Watching things grow

This is a very fun time of year.
Matt remarked to me the other evening that we can practically watch the garden grow.

Potatoes!

We have some flea beetle enjoying our plants. As beginner gardeners we learning what we are up against in this venture

Here is an interesting observation regarding the quinoa. Its the stripe of green on the far left of the garden. Part of it is thick and green, the other part looks like it did last year: smaller, thinners and changing to bright colours. The area that looks good is where we had our garden last year. I believe it needs richer soil and it is only thriving in the area we have improved with compost over two years now.

But the garden isn't the only thing growing!

We moved our piggies with the trailer for the first time. This is something fairly important to us. The first year we raised pigs we didn't move them with the trailer until the day they went to butcher. What an ordeal, and the clock was ticking away! Finally, the last one we had to wrestle into the trailer, and with 220lbs of unwilling pig, it was not a fun time. Also, after months of loving on them and putting our hearts into raising them very best we can, who wants to take them to the butcher all stressed and worked up?
We have learned a lot since then, including the benefits of  pasturing them. We move them continually through the summer and each time we pop them in the trailer to move them. We don't have fancy chutes to load them, so really we are relying on their desire to load themselves. We try to make it a very rewarding experience and the first try kind of sets you up for future loading. 



This turned out to be a perfect first loading. A couple even followed little farm girl into the trailer before I had brought all the goodies out.
They are drowning in grass once again in their new spot and loving it!

Speaking of drowning in grass...

We had an interesting chicken moving experience.



We generally just take down all the chicken fencing, which is a predator proof electric poultry netting, and move the camper and set up over. Then we reset the fence and herd the chickens who didn't follow back in. We didn't realize quite how quickly the grass in the hay field was growing and about two minutes after letting the chickens out, they were completely gone! There was just rustling grass here and there and the occasional head popping up in a sparse area. We had to go all over gathering lost and wayward chickens. As we finished there was a suspicious rustling less than ten feet away, and sure enough, one last chicken! Now I remember why over last summer we used to move them in the evenings after their curfew!

 Here are some pictures from around the farm this week.

A gorgeous morning butterfly

I wish I could decorate my house as nice as the beauty we find outside...

Not to attract from the lilac, but notice how one flower at the very top only has three petals?

A squirrel came onto the deck during breakfast. Its was Tonka's delight to make it very unwelcome. She is still watching for it!

Love these colours!

Beep out hunting ants. No improvement to his leg but he is getting very agile by compensating in various ways.

Note little farm girls "chick purse". Its a little bag with an open top that beep rides in to his various bug catching destinations.

We fenced an area to til and plant green manures. It will be our garden expansion for next year. Right now I have horses eating down the grass. We were hoping to run pigs and let them weed it next but they are still too little to make quick work of it.



The garden is my favorite spot right now. Sun and warmth, good things growing, horses munching and chickens scratching.

And off all the good things we are growing, here are the most important ones!

I love sharing my days with these little farmers!

Chick Drama

When I left you last, we were waiting with great hope for some eggs to hatch in our incubator.



I am not sure whether our attempt should be defined as success or not. I am leaning toward not...



We did get a chick!
It hatched three days late, from the egg that I had mentioned before. If you remember, when I talked to it on the morning of its projected hatching date, it had rolled itself over.
Little farm girl heard its peeps and found it at about 5am and was so excited we couldn't get her back to bed. She has been mothering it non stop and is simply delighted. "Beep" goes for stroller rides, has his own little purse to ride in on outside farm adventures and loves to eat the mosquitoes she catches for him.



Now for the unsuccessful part. On day 17 I candled the eggs for the last time and there was life in all of them. Out of 21 eggs, two chicks cracked their shells and only one hatched. That is pretty disappointing. Before I threw the eggs out I had a peek in them. All perfectly formed chicks, little feet, little beaks, some had even broke through the membrane and had breathed their air pocket inside the eggs.

The incubator we are using is borrowed from someone we know who was only able to get one chick out of it. This is our second try at it. The first try yielded no results. I discovered a problem with the ventilation and I remedied that with the hope that that was our problem before. We got much farther but I think how I regulated the vents still was not good enough to retain the humidity. After this attempt I went online and reviewed this particular brand of incubator and found many terrible reviews from people that have spent much, much more time than us and still not been able to make a go of it. It is a still air incubator with no fan and I found experiments from people saying that the temperature could vary by more than 5 degrees in places in the incubator and if one egg happens to be in just the right spot you can get a hatcher.

