Garden List 2006

Wow. I walked up to the garden yesterday to make this list and , once written down, looks like a heck of a lot of stuff! The list looks bigger than the garden.

So here it is, the contents of the 2006 garden:

• Rhubarb
• Zucchini
• Butternut squash
• Canteloupe
• Charentais melon
• Cucumber
• Watermelon
• Pumpkin
• Sweet corn (2 varieties)
• Pole beans
• Cabbage
• Leeks
• Red onions
• White onions
• Green onions
• Sunflowers
• Radishes
• Carrots
• Beets
• Parsnips
• Bibb lettuce
• Salad greens
• Kohlrabi
• Peas
• Cherry tomatoes
• Yellow pear tomatoes
• Green Zebra tomatoes
• Red tomatoes (3 varieties)
• Roma tomatoes
• Red, yellow, and green bell peppers
• Hungarian hot peppers
• Habanero peppers
• Cayenne peppers
• Soybeans
• Sage
• Lavender
• Dill
• Chives
• Basil
• Rosemary
• Garlic

Whew!

Spring's Bounty

We have seen even more wild creatures in the yard since I last wrote. The day after first seeing the turkey in the yard he was back again, strolling calmly through the middle of the yard in the late afternoon. Later that evening as I walked into the kitchen my eye was drawn to the backyard by a flash of red. It was a red fox. She was carrying a dead rabbit, presumably to feed a den of kits. I felt conflicted on seeing her. On one hand it is really cool to see a fox, on the other I am getting my ducks and turkeys this week and was hoping to have the ducks roaming the lawn in about 5 weeks. Maybe they will survive if I pen them each night.

Our friends, family and neighbors will be happy to know that I drained the pool and scrubbed it clean this weekend. Hopefully a few cases of beer will convince the local volunteer fire dep't to stop by with their tanker truck this week to help me refill it. 27,000 gallons would take an awfully long time to fill with a garden hose.

The pigs are still doing great, getting bigger and bigger. I finally broke down and bought them separate troughs, because the big one would just stand in the old one to keep the little one out, whereupon the little one would just flip the whole thing over onto the floor. They were wasting a lot of feed that way.

Walking through the yard at this time of year is just amazing. Every day something new is blooming. Yesterday bright blue irises blossomed among the fading tulips. The raspberry bushes are now a sea of small flowers.White star shaped flowers are popping up everywhere. The mulberry trees, which were still bare 2 weeks ago, now are fully leaved and small green berries are already forming. The pear tree is so loaded with tiny pears that I don't know if the branches will support their weight when they are fully grown.

The garden is also incredible. I never dreamed it would be so successful this first year. Everything seems to be flourishing. The pole beans broke the earth yesterday morning and by nightfall were 3 inches tall! I have planted so many things that I don't know if I can even remember them all. Maybe I will go make a list and put that on the blog tomorrow.

Living the Wild Life

Oops, that should be "Living AMONG the Wildlife".

When I got home from work yesterday afternoon there was an enormous wild turkey running around the yard! I will admit my first instinct was to shoot it, but logic won out and instead I scattered some cracked corn in the general area I'd seen it. Maybe we'll get a nice local flock and my spring and fall turkey hunting trips won't require more than a 100 yard hike. Other than rabbits and squirrels that's the first game animal I've seen in the actual yard, but there were deer tracks in the garden a few weeks ago.

I was a little worried about Breakfast's eyes, the eyelids looked a little swollen and inflamed. Nikki thought I was crazy and it turned out she was right. Well, only about her eyes being nothing to worry about! They look much better now, it was probably just dust from the fresh bedding I put in there the day before. That is a relief.

Speaking of the pigs, it looks like we have one entire pig sold already! That's pretty cool, I wasn't even thinking about trying to sell them until the fall, especially since they still have about 180lbs to gain between now and then. But I guess many people are interested in what we're doing here at Ardwyn and are interested in the final product, too! I have been getting a lot of comments on the blog, I think it's amazing how many people are interested in a couple of goofs just trying to raise a little food. But I'm glad people are enjoying this, don't be afraid to comment!

Queen of the Pigs

I believe that Breakfast has decided that she is the Empress of all things Porcine and that I am simply a vassal, providing her with her twice-daily royal meal.

When she hears me open the door to the feed room and start mixing feed she will walk out of the barn into the corral area and begin grunting at me. If she determines that I am taking too long she starts pacing back and forth and gives an urgent series of squeals, telling me to get with it.

