Preparing the Summer Garden

Sunday every week is our day to clean the chicken and duck coops along with cleaning up the goat area inside and outside of the barn.  The nesting material we use for our birds is organically grown barley straw.  Same for the goat bedding, but the goats waste some of the alfalfa they are supposed to be eating; we get a good mix of that from the goat barn.  All of it goes into compost piles.  We have so much compost that I put an ad out giving it away for free.  This week we had a neighbor wanting some so she left her truck down here for a couple of hours and I loaded it up as I cleaned.  I think I have 10 year’s worth of compost at our place.

One of our Fresh Compost Piles Steaming 24/7

 Pam pulled nettle from our blueberry patch and rhubarb bed while I did the cleaning.  I was finished by 2 p.m. and then continued to weed our garlic bed.  I’m half done – when I’m finished I’ll side dress some fertilizer and spread finished compost. 

Filled up our Neighbor's Truck with Hot Compost

We have cool season greens growing, sweet peas coming up, and just seeded an area for this year’s beets.  Next job will be to turn the beds in for corn, squash and pole beans.  Last year I let the Asian greens flower and go to seed as the honeybees love the yellow flowers, so this year we have half of a bed of different types of mustard.

Self Seeded Mustands growing next to the potato bed

Our 5'x30' Garlic Bed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garlic bed Weeded

Small Farming on Whidbey Island

We live on five acres on Whidbey Island.  About three of them are thick with alder trees with Salmon Berries as our dormant understory plant.  I’ll eat a few of the berries but our grandchildren love them.  Our honey bees will visit them early on nice days but prefer fruit trees and the flowers on the huge big leaf maple trees growing on our neighbor’s land.  Our native bumblebees love them and I can hear them buzzing at 5:30 am to 8:30 pm.

We have three honeybee hives this spring.  Two are from last year and I added one this month.  The new one was a queen and five pounds of bees.  Last week we had sunny weather and the honeybees were all over our blooming orchard.  Our Asian pears (four mature trees) were in full bloom the past two weeks and were covered with honeybees.  We had a good crop of them last year and they are our favorite dried fruit.  What we don’t eat fresh we slice and dehydrate, storing them in wide mouth jars in our cool spare bedroom.

Asian Pears ready to pick in 2012

We harvested about 30 pounds of honey last fall from one hive.  We talked to a local commercial bee person and he said, due to the color, it was probably Canada thistle honey.  Canada thistle honey is considered fine and rare, rare because Canada thistle is considered a noxious week in our state.  It grows on our land and neighbor’s abundantly.  It is almost impossible to kill without using chemicals and we don’t use them on our farm, so I’ve learned to live with it.  The flowers are nice, their fragrance wonderful, aphids attach it so they are also full of lady beetles, and the goldfinch bird loves the seeds.  So one man’s noxious weed is another’s gem.   

 

Straining Honey in our House in 2012

We have added to our goat herd this past year, buying one mature doe and breeding one that was born here January 2012.  Daisy Mae is Surely’s girl and is 50% Nubian and 50% Boer.  We bred Daisy to a 100% Boer buck so her kids will be 75% Boer.  I have read that more goat meat breeders are using dams that are the Nubian/Boer cross as the kids have the meat traits of the Boer goat with the mother’s Nubian milk, resulting in fast growing kids putting on weight quickly.  We butcher three to four yearlings every year for our annual meat supply (supplementing our chicken and duck meat).

Cheddar Cheese - one ready to eat and one ready to wax

With all of the extra milk I have begun making cheddar cheese this year – one or two, two pound blocks a week.  I found an old “farmhouse” cheddar cheese recipe and it is somewhat easy to make.  Because I use raw milk I age it for at least 60 days.  Tastes like cheddar cheese but dryer than what you would buy in the store.  With our Nubian goat milk it has no goat flavor – just a very nice cheese.

Preparing the Raspberry Beds

Raspberries, my oh, what a fruit!  We have two 30 foot rows of raspberries, June Bearing.  There are two types of raspberries: Ever Bearer and June Bearer.  My favorite type is the June bearer as all of the fruit ripens within two to three weeks.  I pick and freeze them for use on my morning cereals throughout the year – one half cup of raspberries provide 50% of your daily Vit C among other good things.

