Category: Planting

Autumn Proper

The first week of November is already by, and I am already starting to lament the thought of that long period between Christmas and spring planting, when the seed catalogues come, and the season never seems to go. Everyone who lives with plants knows just what I mean. As for those with animals, unless they can afford plenty of hay, they will understand the anxieties I have right now about the amount of hay we have on hand, and how well the tarp is staying on it, or not. Anyone who survives the cold with only wood heat and limited access to the wood knows the other anxiety I am suffering right now. I know we could be a lot worse off in so many ways. It is just a part of the agrarian life that one lives with when each year one gets just enough to get by. I hope that during the coming year I will better this situation and get truly ahead.

I have got so much done in the past month since the tractor arrived that I am amazed. I am half done with the land bridge from the main property across the street to the other side of the swale at the bottom of the place. Once that is done, I will be able to wither carry on with the idea of planting trees along there and calling it Willow Bank, or I could let the livestock over to graze at their leisure and have about 4/10ths of an acre more land to feed from. It’s no small thing as that would support a cow for a while. Every little helps. But if we do the Willow Bank idea, it would be best to leave it as an untouched natural space for animals and picnics. Willow trees would just finish it over there, providing shade and play.

I went out to do some work in the shop yesterday but noticed the llamas giving attention to something at the bottom of the property. I could not see what it was, so I went over instead, and found three hounds had trapped a raccoon and were biting and barking at it. The raccoon was in a struggle, but I could not do much to interfere with frenzied dogs who would only ignore my pleas for them to stop and let it be. I checked with some people who I saw on the next property, but the dogs were not theirs. I went back and the raccoon was still alive, but had no fight left in it. I thought the dogs were being fairly inefficient at killing it, then realized what was going on. They had worn it down, then one bit on its throat till it choked to death. It was a maneuver that they could not have pulled off with the raccoon fighting back. It was a sad thing to see, but they were not my dogs and I could not stop them, and I did not want to get tangled up with a raccoon. If there are rabies, then I’d be the final victim. No thank you. I now know who’s dogs they are, but there is not much I can do about them, as they live close enough that unless they are going to keep their dogs permanently locked up, they will always end up over on ours. Also, we have had horses break lose and end up in their pasture before, too, so it is probably best to keep an understanding with these particular people. It was a raccoon. It was not one of my animals. But it does mean that I have limits to what animals I can keep over there, as small ones and waterfowl are probably out of the question. It is best as a grazing pasture.

I am nearly done setting up for a welder in the shop. I need to clean up in there, so I don’t set a fire or cause an explosion. I just need to install some gear I have got in order to plug the welder in, then I need to get some practice in. I have got me some learning to do. I put in all the electrics into the cottage for Missus, and now I am doing a bit of work on the shop. Much of it is done already, and things are working much better in there. For example, the air compressor is kicking on at full power now and runs without tripping a breaker. It sure feels a lot safer without worrying about all the power coming into the shop down a single extension cord from the house! That has also relieved a circuit in the house, too! The kitchen ought to run better, and we have finally closed that window on the front porch all the way. There is the door out there that could do with being replaced, and I think it will keep much warmer in there going forward from that.

Ponderings On Our Direction

I did not sleep well last night. I was too busy thinking up things to worry about! Hopefully tonight will go better. Missus is hard at work this week and being swamped with things that are frustrating and high pressure. I won’t say more due to business being a business. I just want to put down that she is under a lot of pressure, and her job role is difficult because she is a multi-hat wearer including Senior Project Manager and Director. While she is wearing multiple hats, I take mine off to her for dealing with all she is right now, while we are adding more stresses at home with the farm.

Someone has driven by the place across the street and looked at it a couple of times today. I think it is in a prime location and will draw some attention. I was just amazed at how quickly it turned from an office visit with the realtor to actual people looking it over.

Seeing such things just about leaves a knot in my stomach. Turning ideas into reality can do that, especially early on, and when we are not sure where tomorrow leads us. But there are ideas of what to do, and I am happy to share some of the generalities.

