the fiddleheads and the ramps, have seasons that are about to end or have already ended, but for some the season has just begun.

Morels.

Hunting for a Morel is like hunting for a fairy kingdom. You want it to exist, but you spend so long looking for it and thinking you see it, that you begin to think that maybe it only exists in tall tales or for small children. To find a Morel you have to be prepared for a good amount if disappointment and a lot of walking. They like to live in hardwood forests, especially near Ash, Elm and Cherry trees and they also supposably like old apple orchards.

They come in a variety of colors; the one most commonly found here is almost indistinguishable from the color of light dried leaves, a pale tan color, or the “Blond Morel”, Morchella Esculenta. One technique for spotting them is to get low to the forest floor and look up to see if there is anything poking out of the leaves or if the leaves are pushed up at all. That technique so far has not brought me any morels, but I feel very stealthy as I do it. I believe a morel knows when you are looking. It will tuck itself up under ferns, maneuver a leaf to be conveniently placed, or simply disappear.

Josh and I hiked for three hours around our property, hunting. We had to take breaks to rest our eyes from searching the leaves and fallen trees for our small fungal prize. We stalked around the brook peering with our untrained eyes for any protrusions from the leafy floor. We found pinecones; upright sticks, false morels, and even places where the leaves had been pushed up but when you moved them there was nothing underneath. We continued through the picker bushes, over the newly cleared pastures around the fallen trees from last years logging, all the places where a morel might want to live, and still nothing, nothing but decoys. Josh had been trying to give up the whole time thinking maybe it would trick them into coming out. I was sure we would find some but every time I had a good feeling about a place all that would come out was a globular false morel. We were on our way back when my eyes began to cross and I realized I wasn’t doing a very good job anymore. We were 500’ from our front door so I decided might as well just walk on the road and enjoy the last few minutes of our walk. That was when it happened, I gave up, and as I began to relax into just walking I looked down to the side of the road and froze, then I screamed. “Josh! JOSH!” I didn’t know what to do I thought that maybe if I moved it would run away. My heart was pounding, I couldn’t believe my eyes, they were real, they existed! Josh arrived and he approached it, of course nothing happened, it is in fact a mushroom and as far as I know they don’t bite. I know it sounds silly attributing mushrooms to magical creatures but I have to say I am beginning to believe in the holy morel divinity.
Our morel was there waiting by an old ash tree, did it know I gave up? Would I have found it if I had kept looking? Can mushrooms sense defeat? Can they chuckle? I for one am off to pray to the great fungal deity.

Last week of May

This week on the farm has been a busy one. We’ve been planting, transplanting and seeding, building an egg mobile for our chickens, playing with goats, going to the market and hunting for wily wild edibles. Last Saturday was the first market where we brought something we actually grew this year. Cress, spinach, and radishes were the bounty for this week.

Last week I made pickled ramps. To my surprise I sold every single jar I brought. I made more this week and before the market had even started I had a woman wanting two buy to more jars from me. I have to say they are pretty delicious and coupled with sharp cheddar cheese they make a mean snack or appetizer.

Esther and Isla have been devouring the pasture’s greenery, Esther continues to make me want to believe she is carrying kids. Her udder has grown from the size of a grapefruit to about the size of a cantaloupe. Her belly has gotten more taught and when I pull up I feel like there are small hooves kicking or tiny heads head butting me, but I might be imagining things.

We finally got the chickens out to pasture, I put them in with the goats last week but Isla wouldn’t stop eating their tail feathers while they were trying to lay their eggs so I put them back in their coop for the week. Then a few days before were going to move them into their new pasture we had one of our bard rocks killed by a hawk. Since the chickens are so large they can’t carry them away so I went to down to feed them a treat to find a chicken carcass with its heart torn out, apparently all they want is the heart and possibly some of the more delectable intestines, everything else isn’t worth the risk of getting caught I guess. Josh buried it in our compost heap where the other chicken was buried this winter.
My now six hens have their own pasture behind the goats pecking away at what the goats have left behind and lounging about in their swanky new hen wagon.


