The relatives have come and gone. The house is quiet again. We had great fun with the Olsen family and hope they return again to play with the critters. The chickens got fed and held, the pigs got extra treats and ear rubs, and the garden, of course, got weeded again. They heard coyotes yipping for the first time, saw birds, goats, cows, heard Meadowlark song, saw some fireworks, and even encountered a small bull snake while out for a walk. The coyotes must have been in pretty close last night because out by the corral fence lay a not so “lively” rabbit. It looked like it had not been dead for very long either. It is always such fun to show farm life to people who really haven’t been exposed to it. It makes answering the questions all that much more fun. I think that if niece Jessica could have smuggled one of the teenage chicks into her suitcase we would be minus one birdie right now!
Zina shot two videos of the garden progress; one of the big storage garden and one of the greenhouse. She did forget that it is ok to speak but the footage speaks for itself! The cucumbers are looking a little droopy but that’s because she did the video at 3:30 in the afternoon in 95 degree heat. We even have cucumbers ready to be picked!
Next weekend is freezer camp time for the broiler chickens. For some strange reason we couldn’t get the niece and her folks to stick around for that…. weird.
Today my sister-in-law, her husband and my niece came to visit. It is so gratifying to have relatives come and see what we have been up to. They got to make friends with the pigs, gather eggs, see the meat birds, hold the new layer babies, and tour the gardens. They are on their way to a church retreat in Colorado Springs and stopped by after a very early flight from Detroit.
We toured the greenhouse and the cucumbers and tomatoes and peppers are all fruiting! Even the Tomatillos. We are going to have boat loads of cherry tomatoes and it appears that the big slicing tomatoes are well on their way!
My son took the Phantom drone with the GoPro and did a 2016 early summer update of the farm. The garden is in and the endless battle with the weeds has commenced. We are staying ahead of it and the rains have stopped so we may get the upper hand. I have had numerous requests for flyovers on You Tube so Aaron was nice enough to take the helm and then edit it together (something I know nothing about).
You will see that the farmer across the road came over and began plowing up the back 30 acres. The green patch on the right is a drainage area that turns into quite a swamp and mosquito nursery when it rains. It’s not really fit for canoeing (haha!). It is fun though when it does flood because the toads out here that go dormant until it gets wet, come out and start chirping like a huge choir.
The outdoor garden is planted with 2 kinds of melons, 3 kinds of winter squash, carrots, onions, red onions, beets, 2 kinds of potatoes, black beans, white beans, string beans, sweet potatoes, and asparagus. The greenhouse has 7 kinds of peppers, 5 kinds of tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, basil, rosemary, oregano, parsley, marjoram, tarragon, tomatillos, and chives. We added blueberry and blackberry plants outside of the greenhouse this year as well.
I have been laid up with a couple of issues after having shoveled some 6 tons of compost onto the garden you will see in the clip below. The muscle relaxers have helped but they make me feel pretty loopy.
In any case, I hope you enjoy the video. JAZ Farm is now in maintenance mode. It was great to see my mom and sister the last couple of weeks. Now we look forward to the arrival of Zina’s sister, brother-in-law and niece over the 4th of July weekend.
Thanks for all of your interest and thanks for following along!
So the neighbor farmer across the road lived up to his billing. Today after we sent my mom and sister back from whence they came, we got home to see the big John Deere discing up our back thirty. What a relief. We have enough to concern ourselves with than having to wonder what to do with the big back field in order to not have to pay residential taxes on 40 acres. We are also going to use the proceeds of the land lease and pay it back to them so they will mow our front 10 acres in order to have some fire suppression when all of the “cheat” grass dries up. That stuff turns to a flash fire hazard as soon as their seeds dry.
So thanks again to my mother for all of her help planting, especially when I hurt my back. Note to self: one need not rake and till the compost in on the big garden all in one day. Sincerely, your smarter self…. idiot.
It was so great to have my sister here to see the farm for the first time as well. We had to be very watchful of her to make sure she didn’t steal my dog! They hit it off pretty good and Basil is now looking around wondering where everyone went.
So the field is plowed, the gardens are planted, the animals are all doing quite well too. I’ll post a picture later but we hooked up our fifth wheel’s solar charger to an inverter out by the broiler’s chicken tractor and plugged in a fan to help keep them cool. As I type it is around 90 degrees. Gotta keep the critters comfortable!
