Well, it's been rainy and windy for three, four days now -- not much to report. The chickens are settling into the coop fairly nicely and as far as I know our plants in the garden are doing okay -- it's been too muddy to look at them much. I am pleased to report that my cloches are all still where I left them. Our up-potted starts are happy. We won't be able to plant anything new until the ground dries up a little, so we're in a bit of a holding pattern for now. Might as well enjoy the sunset.

Good, cheap or easy -- you can have cheap.

I know that's not the exact quote, but close enough.

We are not shoppers. A has genetic, shading into pathological, cheapness (and a scarily complex understanding of the relative value of everything), whereas I'm more too lazy and have finally developed the realization that NOTHING is as exciting or interesting in your house as it is in the store. I also really enjoy creating makeshift solutions to problems using found materials and trash. Thus, our cloches:



I know making cloches (or hats as we call them here; "hats for plants -- keep plants warm") out of milk jugs is not revolutionary. And I guess in the rest of the world just sort of pushing them into the dirt is sufficient to anchor them down. But we have blowing-over-chicken-coop winds around here.

In our past gardens we had a more-or-less endless supply of bamboo poles about 1/2 an inch thick and four feet long. Those things were dead useful and I wish we still had them. To anchor cloches with them, you just cut a segment about a foot and a half long, pushed it into the ground next to your plant, and threaded the milk jug over it (without the cap). This worked perfectly, and if you have a supply of something similar, I highly recommend it.

Without bamboo stakes or anything similar to hand, I came up with the above solution which, while not nearly as elegant, cost a total of $.99 -- the cost of 208 feet of twine. Two foot-and-a-half lengths of twine are tied together at the ends in such a way to make two long ends with a loop in the middle that tightens when you pull the ends. This goes around the spout of the milk jug. The two long ends are held down with the scrap ends of two-by-fours, which we have an abundant supply of.

By the way, there's broccoli under there. We also set out 60 Spanish onions (the sad fellows from previous posts -- wish them luck) and eight Italian parsley plants, planted two plum trees, one rhubarb plant, some thyme, tarragon and a bunch of peas, and up-potted all the tomatoes, eggplants and peppers this weekend. There's a ton more we were hoping to do -- set out lettuce and cabbage starts, plant more potatoes, beets and spinach, plant some carrot seeds, and other stuff I'm not remembering. There is really a lot to do.

This blog post is boring.

As I said, we've also planted a lot of stuff outside. On April 11, we planted shelling peas (Maestro), snap peas (Super Sugar Snap), scallions, looseleaf lettuce (Italienescher), spinach (Whale), radishes (Cherry Belle), and sage. Lots of things are poking out of the ground, but so far they're not very interesting -- a couple of leaves. As best as I can tell, nothing is nibbling on them yet but I'm sure that's just a matter of time.

On April 18, we planted strawberries, Nevada looseleaf lettuce, potatoes (Russian Banana), and more peas, radishes, spinach and scallions.
Strawberries. We did not grow these from seed.

I'm pretty anxious to have something going on besides dirt and a few leaves here and there. I know this all takes time, it's only April, blah blah blah. But it's been winter for so long -- I'm ready to be moving on.

Rainy Day

Well, I was going to talk about the seeds we've started outside, but mud. So instead, I'll talk about nibbling away at the sea of mud, one tiny patch at a time.

I've basically picked an area that needs landscaping at random and begun a garden plan -- the front yard. It recommended itself to me because it's small and reasonably well defined by the house and driveway. Here's what I've got so far:
(click to enlarge)

I an plainly not a professional landscaper. But I think it's pretty good. The "W"s are to indicate plants with winter interest, since we basically have winter for more than half the year. The circles around the herb garden are pavers.

Of course, it's all well and good to draw a picture. Now I just need about $1500 worth of plants.

Do you ever wonder how great-grandmas made their fantastic gardens? Everyone I know has at least one great-grandma who had just a fantastic garden, like an acre of dahlias and hollyhocks and lilac, and the best tomatoes and sweet corn on earth. But these women grew up in the Depression -- there's no way they spent thousands of dollars on seeds and plants. I imagine that they must have shared seeds and divisions with their neighbors. That seems like a completely different universe from what we live in now.

Vegetable Starts: Update

Meanwhile, the vegetable starts just keep growing (sort of):


Left: sad lettuce, unthinned oregano, eggplants, peppers
Center Front: Onions
Center Back: Tomatoes
Right Front: Basil, Savory, Marjoram, Lettuce, Cabbage
Right Back: Parsley, Broccoli, Peanuts


Another angle (re-arranged and pre-onion trimming)

The peppers and eggplants are still going gangbusters; they really need to be put into bigger pots. The tomatoes are also doing pretty well, although they're a little leggy for my comfort. Maybe we should have pinched them. Maybe we should pinch them now. Heck if I know. I've heard that you should put a fan on them to develop thick stems; sadly we have no spare fans. Maybe next year.