Yesterday morning I decided to see just how far I could push it. I filled the feed bucket, walked into the barn and just stood by their trough. Breakfast started off by shoving her head against the back my calves, grunting quite loudly. When this failed she started trying to flip the feed bucket out of my hands with her snout, squealing in frustration. When I raised the bucket up out of her reach this was apparently too much for Her Highness to accept, she started biting my shoe! I was put back into my place because that tactic worked.

The garden is doing great, except for the 4 tomato plants I put out. Mother Nature decided to throw me a curveball and have a nice frost on the morning of May 22nd. Our last frost before that was, I think, April 14th, so I wasn't even listening to the weather forecasts at this point. So 4 of the plants I have been tending to indoors for 2 months are now quite spectacularly dead. I'm just glad I didn't put all of the plants out!

A good day's work

The ground was dry enough that we got a lot of work done in the garden today. It is now entirely fenced in, and today we planted butternut squash, zucchini, watermelon, muskmelon, some kind of French melon (freedom melon?), pumpkins, cucumbers, 2 varieties of sweet corn, and pole beans. I also moved 4 tomato plants to the garden from indoors.

I built one of the two brooders needed for the birds coming the week after next. I used a giant plastic bin and cut a hole in the lid and covered it with wire mesh. The infrared light will hang above that. Then I built a platform for the interior out of the same wire cloth, it looks like it just might work. I think I've read enough now about how to brood ducklings and turkey poults because I'm starting to find conflicting information, so I will probably just ignore all of it and do whatever seems to make the birds healthy and happy.

Tomorrow I'll start getting the lawn mowed and then up to Green Bay to see Lexi.

Now I'm Uncle Farmer Jones!

My little sister had her baby, so I'm a first time uncle. Alexia Morgan Haight was born on Wednesday afternoon and, by all accounts, is the prettiest, happiest baby in the land. I can't wait to meet her, we will head up sometime this weekend if the new parents are up to it.

Not much new on the farm, the bats have returned and just in time because I saw a gaggle of mosquitoes trying to carry off my dog last week. Sunflowers have sprouted in the garden and I got in there yesterday to attack some of the weeds that exploded during this recent deluge. The grapevines have started to grow leaves so I must not have killed them all with my slash and burn pruning this winter, that is encouraging.

Have been researching how to care for ducks and turkeys, every reference I find says that ducks have amusing personalities and are fun to watch. I will somehow have to convince Cash the dog that they are not for him to eat. I talked to the production manager at the cheese factory that is on my way home and he had no problem with me picking up a bucket of whey for the pigs every week or so, the pigs will be happy with that.

Life is good on the farm and we're enjoying spring, even though there are many projects to work on. I really have to start getting the pool ready for summer, I should call my cousins and have them yell at me about it, I'm sure they could motivate me to get to work.

A new plan

A decision has been made and yesterday I ordered one of the "Barnyard Combination" packages from McMurray Hatchery. We'll be receiving 9 ducklings and 6 turkey poults sometime during the week of the 29th. I'm not sure I want that many turkeys so I might see if the guy at the feed store will try and sell 2 or 3 for us.Of course I should probably take into account that some of them won't survive to adulthood. The package we ordered lets the hatchery choose which varieties of the poultry they send, so it should be interesting to see what we end up with, they will probably all be just plain white! They are also a "straight run" which means a mix of males and females. I'm looking forward to the possibility of duck eggs, I hear they are pretty tasty.

The rain has continued and is supposed to continue continuing, so getting any seeds into the garden this weekend is looking more and more doubtful, but we shall see. At this point everything I have planted has sprouted, parsnips are finally up and the cabbage is just starting. The onions are enjoying the drenching, they look amazingly healthy. I still haven't finished fencing in the garden, have to get on that before rabbits and deer clean us out. If I do get anything in this weekend it will be sweet corn and pumpkin seeds and maybe a few tomato transplants.

Nikki took some really great pictures yesterday of a rainbow to the south of the farm, even got a few with the pigs in the pasture and the rainbow behind them. I put a few in the Pigs album at the pictures link. I also tried using one of them as the new header for the blog, seems to work differently on different PCs, I don't know why. I guess that's why I'm not a web developer.

No pheasants...

..at least for now. We had a grand total of one chick hatch from 17 eggs and it died sometime Saturday night. I guess they must have been shaken up pretty good in transit since both shipments had broken eggs in them. Nikki was at the feed store on Saturday and the owner said he's getting 300 pheasant eggs in soon, maybe we will try again. Otherwise I have thought about maybe getting a few ducklings and skipping the whole egg segment of the life cycle. We'll talk about it and make a decision later this week.

