Short grass problems.

One of the not entirely unexpected consequences of mowing the lawn short relative to our wild grass and perennial woods clearing. With the drought we've been seeing this summer, despite our nice moist climate relative to the valley, after mowing the lawn regularly we're seeing a lot of sad and browning grass. It's not the vibrant greens that I'm used to seeing our lawn, but it is starting to look more like a normal lawn. With a bit of rain it'll look fine.

On the GoFundMe front we are closing in on enough to put the %50 down payment on the furnace. Right now with the donation matching my father is offering we could reach that goal very quickly. We hope to reach it before August 1st so we can get the house on the market with a firm date of installation for the furnace. Thank you all for listening, sharing, and donating. Our community has been such a huge help to us.

Now on to the rest of the gardening situation.

The conundrum of chickens.

Obviously I'm using old photos today given that this shows Boris and our old girls, but I wanted to talk about chickens, and letting them express their chickenness. There's a balance to be had as long as you don't have infinite money with chickens. It's the balance of safety versus comfort/freedom that comes up in many ways.

Greening, and resorting to Roundup.

Well, being sick or exhausted for a couple weeks we've missed the easy time to really do ground clearing, now we have a thoroughly greened area. We went from just go yank it up to, I suggest power tools. Given that this slope is a if we have time area, not a focus area I have a sneaking suspicion it isn't going to be gotten to this summer. Ahh well. That said, none of what's over there is something that has to die right now, the only weed we have around that needed to die right now was in our front garden bed, so we did something about it.

Happy Spring! Time for cleaning and snow.

Happy Spring! As you probably know there's been some significant snow fall up here. It was quite a transition for us since it was warm and rainy on Saturday followed suddenly by snow on both Sunday and a Monday.

Volunteer sprouts.

Looks like I missed picking some garlic last year! Not a big deal, I'll just let it mature and pull it up as I would have if I'd actually planted garlic last year. It's definitely the answer to the question I had of whether I could get away with planting garlic as winter slowly wandered in last year. Turns out, if I'd put it in at the normal time the garlic probably would have been just fine. I am a big fan of hearty varieties for just that reason. Learning curve for the future, make sure that you get those over winter plants in the ground!

Ice, more ice, and more learning.

There are times I envy the poultry for their firm footing. While they are having a good time out in the grass, and have no problems with the reality of most of the property which is still, sheet ice everywhere. Those of us on two feet for the most part are having a much harder time of it.

A surprising event

My apologies for the silence for over a week now, things got very busy at both work and home, and of all the things that I could afford to slip on, the blog ended up having to be one. I've been sick, and we've had a lot going on. I'm going to be posting today. and tomorrow. I'm also going to be aiming to get in a third post next week to make up for the lack of posts last week. For today I'd been intending to get back into things by talking about wood and the wood stove, but my plan for the day has changed a bit due to a surprise event.

The kitchen is almost done.

I'm really happy with how the kitchen work is ending up, despite not being happy with the time it's taking. We were going to get a pre built counter top and have it brought in, and install it. Then we realized that counter tops cost a lot. To get a pre built counter top we didn't like would have cost over $900 for us to install. To get one we liked with having to install it would have been over $1,500. So I built a counter top myself. As you can see, this was a bit of a process.

Peak foliage, and kitchen labor.

As we've been focused inside if it weren't for having to drive back and forth to get materials and tools we'd forgotten or didn't know we'd need I'd almost have missed the most dramatic part of fall arriving. Almost, it's hard to miss it for real when you're living in the middle of it, even when you are face down working on floors. As for the work on the kitchen, lots happened, but not as much as we wanted.

Weather for growth, pecking order changes.

First things first, I want to give a shout out to our now 4 Patreon supporters. Thanks to the group of you for your contributions, they have made a difference for us.  A week after returning from the convention, I'm finally feeling fully recovered, and refocused at home. As we were away, the plants got rain and sun, and positively shot up! Many are doing very well, but for today I'm going to focus on the beans, and the potatoes. Other than that I'm going to talk about the turkeys and the chickens a bit.

