Brown Cow and Baby Brown

As of yet we do not have a name for baby brown cow so we'll just give a brief description of the pregnancy and labor along with some images.

We managed to breed cow on the first time and we really feel that it helped with the whole process. We kept track of her cycles and our AI lady, Charmaine was able to come out and work her magic on May 21st. Cow took and had a smooth pregnancy. She continued to give us an insane amount of milk through out the year and we dried her off in December. We had the vet out twice, once to check to make sure she took and the second time to make sure the pregnancy was running smoothly as we've never had a bred cow on our farm. Cow kept getting bigger as the year progressed and was showing signs of near labor at the beginning of this week. We did have a couple of close calls when we thought she might be going into labor but it turned out to be false labors. At the beginning of the week cow starting showing signs of her tail lifting and her ligaments loosening. I would go in and brush her as well as scratch her. She seemed to be comforted by those small things.

I noticed cow laying down and lifting her tail and rocking back and forth. Jed noticed her back hunched with her starting to push so we both concluded that she was in active labor. The actual pushing part went by quickly with the feet coming out first and the baby shortly afterwards. Cow was soon up and cleaning up the baby. As a side note, cow has never been allowed to keep her baby as she was being used to breed miniature cows so the baby would come out and be taken away before she can make any contact with it. At first she seemed really attached, but I think she's gotten over the new mother thing. She seems to acknowledge the baby but does not follow it around. She does her thing and takes care of the baby but is not too clingy. I think it also helps that baby cow is very independent and runs around with the sheep. I think she thinks she's a sheep... that might be interesting in the future.

Second sheepy of the season

The second sheepy was born last Sunday. I was about to go out to feed the animals in the morning and I noticed that the second NC ewe was huddling with a small bundle. Yup, baby was born in the night. Nice that cow and the second lamb were born on warm sunny days rather than in the middle of the wettest, coldest night of the month. All babies are doing well and they are all having fun playing with each other.

New calf on the homestead

So this Wednesday Brown Cow delivered her calf, a healthy female Jersey calf. Cow's labor was short and  with out incident. After the year of the sheep stillbirths Rosie and I get a little nervous around lambing/calfing time, that was such a horrid experience that we are kinda scared by it. But everything went smoothly and after no more than about an hour the calf was born. Within an hour of the calf being born she was standing up and walking around and nursing.

As this is a female calf we will most likely be selling her off in a few months when she is bigger and not so attached to her mom. A mixed blessing to be sure, on one hand we could use the money to pay off some of the farm's debts on the other hand we where really looking forward to home raised ribeye steaks. But maybe we will set a little of the cow money aside and go out to a ribeye steak dinner to celebrate the sale.

We have not decided on a name yet for her, any ideas?

Birds as far as the eye can see

Many of you have visited when we have a plethora of feathered friends running around the back yard. The first year we picked up ten Amauricana and we were getting more eggs than we know what to do with. Now we have a lot more chickens, but they have a tendency to lay all over the backyard, sometimes even just stopping and laying eggs right in the middle of the paths. We have set areas where we can find eggs, but it would be nice to not have to go looking all over the place. Jed and I are thinking about a couple of different strategies to our excess of birds. The set number of birds we would like to have are: 2 geese (mating pair), 3 turkeys (1 male, 2 female), 4 ducks (1 male, 3 female), and 6 chickens (possibly all female). This would be a low number until we are able to get all the the plants growing at a healthy rate and still maintain a healthy bird population. This would provide all the eggs we need with the addition of meat from our flock but at a more reasonable quantity. Our goal will be for family production and not for sale. This way we can focus and balance out the food intake as well as the meat and egg production without too much waste. They will also provide the much needed fertilizer without the overkill of some of our larger flocks we've had in the past. We're hoping the lower quantities will also make for a quieter environment. Our goal will be to grow our meat production from spring to fall (or whenever they are ready) and then slaughter them so that we do not overwinter any extra birds. The plucker will help us with this process and I'm sure the second plucker will help us that much more as we have worked out many of the kinks of the first plucker.