Everything happens the last weekend in May and the first week of June. The goal is to get the gardens planted by the first week of June and Jon, Zina, Grandma and Aaron did it! The drip irrigation is all hooked up on both the big root garden and the greenhouse and surrounding beds. They are all on timers and will come on early in the morning and mid evening until the seedlings are all up and established. After that, depending on the heat factor, we will probably go back to just mornings.
The broilers are also now out in their chicken tractor and that seems to be THE way to go. By moving it the length of itself each day the birds get to have clean grass to live on and it avoids the problems of having to constantly clean up after them like one does with a cat litter box. We put up an electric poultry net around it to keep the neighbor dogs, our dog, the barn cats, and the coyotes and foxes away from them. All in all, if you are going to raise chickens for meat and want to do it on grass, this is the best bet.
So we are all exhausted. I did manage to wrench my back pretty badly so now I’m forced to lay flat until these muscles loosen up. That’s the penalty for farming in your 50’s I guess. Grandma was a trooper too. We just had wine and griped about our aches and pains afterward! But the major projects are done!
We even had the farmer from across the road come over and ask to farm our back 30. This will save us a ton on property taxes and also help kind of rebuild the soil. It will be nice to have the land used in a more sustainable way as he uses a “no tilling” method. The first year it needs to be plowed and disced but after that there will be a rotation of 4 crops and a fallow year in the 5th. He will begin by planting Wheat then Milo, then Millet, then Sunflowers. I am looking forward to a field full of big yellow flowers!
Here is the most recent You Tube update. Thanks for stopping by!
It is unbelievable how spring works around here. The melt off in the Rockies turns to some of the most violent storms I have ever witnessed… EVERY YEAR! This past Thursday I was off to pick up my mother from the airport. As per usual the severe storm warnings came up. We had a bit of a hail storm and I thought not much of it. However, the memo’s being issued from Denver International Airport had multitudes of flight delays. They weren’t allowing planes to land and were re-routing them either above the storm or way north into Wyoming to avoid the golf ball sized hail we were being hammered with down on Terra Firma. I left to pick up mom and didn’t get 3 miles down the road and had to hide out under an over pass to keep from having my truck destroyed by hail. It was like being in a 55 gallon drum while someone shot a 12 gauge shotgun at me repeatedly. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I was in 4 wheel drive in a big old pickup, and it wasn’t enough. The hail was golf-ball sized and was coming down horizontally and breaking itself into pieces on the side of my truck. Springtime in the Rockies… no matter how romantic…. completely sucks!!
This is what exhausted looks like if you are a Lab:
This was from today (May 31st):
However, we have been weeding and manure spreading and tilling and planting like there is no tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow, the root garden gets planted, the drippers pressurized and tested, and the meat chickens go outside (which will be a blessing considering our house now smells a lot like chicken shit). Here is a “so far” update on the big garden:
We had a day or so with a sick piggy but all seems to be ok. He was throwing up but the day before he was just fine. My suspicion is that he ate some of the weeds we had pulled up and something didn’t sit quite right. As of today he is up and running so all is good.
We put the new layer girls out into the “grow out coop” – a coop that allows them to grow up to the size of the existing hens so they can defend themselves once the new pecking order ensues. I have had to dispatch a couple of our 3 year olds because the flock was pecking them to death and while it might be part of nature, it is painful to watch.
Here are the new little ones:
The piggies are all healthy again. Which is fortunate. I had to give our last ladies Penicillin shots for a week and there is nothing more deafening than a screaming piglet!
So during the “holiday” we all weeded, spread poop, roto-tilled, flame weeded and got the garden ready for the summer.
Aaron with the flame thrower with dad hoping he doesn’t start a wildfire!
Grandma has been a weeding machine! She seems to love it so I’m not going to look a gift horse…..
Because we couldn’t put the beds to bed properly last fall, here is what we had to contend with…. metric tons of the nastiest taprootiest, grassiest crap mother nature ever invented!
Once we could find the soil again then came the job of spreading composted chicken crap on it for fertilizer…. guess who got THAT job?
Then out came the tractor and the tiller to flatten it out and make it plantable.