The weather has been absolutely awful, cold and rainy. Luckily it didn't get cold enough to damage anything in the garden but I am glad I resisted the urge to put tomato plants in early. If the rain doesn't let up I might not even get the tomatoes in by this weekend, the soil is much too wet to work right now.

I was gone all day Saturday seeing my good friend Ron deliver the student commencement address at UW-Oshkosh and taking Mom out for a surprise pre-Mother's Day lunch.Came home Sunday morning to find the pigs had a growth spurt. I can't believe how fast they are growing. They look more like pigs and less like piglets after only 2 weeks. They cleaned out their trough completely from both feedings yesterday, so I added another cup of each of the 3 components that make up thier feed. So now it's 3 cups of spent brewer's grain, 3 cups of cracked corn and 3 cups of soy meal twice a day.

May is 'Eat Locally' month

Well, I had a big long diatribe here about industrial agriculture but I deleted it because I vowed to myself when I started this blog that I would keep politics out of it and I was getting awfully close to the edges.

So instead you get this. May 2006 is "Eat Locally" month.

Try to prepare even just one meal a week with ingredients grown in your area. The local McDonald's doesn't count! I know it's difficult right now in Wisconsin because there aren't many farmer's markets open yet but a meal of fresh fish, asparagus, and rhubarb crisp sounds pretty good and all of those things are in season right now. Look around, get to know who is producing wholesome, fresh and trustworthy food in your area. I guarantee you'll enjoy your meal, and not just because it is fresher than anything you'll find in a supermarket.

New pictures of the yard and it's springtime blooms are in the photobucket albums. New garden pictures too!

No pheasants yet and today was day 28. I think we got duds.
Edit: I forgot that we got some more 3 days later, all hope is not yet lost

Waiting is over, the work begins

Well I have proved to Nikki that you can plant seeds and get plants from them, she is still skeptical though. I believe her statement was something like "I'll believe it when I have my first salad." So I thinnned out the leaf lettuce and salad greens yesterday and washed them off and served her a tiny salad of what a high-priced restaurant would call "microgreens". Mission accomplished!

The garden is growing very well, the beets sprouted sometime when I wasn't paying attention, so only the parsnips and carrots are left to sprout from the first planting. Cabbages got planted on saturday. I'm thinking of cheating and putting some tomato plants out a little early since it has been so warm and sunny. Since I have 19 plants started indoors I'll be all right even if some of them don't make it. By the way, does anyone need any tomato plants?

As far as the critters go, the pheasants are supposed to hatch sometime this week, still no activity there. The hogs are gettting bigger every day. I posted some new pictures of them at the Farm Pictures link, in the Pigs album, naturally.

Nikki and some of her girl friends went out for dinner on Saturday and at the end of the evening one of them said "we should give the leftovers to the pigs!" so they asked the waitress for a styrofoam box. She said the look on the waitress' face when she came back to the table and saw all of the plates scraped clean and only the one box was priceless.

That's all for now.

Birds!

Since this our first spring at the farm, I am learning more every day about some of our seasonal residents, the birds.

Yesterday morning I hiked down to the barn to check on the pigs and was greeted by a male barn swallow as I flipped on the lights. He flew up and hovered in the air like a hummingbird, not 2 feet from my face. He seemed to regard me as though committing my features to memory. Then he perched on a fence rail and watched me feed the pigs, making sure I didn't have any designs on his new nest in the far corner of the barn. As I walked back up to the house the bubbly squeaks of starlings and the coos of mourning doves filled the darkness.

Coming home from work, after stopping at the feed mill, I parked in the driveway and while getting out of my car saw a hen pheasant bobbing her head in and out of a tall clump of grass near the grapevines, maybe keeping an eye on her cluster of olive-colored eggs? A prehistoric raspy croak drew my attention skyward where a trio of
sandhill cranes glided on enormous wings toward the top of the hill, below them a merlin floated on a rising wind, his black-barred tail announcing his species as clearly as a name tag. In the raspberry bushes near the house a cardinal called "what cheer, what cheer" and I had to agree.

This morning, though, was the most amazing thing. As I walked toward my car I pressed the 'unlock' button on the remote so that I could open the hatch in back. The short "beep, beep" of the alarm sounded and 2 seconds later I heard it again. I was fairly sure I hadn't accidentally pushed the button a second time, but shrugged it off. As I was unloading some things from the back, I heard it again, "beep beep". I stepped back from my wagon and pressed the button, the car beeped and immediately the sound was repeated from a cluster of pines at the bottom of the hill. I stood there laughing for a minute or two, pressing the car alarm and listening to the response from an unseen bird. I wonder if he thought he was wooing a partner?