We love our llamas, and have no plans to give them up. We would like a few more! They are wonderful animals, and for all of the talk of them being great guard animals, and the viciousness that that implies, I have always found them quite the opposite! They are lovely. Just this morning I went into the pen with the old girl with the bad hips, Mystique. I have to go into her pen to water the little pigs, and she has formed the habit of coming up behind me and waiting for me to turn around and spray her down with water. She does this early in the mornings, before it has got hot, so either it is really hot being a llama, or she just likes it either way. Whatever the case, I would like to quarter all the llamas and be able to work with them better going forward to develop these sorts of habits. I think having a barn for them to do that in, and to put them up in during bad weather would be really wonderful, so it is on the shopping list! Any new property going forward wants to have a barn.

I think in addition to a barn, a field to turn the llamas out in that gives them access to a pond and lots of water would also be very good, and increase the odds of us leaving the property for longer than we have been able to before. Currently, we can go out for a tops of about 36 hours. We would like to better that.

Chickens are a given on a farm. The eggs and food source are obvious, and helpful. There is too much that can be done with eggs to give up on them, and fresh eggs are really so much better than store bought.

We will keep the peacocks, too. They are ornamental, and maybe they could pull a bit of money selling them as they breed, but we would like to have them as a permanent part of our farm, wherever.

I don’t want to do pigs again unless we are properly set up for them for the long term. I am not a butcher, either, so that has got to either be learned, or they have to be given up on. Maybe they will come again in the future, but only if there is good housing and strong fencing set up for them, and the breeds we pick are a bit smaller than our Large Black was. She was lovely, but weighing in at about 400 pounds, she was also a big, expensive pet. So pigs are probably out, at least for a bit.

Missus wants to carry on with goats, but we will need the means to sell them of so, or we will be overrun! I have the boys away from the girls now, because they come in twos and threes when they do come! That turns into a lot of hay consumption!

Missus wants to carry on with our Lionhead Angora Cross Rabbits. Who could blame her? She wants a better pen for them where they can have social time and such, so that is something we are looking at in a new place.

Waterfowl are okay, but again, I would like to seem them with access to a pond because ducks and geese see fresh water as something to go ruin with mud and dirt just as fast as they can, and messing it all up for the chickens that currently live with them.

I have been on this place not for some nine years, working with one hose connection for all of it, and with no tractor to help out with the heavy work. Those are two things that have got to change, especially where I have crossed the fifty-mark! Snow removal is a pain, moving hay impossible in the size bales we currently buy, and so many other jobs that would be aided, especially firewood and compost and other wood products and byproducts!

Other tools I would like to procure include a sawmill and a few more hand tools to try my skills at some furniture building from timber to finished product. I could use a workshop rather than a garage for that kind of thing.

Missus wants to get the fiber mill going where we can handle our own llama fiber, and other people’s fibers as well. If you are following my logic here, you may be adding up the out buildings we are shopping for so all this does not have to be stuffed into a house with us! There are places, and they are in our range, but we have to get ourselves to one, and hopefully not find it in serious need of work when we get there. Only time will tell on that part. Geography has not even been worked out yet.

Last, but not least, I have got a little model of the train I rode on with mom when I was nine. I would like to have a little space to set up something with that. A basement or an attic would do it.

Leaving the area we are in would be bittersweet. While we don’t know a lot of people around us very well, there are a lot of wonderful places around us that we like to go to, such as the ice cream manufacturer’s shop, and the flour mill, the cheese factory, and the honey maker. These are places we can get items that are very fresh, and very good. There are other treats as well, such as the milk shakes over at Brea Lake, or the wonderful little BBQ place over in Malad.

Right now, things are not set in stone or even wet cement. But the ball has been pushed and will either roll, or not. It is time for a change, so I am happy for it to. I have had changes of scenery all of my life, from living in places like California and Colorado and the UK, to little changes from city to city.

I’d like to live where the grass is tender, and I can scythe it without it pushing over because it is dry. I’d like to put a canoe in the water and row from shore to shore, listening to the birds, and spotting the occasional fish breaching the surface of the water, and teaching my daughters to appreciate nature and out part in it. I’d like home to be a place where I can let my llamas graze all summer long, and where I can provide winter feed without being subject to massive price hikes like we have recently. I’d like to spend my evenings in the wood shop, working out how to build a chair for a grandchild, or building a detail for the model railroad. I would like to roll around on a tractor, pulling a chicken coop behind and setting up the birds so they can peck and scratch in a new spot each day. But mostly, I want to see Missus able to spread out and do her hobbies and making the things she enjoys doing, and have a space to teach others the many things she has spent years learning on our hobby farming adventure, and I would like to see her with a deep, contented smile on her face. It is going to take a change to do all of that, and the time is here to at least try to make it so.