The rest of our seedlings are in slightly more disarray. It's hard to say how much stems from neglect and how much from ignorance, but hopefully now that our external affairs are in a little more order, we'll have more time to focus on them. I think partly they're out of sight, out of mind on the ledge, but I don't know what we can do about that. The onions in particular look pathetic; I think sets are in our future.

Several starts really need to go outside: the various lettuces, cabbage, possibly broccoli. Hopefully we'll get to that later this week.

We've planted quite a few things outside, too -- details tomorrow.

Wildlife

So, when we were first scouting this site to build our house, A's dad mentioned in passing that he'd seen a moose about 2 miles down the road, near some trees and a permanent pond. 'Sure you did', I thought sagely to myself. Moose, while certainly present in the Palouse, are not so common that you just see them wandering around* -- and A's dad, while a fantastic person, is sometimes more of a storyteller than a scientist.

So, we're sitting on our deck enjoying the evening sun for the first time since we moved in, when who should come sauntering around the corner of our house?


Pictured: A nice lady moose. Like all wildlife photos, she was much closer before I ran to get the camera.

So, egg on my face, huh?

Wildlife has pretty sorely been lacking this winter, or at least right around our house. We've had mice in the woodpile (and -- sigh -- the garage), some Canada geese, some sparrows [? I'm terrible at identifying birds] that were building a nest in our gutter (I don't think it worked out), and various raptors including a bald eagle and some kind of giant hawk that was sitting in a tree not 5 feet from my car when I was driving to work one day. We saw deer almost every day when we were first building the house, but none for a while.

But the variety has really increased in the last couple weeks as the weather has gotten warmer. I hear tons of different bird songs (of course, I can barely tell a duck from a dodo, so I have to work on this). We've heard although not seen coyotes and owls, got a bit of an air show from some bats last night after the moose left, and some swallows [?] seem to be building a nest under our deck. I saw a wild turkey tom about half a mile from here earlier this week -- man, those things are HUGE!

Less delightfully, at least a dozen paper wasps were hanging out in the chicken coop last night, and we found an enormous blister beetle in the yard the other day -- seriously, it was at least an inch and a half long and when I smashed it (I'm generally live and let live with bugs but the internet says that they exude an oil that can cause blisters [hence the name] and their larvae are parasitic on bees) all this glistening orange goo came out... supergross.

Of course, all of these animals are delightful to see -- but every last one of them is potentially an enemy of the farm, out to eat our plants and kill our chickens. Well, maybe not the bats. Being citified, we're hoping that fence and various old-wifey controls will keep them enough at bay, but that isn't always how it works out.

Still, I don't think we'll shoot the moose.



*Actually, this is totally untrue -- they had to lock down the junior high in Moscow a few years ago because a moose was on the property.

Moving Day

It is time to get the chickens out of the house. They are loud, they smell, and their habitat is a blight on my living room. Also, they are slightly more than three weeks old! How time flies.


Chicken Portrait, The Teenage Years: Prop Joe, Stringer, Avon and Marlo.

The coop still isn't entirely ready, but it's good enough so out they go today.


I think the coop is pretty cool; we'll see if mice gnaw through the floor and then weasels get in, or if owls saunter in through an open door, eat our chickens and then roost there (seriously; this is a major concern of chicken raising. Who knew?). The bump-out is the nest box. It has a hinged lid so theoretically you can just lift up the lid and collect eggs. I'll believe it when I see it. There are also three chicken-sized doors around the other sides, and a larger window on the back. On the inside there are two roosts made of closet rods, and a feeder and waterer that we will hang from the roof with chain. We're also going to give them their heat lamp for another few days. More coop pictures here.

We still haven't fenced in their yard; hopefully we'll get that done next weekend. Since predatory birds of about a dozen different types and neighbor dogs are the main chicken predators around here, the fence is a major issue. In the meantime, they can live inside the coop and get used to that.

You make me feel like spring has sprung...

Apologies for the radio silence -- non-homesteading stuff crept into our lives this week. Also, I'm not sure what happened to the text of the seed catalogs post. I assure you it was fantastic; I'll try to recreate it.


Pictured: Signs of Spring

We found a spare half hour to stop at a nursery and buy a few things: Alpine strawberries, tarragon, rhubarb, and an Italian Prune plum tree. Not pictured: rosemary (it can't sit outside yet, so it's hanging out in a windowsill). We have several more fruit trees on the way: two cherries (Hartland and Montmorency), two apples (Honey Crisp and Yellow Transparent), and a Green Gage plum. We still have pears to buy, and maybe a Haralson apple.

The weather has been fantastic the last few days, getting into the 70s and sunny, sunny, sunny. The winter wheat is coming up in fields all around us; it looks like a green haze on the ground. Spring is here!

