During the week that we actually had warm, dry weather, we put in as many transplants that we could–probably around a thousand plants! Normally we get a few chances in the spring to get in the ground and do a few flushes of transplanting. This time we had to get everything in as soon as we had our window of opportunity so just had one marathon transplanting session. Roger built a transplanter to pull behind the Cub which made things go much faster, but not before I had spent an entire morning putting a bunch of those transplants in by hand (with the calluses and blisters to prove it). The transplanter made it go about 10x faster than by hand–I drove the tractor while Roger rode the platform behind the furrower, setting the seedlings in the trench, which then got filled in with soil by a couple of press wheels holding the platform up. Then we watered everything in with a 55-gallon water barrel mounted to the side of the Cub, piped down under the tractor with a valve to turn the water on and off. It’s pretty slick actually, and has made a world of difference in getting things watered over hauling 5-gallon buckets to each plant.

So in the ground currently: 300 asparagus crowns and 400 strawberry plants; broccoli, mustard greens, kale and pac choi that survived the greenhouse crash, chard seedlings donated by our friends from Muddy Fingers Farm, and a whole bunch of brassica and chard seedlings donated by our friends who recently moved to the area last fall and who are starting a farm (Giving Ground Farm) and intentional community out in Hector. We also have a bed of salad greens in our greenhouse which with a lot of luck will be ready by our first day at market <crossing fingers and knocking on wood>. We will be at Trumansburg Farmer’s Market on Wednesday, June 1 from 4-7pm, which is coming all too soon.

Here is Roger plowing up in our orchard where our sweet potato plants and squash will go:

500 sweet potato slips are coming our way sometime this week, and unfortunately it’s going to be cold and rainy for the rest of the week.

Grow, plants, grow! Come back, spring!

We also built a new evaporator this season. Previously, we had just built a big fire under the evaporator pan, which we supported on concrete blocks. It took a huge amount of wood to get it going due to all the mass of the blocks. This year, we decided to build it Rocket-style: using a 55-gallon drum, two pieces of stove pipe joined together to make the feed tube, some Rockwool and fiberglass insulation, and some old pieces of roofing tin to make the skirt to support the pan. I am happy to say that we used much less wood this year to make our syrup.

Pictures below…

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We are increasing the number of shares available over last year, so tell all your friends who haven’t already signed up for a CSA in the area. Contact us to sign up!

And I couldn’t resist taking a picture of both the calves on their mamas at the same time…

Cow breeding via AI is kind of strange to a person who’s never had to deal with this sort of thing before. When we had goats in Oregon, we took our lady goat on a “date” to visit with a friendly buck. But since we wanted to breed our girls to a Dutch Belted sire, we had to have our ladies “serviced” by a technician. Figuring out heat cycles (Popcicle bellowed all night long, Lily was a little harder to detect), selecting a sire (going through sire catalogs can be a bit humorous…studs, stats and udders!) and then calling the AI hotline (which is somewhat akin to sending out the bat signal) all took some time to get used to. Lily was serviced first, and the AI tech that came apologized for being late and told us that he’d been working at one of the mega farms aka CAFO up north. It was a 2000 cow dairy and he and another tech had 82 cows to do that day. The barn was 900 feet long and had computerized gates that were malfunctioning that day, so he and the other tech had to hand-sort the cows scheduled to be done. “It was a nightmare,” he told us.

Popcicle came into her cycle two days later, and the other AI tech came. He saw that she was in standing heat (which means that they will stand for a bull) and said that you just don’t see cows like that anymore…all the CAFOs use hormone shots to get their cows to cycle on schedule. He tapped the metal hoop support on our greenhouse and said getting into those cows is kind of like going through one of those pipes, not very easy at all. He continued, saying that back in the day a farmer would be jumping up and down in excitement to see a cow like ours but now it’s all shots, then sighed.

Yet more reasons to support small moreganic/local farms!

(Just waiting for the weird search terms that people will be using to find this post…)

Our biggest project? The Barn. Ever since our hoop storage shelter blew up, we’ve had just random piles of our stuff strewn about covered in tarps, a shifty proposition at best in a place that gets pretty severe winds. Every time we get a wind storm, I am chewing my nails thinking about what is going to blow away. I will be very happy to get the barn done! We still need to finish the siding, install doors and windows, and then finally move all our stuff in.

After we got the roof on the barn, we took a little break to make a wood-fired Rocket Bread Oven. It’s really nice to have an oven again after living without one for 2 years. Then over the New Year’s holiday, we butchered the T-Bones with the help of our friends Jim (who also helped last year) and Joe (our friend from Evergreen Farm). They helped us get the steers processed and cut up in one day, then we made lots of sausage, traditionally fermented and dried, and now have our freezer space that we rent stuffed full for the coming year. Our holidays were pretty good; we stayed at home so it was pretty quiet. We unfortunately could not see the Solstice lunar eclipse as it was cloudy. Now we are working on our seed order for this coming season, and trying to plan out our house design which we will hopefully start this Spring.

Here are some pics of the barn building…enjoy!

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-Popcicle calved in early October and had a great big bull calf whom we named Pepper. His daddy is a Lineback so he’s got a big white stripe going down his back. I think it makes him look like a skunk, but as he will be next year’s freezer meat it would have been bad to name him Skunk. Having two cows in milk means a lot of milk, though since we’re sharing with two hungry calves then it’s been pretty manageable. We are making lots of cheese, mozzarella being our new favorite.

-Our CSA and market season ended at the end of October. It’s nice to have a break, though we will miss seeing our friends so regularly.

-We are in the process of building a barn right now. It will be nice to have our things sheltered properly instead of under tarps.

-I need a nap. Badly.

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We knew Lily’s calving was imminent, but like human births, you never know exactly when it’s going to happen. Her due date was on the 20th and having never been a part of any animal births before, we were worried about how it would go–especially as she is a first-time mama. Thankfully, everything went smoothly. We had called out the troops (veteran dairy farmer friends) just in case it didn’t though. She gave birth to a beautiful 3/4 Jersey, 1/4 Dutch Belted heifer who we named Penelope. Yay! And double yay, now we have milk again!

Penelope is very sweet, and we hope to train her as a family cow in the future. For right now though, she is happy to frisk about the pasture. All of the sudden, it feels like we have a lot of cows as we are up to 5 bovines on the property. We have jokingly named the two gangs the White Stripes and the T-Bones.

Chickens on pasture have access to many things as part of their daily forage. Eating bugs and other critters is a totally normal part of a chicken’s diet. I have even seen my flock of chickens, just moved onto fresh pasture, excitedly chase down and devour a nest of field mice. Chickens also eat a LOT of grass. Upon butchering our chickens, I have found their gizzards completely stuffed with green grass along with their daily corn and oats that we get from the organic farmer that rents part of our land.

Along with pasture, our chickens also get free-choice kelp meal and crushed oyster shell. This provides a wide range of micronutrients, as well as a lot of calcium to make strong shells. As a result of this diverse diet, we get amazing eggs with incredibly rich orange yolks. This used to be the norm, and why cakes were yellow. Now with factory farming, we get pastel yellow yolks that are a pale comparison to their pastured counterparts. And “yellow” cakes are now dyed to mimic the cakes of yore.

Eggs are a surprisingly good seller for us at market, so we are increasing our current flock of 20 hens and 2 roosters with an additional 24 layers. We also have both Blue Swedish and Muscovy ducks, though they are not laying right now. Our broody hens only managed to hatch out one extra chick and I’m hoping that it will turn out to be a hen, otherwise we’ll be making rooster stew.

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