The apples have finally bloomed so I can change our website photo to spring! We are hoping for no frost since our peach tree has also bloomed and last year the peach crop was destroyed by the late May frost. It has been a wet spring and all the rain has slowed us down, the black flies however are in hyper drive, I go to sleep itching and I wake up itching I’m hoping that once I am bit enough times I will become immune to their irritating effects.

We harvested cattails this week, not enough to bring to market but enough to eat ourselves. Their shoots taste surprisingly of cucumbers and we have been eating them plain and in salads. We want to try pickling them to see what the result will be; I think it will be delicious.

I’ll be putting up some recipes for dandelions and other wild edibles this week. Anyone have some they would like to share? Anyone else finding new fun wild things to eat for dinner?

Long Week

This week seemed to go by very fast, I’m not even sure where all the time went. Somehow though, it also seems like the week has been so very long and now on sunday with a week ahead of me I find myself wishing I could have another hour in the morning before my days start. This week’s post will be mostly pictures. I apologize, I promise to do better next week.



Our fruit trees are ready to bloom the next sunny day we have!



Our goats are eager to move to their new pasture, this is the line between their old pasture and their new one.



Here they are chowing down on the new greenery.

Josh and Alec have been busy building hugel bets in the dry weather we had this week. We have almost twice the amount of growing space that we had before, and they look beautiful.



Josh built two paddies for our rice and the toads have taken up permanent residence. They all moved out of the pond and have layed strings of black beaded jello eggs all throughout and singing up a storm.



How is spring progressing for you? Anyone else undertaking some ambitious garden projects this wet spring?

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New HugelBeets

Finally the sun has been shinning long enough for the ground to dry out and for us to start building another round of hugelbeets. Last year we built 7 45 foot long beds which are now growing different greens, peas and onions. We have plans to do 3 more 45 ft beds and then around 25 23 ft beds. The 45 foot beds run close to north south. We did this to best accommodate the rolling high tunnel we are planning to get up soon. The shorter beds will run east west creating a few different microclimates on each bed. We also are arranging them that way because that is what our tractor can build. If the rows all ran the same way north south we would run out of room to move the tractor around while we are building.

Last week I piled up the horse manure and hay from the horses winter coral into a nice big pile. We use this for our first soil layer of the beds. It was pretty late when I had finished and I left the key in the wrong position. So when I went out yesterday to start up the tractor it was dead as a door knob. I also had parked it in a terrible place so we couldn’t go down and jump it. I had to run around Tinmouth trying to find extension chords and a charger. Then waited. And waited, and still no charge. Luckily we have so much stuff to do on the farm if one thing doesn’t pan out there is always something else to do. Today we finally got it started by dragging it with the other tractor and bump starting it. We lost a day which hopefully wont bite us in the tush. It looks like its going to rain for a week straight so friday we will be trying to harvest and build as many beds as possible.

The area we started with today is already prepped from last fall when we took of the top layer of soil and piled it up ready to be added to our final layer. I ran a few lines last fall to square the beds in the space that will be under the high tunnel. I measured off these lines to make an 18 inch row and a 3 foot bed. The row always end up being smaller once we pile on the soil but there is still a good amount of room to work with. I hammer in sticks to mark the 4 corners of the bend then mark a center line. The center line helps me keep the first layer of big wood in a almost straight line while leaving room on the sides for brush and soil.


Once the lines are marked I start added wood. For this bed we had smaller lengths of wood that were cut last year. These were small enough to carry while other beds we dragged larger lengths into place with the tractor. With these smaller pieces I like to do two on the bottom and resting on them. I normally shove smaller bits in the space that is formed between them.


Once that is done we add smaller pieces of woody material. For the smaller logs I go straight to brush size(smaller than 1 inch). When there is only one log in the center I add larger pieces 1-3 inch pieces to fill in the bottom gaps. We are still experimenting with which formula or ratio works best. We will let you know in 10 or so years. Trying to get the brush layer to play nice is a challenge especially with smaller beds. We do some manicuring to the branches before they get piled on. Branches that curve to much or have smaller branches that jut off in weird directions get cut so they play at least a bit nicer.