We've have set numbers of birds that we know that they can hatch out: Geese (12-25), turkeys (12-20), ducks (6-20), chickens (12-22). We're not sure if we would like to have additional meat chickens as the Amauricans are tiny and do not provide that much meat. We might do some large chickens and some egg chickens so that we have a mixture of both. It is interesting to see the dynamics of the bird flocks and see how we wish to change it. As with everything else in the farm, we learn by doing. We'll see what works for our property and we'll see what we can do to make it work well. We'll probably post more in the future, as with all topics, but for now I think our goal will be to decrease our bird numbers to a more managable quantity.

The possibility of turkey

As many of you know, we have horrible luck keeping male turkeys on the farm. For some reason all the predators love the taste of male turkeys or once they are grown they are too dumb to keep themselves from committing suicide. (FYI - jump attacking Jed is a form of suicide.) We were thinking about picking up another set of turkeys next year, but luckily we had the good fortune of going to one of the local nurseries and it turns out they have a heritage breed tom. They said that they used to have a pair but that the female was eaten by predators, which left them with a lone male turkey. We're going to see about picking him up and seeing if he can aclimate to our homestead, at least long enough to farther some new baby poults and then we can take him back. We were thinking about keeping two females and a male turkey to hatch out new turkeys for us. At first Jed thought that might not provide enough turkeys until we realized that they have a tendency to hatch out 15-25 eggs at a time, which means we'd end up with 20-50 turkeys (accounting for bad eggs and such) a year. That's a lot of turkey. I don't think we can eat a turkey a week, but we can definitely try. Turkeys have turned out to be the best keepers of our homestead, so who knows, we might end up just keeping tukeys and lowering our chicken count.


Image from http://www.porterturkeys.com/narragansett.htm

 The tom looked to be a narrangansett, which is what some of our birds are. The rest of our turkeys are Bourbon Reds.

Extending the berries - currants

Image from Cornell Fruit page

Our first order of currants was a Wilder and a Crandall Black. The Wilder is still growing in the front with the blueberries and is throwing out more shoots. The poor Crandall was squashed to death in the Great Piggy Debacle of 2011. Thanks to the Tree Man and Bay Laurel I was able to pick up a second Wilder (from Bay Laurel) and two new Blacks from the Tree Man as well as a second set of Red Lake. The Wilder is considered a pink (It's light red!) so I thought I'd get some of the reds to match the sets. These all went in near the citrus along the garage as they get a good amount of sun but they are also shaded through most of the year, which helps keep their temps low. Our mandarin and our blood orange are still growing in that area (Keep fighting little ones!) but I thought I'd surround them with other vegetation to help keep their winter temps a bit higher. I've also interspersed some Pixwell gooseberries so we'll see how they produce in the next couple of years. I'm thinking about lining that whole fence line with some of the cooler berries such as currants and gooseberries to help fill in that area and to make it a bit more productive. And since apparently six currant bushes is not enough I ordered another 2 bushes of white currants from Trees of Antiquities to add to the mix. I have not yet pruned them, but Ivan and I have a date with our currants and gooseberries tomorrow so that we can whip them into shape. If all works out well we'll have 8 currant bushes in production with red, pink, black, and white currants coming in each year and we'll add the four gooseberry bushes to that blend and we'll just have to see what awesome jams, syrups, pies, and food stuff we can produce with these beauties.

Tree pruning and planting

I visited the pruning meeting for the California Rare Fruit Grower's Association of the Central Coast and I think I'm going to join. One of the incentives to join was a Carob seedling and I find it delightfully interesting to add that to our list of products grown on the farm. I doubt that we can use it as a chocolate substitute, but I wish to use it to make carob desserts. We'll see if they have any left next month so that I can join. Their scion exchange takes place next month and I'm planning on attending that meeting. I met a lovely lady who lives in Atascadero who was also visiting that meeting for the first time. We'll see if I can pick up some French Prune scions from her so that I can play with them.

