Road Trip!

How to start? I am writing this later than I meant to and so this is all colored with retrospective insight. Since some not great stuff was sprinkled in to this trip and the days after, it is hard to write this with all of the excitement it deserves. Anyway, after we finished up Thanksgiving we had a few spare days, some helpful volunteers, and a run of good weather so we decided that it was time to go get the goats. The ladies have been patiently waiting for us in Northeastern Oregon.

First we had a few projects to finish up to get the place goat-ready. We spent two days building a shelter for the Mule (all the stuff was in the barn, so we had to build it to free up some space), finish some fencing, secure some of the indoor goat pen, go and pick up hay and straw, move a million pound metal table out of the way of the barn door (which very nearly resulted in my death or at least a traumatic brain injury), and just clean up the barn. With all that done we packed up the SUV, created a goat barrier in the back and headed out.

We left on Sunday and drove up Milton-Freewater, spent the night in an empty hotel, and then got up early to meet the ladies at milking time and learn how to trim hooves before we brought the ladies home. It turns out we are adequate milkers (or else it's not very hard). We signed papers, learned some things about American Dairy Goat Association registration, handed over the money, wrangled the girls into the back of the truck.



We brought home three goats. I changed the names of two big girls, but the baby I got to name from the first. I would like to introduce Ruth (formerly S'Mora), Fanny Mavis (formerly Caramel), and Millicent, called Millie.

Ruth is one of our milkers and hopefully pregnant too. She and Fanny were bred in November. Ruth is having the hardest time adjusting to her new home I think. She seems to think that the grain is not good enough, we don't milk her right, and it is too wet. She is very fussy at milking and stamps her foot at us, but she is calming down a little more each day. She is getting better, but I think maybe she is homesick. She is also queen of the goats and kind of a bossy bitch. Mike likes her best of the three and she likes him back. She kisses his chin when he comes in to see her.

Fanny Mavis is a lovely blond who is very motivated by food. She is also a milker and hopefully bred. She is more placid that Ruth and maybe a little dim. She seems to forget that the fence is electric more than the others and is always leaning up against it and then glaring at us when she gets shocked. She does great at milking time. Just stands still and horks down her grain while we finish up.

Millie is the little one. She is only about six months old and she is beautiful and sweet and funny and affectionate (and my favorite). She is brown and black with huge soft with ears and the sweetest face ever. She will follow you anywhere and cries and cries when you leave the barn. We are hoping that we can breed her later this year, but she was born at kind of a funny time and may not come into season this year. We'll see. We have a few months before she is big enough anyway. Our plan was to breed the goats at the beginning and end of the season so that we would never have a lapse in milk production. But of course it depends on her.

Since we have been home the milking is getting easier and easier. The first night we used six separate containers to milk in; the goats kept stepping in the milk or kicking stuff over. But we are getting better and making fewer dishes and more (usable) milk every time. We got all our fancy milking equipment too so now we don't have to milk into a pot and strain with a funnel and cheese cloth. Now we have a milk bucket and a milk strainer and a strip cup, ooooohhhhhh. We are settling in to our new routine and getting to know each other. Next week we will make cheese galore! And ice cream! And yogurt!


Goats!!!

Thanksgiving AND.......

Ok, so Thanksgiving is over and we were able to successfully pull off a full size holiday with our family without a hitch.   That's saying something considering our pipes froze over night due to crazy weather, we had about 1" of snow on the ground for 3 days.  I got to insulate some lines and put a heater on some pipes all day in 21* weather the night before Thanksgiving.

After Thanksgiving we decided that it was a good time for us to get our goats so Sunday we left to pick up our pure bread Nubian goats just outside of Pendelton, OR.   Now this is a 7 hour drive one way from our house.  I know this may seem like a long way to go for goats but I assure you it was worth it.  Here's the kicker...  we drove Megan's Mazda SUV there, had them in the back with the seats down with plastic and straw down (By the way it still smells like piss, even after I cleaned it).  We stayed near Pendelton in a hotel so we could attend the first milking with the goats in the morning.  We left with our 3 goats in the morning and headed home.  This was a big day for us, we have been waiting for some time so I will let Megan explain everything regarding the goats in it's own post.


