Mid Summer on the Farm

Yes, they say it is summer but this is one of the wettest and coolest I remember in a long time.  Several days this week we had thick cloud cover, drizzle, and temperatures never reaching 60 degrees.  Thursday was especially bad as I did pruning off the Island all day in heavy rain.  After we completed our evening walk we were treated to one of the most beautiful rainbows I've ever seen - then a second one appeared.  I was about to feed the goats their evening snack and just couldn't break away from looking at the rainbows, when two ravens flew through it.  Oh my, I thought, this makes up for the crappy weather!

Some of our Garlic ready to hang to cure

Pam dug the garlic out - a very good crop this year of large heads.  She'll tie bunches of six heads or so and we'll hang them on the rafters of our front covered porch to cure in the shade for a month or so, then clean them up and store them in mesh bags.  The garlic will last us until the next harvest.

Our Buckwheat Bed with squash and carrots

Pam watering the corn last night

We have two vegetable beds we never planted this year so I planted buckwheat in them.  Buckwheat is a good summer cover crop and the bees will love the flowers.  Speaking of bees, we have another swarm in our garden.  I sure hope it didn't come from our main hive!

Bee Swarm on our Garden Fence

We decided to replace our drake (male duck) named DJ.  I'm going to miss him, he is so mellow but a great rater.  When rats come into the duck house at night to share in their grain, he grabs them and drowns them in the water bucket, either leaving them in there or throwing them out.  Our problem is that two of our female ducks are his daughters and many of their ducklings have died from unknown reasons.  We are guessing that the cause is inbreeding. 

DJ (Don Juan) our Drake

The new chicken house with a chicken starting to lay her egg in the smallest nest - also the most popular!

All of the chickens are now living in the new house now.  I have the old one locked up and when time permits I'll tear it down.  I'm going to keep two of the posts that are set in concrete and turn them into Scarecrows.  Scarecrows have been successful at our farm in protecting our birds from eagles and hawks.

Steam raising from our compost pile behind the fence

Tomorrow we'll be butchering half of our meat birds - all of the males.  We have about 45 in total.  We'll let the hens grow with the boys for two weeks and then process them.  Tonight I'll remove the feed just leaving them water to clean out their intestines.  We did 45 last August and still have nine in the freezer - so this is a good number for us.

The Broilers in their summer home

The Broiler Chicken Yard

We don't use the popular 'Chicken Tractor' concept.  Though the chicken tractor is better than cages, I prefer to let my birds run in the pasture.  Our birds have plenty of space to search for bugs and weeds and get very good exercise.  I've seen other people's chicken tractors and believe they are not much better than living in a small cage.  We lose very few to predators.

Honey Bees

I was in the garden last Thursday watering the bee balm plants and could hear the honey bees  buzzing but couldn't see them.  I thought that was odd and looked up into our apricot tree and saw a swarm of bees hanging.

A Swarm of Honey Bees in our Apricot Tree

I assumed it came from our hive as when honey bees swarm they don't go far at first from the hive and I don't know of any other bee keepers within a mile of our place.  I've been meaning to order new hive boxes as I prefer to have more than one hive but have not done so.  I do have two honey supers in storage that are brand new, so decided I could use them as a temporary home until I order a new set of boxes.

The Swarm of Bees up close

Bees swarm as a natural form of hive splitting and growing.  When the bees in a hive believe they are filling up the space available, the queen starts laying queen eggs.  The worker bees feed these eggs a special food (royal jelly) that will allow these eggs to grow into a fertile female.  Shortly before the new virgin queen emerges from her cell, mama queen flies off with 50 to 60 % of the workers.  They will land on a nearby tree to rest while worker scouts fly off to find a new home.

I got my ladder out, set up the new temporary home, put on my bee suit and climbed the ladder.  I sprayed sugar water on the swarm to calm them, placed a five gallon bucket under the swarm, and shook the branch.  Almost all of the bees fell into the bucket.  The queen is usually in the center of the cluster.  I then pored the bees from the bucket onto the top of the hive and put the lid on.

About five days latter (yesterday) Pam and I were cleaning the goat barn, hauling the spoiled straw and bedding to our compost piles, when we both heard thousands of bees.  I went over to our established hive and saw thousands of bees coming out and flying over to a place in our orchard.  In the orchard they were all gathering, forming a funnel of bees forty to fifty feet high.  Another swarm was forming in front of our eyes!

It's very rare for a hive to have two swarms within a week unless there is something wrong with the existing hive and the bees are all moving out.  I went in my existing hive and all is well.  Our established hive looked very good, with many bees, frames of honey and brood.  My guess now is that the first swarm I caught was from a local wild hive.