I guess the good thing is, now we know what to look for in our own incubator. It was very exciting to see this little guy hatch and I could see us hatching our own to replace our flock as we need too. Next try will be with an incubator of our own and hopefully it will be a more positive experience.

And a bit more bad news. The little guy who hatched came out with a funny foot. His little toes were all curled together and he wouldn't walk on them. After consulting the internet we built a little "shoe" out of cardboard and a bit of band aid to straighten out his foot.
His foot looked much better but he still wouldn't walk on it. He would sit on his tail and use (what I think of as) his hock joint to walk on, with the little foot and shoe sticking up in the air in front of him. Finally I taped that hock joint with a bit of stiff tape and he started to walk on that foot.
Still it didn't look right. Finally I stumbled across a video of a chick with Perosis, or a slipped tendon in its leg. It looked exactly like Beep. It happens when the bones and cartilage don't form enough to make a groove for the tendon to sit in the right place and caused (of course) by unstable incubation temperatures. I have yet to find a success story of a chick really recovering. I have learned how to massage the leg and get the tendon back in the right place and then I wrap the little Q tip sized leg with vet wrap. I can't get the tendon to stay in place and his little hock is still swelling. Sound like most people end up putting the chick down.

Beep in his chick shoe, see how he sits back on that hock

Today I gave him a try without the wrap, he is pretty good at getting around with one leg.

I have felt a little sick ever since I read about it. Even as I write this, Little farm girl is sitting with the little guy nestled into her lap and describing in great detail every picture of her library book to him. We did the right thing by stretching it and wrapping right away and he does look a little tiny bit better... I sure hope...  but I have a sense of dread...
He is a pretty friendly little guy despite all this. I am getting pretty used to walking into the kitchen and seeing a little head pop up and little peeps filling the room.

 Here is some other pictures from the farm over this week.

The first day it has been hot enough to make mud!

I love watching them discover something that is such a joy to a pig!

Popcorn does this weird thing with Tonka. She rolls on her and jumps on her. I have never seen any of the others do it.

She will climb right on Tonka and then slide off

 


Demonstrating their bubble blowing techniques. Its amazing that they just come with all these pig skills.

Love those eyelashes

I can see why people want pet pigs. They are insanely cute when they are not destroying things, escaping or wrestling over who gets the best spot at the trough. 





And this week I have had some of the best pork of my life. We finally bought ourselves a barbeque. It had been on our list for a very long time and I am so glad we did. This picture is some BBQ pork chops my Dad grilled for us. Wow.

Last night I made a special dinner from our ribs. I slow cooked them all day until they were falling apart and then lightly barbequed them in my very favorite, stickiest, homemade barbeque sauce. I cannot find a word to describe how good they were. The juicy, tender Berkshire meat falling off the bones. The sauce; sweet, tangy and garlicky and crystallizing perfectly on the edges. It doesn't get any better than that!

Patience

This week we have been practicing our patience.



We started the week with a Houdini pig that refused to be contained. It was something we have not had to deal with before and it was a bit of a problem. She would come and go as she pleased leaving a path of vegetative destruction wherever she had been. She also was encouraging the others to follow in her little hoof prints. Worst of all, the spot they are in is kind of a piglet training spot before the go out in the big pasture with just hotlines and no fencing. We like to know they respect the hotline before they go out, and she seemed to be getting bolder and bolder in her ways of exiting. 



 It was one of our smallest pink ones and she would hesitate a second before the hot line and then spring herself through. It was kind of our fault to begin with. When we moved them onto this new spot the hotline was just a touch too high. I figured it was pretty close and they are growing like little weeds so the problem would be very short term. That was not a good outlook!

Once I realized how freely she was coming in and out, we fixed the hotline to the proper height, but the damage was done. She had to spend a bit of time in the barn, where she showed off some very impressive climbing skills, and it took multiple tries, alternate fencing set ups and finally some advice from local farmers before she decided that the hotline was not worth tangling with.
Another lesson learned! Sometimes good enough is not good enough!



Another place to practice my patience is my ponies. At this stage in my life, with the busyness of my little farmers, I just cannot seem to get away to ride. It feels like a constant itch that I can't scratch. Sometimes the draw is so strong that I accidentally hop onto a sleek shiny back as I pass by their pasture. I really try not to do it as its a terrible example to the little ones.



This would be such a cute picture without that muzzle. It is very not picturesque!
That being said, I love that muzzle. Charlie, who ended the winter nearly obese is able to spend all day on the grass with his friends and it reduces the amount of grass he is able to eat. I don't worry about him being bored, lonely or the dreaded foundering that can happen to a horse with his metabolism. It ruins pictures, but it could possibly have saved his life!