I built a shelter for to proposed mule, here's a picture:
*Insert Pic*

I had my first solo milking this morning, it went fine I guess.  One of the goats is still having issues with trust on the milking stand :)

Final thought:

I got a new (used) truck today!  Yay!

Dining Room, so far...

So our first little project was redoing the basics of the dining room. Although we haven't done the floors yet and the trim & molding isn't complete Megan has insisted that I post up pictures of our dining room

So here's what's going on:

*Mirror - 1910-20's lead glass on silver.
*Ligting - I repurposed some Mason jars that we had and put in some bulbs on a dimmer.  wired and hung at odd levels.
*Herb drying apparatus!- I know this is a little overboard but it's cool.  I got some old pulleys and rope...  found some old roto-tiller tines,  and voila!
*Spice drawers- Megan found those at a local antique shop.
*Chest- found a cool old chest, cheap and pretty tattered...  but it works well there.

The table and chairs are next...  I am planning a build of epic proportions, an 6' dining room table made of a solid piece of wood....   wish me luck.

All Tucked In

A few weeks ago Mike and I planted some starts and today they are grown up enough to go into the big-kid boxes with the grown ups! We learned some things about light availability in the greenhouse with the first round of planting, so we also brought in some extra compost, raised up some of the beds, and totally ignored parts of others because they are not worth it in the fall and winter.

Greenhouse Tangent: before I get to telling you what all is in the greenhouse let me describe this structure. It sounds great at first because it is so big and it is more or less permanent. But it is perhaps the worst possible design for our climate where we are more concerned with light in the winter than super frigid temperatures. It looks pretty much like this:

Except that it actually has a few less windows (and more roof) if you can believe that nonsense. And it is fully dry-walled and insulated with very few vents so it is roughly a billion degrees in there in the summer. Apparently this is a good design for "cold winters in northern latiudes." With our relatively mild winters with near-constant cloud cover, this is possibly not the best choice. That said I am pretty certain that said greenhouse was erected with the intention of growing marijuana; there is plenty of ceiling structure to attach grow lights to. So maybe it is a great design for that, but not quite so brilliant for veggies. On the other hand we would almost certainly not have a greenhouse of any sort at this stage, so really it's silly to complain. I bet I will talk more about why we are so certain that one of the money making ventures of this property was weed, but right now I want to talk about my veggies more.

We have two rows of about 2.5 x 8 foot boxes (they were there when we got here and some of them have moved up behind my kitchen for an herb garden) two boxes per row, four sets in front and three in back. Each box is split in half and there is largely on type of veggie per 1/2 of each box. So about 2.5 x4 of planting space for each section. Also there are, what? five or six more boxes stacked in the back of the greenhouse too. Goodness this is boring. Anyway, I planted starts and direct sowed some things and then of course we have some things in the ground already. Here is a (maybe?) boring inventory of vegetables (from left to right and closest to the window to furthest away; four rows).

• New kale, mixed variety, sewed today.
• Broccoli, about six weeks old.
• Purple carrots, about six weeks old (I have a weakness for oddly colored vegetables).
• Mixed colors of carrots, sewed today.
• Lovely kale that we are already eating. I like it early for salad greens and I always plan too much so I have to "thin" a lot.
• Rainbow chard, sewed today.
• Some big spinaches that we have already "thinned" and eaten up the babies in salad; now they are ready to get big and be soup or pasta greens.
• And some broccoli I sewed straight in the box today. NEXT ROW
• Cauliflower starts and some established cauliflower too; in two "sections"
• Plain old orange carrots (sugar snax), about six weeks old
• More purple carrots, from starts, about 4 weeks?? old (an experiment).
• Old kohlrabi and then kohlrabi from starts. Why so many?? I have no idea! I think I just like to watch them grow because they are so weird.
• Lettuce, sewed today. Romaine, red leaf, and green leaf.
• Spinach from starts.
• Two whole sections of cabbages. Cabbages!!
• Purple turnips, old and new.
• Golden turnips, old and new.
• Rutabagas, old and new.
• Mixed greens, that should probably find their way to the salad bowl this week.
• Now we are in the back row, where there is the least amount of light:
• Holy smokes: more freakin' turnips! But as Mike pointed out: a turnip is not like a cabbage; you need a bunch to make supper.
• Beets (old) and
• Beets (new). I <3>
• nothing and nothing again. Not enough light. Some lettuces told us in no uncertain terms Not Enough Light.