I am fifty. Accidents aside, I am probably 20 to 50 years away from snuffing it. Whatever, I need to make good use of it all. We need to put down where our roots can grow a little deeper than they have been able to here.

Oh, and I still love heating our place with the woodstove, so wherever we go, I am going to need that! There is nothing better, and nothing that provides more security over the winter than having heat with the flick of a match and a good pile of dry wood at the ready! I don’t ever want to give that up! That rules out most rest homes for me in the future!

This Week On The Farm

This week we got some work done while the weather was cool. We did not do any specific projects, just some general work here. I suffered some sciatic pains, so that kept me from doing much for three days. But on Thursday I got a call from a farmer neighbor to come help him get hay from his field into his shed. I drove one of the trucks for a couple of loads, and took over the loader tractor when his daughter had to go to work. Yup, she was running it like a champ at sixteen years of age. I told her it was amazing watching her girl-power that thing around like an old pro.

Friday was a tired day, so I fought off the tired by going to get firewood. I expect this to be the last load of the spring, as the weather is getting awfully hot now. Now it is time to cut wood to length, and split it and stack it during the cool parts of the day.

We have been mulching flower beds, the herb garden, and the gothic garden. We have fought hard against weeds and grass that regrows where we try to clear and plant anything, including the vegetable gardens and the raised beds. Nothing seems to have worked, so we are giving up on much of it and putting down plastic and mulch to try to defeat it once and for all. Failing that, everything will be put into containers and kept on mulch beds. This place has always been fortunate where grass is concerned. I have burned holes right through the lawn, and within two years, it has recovered itself and looked like nothing has ever happened.

I took down the last of the raised beds in the front yard. That makes room to widen the parking on the driveway, and finish the circle drive we decided on a few years back. That will be completed once and for all when I get a tractor to do the job with. There is no doing that job by hand!

I planted the potato crop a little late when I did that this week. But it is fine since Missus likes New Potatoes. I am okay with that, too. as I suspect our growing seasons are getting longer anyhow, they will have time to finish up in the autumn. Enough, anyway! I put in a whole garden patch full of russet potatoes.

We have three 110 foot garden hoses on order to solve watering issues for the time being. I will put in a new frost free hydrant one day. Again, when a new tractor with backhoe arrives! Just one more of the many jobs I anticipate doing!

On Saturday, my primary job was removing weeds in the pastures across the street. I also put in the top wire on the fence that separates the front paddocks. That is the final assurance that the male llama won’t jump the fence and have his way with his sisters. I need to put a fence in at the back pasture to separate it into two paddocks. Maybe it would be good to divide the paddocks once again, eventually. I would like to see us doing rotational grazing with permanent paddocks. Then we can do better field management and hopefully get the grass in tip top shape.

The farmer I worked for this week came by on Saturday to deliver two bales of hay for our goats and the old llama that remains on this side of the street. We sat on the front porch of the granary and talked for a while. He is an interesting guy, and knows his work. It is always good to talk to him, and to learn what he knows.

During the coming week I need to get some mulch to finish the bed in front of the house. I also want to see about some gates that would better suit the front drive, and move the ones we have to the canal access. That would finally put a good gate across each end of the canal access that would be easy to open and close, keep the animals safe, and allow me to hang No Trespassing signs directly on the gates. There are people around here who assume that because the canal path goes through our property, so can they. It is not the canal’s property, and I do not have to grant access to anyone but the canal company’s people. I don’t think it is a general disrespect that leads people over our land, just an unawareness.

You may have heard that there is a drought in the Western United States. It is true. We are expecting temperatures in the 90’s for at least the coming week. I checked our weather station, and it was 97 this afternoon with a humidity level of only 1%! The place is a tinder box! I am sat with my kids right now, fans running, drapes drawn, the place as cool as we can keep it with no air conditioner. I have seen old trees from around here that have been cut down, and they show in the rings that prior to around the turn of the millennium, the weather in the valley was wetter. I should confirm that on the weather records! It would be interesting to know for certain. I wonder what the future holds? After a year of Covid, I am less certain and more determined to make the best lives we can on our little farmette.