Tomorrow the meaties go out in the chicken tractor, the drippers get pressurized, the onions get planted, the beans get seeded and we are off to the races to get it all in before the end of the week. Vacation? What stinking vacation? I stop doing my real job for a day or so and this stuff happens….. why am I doing this? I must be neurotic. Time will tell.
Spring melt is happening up in the mountains. May is always a nail biter here on the plains. It is almost a certainty that we will have severe thunderstorms and hail through Memorial Day weekend. This year was no exception. This is why A: we got the greenhouse (to protect the more delicate plants) and B: why we don’t plant outside until Memorial Day weekend. I was lucky to escape hail damage to the truck on the way to the airport to pick up my mother. I was pelted with golf ball sized hail and it made it impossible to see or hear and even in four wheel drive there was enough ice on the road to make me slide around. Of course today it was 75 and sunny and we spent the day weeding out the big garden to get ready to plant. The damage to the thistle plants was apparent (not that we cared) as many were broken off. Looking forward to getting past this part of the year. It is always a bit nerve wracking.
Tomorrow our newest layer hens head out to the coop and on Memorial Day the broilers head out into the tractor. Its always an adventure and we play Farmville here for real!
As of today, the JAZ Farm “have to” projects have practically ended. There are some things yet to be done with the drip irrigation to get water to the greenhouse, but other than that we have a functioning homestead that we can now enjoy with all the infrastructure built to support our goals.
It has been practically 4 years since the start of this endeavor. Looking for the place, rebuilding the place, putting in the coops and pens and gardens and greenhouse and alternate power source, and all the other “pieces” of it all finally have come to an end. Should we want to add more pens or livestock or other “homestead things” we can do them at our leisure and want. The last bits have happened in the past week. We built a sub-divided chicken coop, added a pig loading corral, strung the drip mainlines to the greenhouse, moved plants out to the greenhouse, built the chicken tractor, and started the bed prepping for the root vegetable gardens.
I was about to the end of my physical capabilities and wouldn’t you know it, the world conspired to attack me mentally through work. The times they are a changing’ and I must change or retire (the jury is still out, I love my clients and I hate having to continually defend them against criminals). Every generation thinks they are changing things for the better, but my experience has taught me that it is simply one big circle. Everyone forgets history, repeats it, and then says “no one could have anticipated that….”. What nonsense. Sorry, I digress, but in our efforts to be prepared, the one variable I didn’t anticipate was “real” work. Now that the farm is done, I guess I can focus my attention on whatever the Department of Labor thinks we need to change at work. They are attacking the wrong people. Why aren’t the banksters in jail? Why haven’t hedge fund managers and those responsible for the worst heist in the history of the world been summarily jailed or executed for crimes against humanity? Instead, lets target those who already work in the best interest of their clients. Let the criminals go free. Such are the ways of things.
So I am thrilled about the fact that the JAZ Farm is as self-sustainable as it can be at this time. That in itself is a sense of security. The rest of the world? What a joke. We are just big apes with big malfunctioning brains thinking we are the superior species on earth. Arrogance and sociopathy rule. I long for the gentle and the kind. My motto, probably for the rest of my life is: Live Like A Hobbit.
The big push to get caught up and get the gardens in has commenced. This is when Zina and I take time off of work as a spring break and spend the time many people take to go to some pretty beach, digging in the dirt. Today began that effort.
We discovered that big pigs aren’t as willing to do what you want as little ones. Our most recent freezer dwellers were about 270 lbs when we took them to the processor. As I had mentioned previously, we discovered that we are not ready with the right infrastructure to breed pigs yet. We will be, but not yet. There are a couple of pens we need to build and we need to have some way of getting electricity to at least one of the huts to run a heat lamp when the babies are born. One of my pig gurus also said that our girls are likely too big to be bred as first timers. Ideal I guess, is under 300 lbs. Ruby is closer to 400 and a force to be reckoned with. As a result, we decided to make them additions to the freezer. Well folks, not only are we not really set up for breeding, until today, we weren’t set up for getting a small VW Beetle replica on the horse trailer either! Yesterday was quite a site. I’m a big lineman looking sorta dude and I was physically bested by these ladies.
