Baby Goats!
We recently went through a birthing cycle at the farm: three of the goat does gave birth to a total of six baby goats! One of the cute fellas is shown above.
Kurt on 02.25.10 @ 01:10 PM PST [more...]
The Living Green Farm Journal
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Thursday, February 25th
Tuesday, January 26th
Winter projects
My already irregular posting schedule has suffered lately, as farm trips have been relatively infrequent and I've been rebuilding my computer. Plus, Lou and I did a whole project in which none of the photos I took turned out! This relates back to last summer when my daughter borrowed the camera while eating sticky cotton candy, but that's a story for another day.
The only interesting photo I have to show is from a recent trip where I ran out of things to do... unbelievable, eh? Well, I didn't actually run out of things to do, but rather ran out of things that I could do in the time available. So I was reduced to organizing the shop a bit. Quite successful, I think. I found out that we were woefully under-stocked in 1/2" PVC fittings, which is a problem because a lot of the water supply is comprised of 1/2" PVC pipe.
Kurt on 01.26.10 @ 03:24 PM PST [more...]
Tuesday, December 8th
Saving The Shop
OK, everybody is sick of hearing about the barn... the weather is getting colder, with a chance of snow... so, time to work on saving the shop. One of the contractors who came to look at the barn took one look at the shop and said that I was about six inches of snow away from a collapse there! I already knew that.
Kurt on 12.08.09 @ 10:11 PM PST [more...]
Sunday, December 6th
Saving The Barn, Part Five
We've been fortunate to have a pretty dry autumn, actually. So much so that Lou and I have continued to make progress on the barn gutter project. Lou had a sunny day during the week right before Thanksgiving, and he single-handedly tacked the gutters up on the fascia that we had installed in part four. Don't ask me how he did it, but he managed. By the time I arrived on Saturday, much of the hard work had already been done.
Kurt on 12.06.09 @ 10:23 PM PST [more...]
Sunday, November 15th
Saving The Barn, Part Four
Looks like it is going to take three trips to get gutters on the barn! Lou and I took a good run at it today, but we ran out of daylight and energy at about 4:30 pm. However, we did get some important things done today, and we're within striking distance of getting actual gutters on the south side of the barn. I don't know whether we'll be as lucky as we were today when it comes to weather, however. Today was overcast, but blessedly dry.
Kurt on 11.15.09 @ 09:51 PM PST [more...]
Monday, November 9th
Saving The Barn, Part Three
As the crop season has wound down, I have found myself thinking about the buildings and other infrastructure. Not that late fall and winter is the best time to work outdoors on buildings, but you get what you get sometimes. In particular I've been worried about the barn. You may recall that I've done some bracing of things in the barn to try and arrest the (literally) downhill slide of the barn. I should go back and look at old pictures, but it seems to me that some things are visibly getting worse since last I paid attention to them. Like the foundation; one crack on the south wall appears to be getting wider. That is how I found myself recently standing in the rain, with a 32 foot ladder, contemplating how to install guttering on the two story barn. The shot above shows the results of a my trip to Home Depot prior to the commencement of festivities.
Kurt on 11.09.09 @ 01:25 PM PST [more...]
Thursday, October 22nd
Squash Harvest 2009
If you've been following along on the blog, you've heard me write concerning the squash. These were plants that I started in soil blocks off-farm, and then transplanted into the farm garden in early summer. They were irrigated by the same drip irrigation that fed the beans and corn; I used 3' foot plant spacing in rows 6 feet apart. Each transplant got a small pocket of organic fertilizer below the transplant at planting time. The variety that I planted was Hubbard squash; the Territorial seed catalog said that the flesh was sweet and creamy, and they're open-pollinated. I originally had wanted to plant Delicata squash, but Territorial had run out of seed by mid-spring. The photo above shows one specimen as it appeared in August; they got a little larger over the next month before the vines finally succumbed to frost in early October.
Kurt on 10.22.09 @ 03:11 PM PST [more...]
Saturday, October 17th
Fall Spraying
As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've recently realized how serious the weed problem was in the weed, er, wheat field. Bindweed is a non-native noxious weed, and it is a fierce competitor: roots that go thirty feet deep, seeds that remain viable for decades, ability to regrow from root fragments cut by rototilling, etc. So, after researching on-line a bit I came to the inescapable conclusion that spraying herbicide was going to have to be at least part of the strategy for getting it under control.
