Living off the land

The other day I had a completely off-the-land omelet and it was awesome! Remember my onion patch? Well, I guess they really mean it when they write on the packet of seeds "plant in fine, loose soil," because my soil was NOT fine and loose, and the onions pushed themselves up out of the dirt because their roots couldn't get deep enough. So, after 7 months of faithful watering and weed pulling, all I have is a handful of tiny little onions. But they sure taste good!



Those, combined with some fresh zucchini from the garden and a couple of newly laid eggs made for a darn good supper.



I love the idea of growing our own food, and a meal comprised entirely of things we have grown and nurtured ourselves is much more than tasty - it is an accomplishment. I have a feeling we're going to be eating a lot more omelets in the days to come...

Let that be a lesson to you:

Mess with my kids, and I'll eat you for dinner.

We are now a 100% rooster-free zone. It's actually really nice. No more waking up at 5 am to the sound of crowing, no more being charged by a huge feathered beast as I walk to the car in the morning, no more kids walking around the yard with sticks in case the big bird gets too close, no more telling the boys "they're just wrestling" as the rooster has his way with the hens, no more claw marks on our shins... It's just one part of farm life I'd rather do without.

And this guy is going to make a big ol' happy family dinner. RIP Roostofferson, we won't miss you much.

Germination

After weeks and weeks of torrential rain, fog, and cold weather, things have finally dried out and spring is here! This is hands-down my favorite time of year up here on the farm. I will have to post some pictures for you in the next few days of how dang beautiful everything is up here. For now, I will just show you this tiny bit of green that is making my day. My tomatoes and peppers have germinated! Hooray for planning ahead and having a brother who is a scientist and gardening genius! This year I used plastic cups instead of the seed starting trays because they are bigger and I don't have to worry about my plants getting root-bound before I am ready to plant them. In addition to these friendly little sprouts, I've planted my lettuce, peas, beans, chard, and carrots outside (all by seed - I've decided that transplanting anything other than tomatoes and peppers is a waste of time). Fingers crossed on how those turn out - if you've followed my blog for a while you know that I don't have much luck when it comes to actual outside gardening. This year my pest-deterrent efforts have reached an all-time high; after a rabbit made off with two of the brussels sprout plants that I nursed through the whole winter I decided to go all out. Some day I'll show you some pictures of my garden beds - they look like plant jails. It is such an exciting time of year - planning, working in the dirt, choosing what things to grow, plotting the death of all snails and gophers within a 3 mile radius... How about you? Are you planting a garden this year?

Caution: story of death and blood. Maybe don't even read it...

The grim reality of farm life (and the part I don't take pictures of) is that animals die up here. There are fewer roads, fewer people, more animals, and a lot more space for them to bother each other. Unfortunately, over the last week my poor little kids have been exposed to some of these less-than-pleasant truths. What makes it even worse is that the animals involved are our puppy Bentley and our chickens, who we raised from birth. How does one choose between two pets? Well, it seems that when one of them starts eating the others, the predator has to go. We aren't farmy enough to take Bently to the back 40 and shoot him, but we will need to find him a new home. I am so sad. But I was also sad to come home today and have to put a chicken "out of its misery" since Bentley hadn't finished the job. And that was the second time this week (and the fourth in Bentley's life with us). Yes, my kids were right there crying. And I cried too, hardened farm girl that I am. What a mess. Sorry to write such a downer post - aren't you glad you live in the suburbs?

Goat Birthday Party

Lest you begin to think we are high-brow around here after my last post, I thought I'd share what we did after we got home from our weekend at the W in San Francisco. We went to a goat's birthday party. Yep. Little Man turned one, and we were invited - got an invitation in the mail and everything. Of course we brought a gift - Saltines would have been better, but Ritz crackers are a close second when it comes to goat gifts. Here is Moses presenting the birthday boy with his present.

Little Man was a very gracious host - he even shared his birthday cake with his Aunt Angelina and allowed his other goat friends to eat the decorations. We weren't the only guests, either. All of the other "hill people" (that's what we humans call ourselves up here) came bearing gifts as well. The only snafoo occurred when Lamb Chop (who is MUCH bigger than Little Man and Angelina) decided to take a running charge at Moses, who went flying into a shed, banging up his elbow pretty good. Maybe she was jealous or something, but I sure was tempted to turn her name into something a little more literal. Ah, home... :)

Trouble with Chickens

That's right, I said trouble with chickens.