I had an opportunity to prune all of our trees yesterday as it was a nice dry day. I took a lot off the almond in the front as it was showing some signs of borer and I would like to keep damage to a minimum on all our trees. The peach and the apricots were also pruned to allow for top growth. I'm still uncertain on how to trim the front apple tree to help encourage the tree to grow taller. I also wrapped the trees with fencing to see if that will help discourage the geese from eating all my trees. The jerks ate my Franquette walnut tree after Zuzu had knocked of the covering that I had on there to protect it. I hope it can still grow. We'll see as I did not see any actively growing nodes on what was left of the walnut tree.

On Saturday I also made my way to Bay Laurel Nursery and I find it funny that I keep getting the same worker helping me. She's a bit... prickly.. and every time I talk to her I wonder why she's working with the public if she lacks the skills to communicate with someone in an easy fashion. I'm glad she enjoys doing what she does, but it would also be nice to have a person who you enjoy talking to whom you wouldn't mind going back to visit. Honestly, I've only gone twice (once to order and once to pick up my order) and I don't really see a reason to go back if that's the way I'll be treated. They have nice produce, but I think I'll pay extra to have my trees and items shipped from Peaceful Valley if I can feel like a valued costumer. That's just my opinion. But anyways, I stopped by on Saturday to see if I could add to my order and it turned out that the bare root trees were in so I picked up my ordered Muir peach and my Fugu persimmon. I was able to plant those last night although the persimmon turned out a bit more eventful than I would have liked. We have a lot of trees and we're quickly running out of spots to plant them, so I decided to plant the persimmon off to one side. That spot seemed to have 2 1/2 ft of pure rock which I had to dig through. I kept sending up sparks and breaking rocks in half. The shards would jump up and hit my face and I was glad that I was wearing my glasses as they ended up getting scratched from one of the rocks. I would hate to think of what my eye would have looked like if I was wearing my contacts.

I have one almond and the small bushes left to plant. I hope they are all right and that they grow well for us. I look forward to another year of awesome fruit growth.

Trees - Past, Present, and Future

Just thought I'd recap what happened in this last year with our trees. As previously stated, some trees were eaten by goats, others by geese, some caught fireblight (I like it when they later post oh, by the way... this tree is highly susceptible to fireblight.. thanks) and some just couldn't keep up.

Those who did not make it this year: Apple Fuji (goats), Apple Honey Crisp (geese), regrowth of rootstock on one of Trees of Antiquities tree (geese), Navel Orange (geese), Grapefruit (geese), Lemon (geese/freeze), Apple Pink Lady (fireblight), Plum Santa Rosa (geese),

Those who were damaged by geese or goats include - Apple White Pearmaine, Apricots Patterson, Pistachios, Pear Bartlett, Pear White Doyenne, Apple Granny Smith, Cherry Rainer.

Actually, the more I review this list, the more I want to punch a goose in the face. I'll just have to remind myself that I'll just have to eat all their tasty, tasty eggs and children.. in front of them. Some of the trees that were damaged also managed to come back and seem poised to have a good growth year for 2013, for that I'll only eat the remaining non breeding pair geese.

The remaining fruit trees include: Apple - White Pearmain, Apple - Golden Delicious Combo, Apple - Granny Smith, Apple - Braeburn, Apple - Summer Rambo, Apple rootstock from pink lady (to be grafted with different apple),  Pear - White Doyenne, Pear - Keiffer, Pear - Bartlett, Peach - Ranger, Mulberry Pakistan (2), Blood Orange, Mandarin (2), Pomegranate (2),  Mango, Orange - Valencia, Pistachios (3), Cherry - Rainer, Cherry - Bing, Pecan, Almond, Apricot - Patterson (2).

Just planted include: Walnut Franquette, Walnut -Hartley, Almond (Nuplus).

On order: Peach - Muir, Plum - French Prune, Quince - Russian, Persimmon. 