We didn’t really care which of the big girls got to go for a ride. Whomever got on the trailer first was the winner! But there were no winners. They decided that getting on that trailer, even if there were tasty treats, was not on their agenda. We chased them around the pen until both we and they were exhausted and panting. You can’t just get in their way and hope to turn these beasties. They have a low center of gravity and when Ada decided that going between my legs was a good escape route she damned near upended me!
So we called the processor and made our apologies and off I went to the stockman supply store to consult about a loading pen. A bruised ego, pulled groin muscle, and $450.00 later I am back on the road home with ranch panels and a plan. This morning I got up and assembled the whole caboodle and now we have a fair idea how to get this done at our next attempt next month. As you can see from the photos below, it is a “sub-pen” The pigs come in to get their food and the first gate is closed behind them. They stay there for about a day without food so their bellies get grumbling. The trailer is backed up to the second gate and the doors opened revealing…. food! The theory is they should simply self-load onto the trailer. They can’t escape back into the larger pen because gate one is closed behind them, so while it can get a bit dangerous with half a ton of pork dancing around, it becomes a more manageable feat. My old fart of a man ticker can’t handle all of that football preseason drilling anymore! The direction changes and doubling back on us would have made Barry Sanders very proud! I remember doing this with cows up in Walden a hundred years ago. Worked on cows. Should work on pigs. If not, thats what rifles are for. I’ve cleaned deer and elk… why not pork beasts!
Next on the agenda was getting the “chicken tractor” built for the meat chickens. The process we were using for them in previous years was pretty messy. After being in the brooder for about 4 weeks they go outside into some kind of pen and are grown out to adulthood – which is about another 5 weeks. Then we process them and they become freezer dwellers. The problem we had was that these fast growing little critters are eating and pooping machines! Cleaning up after them was quite a chore and if one doesn’t keep up on it they can get sick. Because they grow so fast they don’t move around much. So in order to give them fresh pasture, keep them from sitting in their own poop, and also being able to supplement their food by letting them have bugs and grass and weeds, the chicken tractor was invented. There are zillions of plans for them on the internet but schedules being what they are having the farmers both working full time jobs, we ordered a pre-fabricated one. Aaron volunteered to come out and assemble the thing and we are one step closer to much easier broiler raising. The thing is fairly light weight aluminum so it can be moved easily every day to new grass. It has a built in feeder. The only thing we need to add is a waterer and we are set to go. Because we have predators both from above (hawks, falcons, owls, eagles) and from below (coyotes, foxes, skunks, snakes and raccoons) this will keep them protected. As a double insurance we will be enclosing it in a 40×40 electric net. This will give us pasture raised chicken and if it is anything like the ones we have raised before, there is never a reason to go out to eat! This will hold thirty birds pretty comfortably so we will probably put a couple of runs of them through it every year.
Now remember, this is all one day’s work. In addition, I needed a bunch more dirt in order to fill in the raised bed boxes I made around the greenhouse. The 35 yards of that also arrived today and as of this writing they are filled. Tomorrow starts the assembly of the drip irrigation and using what is left of the semi-load of dirt to fill in the gaps inside the greenhouse. Anything left after that will go out into the big garden along with the chicken compost. Nothing ever seems to happen spread out evenly over time, nor does it ever seem to exist on a small scale. Construction and planting….. the ever consuming activities that render us with very little free time to navel gaze. We are getting there though. My mother arrives next Thursday to join in the fray and my sister arrives about a week and a half after that. Let the planting party begin!!
After having moved through the most recent cold snap, the forecast for at least the next 10 days is over 75 degrees. Soooooooo, the plants in the basement grow room have been moved into the greenhouse! The dirt for the remaining beds arrives Friday and I will be stringing the drip irrigation to the greenhouse tomorrow.
In the next 2 weeks we will plant the greenhouse, the raised beds outside the greenhouse and the half acre for root plants. If you are interested here is what we grow (for both eating through the summer, but also for storage – freezing, dehydrating, and canning): Blueberries, Blackberries, onions, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, lettuce, spinach, Kale, melons, squash, carrots, cucumbers, herbs, beets, hard beans, green beans, sunflowers, potatoes, asparagus, strawberries, and green beans, wheat, corn, and if we include the animals: eggs, chickens for meat, and pork.
JAZ Farm Blog 