I then hop into the tractor and start hauling manuring mixed with hay to start adding to our soil layer. If we run out of the horse poo we have neighbors who can supply us with organic cow manure. We added a bit more of this mix onto the beds this year compared to our last building adventure. Their are some thin spots on the first beds that we wanted to avoid this round.


Once we shovel the manure mix on the the bed we add a layer of soil that was taken off earlier. Our soil on the garden site is pretty shallow so we don’t have as much as I would like. Every year we plan on adding compost to the top of the beds making the soil deeper and replenishing nutrients.

We only managed to finish one bed and the second one is ready to be covered but I shut off the tractor and it didn’t start back up so we were done with building for the day. I hope tomorrow we can do a quick harvest then be back to building.

There are a few more pics in the gallery

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Foraged Harvest.

We did it. First farmer’s market of the season accomplished. It got a little hectic on friday trying to be ready for it, and we might have had the starting time wrong and got there a tad late, but it was all right. Our foraged harvest was well accepted and we sold a good number of daffodil bouquets. We found a foragers haven, ramps, fiddleheads, gooseberries and morels all in the same spot. (not all ripe at the same time of course) While we were harvesting our share of the wild edibles, (we made sure to only take 1/3 of a plants bounty) I realized how content I was to be sitting in the woods digging away at wild leeks surrounded by living bouquets of dutchmen’s britches and violets. There is something very soul satisfying about gathering food from the forest. It is also more exciting, because you never know what you are going to find, or you know what to find because you have a secret place to harvest from.

I’ve been reading several books on wild edibles, Acorn Pancakes, Dandelion Salad, and 38 Other Wild Recipes by Jean Craighead George is one of them and there is another older book which I don’t have with me but was a guide that gave the edible and medicinal uses for each plant as well as the traditional native american preparing of each wild fruit or vegetable. I’ll be sure to give you the name of it when I put up my next post, it is a great resource. After reading these books I am just amazed at how we are surrounded by such a wide and varying selection of edible goodies and yet we have decided on such a select few plants that we want included in our diet, some of which don’t even grow in this climate. There are long lists of root vegetables, leafy greens, fruits, and even blossoms that grow along our roadsides, in our ponds, are thrown into our compost bins, or cover the floors of our woods, and we either ignore them, appreciate them for their beauty, or treat them as weeds. Well I am bringing back some wild to our diets. We’ve started with the normal edibles, ramps, fiddleheads and dandelion greens, but this week I plan to bring some stranger yummies to the table. You’ll have to check back in to see what we find.
Of course everyone should be careful when dining from the outdoors, since it is an unfiltered menu and some items may be poisonous or toxic if consumed in too high a volume.

We’ve got over 100 berry plants in the ground, raspberries, gooseberries and currents. We also planted our peach trees and sweet cherries. The sweet cherry that my parents planted has bloomed! I hope it isn’t premature, we are most likely going to get a frost again soon hopefully the buds will survive. We also planted some asparagus about 100 plants, two varieties. I can’t wait for two years from now!

We built a goat palace. It is designed so that the pigs and goats can live together and have some personnel space. My precocious/pregnant goat didn’t seem to want to jump up in like little Isla did, but after we set up a little platform with a ramp I find her sleeping in there or just lounging all the time. There are walls on it now, we used some heavy white tarp from my parents arena that works well and keeps it light enough to move by hand.

That’s all the news for now! I think my blog posts will begin to happen on sundays more than saturdays just because saturdays are going to be so busy for us.

Anyone out there a wild edible fanatic? Anyone tried any weird wild vegetable this week? Have your local farmer’s markets started? Anyone else have secret wild food havens that they go to in the spring to harvest their crop? I love to hear from you!

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Bending our High Tunnel Pipe

In our farming practices we try to align ourselves with natural processes, but sometimes we make the choice to move further away from them. This is the case for the high tunnel we are building. It adds the potential for year round growing and warmer overall temperatures throughout the year. Since I love experimenting and being cheap I decided to design my own high tunnel and build it myself.

For the unfamiliar a high tunnel is basically a unheated greenhouse. They come in many shapes and sizes and are normally covered in a polyethylene film. The have been used by grower to extend season of high value crops such as tomatoes or peppers. They have been more recently used to extend the growing season of many farms well into the winter for salad and cooking greens. Elliot Coleman is one of the main leaders for year round growing in New England. His book The Winter Harvest Handbook is a good introduction to winter production systems.