Will pick up more to propagate: Pomegranate and figs, possibly some apples to graft.

Would really like some olives, nectarines, and possibly some other nuts. We also planted some pine nuts and some chestnuts to see if they grow from seed. My goal is to actually have fruit/nuts all year round from our trees. Having them be in season just seems to give them a better flavor and helps us savor them that much more.

Saturation Point

As some of you know we have not had that much rain for the last two years. Last year we did not receive enough rain to saturate the soil. Thus resulting in a year of having to buy most of our animal food and not enough plant growth. This year, it seems we have hit it. We have not had that much rain, but it is slow and steady. As such, all our rain barrels are full and there are puddles all over the backyard, with out pond and stream being full. I might add that the ducks and the geese are having a great time playing. This does cause a great mucking mess in the back pasture area as cow is a bit heavy and our clay soil turns to a mess as soon as it gets wet. We'll have to see what we can do to minimize any damage to the soil. We hope this steady rain continues so that we can dry farm all our grains and winter beans. I might add that "rain" is used to mean any time the sky spits on us. A local farmer and I were talking excitedly the other day about getting 1/18th of an inch of rain the night before. I suppose after a year of less than 10 inches of rain we get excited about any water that we can get.

Cow is in a family way

Yesterday we had our vet come out to the homestead to take a look at Brown Cow. Nothing was wrong but Rosie wanted to have her checked out to see how Cow is doing with her pregnancy.

For some reason Cow is in utter dread of the Vet, but she has only seen him twice now. Normally Cow is very docile, we bring her food and she just stands there while we milk her, check her for wounds and do a few other "cow maintenance" things. We never have problems with cow running way, shying from the milker, or any of the other problems we hear other cow owners have with their animals. We consider ourselves very lucky to have such a well behaved cow. But when the vet walks onto the property Cow flips out, a lot. When she sees the vet she starts to become very alarmed, to the point of running and kicking and jumping. And when you have a 850 lb cow trying to jump away from you and kick everything in site, you are going to have a bad day. I really don't understand  where her dislike comes from, the Vet is a nice man and has always been gentile to Cow (He has only seen her twice!)but she has it in her head that he is some sort of Cow torturing monster. The First time the Vet came out Cow actually hurt herself while trying to get away from him, the second time I knew better and had her stoutly secured before he came outside.

In any case Cow is about 5 months pregnant (9-10 months gestation) and seems to be in very good health. So all is well. It looks like we can be expecting a calf sometime in the Spring. If the calf is a female we will most likely try and sell her, if the calf is a male we will see about fattening him for a year and then give him a "retirement party".

In case anyone in our neck of the woods needs a farm animal Vet we would recommend "The Large Animal Practice"  based in Los Osos. A good Vet who is very reasonable priced, and does not mind dealing with the occasional neurotic cow. 

Our first hard frost of the year

This year our first hard frost came in a bit late. Our frost came in on November 9th, this Friday. It killed off all our annual plants so we'll be tossing those green bits to Cow and the Sheep. We'll also put in the garlic and see about what other items we might want to play with.

2012 Fruit

Just for a reminder to myself and to see how this will compare with next year.

June - Boysenberries throughout the month - fair crop
July - Braeburn apples ready to pick with strawberries and elderberries coming in at the end of the month
August - Grapes matured as well as the main crop of elderberries - strawberries still producing

Note - For next year, pay attention to southern batch of berries and smaller elderberry bush, as well as blueberries, gooseberries, and currants.
Weather for 2012 - low rainfall <15" of rain, temp in 100s since April, some random humid/muggy days with extreme lows in the winter (dipping in the low teens)

I must do all my pruning in January

I can't tell for sure since the weather seems to keep telling me to jog on but I think from the last three years of watching the trees that I might want to do all my trimming in January. The trees go dormant sometime during November or December and then the buds start to swell in January. All the short cold hour trees seem to bloom in February so I have to make sure that I do all my spraying or trimming during January to keep from damaging the trees and vines.