And if you can believe it that is less than 1/2 of the depth of the greenhouse. This spring or summer we are planning on pulling off a big chunk of the roof and replacing it with clear plastic. With vents. So that we can use the rest of this space. In the summer we will grow some of the semi-tropicals that don't usually live up to their potential in our maritime climate: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil galore . . . I would also like to tuck in some dwarf fruit trees: lemon and lime especially, and I would like to try some avocado and grapefruit and maybe figs. I saw some of the lemons and limes in a nursery greenhouse once, before we moved here. Those poor little trees were almost falling over from fruit and I can't stop thinking about them. Also I would not mind replacing the gravel floors with pea gravel and/or sand because I think it would be friendlier on bare feet. But then again it is pretty much a snake swingers club in there, so bare toes are probably out of the question regardless.

And that (finally) is the story of today and the greenhouse.

Also I made more baguettes. We seem to have run out . . .

Lastly: there is a sweet green haze of something in the mud-garden. I think it's crimson clover (we planted a mix). The cover crop i s making it's presence known. Thrilling!

Baking Day

It's Thursday, and Thursday is almost always baking day. Plus I am feeling kind of sick and a little blue, and bread always makes me feel better. I try to make all of the bread and bread-related products for our family. But lately all of my sandwich bread has been less than fantastic. So I decided to give sandwich loaves a rest and make only crusty loaves and sourdough boules and maybe brioche and fancy rolls for a while. Maybe I am just bored with PB&J and grilled cheese and I have stopped paying attention. So today I made two loaves of crusty French bread (they are baking while I write and it smells like heaven in here).

Sorry for the bad picture, if Megan would get a better phone this might not happen.

And then because my sourdough starter was all fed and ready I started looking through some new recipes and decided to make a multi-grain sourdough sandwich bread (which is a new recipe and involves sourdough so it's not really cheating). That's finishing up it's last rise right now and can go into the oven after the French bread finishes up. Finished picture:

And then I will make apple pie. Because it is "bake apple pie for a veteran day." Some years it is "bake German chocolate cake for a veteran day" but this year we had a ton of apples, and I made a half dozen or so quarts of pie filling to can. So pie it is! Everyone knows that veterans love pie!

Is this an unreasonable amount of bread for a family of three? Maybe. Probably. But I can't seem to stop myself. Sometimes I feel like my sourdough starter will get sad if I don't use it enough and let it know how loved it is, so I think I might make just plain sourdough tomorrow and sourdough cinnamon rolls for Saturday breakfast. Or sourdough pancakes.

Other Notable Stuff:

I picked a lovely large bowl of spinach from the greenhouse today. This is our first greenhouse food and our first non-lettuce food (granted it is very lettuce-like, but still . . .)

The cover crop is starting to sprout in the muddy muddy garden.

Highs in the low 50's and Lows in the 30's

1.5 inches of rain since the 7th

Today's Project?

Ok, so we are getting our goats here in a few weeks.  They are coming to us bred and milking.  So how will we milk these ladies without getting kicked in the face or stepped on?  With a MILKING STANCHION! 

I recently just purchased a bunch of 2x6's and 2x4's to have around the shop for projects, so this seemed like a good one.  I went off some plans from a book that we have for these kind of things, but I didn't want to go to the hardware store, so I made due with what I had.  Didn't turn out too bad.  I still need to put the bottom in the feeder and lay laminate on the floor of the stage, but more or less it's done.