Kurt on 10.17.09 @ 09:56 AM PST [more...]
Thursday, September 24th
Bean Project 2009 Harvest
Harvest season rolls on here at the farm... this past week I harvested most of the dry shelling beans. They're a variety called Etna, which I purchased from Territorial Seed Company. I would call the bean project a qualified success; success in the sense that I got back many more beans than I planted, qualified by the fact that it could have been an even greater yield were it not for the rabbits' predation.
Kurt on 09.24.09 @ 03:08 PM PST [more...]
Wednesday, September 23rd
Patrolling the Skies
While harvesting the beans last week I heard some screeching, and I looked up to see a pair of hawks gliding and circling above. The picture above makes them look quite close, though they were in actuality pretty high up - the wonders of telephoto lenses. I watched them circle and drift southward, in search of easy prey. How were the chickens doing, I wondered?
Kurt on 09.23.09 @ 03:08 PM PST [more...]
Tuesday, September 8th
The Yin and Yang of Blackberries
Blackberries. Love 'em or hate 'em. Or more accurately, love 'em and hate 'em. The sweetness of the fruit, the prickle of the thorns. They bear the fragrant blossom for the honeybee, but they also take over land, and even pull down buildings. I once watched a blackberry patch cover and seemingly demolish a small shed along my walking route to work. It was a slow, inexorable process; I'm sure that the canes themselves didn't actually pull it down, but they may have clogged gutters and directed water into places that eventually destroyed the structure.
Kurt on 09.08.09 @ 10:11 PM PST [more...]
Wednesday, September 2nd
Threshing Fava Beans
A couple of weeks ago when I was down at the farm I happened to notice that the fava beans were looking ready to harvest; the pods had turned dark, and many of the leaves had dropped. Although I had planned to work on threshing the wheat that day, I switched gears and started stacking fava bean plants in a pile on a tarp; this was necessary because fava beans, like many legumes, are biologically programmed to explode when the pod is ripe. At a certain point you can't disturb the plant at all without having the pods explode in little mini-showers of dried beans! So, getting the plants onto the tarp at least meant that they could continue drying until I had time to deal with them, and any pods that opened would have the tarp under them to catch the beans.
Kurt on 09.02.09 @ 01:00 PM PST [more...]
Monday, August 10th
More Wheat Threshing
The threshing process for the wheat continues, although at a slower pace. The photo above is from more than a week ago (the family kidnapped me for a vacation, so no farm activities last week). The day this picture was taken was in the midst of a giant-sized heat wave we had here in the Pacific Northwest, with about a week of temperatures in the 100's. Luckily, I had thought of the idea of setting up an awning, which was the only way that I could have been doing any of this work at all on an afternoon where the mercury hit 105 degrees. I would work for about 45 minutes, then go sit in the shade for ten minutes. Everything had to be slowed down: move carefully, deliberately, slowly.
Kurt on 08.10.09 @ 12:44 PM PST [more...]
Tuesday, July 28th
The Wheat Harvest
Finally, time for harvesting the wheat! Lou and I knocked the few remaining panels off the carton enclosing the thresher, and got it mounted on the tractor. Lubed it up with the grease gun; only broke one Zerk fitting, so that was par for the course. I needed to make a trip to Wilco anyway to get a short shaft PTO anyway.
Once back from the store we tried it out with some bags of wheat tillers that Lou's family had cut. The photo above shows the bits of chaff flying out of the discharge chute of the awner, which is covered with the green plastic cloth. Lou is feeding tillers into the entrance to the awner on the other side of the thresher. It worked!
Kurt on 07.28.09 @ 07:58 AM PST [more...]
The Giant Egg!
Lou's daughter brought this egg out to show us while we were working in the wheat field last weekend - it's a whopper of a chicken egg! I put the quarter dollar next to it to give some sense of scale; it's the biggest chicken egg I've ever seen. Can't be a duck egg - they don't have ducks. She said that she thought it was laid by their Auracana chicken named Big Red.
Kurt on 07.28.09 @ 06:29 AM PST [link]