I found the swarm in a hemlock tree outside our orchard, took one of the honey suppers and set up another temporary hive, and caught the swarm like before.  Now we have three hives, two in temporary quarters.  July swarms are not known to be strong with little time left to build their winter stores.  I'll help by moving some of the brood frames from the established hive to the new ones, start feeding them sugar syrup, and hope for the best.

Summer on the Farm

My typical summer day starts about 4:30 am when I get up.  I like to run when it is dark out, so three times a week I rise at 4 am to get my run in before starting the farm chores.  5:30 am I'm out working the birds, changing their water, topping off their feed and watering the garden.  I then feed and milk the goats.  I'm usually back in the house with the fresh goat milk by 7 am, strain it and let it set in the sink in an ice bath.  Our goal is to get the milk chilled to about 40 degrees within an hour, then it goes into the refrigerator.

Runner Beans

Potatoes and Sweet Peas

Our garden is doing okay this year, below average.  The runner pole beans are looking very good and we should have a good crop this year.  We grow two beds each year letting the beans mature and save them for the future.  Runner beans are very large and we use them in recipes that call for Lima beans.  Two beds of 8 sets of poles will give us about a gallon of dried beans plus our seed for next year.  The flowers attract humming birds and the honey bees love them.

Corn is way behind this year

Our corn is usually knee high by the 4th of July - today is the 11th of July and they are only half way to my knee.  I fertilized them this morning and watered.  Unless we have a very worm summer I don't believe we'll have fresh corn.  Potatoes are looking very good, as is the garlic.  The garlic will be dug up by the end of this month, tied together in groups of six and hung under our porch to cure.  Sweet peas are late but starting to produce well.

The Meat Birds are doing very well

 

I'm just about done with the inside of the new chicken coop - I still need to put an electrical outlet in the main room so we'll have winter light.  Once the days become shorter I'll put in a timer so the light goes on about 4:30 am until the sun rises.  The idea is to get the chickens to eat more (with the light on they wake up and eat).  The more they eat the more eggs they lay.

Our newest Mother with 12 day old ducklings

Yesterday our newest duck came out with 12 ducklings.  Moved her to the duckling pen where they will grow until feathered out.  We give them free choice grain during this growth period.  We have 26 ducklings living here now and have sold 10.  I have one duck on a nest and one laying eggs in another nest.  The Muscovy will usually set twice during the summer - so we get a lot of ducks!  I will sell all of the females and most of the males - keeping 10 or so males for the freezer.  We sell the day-old ducklings for $5, once they are feathered out the price goes to $7, full grown females are $25.

The New Coop, with siding still to do

The Egg Condo

We bought a new dehydrator, one with a fan and temperature control, and large enough to put my cheese in.  In the past I have been letting the cheese set a warm oven (warm when I first put in the milk) but with the new dehydrator I can set the temperature at 90 degrees and it stays there.  My last two batches of Chevre have been excellent.

Cheese setting in the dehydrator

Summer is Upon Us

It hit 80 degrees here about 2 pm today.  The honey bees are happy, corn is growing as are the weeds.

Our Broiler chickens at five weeks in their summer home

I transferred the broiler chickens to their home and pasture.  We'll butcher them this August and they'll dress out about about 4.5 lbs each.  We started with 50 and four have died.  Why, I believe they committed suicide.  Who knows.  The pasture and inside the coop had grass waist high; they ate the grass in their coop down in two days, hungry guys and gals.  Now they are working on the pasture and they are growing well.

Day 2 in their new pen - half of the jungle is gone!

Of our two bee hives, the one in the new boxes are doing very well.  The other hive I kept in an old hive box I bought used.  The queen died and now we have few bees there.  I think I will burn it and start over next spring with new boxes.

The goats are doing well.  We have four boys, all healthy.  I milk their mothers in the morning and let them feed all day on their mothers.  We are getting about a gallon of fresh milk per day.  Making kefir and some other soft cheeses.

We had such a cold and wet spring everything growing is behind except the garlic and the raspberries.  Our honey bees wouldn't come out most spring days and our normal large crop of bumblebees came out late, so we had no pollination on the cherry and plum trees.  Only one of our Asian pear trees (out of four) has fruit.  The apple trees set ok, between two and three apples per cluster of five, which is alright with me as I usually thin to that so we get larger apples.

Mother duck with some of her ducklings in her brooder house

 We have a good crop of ducks this year.  Two mothers have hatched their eggs and we have two setting on nests due any day now.  The first one had 15 and we sold 10; the second one had 10 and we have five of them sold as soon as they feather out.