Ever Bearers produce two crops instead of the one with June Bearers, but the berries tend to be smaller.  To prune June Bearers I cut down the canes that bore fruit any time after the plants are done fruiting.  These canes are called florocanes.  The new canes that come up in the spring are called primocanes, which will produce fruit the next year.  These I don’t prune at all, but after cutting out the florocanes I weave them onto my trellis.  They are next year’s florocanes.

Our Raspberry Patch after mulching in the Spring

 We mulch with our goat straw bedding and add fertilizer and compost along the rows and that is it.  Last year I froze over 60 lbs at very little cost to us.  Year after year they produce and I have little pest damage (as long as I keep the chickens out of the area).  Besides loving the fruit, the chickens will strip the leaves of the new, young priomcanes, killing them.

Our two 30 foot rows take about 16 man hours a year to work (not counting harvesting the fruit).  Early spring I weed, move the wayward primocanes coming up everywhere but under the trellis, and mulch.

Fruits of the Farm

We have two raspberry rows about 30 feet long. I started in 2003 with some plants we brought to the Island from our home in Poulsbo from plants Pam received from a friend.  They have done well and we would freeze about five or six gallons of them for use during the year, usually put on my morning oatmeal.  I tried growing boysenberries in a row next to the raspberries but that was a disaster - it was like planting wild blackberries - except the birds loved them and would start eating the berries just before they were ripe.  I dug them out, potted them up and gave them away.  We then bought more raspberries and planted a second row.  We did well again last year with some berries from the new row, but this year they really took off.  We had a warm and wet May and the berries loved it.  We have been picking for two weeks now, about five gallons of berries every two day - I estimate that we have frozen over 40 lbs so far this year!  We had to fence the area from our chickens as they discovered they could walk down the top of the canes and eat the berries, then when the berries were gone they would eat the new canes (next year's fruiting canes) just as they were coming up.  We are about 2/3'rds of the way through our crop but with the wet July we are having, some of the berries are molding.  Most of the berries are so large they look like strawberries.

Our Raspberry Patch in 2011 has really matured

Harvested the garlic these past few days.  My favorite is Pink Music, a variety few have heard of.  I love it because the heads are the size of a baseball, have about six cloves which are very large, is easy to peel and has a very good garlic favor.  This year's crop of Pink Music was excellent and I planted four times as much as the other four varieties I grew.  The others were okay in size, what I would call "average".  I'm not willing to grow only one variety though.

This Years Garlic hanging on our front deck to cure

We are picking sugar snap peas and because we start late and do two planting we should have them until late summer.  New potatoes are being dug, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage are mature.  Our onions have developed purple blotch due to the cool and very wet July we are having.  When I first saw it two days ago I sprayed with Neem Oil, a natural fungicide, then the next day with Lime/Sulfur, also an organic fungicide.  We are hopeful that they will recover.  I never recall having a July like this one, with nearly two inches of rain this month already.  We in the Pacific Northwest are use to wet winters and springs, but summer is usually dry, even though sometimes cool.  We have had two weeks of thunder storms with on-and-off heavy showers.

Onions with Purple Bloch

The Corn Bed

Our early corn with the beginnings of tassels

I opened the bee hives the other day and in our best hive we have half of a honey supper filled - so far about 20 lbs of honey that I can harvest when I return from a camping trip next week.  This is good as the wild blackberry is blooming - so we might get another 20 lbs before the summer is over.  The wild goldenrod is about ready to bloom and the bees also love that flower.  We now have three bee hives, one really strong and two no so.  I'll re-queen later this summer so we'll be going into winter with three strong hives.

Our Chickens

We raise chickens for eggs and meat.  We started out with 15 Rhode Island Reds, a breed I've always liked but never raised before.  That was about four years ago.  Over time birds died and in 2011 we added 15 Black Sex-Links.  The Black Sex-Link is a cross between a Barred Rock and a Rhode Island Red.  They call them sex links because the males look something like a Barred Rock and the females are solid black.  We received them in April of 2011 and by August they were laying huge, dark brown eggs.  My egg customers went crazy over these new eggs.  The Rhode Island Red eggs looked small and faded out in color compared to the sex link egg.  So this year we added 15 Golden Sex Links to our flock.  The plan is to butcher our layers after three years and by keeping different breeds it allows me to know how old they are.