Since getting my own "flock," I've been pretty snobby about the fact that ours are true Free Range hens. Legally speaking, someone can claim to be raising free range hens as long as their chickens aren't confined to a tiny cage - if they never see the light of day, have their beaks clipped to keep them from pecking their eggs, and are injected full of hormones, they can still be called "free range," and everyone thinks that their meat and eggs are completely healthy. Anyhow, my chickens get let outside every morning to range around the 3 acres eating bugs and grass and rolling in the dust (chickens LOVE to roll in the dust) and having all sorts of other chicken shenanigans. From what I've read, this produces much healthier eggs, and of course the chickens are happier.

Well. Over the last month I have realized why anybody hoping to make money off their eggs, or anybody hoping to have eggs for their family, or basically just anybody hoping to preserve their sanity might consider caging their chickens into tiny boxes. We've got chicken trouble. It all started when one hen, my most faithful layer, decided that after she laid an egg, it made perfect sense to take her sharp beak and punch a huge hole in it. This annoying behavior quickly snowballed into her punching holes in everybody else's eggs too. You can't eat an egg with a chicken-beak hole in it - gross. So every day I was collecting maybe one intact egg, and 4 broken ones, not to mention cleaning raw egg out of the hay and chicken food that it had run into.

Attempt number one at extinguishing this behavior was to modify the nesting boxes. Chickens are very instinctual and will lay their eggs in nesting boxes (boxes full of hay) without even being trained - it is like getting a cat to use a litter box. This way you can control where they lay their eggs, which makes life much easier for everybody. Brett decided to give our existing nesting boxes slanted floors so that when the chickens laid an egg, the egg would roll to the back of the box into a little compartment that the naughty chicken couldn't fit her beak into. This was a great concept - except that the eggs rolled only if there was no hay in the nesting box. Kind of like trying to get your cat to use an empty litter box. Not gonna happen. Only, we didn't realize this until about 2 weeks later. At first we thought we had succeeded - all of my eggs were intact! Gradually, however, I went from collecting 5 eggs a day to 4, and eventually I was down to only 1 egg per day. Where were the other eggs going?

Well, let me shorten the story for you: the eggs were going EVERYWHERE. My chickens have gone wild and now lay their eggs anywhere in the heck they feel like it all over their glorious free ranging 3 acres because the nesting boxes no longer feel like nests to them. And chickens are not like the Easter Bunny, either. They aren't laying their eggs where somebody is sure to find them, and they are not laying fluorescent blue eggs. They lay brown eggs inside of bushes or under rocks or in holes that they dig in the sand. It is almost impossible to find these eggs, and once you DO find one and take it out of the nest, the chicken won't lay another egg in that same spot because it is obviously not a safe location (never mind the fact that she laid the egg and promptly got up and left it there unattended for an entire 24 hours). Are you getting a feel for how our afternoons have been going? Yep, we have a daily egg hunt. The kids love it. I hate it.

Oh, and did I mention that "stupid chicken lady" (that's the one who pecks the eggs, not me) is still punching holes in eggs, whenever she manages to find them before we do. Now that we ruined the nesting boxes by making them peck-proof, all the eggs are vulnerable again and she's on the prowl. I plan on turning her into dinner soon, but the problem is that she looks exactly like all my other black hens and I haven't been fast enough to mark her before she escapes. That's right - I've been stalking a chicken around my dad's property for weeks with a can of spray paint hoping to identify her for later slaughter. These chickens are turning me into a maniac.

SO, if you are reading this and happen to have any experience with chickens, particularly with wild egg-laying ones, or the egg eating type, could you give me some advice? I'd sure appreciate it...

Underwear Power!

Somebody is on day two of potty training, and I am glad that I had the wisdom NOT to blog yesterday, because today I can say that I am thankful for potty training. I am thankful that potty training kept us at home all day today, resulting in one of the most relaxing, fun days we have had in a long time. I am thankful that potty training forces me to spend hours sitting on the floor next to my little guys (one on the potty, the other on the floor) playing Legos rather than cleaning. And I am thankful that we live where there is lots of grass that needs to be, *ahem*, watered.

We found a tree in the far corner of the property that we had actually never played under and it was the best discovery of the day. I love the colors of the lichen growing on the weathered grey bark.

The boys ended up having an hour-long wrestling match in the long shiny grass while the dogs dug a huge hole in search for gophers and I sat in the sun. Seriously the perfect day. Thanks potty training!