Oyster Mushrooms growing on a down Alder log

With the cool spring our Oyster mushroom log in the woods was late, but our crop is better than ever.  We gathered about 10 lbs last week, sauteed them and put them in the freezer.  Oyster mushrooms sell for about $10 per pound.  I'll go out there this afternoon and pick some for our stir fry dinner this evening.

Between real estate being extremely busy for me this year, and my building projects (new buck house, new chicken coop ...) I been behind on weed eating and preparing the garden beds.  I have weeds growing into the electrical goat fence and still have three garden beds to weed and turn.  Lots of work to do.  Pam ends her school year next Monday, June 27th, so I'll have more help.  I have not even had time to write, which I love.

Our Goat Milk-Flow is Back!

Fresh goat milk is back and oh how I missed it.  Normally we leave all of the mother's milk for her kids for the first three weeks, then separate the kids at night and milk the mother in the morning, leaving some for the kids.  With Alure, we are getting about 3.5 lbs each morning (about 8 lbs per gallon).  Nettle gave birth less than two weeks ago and I have been milking her in the morning for the past nine days, and averaging over 4 lbs. per day.  I was concerned that maybe her kids are not eating well (I seldom see them nursing but then I'm away most of the time).  Yesterday I took all of the kids up to Oak Harbor to Ron & Arline's farm (Stonebrier Farm) to have them disbudded and neutered; Arline commented that Nettle's kids looked great and that they were feeding well.  Toots, the first born, weighed in at 18.5 lbs, Puddle (who we thought was the good eater) weighed 16.5 lbs.

Puddle and Toots bouncing around in the goat barn

Rain and Storm watching the new kids

So we once again are making Kefir, our beloved milk drink.  I made some this past winter with frozen milk, it kept the grains alive but they did not thrive.  Oh how they love the fresh milk.  We still have 10 lbs of Pannier cheese in the freezer from last year, many pounds of other cheese, but with two gallons in the refrigerator I need to do something this morning.  It builds up fast.  Last year I was milking four goats and it was a major chore to use all of the milk.  

Nettle has become an excellent mother this year

We named Nettle's two kids Toots and Puddle.  We will be keeping them for meat, butchering them next May.  It'll be interesting to see what our meat total will be with them being half Boer.  We received 90 lbs from the two Nubian bucks we had butchered last month.  Nubians are considered "duel purpose" - very good milkers and also good for meat.  The Boer is a meat goat.

Our apple orchard in full bloom

Our new chicks are doing well.  One of the problems with chicks is called "pasty butt" - their poop clumps up on their butt and can be fatal, blocking more from coming out.  The book says to use a warm wash cloth to remove the clumps.  This is a major chore when you have 70 chicks as we do.  I have found an easy solution: feed them milk every few days.  The milk give them loose bowels and we don't get the pasty poop.  Last Saturday I went in the chick brooder to give them some milk when problems developed.  I have a bungee cord inside to hold the door closed when I'm inside - the hook on the door stripped out at the same time I dumped the milk upside down, scattering the chicks like a bomb when off.  One of our layer chicks fell out the door and ran off into the brambles.  I was running late for a real estate appointment so had no time more time to spend looking for her.  It was 45 degrees out and raining hard, so I logged her as gone.  Sunday afternoon when we returned from Seattle after our Mother's Day gathering, the little check was still alive, scratching around the door.  I put a little dish of food out and when she returned to snack I trapped her with a leaf rake.  She'll be happier with the warm place and plenty of food and water.  I'm also happier with her being back.  I once read the only thing better than happiness is freedom, but this is a farm.

 This Saturday Pam and I are off to Eastern Washington for our annual anniversary and birthday trip.  Our wedding anniversary is May 16, Pam's birthday was May 3, mine is May 17, so each year we do a short trip with Pam taking two personal days off along with the weekend.  This year we rented a place in Winthrop, a small resort town on the eastern sloop of the Cascade Mountain range.  Our friends and neighbors Michael and Prescott will run the farm while we are gone.  It's hard to leave the place when everything is peaking, but once we are away it's fun.

One of our bees working the apple trees

The bees are doing well.  Our apple, pear and cherry trees are in full bloom, along with salmon berries and elder shrubs, so the bees have a lot to draw from.  I love to set in front of the hives and watch the bees come and go.