The two main shapes for high tunnels are quonset hut which is basically a half circle and gothic which has straight walls that curve up to a peak. I decided to go with a a gothic style for two reasons. The first is they are much better at shedding snow then the quonset style. This is due to the shape at the top of the two structures. The quonset style ends up have a pretty large flat surface on top where snow can collect which can collect of lot of snow. The gothic has a smaller or no flat spot on the top so snow cant build as much. The second reason is the vertical space in a gothic is much greater because of the wall design. This makes for more growing space inside the high tunnel compared to a quonset.

The problem with this is that there is not very much information about building gothic style high tunnels on the net. Almost all the information is for building quonset high tunnels. I ended up looking at lots of pictures and designing a basic framework in SketchUp a really easy to use 3D modeling program. It gave me a rough idea of how much pipe I would need and what degree bends I would have to do to make the correct shape. Of course the design changed many times before getting to the version we are actually bending now.

I contacted the folks at Ledgewood Farms who sell high tunnels and asked them for their metal supplier. They passed along information on Sonco Tubes where I made an order for lots of metal tubing. I ordered the pipe before we made the decision to move back to Tinmouth. I ended up storing the pipe till the fall because I didn’t think building it for one season then moving it to Tinmouth made much sense. This spring I started working on a new design for our new garden layout and then I had to figure out how we were actually going to bend this stuff. The final design is 22′ wide and 48′ long.

I found some information on bending pipe online using jigs made out of metal or wood. I figured it made a lot more sense to make one of these then buy a really fancy meaning really expensive tube bender. My design called for bending 1 5/8 inch tubing for the walls and 2 inch tubing for the peak. From my 3d design I knew I needed a curve with a radius of 5′ 3” for my wall bend. I put a piece of plywood onto an empty hay wagon and measured out 5’3” and made an arc with a pen and a length of string. I then made a jig out of pieces of wood along that arc and made a stop so the pipe would be bent in the same place every time. I did not account for spring back with this measurement. When ever you bend a tube the metal will rebound back after you make the bend. This distance back it goes depending on the metal and the type of pipe or tube you have. I made the radius of the bend smaller by moving the pieces of wood in away from my arc line the same distance as the spring back but in the opposite direction. Once I did that the tube bounced back to the 5’3” arc line and we were ready to bend.


The peak bend was a heck of a lot more challenging. 2” tubing is really tough to bend and its really really tough to bend to a small radius. The design called for a peak bend of 11” which is really tight for that size pipe. The smaller the radius the bend is the more likely you are to get a kink in the pipe. This makes it much weaker. I built a jig using layers of plywood. My plan was to bend smaller pipe to a slightly smaller radius and then use the pipe as a jig for the 2” tube. I ended up kinking the smaller pipe because I didn’t smooth the plywood jig enough. The degree of the bend on the out side of the bent pipe was still okay so then it was time to building a jig using these two new pipes. The picture shows our final version of the jig. There were many many many more that did not make it. Most exploded from the pressure of the bending tubing. I finally gave up using the 2” tubing and when to the smaller 1 5/8” which was a heck of a lot easier. Instead of doing one bend we made two bends one on each side of the middle. This gave us the smaller radius we needed without kinking the pipe.


We have one side of the bows bent and all the peaks are done. We are going to bend the rest of them next week. The high tunnel is going to be mounted on wheels that are made for gate fences. This will allow it to cover double the area at a lower cost. It also allows a more flexible planting schedule. We will have tubing on the ground that the wheels roll on and the high tunnel will be connected to support rods that will be hammered into the ground to keep it in place. They should be delivered next week hopefully along with the poly film covering.
More pictures in the Gallery

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We adopted an orphan.

