Something Has Got To Go

Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory from Seed Savers

There have been several times when I sit down to do a post here and I'm fresh out of thoughts, imagine that, or I have other things that require my attention. If I had my way this is what my life would be:

• Turn off my alarm and wake up anytime I want.
• Go for a run or a ride.
• Take care of the critters.
• Nap.
• Plan all of my gardening adventures as the year goes on.
• Play in the garden and make the yard and surrounding areas pretty.
• Cook Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.
• Go to bed whenever I feel like it.

Looks like a life without working away from home right? It's a dream for me at this point. 

As it is I spend 40 hours out of my week away from home. Actually more because lunch breaks and travel time don't count into those 40 hours. Depending on the time of year and how my morning starts off as I wake up for the day I will either head out after coffee and bible reading. Lately I have not been going outside to help with the chores. I have been known to head outside for morning chores on the weekends though, so I'm not a total deadbeat "mom." 

Gus & Greta checking out the home improvement project

The evenings are fairly enjoyable - arrive home and eat dinner then head outside to give the feathered creatures a treat or just sit and watch them be who they are. The Magpie Squad and the Geese are usually penned up by 7 or 7:30 and the two Magpie Babies get some extra time to play in the pool before it's time for them to go to bed. 

If I want the routine of a person who doesn't go to work everyday I'll take vacation to get away from the crazy. I took vacation time during the first full week of this month and boy I did not want to go back to work. Especially since my supervisor would be on vacation when my vacation time was over.

sigh.

The past two weeks I have been back to the regular work routine and now the weekend is upon us again and this weekend I have even less time to hang out at home. It's all good though. We'll be heading out to the Swan Island Dahlia Festival tomorrow with some friends and then Sunday I have a couple of responsibilities at church that I will need to do before we have home time. Although I have a feeling that my afternoon will involve going to a local building center to pick up some decking materials that are on discount.

oh well.

This is the life of a full-time office assistant/part-time farmer-homesteader. One day I'll leave work and never return.

one day.

First Spookie sugar pumpkin

2018 Mother Earth News Fair - Oregon

Oh yeah...it was a good day in Albany!

There were three seminars we agreed would be good to sit in on and one extra just in case we wanted to stay a little longer.

Seminar #1 - Making Bacon at Home with Karen Solomon

We had a little bit of a theme this year...anything pig/pork. So when I saw this on the schedule and that it was early - at 10am...that was incentive to get to Albany as early as possible. Our chosen route these days to avoid going through Portland is to go via I-205 and not deal with any nonsense that might slow traffic down. It's a little longer, but at least traffic keeps rolling. Anyway, we arrived with about half an hour to spare.

Just like most fairs there were a variety of vendors, so I wasn't terribly interested in checking those out except for Bob's Red Mill. I love to stop by and just pick up the goodies that they are giving away.  We made our way to the Real Food Stage and selected our seats.

Once the presentation started I felt like maybe this presentation would be a little slow. The speaker was inexperienced at Mother Earth News Fair and there were a couple of technical issues - mainly with her mic. Her talk was fairly brief, but full of all sorts of information that will help us with making bacon once we  have pork with which to make bacon out of.

While the talk was interesting I was glad it was over and looking to move on to the next presentation...

Seminar #2 - Homegrown Pork and Getting Ready for Backyard Pigs with Jeannette Beranger, The Livestock Conservancy

Jeannette Beranger is an excellent speaker and we have sat in on her presentations the past two years which both were about chickens.

So this talk was mainly about how to set up for pigs and we did pretty good with setting up for them. Especially with the few items that we actually had.

• Shelter - check - The shelter can be elaborate or fairly simple. We went with simple. Free pallets from a neighbor down the street and a tarp. Tom slapped the pallets together and put up a piece of garden fabric to use as a curtain of sorts. They basically need to be sheltered from rain and wind. During the few days we have had that were rainy, the did spend a good amount of time in their shelter. I'm guessing that they were sleeping and only emerging when it was time to eat or to relieve themselves.
• Water - check - Since we only have the two pigs right now we are able to get away with using a Rubber Feed pan that we picked up at Pioneer. Once there are more (babies) we'll have to revisit the waterer and explore our options.
• Protection - check - We are currently using the Pig QuikFence. It's a nice set up, not terribly different than the poultry netting. This netting is 30" high and should work until Fiona has piglets. At that time we'll have to figure out how to modify what we have or get the Hog Net which is 24" tall and has strands of wire along the bottom which are spaced two inches apart and would be perfect to keep piglets in. We have some time to consider what to do once Fiona does have her first litter.