First construction project

Yesterday I completed my first ever construction project and I am so proud of myself! Building with wood is actually a lot like making a quilt, only instead of using scissors, fabric, and a sewing machine, you use a circular saw, wood, and a hammer. Oh, and you could die. However, the weather has been so beautiful and sunny and something about it made me feel like I could do anything, so I put on my "safety glasses," ($7 aviators from Target that are actually just sunglasses - don't tell Brett), said a quick prayer, and started sawing. The end result is this planting box that I plan to grow onions in. (We have a ton of land around here, but anything planted directly in the ground is immediately devoured by gophers, so my solution has been to use planter boxes, and I need more.)

This project was actually quite simple, made even easier by the facts that all the materials were on hand in addition to an entire barn filled with my husband's tools and a 5 year old who knew exactly what to do because he's watched his daddy do it before. We were probably quite entertaining to the neighbors - the tiny foreman bossing around his mother who was literally shaking with fear as she wielded a gigantic saw while praying out loud that she wouldn't saw her own leg off.

Here is an embarrassing picture of me looking proud of my planter box and flexing my newly found I-don't-need-a-man muscles. Which of course, I don't really have because I TOTALLY love having my husband do things for me and was not happy about the condition of my boots after the project was over. In all seriousness, though, it was really great to do something I've never done before and I highly suggest it. Now I'm off to order some onion seeds...

Sick Day

Today Moses was coughing enough to make me feel too guilty to take him to school. With nothing else on the schedule besides laundry, we ended up with a rare morning at home. And what a gorgeous morning to spend on the farm!

I think all three of us were feeling low on energy this morning, so it was nice to putter around outside doing nothing in particular other than watch the leaves blow around and enjoy the beauty.

Of course, there were bikes to ride...

And plenty of rose hips to throw at the geese (don't judge us, those guys ended up mean and we still have pretty bad aim).

Hopefully we're feeling better soon, but this ended up being a pretty great sick day.

Harvest!

Happy Monday! How was your weekend? This weekend was harvest time up here on the farm. My garden has kind of petered slowly, but my dad's is undergoing a kind of grand finale, and this weekend we all benefited from his hours of toiling outside. The main attraction was the harvesting of the pumpkins.

This year my dad grew "Big Max" pumpkins, which are supposed to be able to grow up to 72 inches in diameter. His didn't get quite that big, but the biggest one weighed something like 85 pounds. That's a lot of pumpkin! The boys and I have enjoyed watching the pumpkins in the front pasture get bigger and bigger, turning deep orange as summer drew to an end. We've also chased countless wild turkeys out of the pumpkin patch, so we have a kind of motherly attachment to them.

All together there were 8 huge pumpkins - our own mini pumpkin patch. I'm sure my dad will carve a few of them together with the boys, and I'm hoping he will give me at least one to eat, since my own "pumpkin patch" is nothing but one sad looking vine this year.

After the pumpkins, we moved to the second-most-exciting crop: popcorn. This is so cool - did you know that popcorn grows on a cob, just like regular corn? That's right, it doesn't grow in a paper bag filled with fake butter and salt - who knew? This is blue popcorn, and it didn't do very well this year because of the cool weather we had all summer.

However, after putting an ear in a brown paper bag and microwaving it for a while, it came out looking like this:

And the rest of the bag was filled with perfectly popped popcorn - YUM! I highly recommend growing this some year with your kids. Eating popcorn off the cob might be one of fall's most missed-out-on pleasures.
Thanks so my dad's huge garden, we now have TONS of fresh food to eat: corn, popcorn, pumpkin, Honeydew melon, two types of watermelon, tomatoes galore, bell peppers, sweet potato squash, and beets. I'm still contributing a zucchini and yellow squash here and there, so between our two households we are doing pretty well. Fall has definitely always been my favorite season, and now that we have a real harvest to celebrate, it makes it even better.

Keeping Cool

School may be back in session, but that doesn't mean summer is over!

(This was my best purchase of the year by far - a $4 slip-n-slide from Target that has sprinklers on it. Awesome!)

Weekend Away

How was your fourth of July? We celebrated by taking a REAL weekend away - as in: we left on Friday morning and got home on Monday night. We spent most of our time with Brett's parents in Twain Harte, and then took a day trip to Kennedy Meadows on Monday. Brett has many fond memories of camping there as a kid wanted me to see the setting to so many of his stories. It was breathtaking! We parked at the "lower meadow" and hiked a short distance to the "upper meadow" and spent the day along the river fishing, eating a picnic lunch, playing in the water, chasing butterflies, and basically marveling in the vastness of God's creation. These pictures don't portray how HUGE everything was - I honestly felt dwarfed.

Brett and Moses took a log ride down the river - definitely a highlight of the excursion!