May Day

Nettle licking off one of her new born Boer mix boys

 The last day of April brought two new goat kids onto our farm.  Nettle gave birth to two Boer/Nubian bucklings at 2 pm.  We bred Nettle to EV, our Boer buck, 148 days earlier.  Our goal was to refresh Nettle, one of our best milkers, and hopefully have additional bucks to butcher for meat next spring.  Success!  Just what we wanted.  They both seem healthy, bouncing around and Nettle is being a good mother, not like last year.  Last year, her first, she didn't get it.  I had to hold her feet down to let her kids nurse, and later she killed one, slamming the kid into a wall that was trying to nurse.  I planned on turning her into sausage until I discovered how good of a milker she was.

Windy died Sunday morning about 9 am

After returning from a Beltane potluck dinner at a friend's farm, we bottle fed our little Nubian girl Wendy.  She was normal, sucking down the bottle of goat milk in two minutes.  Sunday morning when I went up to the barn to feed her I noticed something wrong - she wouldn't eat.  She has always been extremely hungry so this alarmed me.  I noticed blood and poop flowing out of her behind so we went into emergency treatment, talked to our vet, and tried to comfort her.  She died about 9 am that morning, just three hours after we noticed her problem.  So quick and sad.  Pam held her as she took her last breath, singing to her a song about passing on to the next phase of her existence.  I buried her in the raspberry patch that afternoon.

Our Cherry trees are finally blooming!

 A goat breeder friend of our told us when Windy's mother first rejected her and wouldn't let her nurse, that often goat mothers will know there is some genetic problem with a kid and reject them soon after birth.  Why waste energy and resources on a kid that won't make it?  Natures way she said.  Of course we didn't want to believe our dear little Windy had a problem.  I guess we were wrong.   Oh well, we have more milk now for the kitchen.  We have four buckling kids for our meat crop this year, and not needing any more does, we are pleased.

I took a beekeeping class on Sunday afternoon and found it interesting.  That afternoon with the outside temperature in the upper 60's I opened the hives and checked things out.  The queen is starting to lay eggs - she will lay up to 1500 per day, and I put in the first mite treatment - formic acid in the form of strips.  I'm told it's the closest thing to organic treatment but can be dangerous to humans and have to be handled very carefully.

Our apple, pear and cherry trees are now in full bloom - much later than past years.  With our new bees I'm hopeful we'll get good pollination. 

 

End of April and other things

This last week of April has been full!  I started out bring in the butcher to dispatch two of our male goats, Snowshoe and Stewie.  A friend of ours wanted a buck of hers butchered but didn't want it done at her place so she brought her goat over last Saturday to stay at our place until the butcher arrived.  Being he has never been tested for the dreaded goat disease CAE, we put EV (Extreme Vision) in with our girls - just in case.  EV is our pure bred Boer goat.  He and Snowshoe were born last spring and EV probably is 40 lbs heavier; I can understand why people like the Boer goats for meat.

Snowshoe looking over our friends goat Tank

When the butcher arrived I first led our friends goat out.  He didn't like the experience much and made a lot of noise.  Our goats seemed to understand that it was their destiny, walking gently to the butcher and never made a sound.  It was really awesome.

EV, our Boer goat, made the cut and gets to stay on our farm

 Alure, the mother of our little kids, continues to have problems.  She doesn't like to eat grain, and she needs grain to produce milk.  A couple of weeks ago her morning milk supply fell from an average of 3.5 lbs to 1 lb.  I took her to our vet and she checked out ok.  We did stool samples and drew blood, checked her teeth, had her milk tested...The blood sample came back with a liver problem on one of the tests.  The vet doesn't know what that means, so he sent the information to Washington State University and had one of the professors look at it.  He doesn't know what it means either.

Trying creative ways to get Alure to eat grain - her new thing is to eat directly out of the can

Nettle is due to birth within the next three days.  She is huge, and her utter has filled up (called "bagging up").  Last night we cleaned out her birthing room and have isolated her in there by herself.  She seems to be doing fine.

Pam cleaning Nettle's birthing room last night

Our bees are doing well.  Their hives are all set up and the bees are very busy.  Today I'll do the first mite treatment.  I found a new product just approved in Washington State, called Mite Away Quick Strips.  My bee guy said this is about as close to being organic as you can get, the product consisting of Formic acid.  Formic acid is naturally occurring in honey.  Two strips are added per hive three times per year: now, early September and late December.  Sunday I have enrolled in a beekeeping class put on by Washington State University Extension Service for Island County.  That should be interesting.

EV asking for more grain

April weather on the farm here in Greenbank has been close to normal, except much cooler.  Our rainfall for the month is at 2.1 inches, with some more projected for Monday, but then dry.  This morning we have no clouds and all sun, with highs expected to be in the upper 60's, maybe 70 for Sunday.  Nice!

The three kids waiting to be let out in the morning