There were other tips and what not, but these were the most important. She also went over the different breeds of pigs that would work well for a backyard situation. 

I always enjoy The Livestock Conservancy presentations. I hope that there will be more talks in the years to come.

Seminar #3 - Whole Animal Butchery with Meredith Leigh

We both were looking forward to this presentation! For this demo she was using a half a hog! What the What?! When I saw the carcass being prepared, I started to get excited and couldn't way for things to get started. 

Not only did we learn a lot of the lingo - Primal, Sub-Primals and Retail cuts we learned a lot about how home butchery is the best way to go as far as the animal goes. Every part of the animal will be used in one way or another weather it is for human consumption or for amending the gardens or feeding to the animals - mainly chickens. Even the feathers can be composted which goes right back to the earth.  Every part of the animal has a use and those parts need to be used!

The thing that really struck me is how as a consumer we look for a specific cut (steak, roast, etc) whether it is considered the "best" cut or a lesser cut. What is thought to be a great cut - tenderloin - is actually not that great. While the cooking of the tenderloin is easy, it actually does not have that great of flavor. So to just take something like the tenderloin out would be to take away from another cut of meat that is considered a better cut. So to butcher for a specific cut can be wasteful and some of the parts are useful for better cuts of meat are used for things like All Meat hotdogs. Anything to make a buck right?

What?! 

Oh man! If this isn't compelling enough I don't know what would be. 

I know, most people do what is natural...go to the store and peruse the meat cases that are filled with all those supposedly tasty cuts of meat and make a selection of those steaks, roasts etc and plop into your shopping cart. 

What is happening is people are buying meat that has been factory farmed...and that's another issue altogether which I touched on a couple of posts ago. 

My solution for part of our meat purchases is using Butcher Box which has been great! They partner with farms that raise pastured animals - win! However, just as before we are still consuming specialty cuts of beef and pork. So, in a way it's also a non-win. Soon enough we'll be able to fill our freezer with our own pork and even sooner we'll be harvesting our chicken. 

This seminar was the best of the three and at some point I'll have to add Meredith Leigh's book to our library The Ethical Meat Handbook. 

Until then I'll be educating myself on factory farmed animals, the importance of whole animal consumption and learning how to butcher an animal myself.

After looking around at a couple of vendors and checking out the animals that were in one of the buildings we made our way out. Before heading home we visited the Historic Carousel and Museum that was featured on OPB a couple of months ago.

Each animal on this carousel is hand carved and painted by volunteers. People that had no experience or skill for carving were able to carve each of these with amazing skill. The story is pretty extensive, so it would be best to just go to the website HERE.

The next time we find ourselves in Albany we'll be going back to the carousel and taking a ride. At $2 per person that is cheap entertainment.

We have decided that attending both days of the fair would be the way to go. That way we could sit in on seminars that happen later in the day without feeling like we need to jet out of there at a certain time. 

For example, one of the last sessions at the 5 o'clock hour was Intro to Charcuterie with Meredith Leigh - now that would have been interesting to sit in on. Learning how to incorporate the parts of a pig that wouldn't normally be sold as a retail cut. Think Italian cold cuts aka Salumi.  The Sunday sessions included more Meredith Leigh presentations and another Karen Solomon session focusing on pickling. 

Next year we'll go both days...do AirBnB or the hotel next to the fairgrounds and do all things Mother Earth News "Bringing the magazine to life."

In other news: the swine have been with us for 3 months! The duo are doing well, growing a lot and getting older! Fiona is 5 months old and Mr. Rexy Pants is almost 5 months. They may reach breeding age in 3 more months at the earliest. If that is the case I'm not sure how we would know for sure that she is bred.

We still have some time so we'll just put those thoughts on hold for now.

It's has been a great day! We spent the day catching up on the things that we would normally do on Saturday and had a nice relaxing day at home. Next year I'll extend the weekend by a day maybe two to enjoy the weekend even more.

Farm Life is the Best Life!

Photo of the day:

I wanted a photo of the 4 girls...but Shell-Bell couldn't stand not being the center of attention.