This year I was able to trim most of the trees and berries in time. Heck, I was even able to take some 18 new shoots from the boysenberry in the front and transplant the to the back. I also started propagating some grapes to plant along some of the fences to work as live hedges. We'll see if that is really how they will end up or if I end up devising a much more elaborate pathway for the garden area.

But I must remember... prune in January before the bud swells.

Polling

Polling is the act of removing horns and the ability to grow horns from an animal while it is very young. This is generally done in three ways;

1)Polling bands (very small rubber bands) are placed on the nub of the horn and inhibit horn growth, this method is not very successful as the animal will often rub the band off.

2) An electric polling wand has a heating element (similar to a car cigarette lighter) that burns the incipient horn out of the animals skull and the resulting scar tissue keeps the horns from growing back.

3) A caustic chemical solution is used to burn the horns out similar to a polling wand.

As you can guess the animal in question does not enjoy any of these methods, imagine what having a section of your skull burned off would feel like. But the main reason most people poll their animals is that in order to "show" your animals in competition, they must be polled. The secondary reason is that people think that horns make the animal more dangerous.

Rosie and I do not poll our animals, frankly I can not see any legitimate reason to poll an animal on our homestead. We have one goat who's prior owners tried to poll her with a caustic chemical and failed, as they would not be able to she show her due to this failure she was sold to us at a discount. Little Lucy AKA Unigoat is our little pure bred toggenburg female and she is the only goat on our homestead that was polled. Due to the failed polling Lucy has one stunted but straight horn and one small horn cap, about 1" long. From time to time Lucy manages to snap off this horn cap leaving an open bleeding wound on her skull that has a direct line into her sinus cavity. Recently Lucy once again snapped off this cap and bled all over the place, so far we have been lucky and she has not gotten the open wound infected but we try and keep a close eye on her while she has that injury. A failed polling will haunt an animal for the rest of its life, causing reoccurring injury and associated pain.

So why am I talking about this? Well we have a fundamental belief on our homestead that our animals should be able to live in an environment as close to the one they evolved into as we are able to provide. Our chickens run around cage free, our pigs live on pasture and our goats and sheep don't get their skulls burned open at birth. Call us crazy, but we believe that animals are pretty smart and if you let them live like they are meant to live they will be healthy. Goats use their horns for two reasons;

1) Defense
2) Temperature regulation

Goats use the vascular structure of their horns to keep their temp from fluctuating in the weather and without their horns you need to be watchful of weather extremes that could make your goats sick. Goats (and their ancestors) have been developing horns for millions (sic) of years, there is probably a pretty good reason they needed to keep that evolutionary trait. Granted that not all ruminants have horns there are some naturally polled animals and while I am not a specialist in the anatomy of herbivores I would be willing to guess that naturally polled animals have other forms of temperature regulation not found in horn-growing breeds.

Some people claim that goats with horns are too dangerous and polling is meant to keep people safe. To that I would say "What are you doing to your goats that makes them want to gore you to death?" I move among our 500-700 lbs pigs with no fear, I push apart our rams and male goats with out getting hurt, I feed our roosters and ganders by hand, this is not magic. If you raise your animals to be friendly by treating them well and showing them respect and affection then you will not need to worry about them trampling you, biting you or goring you to death on a daily basis. Really, it works, try it.

The moral of all this?

If you animals are born with a trait normal to that breed there is probably a reason and you should let them be normal. To do otherwise is cruel and flies in the face of millions of years of experience and no matter how good you are I am guessing you don't have millions of years of experience.

Preparing for ...

Many things actually. We hope to raise the frame for the goat hall tomorrow. And we have a long list of things we would like to get to fairly soon. I would like to build my milking stand, as well as a movable coop so that I can completely destroy the two "coops" we currently have. Also on this list is the new weatherproofing of the base to the bread oven with a new means to keep the weather off the actual oven. Jed just started the base for the fogon and we're looking into building something to go over it so that we can smoke some of Oreo. And speaking of Oreo, as we've never slaughtered/butchered anything as big as him we're going to have to prepare a working area for him. And, and, and... I'm not sure what it will look like to actually have our infrastructure all set up (I hope it doesn't hurt too much) but I think it might be a nice thing to just be working on daily chores rather than constructing everything from scratch. Catch me again in 5 years to see how we're doing.