I hadn't quite understood just how fast beans go Up, or how strong their little tendrils are. Because the cattle panel isn't tall enough for their tastes, I put in twine runners, and drop lines for them to climb up, and within a day they're twining around and going up. It's fascinating to watch. Before I had the twine in place, the beans were growing up beyond their supports by twining around each other, and climbing. The tallest of them was over a foot and a half over the top of the support. I'm happy with how well the beans are growing, and that barring some catastrophe wiping out the plants we should have a good harvest of beans this year. Obviously, as with everything on the homestead, don't count your beans, or anything else before harvest.

What did we learn from our first big hutch.

I'd like to start with an apology for the photo quality, I didn't have time to get photos with a real camera today so this is busted iPad photos. It'll work for getting the point across at least. Today I want to talk about a couple things, but the first thing I want to do is talk about what we've learned from our first grow out hutch, and the things that I want to do to modify it. If you haven't been following since then this was the construction post for the grow out hutch.
Before going on to talk about the grow out hutch, and learning experiences from it I'm going to touch on our seed starts. Obviously our peppers are doing well, and we started them very early given the short season. Just this past weekend we started the tomatoes, and last night when I took a look, a bunch of seedlings have started their thready sprouts. I'm really happy to see them coming up so quickly, and so many. Looks like I dropped some extra multiples beyond the two I intended to toss in to each seedling pot which is normal. No matter how closely I work to try to only drop one or two seeds in a hole I always end up with some extra seedlings per hole which is fine since I'm going to be splitting them out to larger pots anyhow. Just wanted to touch on that briefly, before going back to talking about learning from the grow out hutch.

Mud season has (sort of) begun!

Today was a landmark morning for us, this somewhat unremarkable picture of a very happy Dorado shows something we haven't seen for a while. A water bottle with liquid water in it that hadn't been brought in over night. It's a wonderful change, and while we aren't going to be able to do that over the weekend, it's a very nice step towards "real" Spring.

Driveway done (mostly), and poison plants.

Well, we finished the driveway. Of course I don't have photos of any of the work, or the completed result because I forgot to get the completed part, and most of the time working was in the rain, or my hands were shaking too badly to get photos. So instead, here's a bunny.

Well, really it's a couple bunnies but you're most interested in the kit in the foreground. This is the smaller of Dawn's two kits. It's hard to get good scale on it because Dawn's so far from the camera. Anyhow, both of them are doing very well!

As for the driveway, in 2 days of work we moved ~18.5 tons of crush which comes out to about 15 cubic yards into ruts, and spread it across the driveway to crown it. The only tools we have for it are a digging shovel, a short digging shovel, and an iron rake. Appropriate tools for this, transfer shovel (broken fiberglass handle), bobcat, tractor, earth mover. I suspect mule or horse team would also be useful for this. Either way, without those we just did what we could, and for the most part it worked out. I really wish instead of 6, 3 - 4 ton piles the driver had been able to slowly scatter it down the driveway, but we got what we got, and can now use the driveway. It didn't even wash away in the recent hard rains!

Below the cut I'm going to talk more about how the baby bunnies are doing, which has both good, and learning experiences on our part.

It's an interesting life

Life has been interesting lately, and I have a picture of some of it. Today is going to be picture light because there's been too much going on to properly get pictures, and take care of work, and everything else. So. First and foremost, it's been cold, windy, and wet. The windy has had some interesting consequences including making the fire more difficult to light, and trees wandering around. Not like, Ents wandering, falling over mostly. Fortunately for our blue boy here, his hutch was sturdy enough to take a fairly substantial branch falling on it.

All of the chickens killed by a weasel, and forgetting.

One of the things emphasized in martial arts, the military, and driving is that it only takes a moment of inattention, laziness, or carelessness to get someone killed. In this case it was a quartet of chickens, and it only takes a moment applies just as much to homesteading as anything else I think. The short version of the story is on Sunday the Lady of the House shoveled out the chicken run so they'd have a place to have out time, and on Tuesday let them out during the day. By the time dusk fell she hadn't closed the hatch yet, and given how icy it is she decided to wait for me to come home to have me close it. Reasonable given how treacherous it is right now after an all day rain storm which turned into a 0F night within minutes of it getting dark a couple days ago. When I got home from work at about 11:30 PM I was upset because she hadn't re watered the rabbits, and in us taking care of that, we both forgot to close the coop. Wednesday morning she found the dead bodies killed by a weasel most likely.