Throw Back Thursday...

to when we really started this farm up. I feel like the moment the farm came alive was when we added the chickies. Which meant my dream was coming to fruition. In April 2017,  we visited Pioneer Feed and went away with 10 Jersey Giant chicks and some supplies to get them set up. Go HERE to see that post. A few weeks later we added a few more pullets from a chicken farmer located nearby to supplement our flock that at the time ended up being 5 pullets and 5 roos.

Now, nearly a year since we started this adventure we have added an addition six 3 day old pullets. We settled on Mottled Javas that JUST arrived at the farm supply store the morning that we brought them home. Tom wanted a breed that wasn't black. These won't be totally black...so we are slowly transitioning to other colored chickens.

February 16 - The newest members of our flock

Most of them were good size, the only runty one would be the one all the way to the right. I was concerned that she would not make it, the other just seemed a little more lively. As it turns out, all of them made it and have been thriving since we brought them home.

February 18

The little girls were settled in a couple of  days later. Their markings looked like little scarves.

February 25

I had forgotten how quickly they change from the little fuzz-balls even after just a few days.

March 4

The only time that they got to kind of experience fresh air was on March 4. These little girls are quite active and it was hard to grab them so we could get them outside for some Vitamin D.

Then the photo sessions became less frequent after this last photo...I don't know why.

March 24

Toward the end of my vacation week. I guess we were pretty busy doing stuff, just did enough to keep these little girls watered and fed.

March 31

The most recent  photo is from this past Saturday. It was a nice sunny day and there was no reason why the girls could at least be in the sunshine. So we dragged the brooder over to the opened garage door and let them enjoy not only fresh air, but some actual sunshine! They didn't realize that they could sit at the opposite end to keep from overheating. After a few minutes they were actually panting. Silly girls!

The plan is to have them out in the yard on grass by the weekend. Since it is pouring down rain right now I am not sure how much we'll work on the chicken tractor after I get home. It is nearly finished really. Just one more piece of chicken wire on the top and then the back end...install the carriage bolts for the wheels and add a hook to keep the door closed. So close!

These little chickies have grown so much so fast that it is crazy! Once they go out we will get the brooder ready for the girl Magpie ducklings to arrive. They should be at the feed store on April 20th! So excited!!! Then - we'll have the meat chickens coming sometime toward the middle of June.

If I don't order them, we won't have them...I bet get on that!

Life Before the Farm

For the first few years living in our house I didn't have any aspirations to do anything other than grow a garden. A big one. All the while, not really take advantage of all of the produce that we were growing. I am pretty sure that we ate a fair amount of the tomatoes, beans cucumbers, zucchini...but at that time I did not really have the time or energy to preserve anything. So we just ate what we could and gave some of it away or composted a lot. When we lived at the last house I did make the effort to freeze a bunch of green beans - there were so many...the freezer was full of beans! At least I know that I can get it done. 

Anyway, I always had flowers in the garden. This was before it became a thing to pay attention to the pollinators in the garden. Well, maybe it was a thing, but it sure wasn't with me. There were so many flowers one year that someone stopped and asked if they could harvest some of the Cosmos for an upcoming event (it may have been a wedding). It was so surprising that someone would ask...I said yes, of course. That may have been the time that I thought about doing a flower market garden. I even had books and everything. 

I had a little obsession with Dahlias!

So we continued on spending the summers working the garden growing food and flowers and the winters indoors doing indoor stuff. 

After a few years my life changed in a big way - I was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Dealing with that took away a lot of my desire to grow a garden. We continued with gardening though, but it wasn't as enjoyable as before. Actually, my focus was to get through the surgeries and the treatments that followed. It was all of the energy that I could muster and continue to work through all of the cancer stuff.

During that time the size of the garden grew smaller and my mentality turned to keeping active by cycling. Then after some more time, we were running...and the garden still continued on, but now in boxes that we had built during one of my fall vacation times. 

That seemed to be the turning point and I was starting to get interested in growing food and flowers again. I can't believe how long ago that was! It was September 2008, which would have been four and a half years after my diagnosis. Go HERE for the mini post of those boxes. Since then, the garden started to get bigger again and I started looking at different places to grow things. I have four garden boxes in front of the garage and have been expanding ever since! 

