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.

Things are beginning to slow down here at Pleasant Places. The vegetable garden is finished and has been mowed down. Most of this year's crop of goat kids have moved on to their new places of residence. Still, there are always the daily chores to do: feeding, watering, gathering eggs.
As the grass dies out, we will begin to supplement all our grazing animals with hay. It looks like our grass is going to hold out into November this year. We are happy about this as it means that our pastures are much improved. The first couple of years we lived on the place, the grass was all gone by late August and we had to begin supplementing with hay. That can get expensive.
As the cold weather approaches, the animals will also choose to spend more time in shelters, and that means more cleaning out of stalls and sheds. Work on the barn continues and we really need to get busy splitting the wood that has been cut, but in general, fall is a very pleasant time on the farm when there aren't so many pressing needs.

Now that the kids are old enough, we expect them to help out around the farm.
Well, they do help keep the grass mowed, but they don't use a lawnmower!

A few of the chickens purchased last spring have started laying. They always start out laying small eggs that we call "practice eggs". The eggs get larger as they mature until they reach normal size. Now that we are back in school, the chickens are enjoying their leftover milk again. The calcium makes their egg shells hard and the extra protein helps them grow and lay eggs. Did you know that you can drop the egg of a well-fed farm hen on the ground and it usually won't break (unless it hits a rock or something). Egg shells are also covered with a thin, clear coating that makes it air and water tight for awhile. They really are quite an amazing food.
The photo shows a "practice egg" and one from a mature hen.

The goat moms starting having their kids the evening after school was out for the summer. ( I had told them that if they expected any help from me, they would need to wait until I was finished with school). We just had our last goat kid less than a week ago. We have 13 cute baby goat kids bouncing all over the place down there in the goat paddock.
The garden is doing Ok now that we are getting some rain, but there will be no green beans and no corn...rabbits ate the beans and Doa helps herself to the corn every time we get some up a few inches tall. So we have decided, since we really like corn and beans, that before next year we will have to put a serious fence around the garden. The potatoes have done great and the tomatoes, squash, cukes, pumpkins and cantaloupe all look good. We are having a few of the first squash tonight for supper.
Work on the barn is coming along steadily but slowly. The next step is to put on the trusses.
Lance, the livestock guardian, is doing his job well and doing much better about staying on the property, so he has now been promoted and is allowed out of the paddock and into the pasture. He still get grouchy with goats, chickens and even the horse if they get too close to his food, but I guess I understand that.
Hope everyone is having a great summer!

The chickens are now about 2 months old. They can go in and out of the coop through the "chicken door", and they have access to a large fenced yard area, plenty of green grass, dirt, bugs and sunshine...chicken heaven! They are still being fed a special feed for young, growing chickens. They also get the milk leftovers from school--I guess they are going to miss that this summer! And, of course, plenty of clean water.
Learning Center Students, I will continue to update our blog during the summer, so check in from time to time. Summer is a busy and exciting time on the farm. For starters, our goat mamas are ready to have their kids any day now. I'll be sure and post pictures of the babies.
Have a happy, healthy summer!

Farm Friends

We were delighted to have students from The Learning Center! join us at the farm yesterday. They checked in on the chickens, visited the other animals and asked really good questions about our organic growing methods. We hope they will come again soon!

Our chicks have made their move out to the new coop. Goats and older chickens have been evicted, and now the new batch of chickens have the coop and chicken yard to themselves...Well, except for their guardian dog, Lance. Right now, for their warmth and protection, they are confined to the coop itself where they have everything they need to keep them happy and growing. The chickens are about a month old now and don't look much like the fluffy little peeps we brought home. Now they look like small versions of the plump Rhode Island Red hens they will grow to be. Young female chickens are correctly called pullets before they begin laying eggs.

Meet our asparagus thief. This is a young, female deer that I call Doa (as in "doe, a deer, a female deer.)  Doa was orphaned as a fawn, hand-raised by our neighbors and then released, but she is still very, very tame, and she hangs out a lot at our farm. She seems to think she is either a goat or a dog. One thing she does know though is that she loves fresh asparagus. So do I, so I had to cover up my asparagus bed with wire row covers to protect the plants. Our garden has a low, electric netting fence around it to keep out the resident groundhogs and raccoons, but Doa bounces right over it. We will probably find it necessary to protect other crops from her, but she is so pretty and sweet that it is hard to be too upset with her.

The new chicken coop is ready and waiting for the new chicks. If the weather stays this warm, we should be moving them in in another couple of weeks. The coop is made mostly of recycled materials. It contains nesting boxes and roosts with a special hatch under the roosts so we can clean out underneath there when needed. Right now it also contains a goat now and then because the goats are currently sharing space with the few grown chickens we have. Eventually we will move the goats out, but that may be awhile yet.
We have just begun on the barn this weekend. We set the four corner poles. It doesn't sound like much, but getting the four corners right will have everything to do with how the whole structure turns out. We will continue to work on it throughout summer and possibly fall, hopefully finishing in time for winter.
In the garden, the lettuce is up and growing. Sometime soon after spring break, I will be bringing in some for the salad bar. The asparagus is also coming up, but some critter has been helping itself to each little sprout that pushed itself up out of the ground...we finally discovered a way to keep the culprit out so we could have some ourselves. More next time on who the thief turned out to be!

The Chicks Have Moved Out!
Our fine feathered friends have already grown up enough to move out of their brooder box in the laundry room and into a much larger cage outside near the back porch. They are still quite small and they must have their heat lamp on at night especially, but their fluffy down has been replaced by small feathers and they can actually fly about some. It's a bit chilly tonight, so I am going out to check on them as soon as I am finished here. We worked on their new coop today and it should be finished in plenty of time.