mcnuggets

If I was a little bit taller...

all bow before the queen of the chickens

spring blooms

apple blossoms

peach bud

finding meaning while moving manure...

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task,
but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks
as if they were great and noble.”
- Helen Keller

worms and a new grill

our soil quality engineers moving to a new job in April's palm

Otto and our seedling destruction engineer ready to ride

infrared charbroil grill, grilling's juicy little secret

a great friday

Clyde woke us way before we wanted to get up this morning by wriggling around the bed like an angry worm and trying to lick our faces. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and let him outside to pee before trying to fall back asleep; ignoring his pitiful yelps to be let back in. There would be no sleeping in this Friday, so we discussed the game plan for the day while remaining horizontal as long as possible. The dump would be the first stop, then Lowe's and maybe a biscuit for breakfast...perhaps a spicy chicken biscuit. We needed to load our trash and the railroad ties we were returning, so borrowing a page from the Egyptians; we used the lever method to load the 9ft 150lb creosote soaked death bombs into the bed of the pickup. After dropping off our refuse, we returned the railroad ties for cash and gave it right back to Lowe's as we loaded up on manure, pine mulch and peat moss. It was nearly noon and we still hadn't eaten so we agreed to splurge and enjoyed the lunch special at Giovanni's; salad, pizza and a beverage. I wasn't sure we would be up for transplanting cold weather tolerant seedlings from the basement to the raised bed, putting in 100 strawberry plants, putting blueberry bushes in old whiskey barrels and then devising a way to protect all those things from deer. But one should never underestimate the power of a beautiful spring day. It was near 70 degrees for the first time this year and the dogs were panting something fierce. We tag teamed the strawberries, herbs, onions and blueberry bushes then got down to creating a netting fence for the raised bed and chicken wire shields for the whiskey barrel blueberry bushes. We had intended on putting in the apple trees, raspberries and blackberries but as the sun and our energy got lower and lower; we knew it was time to call it a day around 6:30. After feeding the voracious chicks and loading our filth into the laundry, we each enjoyed a soil removal session in the shower. I shaved off my beard for the first time in more than a year, feeling so fresh and so clean afterward but a little guilty that I made April live with Grizzly Adams for so long. We felt drained of all life force but satisfied with the results of our labor. There will always be more to do tomorrow, but having 24 happy chickens, two exhausted dogs, the promise of berries, onions, broccoli, eggplant and herbs galore in our raised bed means we will sleep happily tonight. And that we are one step closer to being real country, farming folk.

The raised bed protected by pvc hoops covered with wildlife netting...and Otto. Carport and garage in background

blueberry bushes in whiskey barrels protected by chicken wire shields by South side of house. Windows look out from dining area and kitchen.

blondie and lois the red hen chick practice gossiping like church ladies

let's talk about chicks, man...

The phone rang loudly about 3:35 Monday morning, I was not aware of this but April says it happened. It was Carl from the Lenoir post office calling to say the baby chicks had arrived from Murray McMurray Hatchery and were ready to be picked up. I had spent Sunday night getting the mudroom setup for our girls; filling the horse trough with pine shavings, the feeder with chick starter and rigging up the infrared heat lamp. Clyde wanted to know what all the commotion was about.

We had no idea when the ladies would actually get here, the hatchery said anytime between Monday and Thursday. So at 8:00am Monday, while I enjoyed a breakfast of eggs in a frame and chorizo, I noticed I had missed a call really damn early that morning. When I realized it was the post office, I decided to forgo a shower, threw on some kicks and my toboggan, told los boys to hold the fort down and tore down the driveway in our trusty Camry. I wanted the chicks to enjoy a comfy ride home without feeling every bump and turn like they would have in the truck. While I waited for the clerk to get the package of future egg layers, people behind me in line made comments like, "Chickens in the mail!?! What's next sending letters over the computer?" & "Yew coulda gots a better deal if yew'd got em from my cousin Billy at the flea market." I practiced my trusty southern chuckle, smile and nod and happily took the smallish brown prison from which the caged birds sung. The heat was blasting in the Camry as I wanted to warm the ladies up after their tough trip via US Mail, the chicken guide said they needed a 95 degree environment since they can't regulate their own temperatures until they feather up. When I got home and anxiously pried the top off their box, I was heartened to see 25 happy, healthy chicks peeping away. One by one I gently captured and placed them into their new digs.

When I got to the last chick in the box, my heart sank as I realized she wasn't going to make it. Laying nearly motionless and gasping for breath, she had been trampled and smothered underneath all the other chicks. I read the chicken guide and googled around for the most humane way to put down a baby chick, finding nothing I called the hatchery. Lurlene answered my call and told me I should just let her expire naturally, I had already retrieved and loaded the .22 by that point so I was torn between letting nature take its course and not letting the little one suffer needlessly. All I could think of was to pray, so I held the sickly chick to keep her warm and said the lord's prayer. When I got to, "forgive our trespasses" she gave out and I finished praying holding her limp little body. I thanked God for showing mercy on us both and set her aside so we could have a funeral when April got home. I know I will not be the most efficient farmer but no one will be able to say that I didn't treat every living creature with love and respect. So as not to end on a sad note, here are some gratuitous chick pics:

I call these brown girls with cream stripes, "Chipmunks"...we have 4 of them. The traditional light yellow girls in back are mellow and the easiest to care for, we have 6 of those.