The warm weather is winning. It was in the 80′s this week, my delicate winter skin got an unpleasant surprise when I wore a tank top in the hot sun for 8 hours last wednesday. I am still sitting tenderly to keep my back form touching the chair behind me. The warm weather brought more than sunburns though, blooms! Green seems to be everywhere now and the spring flowers are showing off shamelessly with bright colors and flashy new petals.
We adopted an orphan last thursday. My mother has made a name for herself being a good foster/permanent parent for orphaned or abandoned animals. Last spring it was a litter of 4 day old kittens that she bottle fed every three hours until they were big enough to see and eat on their own. The year before that was a puppy that was found running around the water treatment facility in Poultney, VT, who is now full grown and a sweet little dog named Lily. The year before that was two ponies, the year before that a pregnant mare, and the list goes on. Last thursday we got a much smaller addition to our list, a tiny little road island red chick found on a motorbike at a repair shop in West Rutland. Even though the sex is impossible to know we’ve all been to referring to it has a he. Here he is in his second favorite place,

In fact this blog post is being written with him nestled into his very favorite place, my hair. As gross as some might find it I do indeed have a baby chicken in my hair and when he nestles into my cheek it is tremendously adorable. I’ll also have you know that as of now he hasn’t pooped in my hair he comes out and poops on the shirt I have around my neck, he is a very considerate chicken.

He is also a very lonely chicken and when left alone will cheep incessantly in that piercing high tone that would make anyone want to put him in their hair. He goes right to sleep though the moment you take him out of his cage, he just wants some company and some love, and I find it hard to resist.

Although we have an order of chicks being incubated for us by Layed in Vermont we might have to just go buy some industrially produced chicks just to keep him company.

Besides chicks, we’ve also ordered 15 heritage turkey breeds to sell for thanksgiving. This idea was inspired by the other new member of our farm family, Alec the intern. Alec came to us through a family connection, looking for work of the agricultural variety. I informed him before he arrived that we were just starting and very small, but he still seemed to want to come out to Vermont to live with us in our lincoln log cabin and play in the dirt. We are excited to have him, he is interested in working with poultry so we are getting 15 turkeys and possibly some broilers for the fall.

Market is next saturday! Although all our seeds and starts are coming up we will not be able to harvest anything we’ve planted for the first market. Next year we will have our hoop-houses so this will hopefully not be the case in 2012. In order to still be present we are going to spend thursday and friday next week hunting for ramps, fiddle-heads, and other wild edibles. Since it is mother’s day weekend we will be digging some plants to sell as gifts, Lilacs,(white, deep purple, japanese purple, and violet colored) comfrey, hollyhocks, and maybe some northrup roses. So if you need a gift for mother’s day we’ll be in Rutland next saturday selling potted plants as well as spring flower bouquets that you mother will love!


No news on the goat, just going to have to wait and see. We moved them out into new pasture and they have spent this week foraging on blackberries, saplings, and goldenrod sprigs. They seem happy and healthy as well as ravenous for anything green.

As some of you may have noticed we are in the middle of trying to move our flicker photos onto our website to make it easier to view our images. So if you are looking for pictures from this week go to “Our Farm” on the menu bar and then click on the photo album entitled “Spring Flowers.”

Anyone else have baby animals showing up at their houses? Any other flowers being particularly showy this year? Is this wet weather effecting anyone else’s spring plans? I love to read what-other people are doing so don’t shy about leaving a comment!

Thanks for reading, and happy flowers!


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Pregnant or Precocious?

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So spring is still being cruel. Snow this morning and frost for the last three nights. We had an insane wind storm that blew the top of our composting toilet,

…scattered all the plastic in the garden

….and lifted our solar shower over the goat fence and into their pen. It was one hell of a storm.


But besides all the crazy weather that refuses to warm up we have some excitement to keep our hopes up for the warmer months to come. For awhile now I’ve wondered why my goat Esther was so much rounder than Isla.
They both seemed to eat the same amount of food and do the same amount of exercise but Esther just seemed so much bigger. I’ve been handling my goats since we got them, rubbing their stomachs and sides and getting them used to the idea of having someone milk them. Esther was always harder to handle than Isla but recently she’s gotten much friendlier. So as I was going about my routine I found that her teats were no longer just little nubs sticking out of her belly, they were thumb sized and hanging from an udder that filled my hand.
Not wanting to give into wishful thinking I did some research into the possibilities of udder development in a non-pregnant goat. Turns out it is possible. The term used is a “precocious” udder. It is common among goats especially ones that come from strong milking lines, which would apply to Esther. Usually a goat that has a precocious udder will be a very good milker giving over a gallon of milk a day. However there is no way for me to tell if she is indeed pregnant or precocious. I’ve poked around her belly, much to her disgruntlement, and can’t find anything to determine the verdict one way or the other. We will just have to wait and see. If she is pregnant than she would be somewhere around her 15th week which means in another month or so we should no wether or not we will have a baby or just a good milking goat!