Our Black Sex-Link Layers getting outside in the morning

When I was a kid I remember seeing chicken in the store for sale called "Stewing Chickens", usually less expensive than broilers.  No more, as the commercial egg growers now use a very small chicken and when they are past their prime egg laying time they get turned into pet food (the completed bird, feathers and all).  These old layers need to be used in some type of soup or stew, but when cooked for a long time they make a wonderful dish.  The meat stays firm compared to using a regular broiler, which gets mushy.  Once you taste the difference you don't want to use a regular chicken in one of these dishes.  Last week our plan was to butcher the balance of our Rhode Island Reds and I had commitments from customers for all of them at $5 per pound.  Turns out we didn't sell any of them but gave them to friends and kept one for ourselves.

Our Black Sex-Link Rooster

Last year we changed our feed for our broilers to a soy-free product and our average production fell from 5 lbs. per bird to 4 lbs. We buy our feed in 320 lb barrels as part of a small co-op, getting wholesale prices and pay a small delivery charge.  Results from other growers in the co-op were the same or worse, some of the growers had chickens with major leg problems.  This year we went back to the old company and our average production increased to 6.1 lbs per bird and they consumed the same amount of grain.  We had many that dressed out nearly 7 lbs., and one at 7.1 lbs.  We were very pleased as we like a large bird.  These are not your commercial broilers that do nothing but set and eat grain, not knowing what to do with a bug if they found one.  Our flock was truly free range, going out into a pasture to eat weeds, grass and bugs during the daytime.  We received them about the 6th of April, 11 weeks later butchered the first half (chose the larger ones).  The second 25 were butchered a week after that.  So our freezer is full, with cheeses, berries, goat meat and now chickens. Next project: firewood.

The chickens eating fresh weeds from our garden

We cooked one of the new, large broilers a few days ago and it was wonderful.  Almost melted in your mouth.  Tender and juicy with a flavor unlike store bought chicken.

We ended up with 41 broilers out of 50 that we started with, about 10 were females, and 249.5 lbs of broiler meat for the year.  Average weight per bird was 6.1 lbs.  They ate about 1000 lbs of organic grain at a cost of about 30 cents per pound; worked out to $7.32 per bird or $1.22 per pound.  Very good for an organic free-range chicken - local farmers I know charge $5 per pound for organically pastured raised broliers.  It takes us about 32 hours to process the birds, and very little time to raise them.  Usually we have friends help with the processing which makes it a four hour day split into two days.  I wonder how many pounds of grain the rats ate?  Next year I'm going to bury hardware cloth to keep the rats out of the broiler coop at night.  One of the dark sides of raising farm animals is rats.

Today's project:s: making blue cheese, raising the buck area fences that connect to the girl's area, and going into the three honey bee hives.

Note: If you live on South Whidbey Island and re looking for farm raised broilers, check out Joli Farm.  Here is the post from the Grange Food News:  

Joli Farm, Freeland, which sells Whidbey Island Eggs at Bayview Market will be selling broilers soon. The birds are Red Rangers, pasture raised  and currently 9 weeks old. If you order birds, they will be custom processed in the on-site WDA licensed processing plant, at around 11 weeks of age, that’s two weeks from now.  So call 331-5058  and get your order in.

Most people I know who are raising  broilers are just doing  it for themselves and a few friends. So it is great to have local pasture raised birds available again for public sale.

Pooh Bear - Our Livestock Guardian Dog

"Christopher Robin?," whispered Pooh Bear. "Yes, Pooh Bear?"  "I'll never not remember you..."

Pooh Bear, our Livestock Guardian Dog (LGD), who we have had for four years, died a little over a week ago.  Quite a shock to us with him being so young.  We noticed that he was getting a little thin so I increased his food, but other than that, he had been doing very well.  Eating well and going on a two mile walk every evening with our other two dogs.  Pam went to check up on  the goats about 10 am and found him down on the ground making some strange noises, called me, and I rushed home to help her load him into our car.  The vet said he had a tumor on his pancreas and it was limiting the amount of insulin flowing into his body.  I loved Pooh more than any dog I've ever had.  So sad.