Below the cut are photos of dead chickens. If this is disturbing to you or your work would not like it, don't click!

Cows, cold, nest building, and thoughts.

Meet a Highland Cow! They're very fluffy and in my opinion good looking cattle originating from Scotland that seem to be very well adapted to the rough terrain and cold winters of our area. This cow is actually from Gordon's Fold farm which is (in theory) walking distance from my house through the woods. The Lady of the House and I went for a wander along a near by road for an artist event that ended at the above cattle farm where we cooed at the cattle for a while.

Blessed Samhain to all, a day of reflections.

Blessed Samhain to all. For me this is a time of reflection, and while I don't have enough time to do a solid reflection for the blog on this year, I'm going to at least to a quick run down of our year and what's come of it. I think it will soon be time to do a proper re examining of our goals and ethical guidelines and see how we're doing.

 First of all reflecting on the rabbits. Overall I'd like to say I'm happy with how we're doing with the rabbits, and we are still learning a lot. For all of our successes, there were also a good number of failures which have led to us trying to extend the breeding season. The first breedings of the year were too early which led to the really awful 10 days of trying to keep kits alive that had gotten wet and failing. That was a discouraging and difficult time, but the rest of the breedings went relatively well. Even so with a couple small litters from Twilight, combined with the lost first litter, and then our later learning experience of the heat sterility (note to self, keep all males in the woods!) we ended up short for our needs. So in a lot of ways this was a year of modest success and a lot of mistakes. What I am confident I can say we did well was treat our rabbits well, take care of them, and try to learn to address their wants and needs better. Even with Sunshine and her sore hocks we gave her the place needed to recover, and we're keeping an eye on her to make sure they don't come back. One of the largest reflections oddly enough is the, just give rabbits cardboard boxes thing. The other big one is the huge value of fresh greens over the summer, and re examining the way we do feeding of greens and hay.

Despite the importance of the rabbits to our homestead, a lot of my reflection on the year is focused around the gardening and our tentative first steps into it. The biggest thing about gardening and this year with the homestead in general is acknowledging the huge amount of benefit we have had from the kindness of others. Our garden, modest though it may have been fed us a good many meals with the promise of more if we learn to use it better. That cost us very little due to the generosity of others through the Hilltown Seed Saving Network and it's seed swap and seedling exchange. As a note for folks in the area, this year's seed exchange is coming up November 23 in Cummington. You should come by! That group has been very generous with their advice, their seeds, and their seedlings. We didn't have as much to give as we'd like to have since this is our first time gardening, but that didn't  lead to hesitation on their part. So now we have peppers drying, tomato seeds separating from the goop, drying stevia, a bunch of frozen tomatoes, and a few squash having eaten liberally of Kale all summer, much of it on the generosity of others.
 Some of the largest of that I'd like to reflect on and touch upon was from Tevis and Rachel at Crabapple Farm who have tolerated our questions, helped us learn to grow, and even shared in some of our enthusiasm for the rabbits. The inspiration and friendship of people of like ideals has helped us sustain ourselves while things aren't easy and our garden looks like it isn't getting anywhere. The other obvious inspiration and teacher is Michelle Chandler and her Blessed Acre Rabbitry, in all ways our mentor in rabbits who has continued answering questions, inspiring, and helping us as she can, including the loan of a vehicle for a month(!) while we were in trouble.

There are many individuals and things that have been part of the year in terms of helping, inspiring, and teaching. Keeping us on our feet, and not giving up.

I think in the end of this reflection for me the biggest thing is, this is a partnership. Without the Lady of the House I wouldn't be doing this. Even if I had the inspiration, the drive, and the skills to do it I don't think I could do this alone. I don't know what that says to those looking to homestead in the future, if it's just me, but I think I'd recommend to people considering our path to not try to do it alone. Maybe find a community, an individual, a life partner, or even just a friend. This isn't a solitary activity, and that in the end is what I have taken away as I reflect on this year.

And last mentioned, but first in my mind, I'd like to reflect on the animals that have given their lives for us to eat.

Blessed Samhain

Two litters born, two to go.

I always forget just how small new baby rabbits are when they're just born. Especially when I've been handling all of the older rabbits regularly. The litter in my hand there is all six babies in Dawn's newest litter of kits.

