The chicks pecked their way out of the shells and moved cheerfully into a chick pen.
Tropical Resort
Jenny set up a brooder heater. Last year we used a traditional heat lamp and has success with it. This year we are using a flat panel heater to lower the risk of fire and burns on little fingers. It is working well, with one problem.
The problem is the chicks want to roost. They specifically want to roost on top of the heater, freely depositing chicken manure across the surface of it. Our Good&Cheap(TM) solution is a foil pan fitted to the top. It blocks the surface access without causing any new problems.
One surprise was how many different times and places the chicks managed to pry under the foil pan. We would hear distress cheeping and discover one roosting in the foil pan oven on top of the heater. The fourth iteration of the foil pan finally blocked all of these intrepid adventures.
There was another surprise this weekend. A new kitten joined the workshop. We’re calling her Blue Belle, and more on her in the next post.
Spring is coming and we have done a lot of blending livestock with each other to make feeding easier this winter.
Our livestock guardian Anatolian Shepherd, Ashok, has taken to preferring goat feed over dog food. He’s also sleeping with the Kune Kune pigs and playing with the bullcalf Yum.
In his spare time he’s also started fights with his pops and eaten a chicken, so there are some problems.
Let the wash begin
Cattle in herds take care of grooming each other. We see them lick fly ridden areas on each other and rub on areas the tails can’t reach. They also give the piggies a bath. The piggies will come up and roll over for a good solid lick down and then wonder off again. Complete surprise to us.
Let’s play paw-to-hand through the glass
The cats are also friendly with the kids, through the door way. No cats in the house!!
Previously we tried to season our sweet potatoes in the well house. Stays warm with a heat lamp and stays humid with condensation.
I moved the box to collect the sweet potatoes. The box tore apart as I picked it up. I muttered angry imprecations and found a surprise. The sweet potatoes had endured their dark yet tropical hideaway by sending down roots and sprouting new sweet potato plants. In the dark and through the concrete, little sprouts reaching for the dim light of the door frame.
I was less annoyed and somewhat inspired. The sweet potatoes were terrible though, I’m glad the piggies enjoy them.
Texas snow is happening. Blink and you’ll miss it. It’s enough to remind us each of the mortality of man every time and then brief enough to be fondly remembered in hindsight. It also makes a challenge for the pasture raised pigs who want to stay in their snug abode until hunger forces them out.
So they get some of the sweet potatoes that went to freeze previously and I don’t want to eat.
Pigs are rewarding creatures to have around. Always excited about gifts and abounding in squeals of thanksgiving.
They are still pigs though, so not strong on manners.
Managing the hay access has been a challenge. The pallet fences that worked so well to keep the goats and cows out of the hay bales all summer and winter are failing. Given the thousands of pounds of beef weight shoving them around, that only surprises a city boy like me.
But why though?
The bullcalf Yum is taking the cake. He’s small enough to fit in some of the cracks and got stuck on top of the rounds. He even fits through the hay feeder ring openings.
“Have you brought snacks?”
Now, I have a hypothesis. I don’t have a picture of it but the dogs keep getting on top of the hay bale rounds. I think the young one Ashok learned it from the goats this summer. The dogs and the calf have been playing and following one another around lately. So I think the calf learned it from the puppy. The dogs bolt off the hay when I go to take a picture, but I think they got up there and left their beefy buddy high and dry.
Exactly the conversation we had together
Eventually the calf hopped down and I modified the fencing to restrict access. It’s been working, mostly. Keep your hay dry folks!
Managing the hay access has been a challenge. The pallet fences that worked so well to keep the goats and cows out of the hay bales all summer and winter are failing. Given the thousands of pounds of beef weight shoving them around, that only a surprise to the city boy like me.
But why though?
The bullcalf Yum is taking the cake though. He’s small enough to fit in some of the cracks and got stuck on top of the rounds.
“Do you have snacks?”
Now, I have a hypothesis. I don’t have a picture of it but the dogs keep getting on top of the hay bale rounds. I think the young one Ashok learned it from the goats in a storm this summer. The dogs and the calf have been playing and following one another around lately. The dogs bolt off the hay when I go to take a picture, but I think they left their beefy buddy high and dry up there.
Exactly the conversation we had together
Eventually he hopped down and I modified the fencing to restrict access. It’s been working, mostly. Keep your hay dry folks!
Every year around Thanksgiving the Cornucopia is used in decorations. It was originally the horn of the goat filled with plenty of nuts and berries brought in from foraging the countryside. Today it’s even more expansive: a woven basket heavy with harvest and spilling out upon the table.
Plenty
You notice some changes. It is no longer hunter-gatherer but agriculture. No longer a found and repurposed object (goat horn) but a made-to-spec woven product. No longer constrained with what was freely acquired, but increased abundance from what was produced. There’s thoughtful work going into it and much better output as a result.
