School's Out! As much as I do love my job feeding the students and staff at The Learning Center!, I will admit that the prospect of two months of summer vacation stretching out ahead of me has me feeling a bit euphoric. Maybe I will even do a better job of keeping my blog up to date.

Well, I did finally just give up on all attempts at gardening in the bottom land where the animals are. They win. They can have it. My tiny square foot garden shows much promise, though. Even with this little patch we are inundated with lettuce. Not a bad problem to have in my opinion. The gourmet type green beans and the squash are both coming along well and the potted tomatoes seem happy. And as my husband pointed out recently, even though this a much smaller garden, in the end we may actually get more out of it since we aren't "sharing" this one.

We have been eating the lettuce and despite the hot weather and little rain, it wasn't at all bitter. Of course, I am watering it (but since it is so compact, it takes much less water) and we also have it covered with a layer of Agrobon, which I think is really helping it. I stretch the cover out over the green beans to keep bugs off and they seem to like it too.

Plans are to extend the garden a bit this summer. I will also have to find a good place to replant some asparagus next spring since the goats destroyed that as well. But we live and learn. One thing I have come to realize is that a farm is never stagnant, never "finished". Circumstances change, the mix of animals changes or we just figure out a better way to do things. It is always a work in progress, but that may well be one of its attractions to me.

The next big event at Pleasant Places should be the arrival of the goat kids. Stay tuned...

Welcome to Pleasant Places Farm Agricultural Experiment Station

Warning: this post is really only appropriate for die-hard gardeners. Everyone else will be bored to tears.

I have long been fascinated with farming/gardening "systems". What you see in the photo is not really just a bunch of junk. It is my latest experiment...and it seems to be working for a change. The system in place here is not original to me. It's a combination of square foot gardening (Mel Bartholomew) and chicken "tractoring" (Andy Lee). For the uninitiated, the "tractor" is a bottomless, moveable chicken pen.

My tractor is actually my brooder. You will see the cord to the heat lamp going in and note that the sides are clear pvc roofing panels. This would prove way too warm for a grown hen, but with ventilation of the top on hot days, it makes a great brooder. Chicken tractors are usually a good bit larger, made to house layers or broilers. Our brooder/tractor is about four foot square and three foot deep. If I had to do it over again, it would be less deep as it is a little hard to reach over in there and hold up the lid at the same time.

This is our second batch of chicks this season. With the first batch, they were brooded over the bed that you now see draped with the agrobon row cover. They were bedded on straw over which they deposited their manure during the brooding weeks. After they were moved on to the barn, the tractor was moved over four feet, I put down about a two-inch layer of homemade compost over the straw/manure mat they'd created and sowed lettuce. Normally you should not sow vegetables into raw manure, but the finished compost is a buffer so that vegies don't contact the manure and the straw adds enough carbon to the manure's high nitrogen that plants shouldn't be burned. Also, it should break down quickly and provide food for the growing plants. It seems to be working. The lettuce, though I planted a bit late, has sprouted and is growing. It does require daily watering and I think maybe an improvement would be to install a soaker hose underdeath the straw/manure layer before the brooder tractor is even put on. (Of course, the hose wouldn't be turned on until the seeds were sown.) The 4x4 bed is covered with Agrobon for two reasons: We have a cat who would probably try to use the bed as a litter box and that side of our house is getting very hot on these sunny days and I was trying to provide a little shade and slow down moisture loss just a bit. I may have to switch to some shade cloth soon.

Soon we will move the second batch out of the brooder, and I will repeat the process with bed #2. I can continue to make more beds, which given the destruction being done to my regular garden (see previous post) might be wise, or I can leave it at two beds and put the brooder back on bed #1 next year. By that time, the old straw/manure mix will have broken down and I will put down another layer of bedding on top of it. In this manner, the soil will built layer by layer. At least that's the plan.

If we were keeping score, the animals would be winning. They have seriously damaged all previous gardening attempts and appear to be outsmarting us humans yet again. After having woodchucks eat the corn, a deer eat the asparagus and rabbits eat the green beans last year, we had decided that the garden area definitely would require a fence. Instead of building a new deer-proof fence, we decided that we would section off a part of the goat yard, which already has a goat-tested fence and grow the most vulnerable garden crops inside there.