Here is a Grizzly sow and her cubs, I think the first grizzly I have seen? We took a little road trip this week...

We had the opportunity to visit an Organic vegetable farm! Garry and Wendy Lowe of Twin Meadows Organics invited us out to have a visit with them. What a learning experience that was!
We came back very encouraged and excited to make farm plans of our own! We have been scheming and discussing different ideas and plans and Matt has been sketching out ideas for implements and layouts for garden growth. Its pretty exciting to have an idea of where we are headed and that could look like!

A huge Thank you to Twin Meadows Organics for sharing their experience!

Our garden sure looked pretty skimpy once we got home...



The chickens are slowly moving their way closer and closer to the garden. Then Little Farm Girl can play with them while I work.



A stripe of Quinoa growing.

And that is another area we are practicing patience!

Some of our seeds were really taking their time coming up! We did have some very chilly mornings so it could be explained. We were having a really hard time waiting and watching the weeds coming up. Its possible that in our impatience, a couple potatoes got dug up and examined...
Finally we are seeing some action though! Our potatoes are now up! The Carrots, Kale, turnips and more are making appearances! I am still waiting impatiently on my lettuce and a few other things. Some things you can't rush, and its probably better that way!

A potato!

Kale making an appearance

And one last thing to practice my patience on...



Our eggs in the incubator were due to hatch yesterday.
I candled them on day 17 and there was lots of life. Candling eggs just leaves me speechless and this was exceptionally awesome. I could see little chick legs kicking and moving inside. It left me with so much awe at how that little life can grow with everything it needs inside that egg!
The last bit of time in the incubator is lock down. You raise the humidity, and stop turning them so they can get in position to hatch.
Yesterday morning was day 21 and their due date. I went and cheeped at the eggs and one rewarded me by rolling over so I know their was life then. I am getting less hopeful as time goes on. There are a lot of variables in egg incubation and lots of room for error. Until I know for sure, I am going to be spending way too much time looking in the incubator and practicing my patience. Once again, something that you just cannot rush!
Hopefully my next post with be pictures of cute fluffy chicks.

By I am certainly not going to do any counting...

Calluses

I think I have finally broken my hands into this season of farming.
Over the spring I had quite few blisters as my hands transitioned out of my winter mitts. Finally, they have all turned to calluses and my muscles are volunteering for jobs they previously complained about.



Like always, we had a crazy busy week!
It started with some wonderful visitors. Matt's Grandparents and Dad spent some time with us this week. We had a lot of fun and it was so great to reconnect again. I felt blessed to have 4 generations of Young men around my table!

We finally got the whole garden planted! Here is a squash seedling that I started in the house.



And here are my purple top turnips starting to flower. I am hoping to get some seed to save from them!



Here is our whole family after a gardening picnic lunch. Little farm boy is playing in the grass behind the pick up.

Working and playing in the garden

We got all of our critters moved to fresh grass again. The horses are moved daily, the chickens weekly and the pigs as needed. We don't want to move the piglets away from our barn shelters until they are a little bigger, but there is still plenty of grass for them where they are so far.

The clover was selected first and thoroughly enjoyed!

I love how pigs look like they are smiling. Or maybe they really are smiling...

Our weather has been so unpredictable. Just over this morning alone we have had brilliant sun, torrential rain, wild winds, stinging hail and two power outages. Every time I look up the weather is different. I am hoping all my transplants are doing ok in the hail, it honestly hurt to walk through!



You can just see a furry cinnamon blob right in the center of this picture. 
Gardening and bear watching are not separate events around here. Little farm girl calls this guy Latte and she enjoys watching him through her little binoculars while I garden. I don't mind as long as he stays over there...



And look who is slimming down and looking handsome! He gets lots of time on grass but he has to wear his grazing muzzle which limits how much grass he can take in. He was dangerously overweight so I am glad to see him slimming down a bit.



And here is a sight you never want to see: Pigs on the wrong side of the fence.
I saw them come through in a spot where the wire is just a touch too high. Its was actually pretty comical. They started curiously chasing that little white cat on the right, and then the horses started curiously chasing them. It was a chain of animals following each other around. The pigs finally realized they were being pursued  and panicked and ran back to their buddies.



And my kitchen garden has been turned into a berry patch. We planted all the beds with strawberries and little farm girl has been diligently caring for them. You can never have too many strawberries!