Seed Catalogs

Windy Day

So, we had sustained winds of 30-40 MPH with gusts up to 60 MPH (or so I hear from the internet; I haven't convinced A to spend $300 on a weather station yet but I'm working on it). Our partially finished chicken coop did not remain in its upright position. Thankfully, no chickens were harmed in our little recreation of Twister -- they're still in the living room. And in fact, the chicken coop seems to have maintained its structural integrity. We're just going to move it to its final resting place tomorrow, re-attach it to its floor, and then hopefully get the windows and doors in ASAP. At which point it will be finished, more or less -- at least move-in ready. We'll probably paint it at some point, but the house isn't even painted yet so I don't know how the chicken coop rates. Hopefully the additional weight and being more bottom heavy will prevent another tip-over.

We'll still need to fence the chicken yard, but that shouldn't take too long. More likely than not our chickens will end up as a hawk/coyote/fox buffet, but hopefully if nothing else we'll learn some things about fencing and coop building/security for next year.

It Hasn't Got *Much* Poop In It: Chickens, Part Two

See, this is where not having a clue what we're doing really starts to hamper our efforts: we cannot keep chicken poop out of the waterer, they climb all over (and occasionally tip) their feeder, and any morning now I'm going to get out of bed and the Rubbermaid will be empty because they've all escaped.



The water is the biggest issue. I'm tempted to blame it on the chickens, who are very dumb and who are, after all, the ones actually flinging their litter into it and befouling it (pun unintentional). But blaming creatures whose brains can't be any larger than a pencil eraser isn't getting the crap out of the waterer.

The problem is that we need to get the edge raised up to about "shoulder" high, either by hanging or by propping it up. I've been trying to think of some way to hang it for 15 days with no luck, and I've propped it on half a dozen things, which are either too high (dehydrated chickens), too rickety (flooded chickens) or too low (poop in the water). The thing I have it propped on right now is a pretty good height, but they actually stand on the left edge and dip their butts into the water. I'm not sure if this is because they are rock stupid, or because they are taunting me. Either way, it's not working. Our next plan is those cheap red garden bricks. Wish us luck.

The feeder seems to be okay for the moment (yes, that is an empty Diaper Genie refill it's sitting on; the tuna can was too tippy). Of course, they're going to get taller and start climbing all over it again. But at this point I'm sort of thinking they're only going to be in there for another week and a half or so. Let them have their fun. They don't seem to poop in the food, anyway.

And our final issue: the chance of escape. I tried to rig up a cover for the container out of chicken wire yesterday, but that stuff is impossible to work with. Now I'm thinking an old window screen would work pretty well, but of course I haven't got one. Hopefully I have a few more days to work on it before we have to fish chickens out from under the kitchen sink.



Chicken Portrait: Marlo, Prop Joe, Avon and Stringer. Marlo in particular is really fledging out a lot.

Come with me, my love... to the sea, the Sea of Mud

Looking at yesterday's photo, you may have wondered what the odd, wave-like formation in the foreground was. Well, without the gentle and forgiving blanket of snow, it's this:



Basically, a sea of mud and construction debris. Remember our 25 feet of topsoil? Well, this is what happens when you pull the grass off 25 feet of topsoil, throw garbage on it, and let it sit all winter.

I could make a lot of excuses (we moved into our house in mid-November, about a day before it started raining/snowing in earnest; I was eight months pregnant; a few weeks later we had a newborn; we are honestly sort of lazy), but the upshot is that our idyllic rural getaway is surrounded by an impassable trash moat that won't really be dry enough to walk on until June.

Which sort of encapsulates our main problem: what do you do with seven acres? Luckily for us, about half of it is woodlot, but that still leaves us with more than 3 acres to do... something with. At most this year we're going to put half an acre into "production" with vegetables, and another maybe quarter-acre devoted to fruit trees and berries. I have a romantic vision of about half an acre in front (where most of the mud and garbage is) as a sort of cottage garden, with a lovely small lawn for the baby to play on. But honestly, that's going to take years. Right now I'd settle for just not being the neighborhood eyesore.

Snowy Day

The view from my porch this morning. The snow was all gone by 10:00 or so, but it was sort of pretty while it lasted.

We've had a really mild winter here this year, but Latah County can have really unpredictable weather. We had snow in June 2008 -- sure, it was gone by late morning too, but it's the principle of the thing. And the record low has been below freezing in every single month of the year. The winter before last there was over 7 feet of snow. Which is all to say that North Idaho is maybe not the ideal location for a farm.

But the dirt sure is nice. When we dug the well for our house, the drilling report said we had 25 feet of topsoil, and I don't think there's a rock on our property other than the gravel we trucked in for our driveway. We're surrounded by thousands of acres of dryland wheat/pea and lentil/canola farms. The weather may not be perfect, and the markets may not be ideal. But the land is fantastic.