Market starts in two weeks, so far our radishes are about….oh half an inch tall and they are in the lead. Our peas are also poking through the ground we planted some on top of our hugel beets and then the rest along the outside of the goat/chicken pen. Our chickens kept trying to peck the pea seeds through the wire mesh but we were able to placate them with grubs and other goodies found in the dirt. Our onions have been planted, we seem to have over seeded and now are waiting for the ground to dry up a little more so we can build some more beds.
Does anyone out there have any experience with precocious goats or pregnant ones? What is coming up in your gardens? How has this crazy weather been effecting you and your spring plans?

Happy Easter!

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Spring is a Fickle Beast

We’ve stepped backward into cold again. The poor daffodils that tried to blossom in the warm sun of last week are cursing themselves for thinking it was safe enough to come out of the safety of their buds. We’ve planted peas, arugula, claytonia, spinach, and mache outside. Our onions were going to go out yesterday but it was so cold we decided to wait, also the cat got into the cold frame and flattened all of them so we thought we would give them a few days to straiten themselves out.

I find it humorous that even though it is in the 20′s and freezing we still haven’t made a fire. We didn’t even think about it we just never put more wood in once it got warm and when it got cold we just bundled up. I think somehow in my mind I feel like if I make a fire I will only be satisfying winter’s cruel sense of humor.

We had to fence the goats and chickens out of the orchard because they had gotten a bit too overzealous with the munching of woody material and started in on the trees. They don’t seem to mind, they have kept on devouring the blackberries and roses that are on their side of the fence. I for one do not understand how a goat’s tongue keeps from getting skewered by the many many thorns found on these plants. They don’t seem to notice them at all.

That’s all I have for now, more photos coming soon!

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April

It is melting. We had a week of snow and freezing and muck and now it is finally melting away. We’ve planted our peas and radishes out in the garden beds. We had to stick some very cold fingers into partially frozen ground to do it, but they are in and with this warm spring sun on them for the last few days and the projected 75 degrees coming on monday I think they should germinate happily.

Spring has brought all the undesirables with it as well, mice, ants, and ticks are the ones we are dealing with currently. We have cluster flies year long in our log cabin and spring brings nothing new in their persistent buzzing. We hadn’t had much of a mouse presence in the house besides the occasional gnawing in the roof, but the warm weather seemed to have brought them out. They got into our seedlings and flats of germinating seeds. Some of our pepper starts were devoured and they even went so far as to dig up all the seeds nestled in the potting soil waiting for germination. It was a sad day for baby plants, and for the mice family in our house.

We’ve caught four mice and the gnawing in the roof has stopped as well as the eating of our plants and seeds. We put the traps inside boxes with little mouse holes cut into them. The idea is that the mouse will be naturally curious about what is inside the little hole that smells like sunflower seeds, the trap will be more likely to snap its head since it won’t have enough room figure out how to get the goodies off the platform, and if the trap doesn’t kill them instantly they can’t run away with it and stink up your wall. It seems to have worked.

Spring has also been busy with meetings. We have become part of a growers collaborative in Rutland, which is trying to figure out a way to market local produce to local restaurants, schools and prepared food vendors. Josh is now on the board of the Vermont Farmer’s Market as well as the Solarfest Board, and we are involved with the Farm-to-School program here in Tinmouth. Lots of exciting things happening in the area and lots of young farmers taking part in it. There are five new farms joining the Rutland market this year we are one of them, Evening Song Farm, Tangled Roots Farm, Alchemy Gardens, Purple Burdock, and us. Having a community of other young like-minded people is amazingly encouraging especially this first year. If anyone here is looking for a CSA in the East Wallingford area Evening Song Farm still has some spots left. Go to their website for more information: www.eveningsongcsa.com.