During those years from the first big gardens to what we have now we did a lot of cycling, a little bit of traveling - nothing exotic - then running. My days were spent working Monday thru Friday like everyone else. On Thursdays we would ride the Bicycle Club time trial series and a lot of days I would bike commute to and from work. Saturday was our long ride to somewhere day, anything over 10 miles usually. Running entered the mix a few years ago. These days we still try to get out early in the morning, but snow...and my bad back. Not to mention a lack of motivation. 

Now I'm dreaming again. This blog was created when those dreams of having a hobby farm full time started to fill my mind again. I knew that I needed to start a blog as a journal of sorts to see where we started and how far we are getting along in our dream. 

When this garden season comes around I'll be pulling up the Winter crops and getting the boxes prepped for the Spring veggies. This year I am planning to focus on vegetables that we can grow a lot of to preserve or store.

Waking up to mornings like this helps me to remember that there is a lot of time to plan and to consider what will be happening on our farm. 

I'm so glad that the snow really doesn't stay for long! It sure is pretty to look at though. 

Partly Cloudy Skies

The days have been pretty decent since the weekend. There really hasn't been rain...maybe just a sprinkling here and there. The typical Pacific Northwest winter weather has been missing in action. The 7 day forecast from a couple of local TV stations. Looks good to me!

 from KGW.com

from  KPTV.com

Sometimes a long range forecast can make a person think funny things. Like scheduling my floating holiday (One of the benefits that I get have at work). So after looking ahead at the forecast (because we know it won't change...) I decided to schedule my floating holiday on the Friday before President's Day. That will be a nice long weekend! It will be nice to have some down time. Sometimes work can get draining and I need to get away from the crazy! Even if the weather does turn, there is always something to do around our farm, so the day will not be lost.

The other thing that I am contemplating is taking a week of vacation time in March. March is pretty quiet at work and I usually take my spring vacation in March or April. With so many things that I want to start and with such great weather lately it's hard to not think about taking a week off from work.

There are a couple of projects that we need to do...hopefully we will finish them during that week. At the very least we'll get the shelter ready for the American Guinea Hogs. I really would like to work on the chicken tractor, but that might not happen. It will be started, I know that.

The shelter I would like to build:

The shelter that is more likely:

I think my vision of this style will look much better.

The chicken tractor that we will build:

This is a John Suscovich chicken tractor

I'll post more about this guy in the next week...but this chicken tractor looks easy to build and it might not take nearly as long as it took to build the Chicken RV which we worked on every single day of my vacation last March. Even then we still didn't get it done!

Here's hoping that the partly cloudy skies last until my vacation in March. That might be a bit much to ask for. So we'll just have to take it one day at a time and enjoy the day and not look too terribly far into the future - but sometimes we just gotta know what the weather might be. 

I am looking forward to longer days though, so partly cloudy skies help out! Especially since the two hoodlums (Lenny & Shelly) get to leave the Hen Pen and forage before the sun goes down.

Bringing Home The Bacon...

Or pigs to become bacon!

This is where I would like to create a paddock for the pigs

Now that we know where we would like to purchase the pigs, we have to get an area ready for them!

We already have invested in the Pig QuikFence Starter kit which, like the poultry netting includes the solar energizer and corner posts. Both kits were purchased from Premier 1 Supplies. We really like how easy the fencing is to move to other parts of our field/garden/yard. I made a minor mistake when I got the 160' netting for the chickens though - I ended up ordering the single spike...ooops. Oh well, it works just as well and we are able to give the girls and dudes a lot of space to forage. The pig netting is 100' and we'll move them maybe on the same schedule as the chickens, which is once a month, we'll see though. We can't be sure until we have them and see how much work they can do in a month. 

We'll need to put together some sort of shelter for them too. That might be as easy as a small hoop house. Although, I would like to have something a little more substantial for them, like a 3 sided shelter - maybe something that we can put a couple of wheels on to make moving it easier. Especially if we could hook it up to the lawn tractor.

Something like this could work for a little while

This is a bit fancy, but I like the idea of it

There are so many possibilities for our little hobby farm. A couple of weeks ago we put together a vision board to keep us motivated. AND to keep us looking forward and not lamenting that we didn't start this dream sooner. Now that Tom is semi-retired working part-time, he can take care of the chores during the winter months.  When spring and summer come around again I'll be out there messing with the chickens and the two hooligans everyday! It's possible that in 3 years or so I'll leave my job and we'll do this farm thing full time. It's a plan that I want to stick to!

Oh yeah...we got vision!