My favorites so far are the grey chicks with white faces, I call them "penguins." They are fearless and were the first ones to eat out of my hand, we have 5 of them. On the downside, they are prone to "pasty butt" that requires washing their poop shoots with warm water and a washcloth fairly frequently. I still like them best and figure it's good practice for diaper changing.

Filling the raised bed...

monday morning - sun rising over an empty 25' x 5' cinder block raised bed

monday afternoon - otto disapproves of clyde scrounging for horse "snacks" while I shovel in the first truckload

monday evening- halfway full

tuesday sunset- full up

the evil that is bermuda grass

We've been trying to figure out a way to get rid of the Bermuda grass growing where we want to build our raised beds that doesn't involve copious quantities of Round-Up for almost a month. I've tried tilling the grass and pulling it out by hand, covering it with a tarp to cut off sun and water and double digging and burying the grass. According to the internet gods of gardening, none of this will stop the Bermuda grass from rising up like Godzilla in the middle of our vegetables. You literally have to get every single blade and root pulled out because even one tiny piece is enough to regenerate roots and runner and return with a a vengeance. Reading what works for others will only get you so far, today it was time to take action.


push it real good

We rented a sod-cutter and hoped the rain had softened the dirt enough to take at least 3 inches off the top of the dead grass. I pushed the sod-cutter and April followed behind with a pitchfork to pry up the sod, we thought it would roll up neatly like the instructional videos had shown us but Bermuda grass don't play like that. The long straight swaths were not too bad to plow but trying to run that machine up or down an incline was next to impossible. Once the mud had covered the steam-roller like wheel in front of the sod buster, all traction was lost and I could not get the supposedly "self-propelled" machine to go anywhere especially uphill. I hit the kill switch and picked up a shovel to help April load the sod into a wheel barrow and started thinking about how good a frozen yogurt would be right about then. The rain would fall hard, quit for a few minutes and start up even harder, we became damper and colder and muddier as the project wore on. The prospect of TCBY drove us on like a delicious frozen temptress. We finally called it once we had met the minimum rental requirements since it was clear we had done everything we could do with the sod-cutter. The fro-yo was delicious.


mmmn...chocolate pumpkin hot fudge sundae and mountain blackberry small cup

We've also been having a great debate on whether the railroad ties we bought to build the beds out of are too soaked with creosote (coal tar) to grow vegetables we will be selling and eating. Since we had dropped $12 per railroad tie and made two trips to Lowe's amassing a pile of 16 of those 100lb+ monsters; I was in favor of using them. April with her fancy Stanford education in health science thought the risk of cancer might warrant the consideration of an alternative. I may be cheap but I'm not stupid. I finally realized that the area the raised beds will be in sits right over our only water supply, the well. If there is even a small possibility of that creosote leaching down into the aquifer after years of rain and snow, it makes sense to get some cinder blocks and figure out something else to do with the railroad ties. April won the debate and we'll be headed back to Lowe's manana, fortunately she has a birthday gift card she has been hiding from me. That will at least take some of the sting out of it...

One last thing, I found some free shit on Craigslist. Literally. On Thursday, the dogs and I drove 45 miles out to Catawba, NC to a horse farm to fill my pickup bed with FREE already composting horse manure. I brought a bottle of Spanish wine as a thank you for the poo, the lady who owned the farm with her husband was super-nice. She came out to check on me as I shoveled the steamy dung in the rain and brought me a bottle of water. It was hard for her to understand how anyone could be so happy under those circumstances so I told her I was sure the novelty would eventually wear off. But it never did, I overloaded my Chevy until it looked like something from a rap video. The drive home was interesting as I was coated in wet horse crap and the tarps I had covered my payload with were not as well secured as I had thought. I started to smell something like burning transmission fluid which made me pull over to investigate, it was actually the tarp which had loosened enough to be dragging behind the truck and had melted into a shredded mess from the friction. Happy I had not killed my truck with too much poop, we made it home safely driving at granny speed down the windy foothill roads. After I finished adding the new stuff to my pile, it is now as tall as I am. I will be making many more trips to the horse farm to get as much of the good shit as I can.


soggy supervisors

Progress

the pruned branches of 75 peach & cherry trees (ready for a bonfire or witch burning, whatever comes first...)

chicken entrance & ramp

barn stall cleared of straw and manure, all in the compost pile now...

first buds of spring

to be happy, be a farmer...

"Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness." - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to George Washington, 1787