Crop failure 2011

It seems as if every year we manage to have one crop that totally flops or just gets ruined. Last year our poor trees kept on getting nommed, this year - our potatoes.

I planted three different types of potatoes in the front (one of which was the purple viking) and we were able to get those to produce some but that all came to a tragic end when the uppity bunnies decided to eat my plants and the cats decided to try to use the raised potatoes as a kitty litter and dig up my potatoes. So in an effort to save those we dug them up and we got a small harvest of about maybe 7lbs of potatoes from just 3 lbs. So not a good return, but we saved some of those that we harvested to plant for next season.

In the back we planted 4 different types of potatoes with zero return because the poultry all decided that they just had to eat our potatoes. We had also planted some organic sweet potatoes. About all that they all managed to do was sprout, get mounded up once before the birds all descended on them and left nothing but open trenches where potatoes used to be.
I did have some non-organic sweet potatoes sprout in the drawer. I planted those in the front yard and they seem to be growing well. We'll see if we get any by the time the cool weather really sets in. Hopefully next year will prove better for our potatoes.

Making Mistakes...... AND learning from them

Rosie and I where having a conversation about our trials and tribulations on the homestead and we wanted to shatter some ideas people have about how awesome we are.

Rosie and I learn a lot by trial and error, OK mostly by error. While we may give the impression to the unenlightened that we are akin to homesteading gods and we need merely wave our dirt stained hands to cause mead and cider to flow from the rocks and manna to fall from heaven in the form of delicious goat and pig meat. In reality we screw up just about every project attempt. But in doing so we learn what works and what does not work, our success are built on the smoking ruins of our failures. If you are thinking about starting a little homestead or just trying to take more control of your food source I hope you are able to learn from our mistakes and emulate our victories. There is nothing wrong with making a mistake, even a really big one, as long as you are willing to learn from that experience and keep working at the tasks ahead.

Here are some of the lessons we have learned:

1) Goats are bastards, they would rather eat your new trees than all the weeds in the world.

2) Build the fence THEN bring home the animals. Lest the animals smash threw the temporary housing and lay waste Visigoth style to your homestead before you are able to build them a cute little chicken/goat/pig/sheep/duck house.

3) If it may go bad, it WILL go bad. Plan accordingly.

4) You will never know what can or can not grown on your land until you dig a hole and plant the seeds yourself and see what happens.

5) The best lazy garden is made by pigs; they do all the digging, composting, ferilizing, and planting themselves.

6) It is NEVER too late in the season or in life to start a garden.

7) Rack off your home brew at least twice before bottling.

8) Rabbits are jerks and eat your garden but are delicious breaded and fried along side mashed potatoes and collared greens.

9) No matter how abused your trees or shrubs are, with a little care they can be brought back

10) There will ALWAYS be more to do, take a little time out to relax.

There is nothing wrong with making a mistake or doing something badly at first, the only way to never fail is to never try.

Characteristics of our flock

It might be that we did not raise the ducks and the guineas from day olds, but the rest of our flock has a tendency not to be skittish nor shy. We walk out and we have a flock of chickens run over to see what we're doing and what we're bringing. They wait for the water and food and they also like coming over just to see what we're doing. When we sit on the bridge to watch them they just sit or stand by us to catch the same view. When we got these breeds we were going for the heritage breed characteristics but were also hoping that they would not be true to the descriptions of "skittish, flighty, avoids human contact" I think we got a good bunch and we look forward to breeding them so that others can have these interactive tame birds.

The same can be said for our turkeys. They let us pet them and come over to see what we're doing. I look forward to their breed.