Lots to learn with chickens.

Today's grand plans for the blog post have gone awry as I forgot to bring the SD card with photos on them making it remarkably difficult to use the photos I'd need to look at our newest breeder on the farm, and do some conformation comparisons. That said, we have a new Creme on the homestead, Sunshine is her name. She is Dawn's sister that we didn't end up selecting because Dawn has a bigger hindquarters. So next week we'll do a proper introduction to her.

My newest creation, IT LIVES!!!! Muahaha . . ahem.

It's a new week, and life continues to move on. The stresses of last week while not entirely gone have been mitigated, and we're getting back on track with our lives. Not entirely coincidentally it's stopped raining for a couple days, and while it may be hot it has allowed us to get back down to business with the rabbits.
Specifically, rabbit hutch creation which leads to happy rabbits. As you can see, barring being painted and the angle braces I'm going to put on around the legs when ever I have a few minutes and some scrap wood, the working prototype of the new model of breeder hutches is up and functional. Above is actually some rabbits in said hutch. The ladder to the left of the hutch in the photo Left gives a nice size comparison for you. As with everything, there were learning experiences involved in building the hutch. For one, make sure when you do measurements, make sure in getting the ideal measurements on one side you don't throw off the other side so much you have to do significant modification to make it work. The side with wire on it had to have 2 extra 2x4s cut and added in to give the wire something to be stapled in to because the front of the hutch is over 3' tall. I figured this would allow the rabbits to be able to utilize the second level I made for them better, and I'm sure it will when they start going up there. Just in the future I will have to make certain I don't make it so tall the wire is floating in the wind.

 On the up side, there is plenty and more than plenty of room. The smallest portion, the nesting area is clearly big enough for Twilight to fit in as you can see Right. I made the nesting area smaller and tighter to make the mothers more comfortable with it since smaller seems to be just as good if not better according to them. I made the small side hatch so I can get in to check on the babies easily. The first night the hutch was finished it got its first test, we had a clever pest visit last night, a raccoon. The Lady of the House heard thumping around down from the rabbits and grumbling about "They're just being playful late at night" I went on out to check in a towel and unlaced boots. I promptly came back up for the dog, pants, and a rifle after seeing a raccoon on the tree next to the hutch, running up and away. Everyone's ok, and it's good to know the hiding spot serves its purpose of making them feel safe, but I'm not happy to see a raccoon for the first time since moving in.

Speaking of pests, let's move on to the squash which seem to be the epicenter of a bugsplosion. We've finally resorted to stronger options than hand picking because we don't want to lose the plants! We're still hand picking and killing the beetles ourselves, but as you can see Left we also got our hands on yellow sticky straps, and that's the result of a day of them being up. They seem to be fairly effective, though not 100%. We also got Neem Oil to try to act as a bit of pest control. It interferes with bugs ability to feed thus killing them off and protecting your plants. It hasn't yet stopped them from mating as you can see Left in the lovely squash flower. We're still doing regular checks and bug killing rampages. I seem to mostly specialize in killing mating pairs. What that actually means is, I'm bad at sneaking up on them and catching them on their own the way the Lady of the House is.



I also found a bug that looked a lot like a Japanese Beetle  but with vastly different markings than a Japanese Beetles. I had intended to take photos of it and then kill it on principle, but it flew off as I was snapping the last photo. Anyone know what this is? I haven't had time to look it up yet due to work + life. I still am fairly happy with having gotten the photos because it's kind of cool looking.

Last, but most certainly not least, especially not in their dinosaurian minds, chickens. It's hard to really get a sense of scale from the photos, but they've grown a lot since we got them. We did in fact identify the method they were using to get out, and so they're in when we want them to be in, and are only out when we're around to observe and protect them. The social structure is interesting to observe as the head bird I've been calling Haystack Below Left stays head bird, and the challengers rotate. There is a whole lot to say about the chickens, but for now I'm going to leave it at, they eat lots, they poop lots, and they make a lot of noise. The Lady of the House is really enjoying having them for their chickenness alone as well as collecting their feathers for art and craft purposes.

I hope everyone is doing well in this mid summer, and as a friend says, "Stay out of the hot sun."