What you choose to eat works in a similar way. Casting about and eating what comes easy and falls to you will work. You will have calories. You will have low costs on paper as the upside and blessings of industrial agriculture rain down around you. You may even have others coming for you all the time if you keep hitting the drive through.
Even in the ancient near east, a wise man pointed to the birds who eat and asked, why do you worry? Does not your father love you more then these sparrows?
This approach beats the pants off starvation and blatant malnutrition, where you don’t have the ability to even wear pants! Raise your goat horn my friends, for you have much and gratitude is in order.
Then sometime when you stop to think about food, you start to think differently. In a very real sense, to think at all is to think differently. What about the future costs of treating your inputs casually? What are the spillover costs others bear? How can there be so much transportation involved? Does local biome impact my body? What would it be like to know my farmer? Can I make small changes today to grow for tomorrow?
Once you start asking, you start to make changes. Maybe go to organics in produce. Maybe drop chemical colors. Maybe do eggs from the farm. Maybe find a farmer to hang a side of beef. Maybe start gardening. Maybe just cook at home more and drive through less.
Suddenly, you’re weaving that horn and planning a future. You’ve moved from the goat and the gathering to the basket and the harvest.
You’re improving health and lowering future costs. You’re uncovering delight in the patterns of the seasons. You soak in gratitude for the men who came before and breed these seeds and beasts to best serve man. It brings you closer to Eden, where God placed Adam in the first place.
Are you willing? There is great abundance for anyone willing to peek behind the easy button and start to build relationships.
Last year we grew some sweet potatoes. For us it was the first time they grew vines and covered the earth.
Then disaster struck in the form of goats on hooves craving their high protein leaves and vines. Once in May and once in July the furry blight descended on the happy sweet potato village. Ruin was wrought but the plucky little plant kept coming back.
The vines came back but the roots never grew big and consumable. The tubers grow big when they can store up energy from the sun, not when they have to focus energy on regrowing solar panels.
This year is different
The gardeners constructed better walls and defensive measures and the 2021 sweet potatoes grew in peace and prospered.
Part of the harvest
After pulling the enlarged tubers from the soil you brush off the dirt and inspect. Some of the rejects had worms and these were given to the very happy pigs. The good ones are kept at 90f for 10 days to season and sweeten. Using a space heater and the well house we were able to manage that process.
Salad for dinner
Taking a cue from the goats natural behavior, we gave them all the discarded vines for supplement feed in the pasture. Great time had by all.
Part of the fun in homestead farming is the power tools. Drills, impacts, sawzalls…and tractors running a woodchipper.
Craigslist Find
Winter is coming and after the deep freeze last year, no more joking around for us. The pole barn is being rearranged to optimize space. Animals will stay on concrete floor areas for easy cleaning. Then we will be keeping hay separate from the animals.
The Steam Also Rises
The plan is inspired from some Joel Salatin writing on the wonders of using wood mulch as bedding in the winter. It soaks up the free fertilizer and can be converted to soil. To help the conversion in the spring, you put some corn in between your layers of mulch. Then the pigs dig up the corn and aerate the mulch in the spring. To do this, we need more chips.
Woodchipper on the three point hitch
Jenny has thought a woodchipper was a good idea for months. Over the summer she had a Don Quixote fixation with cutting tree branches down. They helped to feed leaves to the goats. It also helps grass grow under the trees to get more sunlight to the ground under the canopy.
Between that effort and the brush clearing to fix fences last year and this year, we have wood to burn.
Or in this case, chip into mulch, scatter as bedding, scatter some corn kernels amongst the bedding, put more mulch on it, then turn the pigs loose to till it all up into fluffy garden soils for the spring.
Michael Pollan is one of my favorite authors. He takes something simple such as what a person eats (The Omnivores Dilemma) or how food is prepared (Cooked) and asks the reader to think about it. What is a moral meal? Is there nobility in the kitchen? If you were a plant or animal, how would you conquer the earth?
For example, grass has nearly conquered the earth. It’s everywhere, before you consider wheat and corn dominating agriculture. Their pasture allies the cattle have also been propagated everywhere man builds. If you’re looking to conquer the earth, get humans to domesticate you and value your production.
The harvest for men
These domestic, albeit heirloom tomatoes have done the same in the garden. They fruited in the summer and dropped some fruit. Those fruit planted themselves and now we get to harvest these volunteer fruits.
The harvest for beasts
Because life is complex and I ain’t a good farmer yet, a lot of this fruit went bad or was damaged by critters while on the plant. The upside with having livestock is they don’t care about blemishes, they love nature’s nutrition.
“Chickens love tomatoes. Tomatoes are the chicken’s favorite”
A no waste volunteer food system? We can work with that.
