New Year's Resurrection

January is a time of new beginnings-- despite the fact that the growing cycle to which I am anchored begins not in January but in spring. As I write, the ground is frozen hard and snow covered, but to me the deep winter is an incubation period. A time to plan and dream, a time when growth is unseen, like a baby in the womb or a seed under ground, but no less real and important.

All that to say that I have decided to pick up this blog again and try, once more, to record the happenings and my reflections on Pleasant Places Farm.

A number of factors have kept me away from the blog. During the last couple of years I have needed to take a break from concentrating on the farm. My work at The Learning Center! and family concerns have claimed the bulk of my attention. My daughter's interest in horses, which we wanted to support, meant that our hillside pasture and bottomland were given over to their feeding and excercise needs for awhile. After the first push to fence and build outbuildings, my husband needed a well-deserved rest. It is very difficult to run a farm and work a full time job, though most farmers do it. It is even more difficult to build a farm from scratch in your "free time".

We saw that, with both of us employed off farm and our daughter a full time student, we needed to rethink or farming choices. The dairy goats went first, because as cute as they are and as delicious as the milk was, dairying is a full time endeavor--every day, twice a day. Way too confining for us. Now, with our daughter, about
( I think) to leave the nest, the horses have also moved on. We loved them too, but they are a very needy group on the whole, and we never seemed to be able to give them the hours of attention they deserved.

So in the winnowing out process some things have gone, but others have stayed. We have in the last couple of growing seasons constructed a small raised bed garden that has been very successful. We will continue to expand that as well as add more fruit trees and berries. The chickens have stayed and will stay, being easy care critters who earn their keep.

We are considering some additions to our farm. We have learned that to fit our growing system, our land and our lifestyle, whatever is added needs to be short term, easy care and in some way profitable. Not that they all have to turn a monetary gain, but they must make a positive contribution to the farm system. That means either they or their product can be sold at profit, they add valuable manure to the soil, they eat bugs, scare away predators, they till soil to prepare it for reseeding, they control weeds...you get the picture. No freeloaders. We are thinking of maybe getting some goats in the spring, meat goats this time, for weed control, carrying them to fall and then selling them or having them butchered. I am also considering more chickens and perhaps a couple of turkeys. The chickens would be for eggs and perhaps I may raise a few extra heritage breed pullets for sale. The turkeys would be for own consumption. And, in the back of my mind, there is the idea of a pig. We have so much waste from school that it might be a good idea to get one in Fall and feed it on food scraps until about February or March. Then to the freezer he goes.

So while the snow flies, I have more than enough to do planning the garden and making decisions about livestock.

I am not at all sure how I have completely skipped over most of the 2007 growing season and right on into the beginning of the 2008 season, but I have. I offer by way of excuse the devastating drought last summer and also some personal issues that required a lot of my attention and energy. The drought meant that the growing season was cut short even in my little square foot garden. We had lettuce in the spring but come the summer everything limped along rather miserably until I finally just gave up and went to the beach! Also it became necessary this past summer for us to disperse our herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats. They are greatly missed, but two do live right next door and come to visit...usually around feeding time. Abby the Arab X is still with us, but Ginger Pony, who turned out to be a BLM mustang, has completed her early training, under Elizabeth's skilled hand, and gone on to her next home with lots of kids and the attention. We do still have our flock of multi-colored heritage breed chickens which are providing plenty of free range eggs for us and our customers. Spring plans are to enlarge the square foot garden and build some better raised beds for it and of course there is the ever-constant cleaning of outbuildings, maintaining fences and the like. We do now at least have things on the farm to a point where no large projects loom and that is somewhat of a relief.

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.