Vegetable Starts

We are starting a lot of vegetables and herbs from seed this year; remind me to write someday soon about the various catalogs we ordered from and how we chose. Like the chickens, they're growing fast. Here's what they looked like on March 23:



And here's what they look like today:

(Not pictured: onions.)

Unlike pretty much everything else we're doing, we actually have some experience starting seeds. For three years, we've grown at least a few vegetables from seed with varying success. But three years is really only enough time to 1) impress us with how much we don't know and 2) give us a false sense of security that things will be at least slightly the same from year to year.

Generally speaking, we plant "loose" in flats, unless the plants have roots that don't like to be disturbed (tomatoes). We reuse flats from year to year (I always mean to rinse them with a mild bleach solution, but hardly ever actually do it). Plant labels are cut-up dairy containers (yogurt, cottage cheese) written on with Sharpie. We made dividers for the flats out of masking tape, but I don't know how useful that really was.

In our new house, we are blessed with a fantastic seed starting location: a south-facing window over the "roof" of our pantry, which is accessible with a ladder. It's not the very most convenient, but it's really working nicely. In the past, we've used lights.

On February 28, we started onions (yellow sweet spanish), eggplant (Littlefingers, long, thin and purple-black ; and Lavender Touch, smaller and white/lavender), and peppers (pepperoncini, Feherozon bell peppers, Scotch bonnet, ancho and early jalapeño). First up were onions on March 3, and the laziest was the parsley that came up on March 9. As you can sort of tell from the picture, peppers and eggplants are doing really well (the tray on the right; eggplant in front, peppers in back). The onions are sort of malingering but we think we may have screwed them up by thinning them (which apparently disturbs their roots) and not trimming them. I just trimmed them yesterday to 3 inches; some were easily 6-8 inches "tall" (tall being a little disingenuous since they were all laying down). They're pretty spindly, although trimming them seems to have inspired some of them to stand up a little; we'll see how they do. We can always buy sets if we have to. All part of the idiots' learning process.

On March 15, we started oregano (the tiny "carpet" you can see in front of the eggplants and peppers), lettuce (Esmerelda butter head), and broccoli (Early Dividend, Packman and Small Miracle). They all came up between March 19-21. The oregano need to be thinned, but look at them. How on earth? The flat in the back is broccoli and parsley.

On March 17, we started all our tomatoes: Roma type (Principe Borghese and Cour Di Bue), cherries (Isis Candy and Currant), and "regular" (Big Beef, Beaverlodge, Brandywine and Pineapple). They were all up March 28.

And today we started cabbage (early and late), basil (sweet and Spicy Globe), summer savory, marjoram, and another lettuce (de Morges Braun romaine). I could have taken a picture, but it's just a flat full of dirt.

More starts pictures here.

Chickens

Alright, so there's a bunch of stuff we've already done this year that I really ought to blog about, and I ought to introduce us and explain what this is all about, but it's too daunting so I'm just going to start from now and get to that stuff when I have time. Hi! We are L and A, two idiots who are trying to farm.

Now that that's out of the way -- these are our chickens:



They are two Barred Rocks (the black ones) and two Rhode Island Reds (the red ones). In this picture they are about 11 days old.

We chose these breeds because 1) they're supposed to be good layers (although not necessary the best), 2) they're supposed to be a little more "friendly" than the best laying types, 3) they're readily available, 4) they're supposed to be good foragers, and 5) I wanted pretty chickens.

We bought them last Saturday when they were 3 days old, and it seems like about half the size. They have really fledged out in a week, especially the Rhode Islands. They'll stay in their box for about 2 more weeks, and then move into the chicken coop (depending on the weather, we'll either leave them locked in there with the heat lamp, or let them "loose" in the chicken yard).

The set-up we have them in is a large (about 3x2x2 foot) Rubbermaid container with the lid off. The feeder you can see on the left is purchased, with a pint jar that screws in. It's set on top of a tuna can to raise it up. The waterer is one 8" cake pan set on another (inverted) cake pan, with a quart jar filled with water in the middle for a weight. Not pictured: cheap digital thermometer, a 250 watt red heat lamp bulb in an aluminum clamp fixture, clamped to the repurposed frame of a cheap canvas stand-alone closet. We actually have this sitting in our living room and I've been surprised at how little it smells. We've changed out the litter once.

We would like very much to be able to hang both the waterer and the feeder because the chickens kick litter into the water and climb into the feeder, but so far I haven't come up with any clever ideas for this. We have a larger purchased waterer, but it doesn't fit in the container. We're also going to have to put something over the top soon, or else there'll be chickens in the living room. The Rhode Islands seem to be a little "flightier", but frankly they're all making me a little nervous.

BTW, their names are (from left to right) Avon, Prop Joe, Marlo and Stringer. More chicken pictures can be found here.