The snowdrops are blooming soon to be followed by many more happy faces. I encourage you all to check out the other young farmer’s websites underlined above and read their blogs, we are all doing similar things in similar places.

Anyone else have some frustrating mouse stories to tell or clever ways to eradicate house pests?

Happy mud season!

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Walk-in/Icehouse Update

The walk-in shell is finally done. It took awhile since nothing was quite square and I kept having to run to the hardware store. I also had no idea what I was doing for the most part.

Most of the time spent in the past weeks was figuring out how to make blocks of styrofoam become little particles of styrofoam. Meadow and I had gone to pick up a pickup truck loads worth of styrofoam blocks in Hartland, VT. It was from an old business and the guy had 14 yards of the stuff. We are headed back to get another load which will hopefully be all we need to finish up. I had been hunting for a wood chipper/shredder but in winter they don’t pop up on Craigslist very often. I ended up building a prototype shredder using a hardware cloth disc mounted on a long nail attached to a drill. It worked really slowly and was really messy, I needed a chipper and quick if this was going to work.


I built the floor joists and created a closed cavity underneath it with a plastic liner. Once I had some shredded styrofoam it would fill this space insulating the shack from the ground. The cavity ranged from 8 inches to around 16 inches and we think the r-value is something like 3.5 or 4 per inch. That would put the floor’s r-value above 40. Once I had the floor down I put up felt paper on the two existing walls which will help reduce air infiltration because the boards where spaced around an inch apart.

In the front floor bay I made an enclosed space with the plastic so I could test out the shredder and see how well the broken up styrofoam would fill the space. I had bought a flexible dryer vent and made a manifold to attach it to the shredder. It involved lots of duct tape and as I learned quickly would not work because of all the times I would have to take it off. I placed some hardware cloth inside the output vent of the shredder to try and force larger pieces to stay within the reach of the metal teeth. The set up worked okay for a few rounds of styrofoam but then it got clogged and I had to take the whole thing apart. I went through a few attempts like this and the plastic bubble started to get filled. I decided it worked good enough and covered the whole floor with two layers of plywood. I cut a whole to accept the vent and started reworking the shredder. I switched from putting it in the chipping bulk side to the side used for larger pieces. I also Figured out a way to mount the plastic manifold using string so it was much easier to take apart when needed. Once I made the switch it was smooth sailing and I had the floor filled to the brim in an 2 hours or so.


After that it was time to think about putting the exterior walls for the other two sides up as well as the interior walls and ceiling. I decided that the front wall would not have a cavity and would just be two panels sandwiched together. Just in case I needed to run electric or if we expand it to the rest of the bay we won’t have to deal with the loose styrofoam. The other wall is made of plywood and a few verticals to support it. The interior walls for the blown cavities are rigid insulation that Marshall already had around. They are just under 4 inches and the space between them and the exterior walls range from 4 to 5 inches which would get me around a R-value of 30+. The Ceiling is rigid panels with styrofoam blown in the 6 or 7 inches between the rafters which should be around a R-value of 40+.

I called up Green Mountain Bottle Redemption and they were able to supply me with the 2000 2 liter bottles. Each bottle can be filled with 4.409 pounds of water and should take 72 btus to freeze. We will let nature take these btus away from the water on chilly nights. If I would have finished the shell earlier I would have added salt to the mix which would take the water’s freezing point down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit adding even more btus. But the nights wont be that cold hopefully for the rest of the winter but I will try experimenting with it next year. With the 2000 bottles plus a tank that holds 50 gallons its around a million btus which hopefully will be enough to get us through till it gets cold enough. Most of the vegetables will be picked on friday and sold on saturday so our cooling load will not be to high this year. I’ll be keeping track of the temperature as the season progresses and will be able to chart the performance of the walk in. Then next year we can make the changes that will be necessary if any are needed to keep it cool. This year we will probably miss a really good freeze but the amount of thermal mass in the walk-in should keep it cool.

There are a few more pics on our flickr page.