Giving Up On The War Against The Grass

We are uniquely cursed here on our place. We have grass growing here that I cannot remember the name of, but it is a blended type that when cut short serves as a wonderful lawn, and when left to grow long serves as an equally lovely pasture. It is a curse because I have burned holes through it with burn pits, I have tilled it to death, and I have even in the distant past used grass killers on it in places. In every instance, within two years of letting up these attacks, the lawn has been back, and by the start of the third year, the place where it happened has been completely indistinguishable from any undamaged part of it.

This is a great place to be if your life is about your lawn, and cheap upkeep, or if it is about grazing cattle, and you want an easy pasture to keep.

It is not so great when your wife wants a flower bed, and so you till and prep and cover and till again, and by the end of the year the flowers have all but succumbed to the weeds, and are followed the next year by a lawn that will choke out even them.

We have put in raised beds with no bottoms, we have put in raised beds with cardboard bottoms, and we have put in raised beds with plastic bottoms, and the grass has come up through and overgrown the tops of the beds. I have pulled raised beds out again, too. I am in the process of doing that, now. The only place where we have succeeded has been where the raised beds have been covered at the top with cardboard or plastic and mulch. We have done a fair job of keeping the grass at bay with those efforts. So that is the direction we are looking now.

So this year we begin anew with a different approach to the flowers. We have a couple of beds where we have flowers coming up through plastic, and mulch all over that. We also have purchased half barrel shaped plastic tubs that will sit on beds of plastic and mulch, filled with flowers. It is not necessarily the look we would like, but then, neither is “pasture choking petunias to death.” It is just too grim.

I have a bed right in front of the house that I would like to till, surface with the appropriate slope, cover in plastic, and mulch today. It is not too big, so that should be an attainable goal. There are five tubs for that space. I am not going to win against the now two Russian Olives growing there, but I suppose I can trim them back till I can get my dream tractor with a hoe, and dig out the stumps.

There is work to still be done in the herb garden, but we have got to the point it could be easily said it is half way done. We were working out a watering solution for it yesterday, then I went with a shopping list to the stores down in Logan, and while I was at one of them, I spotted a pair of copper-toned sprinklers that were about three feet tall, and decorative, almost Celtic, and got those to put up in the garden, along with feeder hoses that worked out really well. I could not decide between a green one and a red one, so I got one of each, and while I had other plans for them, they worked for the sprinklers to the point that the green one now sits across the grass, and the red one across a mulch bed of nearly the same color. I could not believe it.

We have a space under the kitchen window that needs doing, and against the back of the garage where Missus would like a she-shed, or a space where she will be able to sit outside and work in the future. By, ‘in the future,’ I mean after that noisy goose finally dies of ole age! But then, a quick Google search suggests that he may be with us for another 20+ years… Maybe it is time for him to move to the water across the street! Apparently he is not like to leave us anytime soon.

With the flowers in place in the spots I have discussed, I think that planting season is about done here. If anything is to get root, and flourish it needs to have been in by now, or at least sooner than we can afford more. I can see a couple more trees going in, and I will be putting in the potato starts in either today or tomorrow. I have about 330 feet of potato rows to plant into in 11 rows. I may be out doing that tonight at sunset, or after, when it is cool. I know it is getting late in the season, but that is fine, as Missus prefers New Potatoes anyway.

We have a short, almost cool spell on us till around Friday, so it is a good time to get some mess cleaned up and sorted out. I would like to see the girls and myself picking up firewood down at the Logan City Dump on Friday. I am pretty sure we are all stocked up for the coming season, but I would like to get a trip or two in before summer’s weather is hot in earnest, and then go back down again in the autumn for the rest of the following year’s supply.

Our rejected goat has been staying in the duck run, and making friends out there in the daytimes, and coming into a crate in the house at nights. We are bottle feeding her milk from the fridge, same as we drink. In the days since we brought her in, she has started walking correctly, and even becoming more playful, and she has gotten fatter across the mid section where he backbone was starting to show before. She likes to follow us around in the house. It looks like she is becoming a part of our family! She’ll have to go back out with all the other goats when she is better, and when she is big enough to take a full hit from her mother and either withstand it with no problem, or even deliver it back to her.