Pooh Bear was a Great Pyrenees dog that we got to protect our goat herd, mostly from coyotes.  Our goats live in a fenced area that we are nearly 100% sure is safe from these wonderful predators, but for a goat there is probably no worse way to go than to be taken down by a coyote.  Our fencing is very good, with five foot woven fence mesh and a hot wire on top.  Surely, the goat in the picture with Pooh, were best friends, and were often seen laying together.

Meet Mishka, our 11 week old Great Pyrenees puppy.  It takes a puppy about 16 months to mature into a force that can defend livestock, so we thought we should get started at once.  Mishka means White Bear in Russian.

Mishka, 10 weeks old and learning his job

The goats didn't like him much, with Alure stalking him, but with over a week now everyone seems to be adjusting fine. The yearlings took to him quickly, as did EV the buck, but the milking girls were not fast to warm up to him.  For two days our milkers wouldn't eat their grain.  He spends his time between being a puppy and watching the herd from a high spot.

Yes Pooh, we will never not remember you!

Fall 2011

The official rain year runs September 1st through August 31st each year.  Our normal rain fall for Greenbank is about 18 inches (we are in the Olympia Mt Rain Shadow).  Last year we measured 30.8 inches at our farm.  Yes it was a wet year.  Fall has been very nice and dry this year, with only a fraction of the amount of rain that we had last year.  Because of all of the sun we have one of the best winter gardens ever.  Four beds of greens, beets and carrots.  This last Saturday evening Pam made our dinner consisting of fried chicken gizzards, baked potatoes, and a roasted beet salad with goat cheese.  Other than the spices and olive oil, everything was from our farm - and completely organic.  We couldn't have bought a better dinner at a fine restaurant.

One of our fall/winter garden beds

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We had a good apple harvest, with 8 - 25 lb buckets from our trees.  These are being dried for late winter when our frozen fruit is gone.

Our goats are doing well, with three of the does bred, one to go.  Surely is due January 3rd, Alure is due February 11th, and Alder Rose is due March 5th.  The next time Nettle goes into heat we will breed her, so she give birth mid to late April or in May.

Our four does with Pooh Bear

Some of the boys eating their morning grain.  We'll butcher the four boys next May

Our milk flow has been outstanding this year.  Both Nettle and Alure are in their second year (the saying goes, never judge a doe on their first year), Nettle has averaged 1 gallon per day and Alure 3 quarts since late July when we separated them from their kids.  Nettle peaked at about five quarts for a couple of months, Alure a little less than a gallon.  We are beginning to dry off Alure as we want her to "rest" for two months before she births in February.  Nettle should continue to produce through February, about the same time we'll start receiving milk from Surely.

One of our staples we make with all of this milk is Kefir.  We add, fresh from the goat, milk to about 1/2 cup of live kefir grains and let it sit on the kitchen counter for two to three days, strain out the grains and put the finished kefir in the fridge.  I keep four quarts going all of the time.  We use the kefir on our morning cereal in place or with milk, and also drink a cup in the afternoon as a snack.

"Kefir is a cultured milk drink that has been used for thousands of years. It is made by adding kefir grains to fresh milk and then letting it set at room temperature for 24 hours - strain out the grains and it's completed. It has a light, bubbly sparkle and is often referred to as the "champagne of milk." Traditionally it is made with live grains, and its unique flavor comes from the combination of bacterial acidification (creating a wonderful probiotic supplement for intestinal and immune health) and alcohol produced by yeast during the fermentation process. With proper care the grains continue to grow and sustain themselves."

Straining our Kefir

The kefir ready for today's milk

Our garlic has been planted.  My favorite variety is Pink Music, a hard neck garlic.  Our heads are huge, the size of a baseball, with only five to seven cloves.  The individual cloves are almost the size of a garlic head you would buy in the store, are juicy and have a strong garlic flavor.  This is a true garlic and is easy to peal.  I have been growing it for 15 years, saving the larges heads to plant in the fall.  I gave some to an Italian friend of mine and he said it was the best garlic he has ever had - and he has had lots in his life.  We grow six varieties in a raised bed 5 feet wide by 30 feet long.

Nettle finished being milked in the milk stand

Pharaoh our barn cat waiting for her morning goat milk

Pooh Bear lives full time with the goats