Because we weren't sure it was going to work, we constructed our divider fence out of materials on hand: chicken wire, more metal fence posts, and whatever heavy objects we could find to anchor down the bottom--landscape timbers, heavy boards, blocks, sections of trees. Let me just confess that nothing says "hillbilly" quite like a cobbled together fence. It's a thang of beauty. But my feeling is that if I can grow a good garden...correction, I always GROW a good garden; what I want is to actually harvest and eat it, and if I can do that, I don't care that the fence looks like a Jeff Foxworthy joke. We can build a better fence later...if this indeed works.

So far the chickens found a way under it and scratched up all the early crops. We fixed that. Then for a few days I found an occasional juvenile goat in there. We fixed that. I think. Then I planted the main season stuff, and waited. Nothing. Three weeks. I have never had seeds take this long to come up before so I thought I'd been robbed again, but just as I was giving up hope, a few seedlings began to appear. Corn. Squash. Cutting Flowers. Ahh, at last. The beans were a loss. I think my seed was old, but encouraged to actually have something coming up, I replanted beans and weeded and watered.

And today Doa, the local deer, got in the garden. She didn't eat any of the plants. It was just that she could have , and she was showing me that she could. Well, anyhow, we'll see. I'm thankful for farmer's markets and even grocery stores. Something tells me I will be needing them this year.

On a happier note, it is May! The woods here are full of trillium, bellwort, and may apples. On my ramblings I see the occasional sweet betsy, toadshade and solomon's seal. The pastures have a pretty sprinkling of wood sorrel and indian strawberry. I saw my first indigo buntings of the season this week, those tiny little impossibly blue birds. They are very shy and flit into the feeders and out so quickly it always makes me wonder if I really saw it. And the hummers have returned in force. Unlike the buntings, they are very bold and very agressive. My husband says they have a Napoleon complex. Maybe, but they are mesmerizing and we sit on the porch and watch them every evening.

Tradition says we have one more "winter" to get through, blackberry. The berries are blooming now, but I don't think we'll have any very cold weather. Actually a little break from the heat would be nice, especially if we could get some rain in the bargain.

Part of living on farm is learning to accept the natural cycle of life and death. The life part is easy to embrace. It's little chicks hatching and lettuce sprouting up out of barely warmed earth. It's goat kids jumping and the mountains greening as we slide through another beautiful spring here at Pleasant Places.
But then there is death. And to live with the natural world with any kind of integrity, we must accept it as well. Yesterday, we had another hard lesson in this reality.
Molly, our dark bay rescue filly, came to us already bred, though we didn't know it until we had our vet check her. We knew it was a risky pregnancy. She was smallish, too young, and we didn't know what size horse she was bred to. Since we found out she was pregnant two months ago, we have tried to balance her feed to nourish her enough, but not enough to cause the foal to get too large. We tried to keep her off the fescue, which causes problems for pregnant mares. We bought expensive hay and supplements that other folks recommended. And despite our better judgement, we began to get excited about this foal.
Meanwhile, Molly won our hearts with her gentle willingness. She tried everything we asked her to do in her groundwork training. And every once in awhile, though she was still underweight everywhere but in her belly, we would catch a glimpse of her potential. And we chose to believe that one day she would be a beauty.
But it was not to be. Molly went into labor yesterday and could not expel the large foal. The Bible calls death the last enemy. Our vet and my daughter and I battled that enemy for hours trying everything possible to help her deliver, but in the end, sitting exhausted in the mud and manure and blood, we had to make the decision to put her down and end her pain. She was, as my vet said, "a valiant little horse" and she tried hard to give us that foal, just as she always tried to give us what we asked of her, but this time she just couldn't.

So this post is a tribute to Molly and her foal. Molly, we will miss you.

Happy Trails.

We just found out yesterday that Molly, one of the rescues, is due to foal in a couple of months. While this is somewhat exciting, it is really not a good thing. Molly is too young and small for a pregnancy to be safe for her, and we have no idea how big the stallion was. All we can do is care for her properly and hope for the best. You can see in the photo that she is still underweight. At this point, though, the vet says don't overfeed her because we want the foal to stay as small as possible. It is possible that Ginger was bred too, but if so, she is not as far along as Molly.

Happy New Year!

Can't believe it is already 2007.
We've had a very mild winter so far and so we have been able to keep working on the barn which is basically finished. And it's a good thing because we now have four horses living here. Abby, our daughter's horse, Rupert, boarded here by a friend from work, and two rescues, Molly and Ginger. Molly and Ginger came right after Thanksgiving. Both are very young and untrained, but they seem to be responding well to all the food and attention. Needless to say, with four horses and a lot of goats, we are tearing through the hay.