Titus spent a lot of time playing with the "tiny rocks" along the edge of the river. I thought it was funny that he wasn't very interested in the big rocks but was thrilled by the small ones - the tinier the better.
Here is my father-in-law fishing in the river - this picture sort of captures how small we were in comparison to the mountains, water, trees ... everything. It was awesome! I definitely recommend taking a trip to Kennedy Meadows. It is very doable with kids and well worth the drive. (You can also rent little sleeper cabins at the lower meadow if you want to stay for a few nights. Again - it would be worth the money!) I hope you enjoyed your weekend too!

Flower Picking

Yesterday I had a bout of guilt over not "doing anything" yet with the boys for summer. We haven't taken any special trips or done anything away from home beyond playing at the park. Of course, at this point it was too late in the day to schedule anything, so I decided we would spend the afternoon picking flowers. Moses loved it - I knew he would. Titus HATED it - that wasn't a big surprise either. But he had fun stepping on snails and trying to drink bubble juice while Moses and I gathered and arranged flowers.

It was so sweet to see Moses surrounded by flowers he had picked from the farm, getting his bouquet just right, then coming inside and choosing the perfect spot to put it. It is on his book shelf, up very high so baby brother doesn't try to drink the water out of the vase. We admired it for a bit, took some pictures of it ... then played dinosaurs, during which there was much eating of other animals and other such bloody violence. We are such a well-rounded family. :)

Plant Jail

Every day as I sit at my computer checking email, blogging, editing pictures, and updating the shop, this is what I see. My precious second batch of seedlings. If you remember last year's soliloquy on why I can not grow a garden on a farm, you will not be surprised to hear that my first batch of seedlings didn't make it. Nor did the first set of seeds I planted directly outdoors. These are my last chance of having an all-heirloom garden of vegetables. I rotate them twice daily, and once a week I water them with seaweed solution I've made by fermenting seaweed (which I gathered myself) in buckets in the backyard. Sounds hard-core, but maybe "desperate" is a better word for it. I want SO BADLY to be more self-reliant, but no matter what I do I can not force my thumbs to be green. These guys are slated to go outside this week - I can hardly bear to put them out there. If anybody has any gardening tips for me, I could sure use them!

Look What My Man Can Do - Third Installment

Here is another of the beautiful yards Brett put in. My photography doesn't really do it justice as the project included facing the entire house with composite rock and installing a beautiful lighting system. I love the olive trees the most. Nice work Brettie!

Twitterpated

I just love spring! Everything is blooming and green and lovely. The colors outside are breathtaking!
For the first time I noticed how beautiful the lichen is that grows on the old fence posts and rocks along the driveway. What great colors!


And, of course, my boys love the spring too. More time outside, less time getting bundled up. (Of course, right now it is pouring down rain outside, but the sun will be back soon enough.) It's nice to have a healthy baby again and feel like life has returned to normal. I have a tray full of sprouts waiting to be transfered to the garden and a huge pile of sewing projects in the works, so I'm excited about what the next few weeks will bring. Hope all is well in your neck of the woods!

Showers

We play outside every afternoon, and lately that means playing in the rain (or at least the mud). It always takes me a minute or two to embrace the idea of my kids getting completely wet and filthy... I picture my newly mopped floor covered in soggy footprints and the laundry hamper filling up AGAIN. But the moment passes and we throw on our boots (or our sandals, as you can see Titus wearing in this picture. I know, great mom, right?) and get out there.

Even when things are soggy, it is beautiful out here. And the kids certainly don't care about getting muddy. Some of our best times have been spent in the rain waiting for that familiar sound of Daddy's big diesel truck rumbling up the driveway. I hope you are off to a wonderful week - and spending some time outside!

Weekend Hike

How was your weekend? We had a really great one - first of all because Daddy, who had planned on working on Saturday, decided to stay home because he "likes eating a special breakfast as a family on Saturdays." How great is that?! After pancakes and coffee (adults only, of course) we headed to Penetencia Creek to go for a hike. Here I am rocking our awesome old-school purple baby backpack, complete with kick-stand.

It was a gorgeous day - so nice to be outside after being cooped up due to lots and lots of rain. Titus' favorite part was the meadow of wildflowers we found. He could have sat there for an hour touching them. We found puddles to jump in, hills to run up and fall down, and even built a bridge across the creek using logs and rocks. I love that feeling of getting back into the car all wet, muddy, hungry, and happy.

In a season where money is tight it was wonderful to have a super fun family outing that cost us nothing. We're hoping to do lots more budget friendly activities as "winter" eases into spring. How about you - any family activities to share?