November 7th, 2010
Rainfall over 2 nights = 2 1/8"
Temp = 55* high

November

I think Mike mostly explained the timeline and his perspective on things in his first post, but the story sounds different from my end, and I have some other ideas as well. I'm just going to tell all about the farm and what resources we are starting with and then talk about the plans we have and the point of the blog. Probably this will be the longest blog entry ever. So here we go from the tippy top:

After very many life events and big changes we purchased and moved to our little farm in July of this year. So, like 4 months, right? The property sits in a little nook in the coast range of the central Oregon coast. It is 32 acres and zoned as "Timber Conservation," so a good 18 or 20 acres is trees and all hilly, which still leaves a good amount of lovely flat pasture/garden area to work with. The pasture area is split into two sections by the lane that runs up to the house. We have two naturally occurring springs, one of which supplies our house with water and one that supplies irrigation for the garden (such as it is, at the moment) and greenhouse and also supplies water for the goats, the mule, and the barn. These are both gravity fed systems, which means we have water all the time, even when the power is out. We also have a sweet little creek down the hill, and about a billion miles of blackberries. So there is the landscape . . .

The human made stuff includes: a 4-bedroom farmhouse, which is completely livable, but also leaves a lot of room for improvement projects. There is too much to talk about here, so I will just address it as it happens. There is also a barn, which Mike talked about. When we got here, it was really truly a church. With carpet and insulation and drywall, which was a stupid idea because they didn't do anything to weather-proof it and it was all damp and mouldy and also stupid. There is also a huge greenhouse and a creepy old shack, which was likely the original house structure. Oh! There is also this sweet little area in the "back" of the property that we call "The Shire" The Shire is where all the best trails start including the trail that leads down to the creek. It is like a cute little, roughly circular, meadow with a little spring and surrounded with trees. There are four tiny cabins in the shire. They are all the same layout (basically 8x10 plus a loft and two windows), but in varying stages of completion. The "best" one has drywall and insulation and flooring and a little stove and an aunt to live in it. The worst one has mould and is used for storage.

So that is what we are working with. Now on to what we have done and our plans for the future. So far we have mostly been playing catch up with land management and trying to get "outside" things done before it really starts raining, since the average annual precipitation where we live is in the vicinity of 100 inches per year and almost all of that happens between November and May. Our primary goals for this Summer and Fall were to get the smaller of the two pastures ready for goats and a mule, to set aside an area for chickens, and to prepare the garden area and plant a fall cover-crop. And really we pretty much met all the goals. Also we got a new dog!

The church/barn has been ripped out and repurposed as a . . . barn, of all things. The carpet is out as well as all the gross, rotted dry-wall. Mike built the most lovely pen for the goats and is finishing up the milking area. The goat and mule areas are all fenced in, the garden area is tilled and planted with cover crop, and the greenhouse is partially cleaned out and planted with a few vegetables. We are pretty much set for winter and ready to regroup and begin planning for the new year.

The next big project is our goats. I am so excited about goats I can hardly contain myself. Because the whole point of this farm is to be as self-sustaining a possible and provide all of our food, securing a reliable source of dairy foods is a very big deal. We chose goats because they are smaller and therefore require less feed and less space than cows. Also they are crazy adorable and friendly and I love them. We are expecting to welcome our ladies to their new home in the next few weeks. We are getting three Nubian does, two of them will come to us already milking and bred (which is what we are waiting for), the third is younger and we plan to breed her later in the year so that we can have a more consistent milk supply. So that means milk, yogurt, ice cream, and cheese of many varieties. And babies! (and goat meat, shhhhh, don't tell the babies).

And that is about it for the moment. Our main goals for the winter are getting ready for chickens in the spring, garden planning, and getting used to the new goats and the mule. We will likely be working inside the house as well, but there is so much to do in there, I can't really tell what will happen. What I hope will happen is that we will rip out the utility room and turn it into a functional laundry/cheese/fermentation area/beer making/extended pantry space (and maybe a secret root cellar too?). I also wouldn't mind heat in the bathroom and insulation in the upstairs. And maybe I will also decide on some paint colors. But who can tell.

And looking out a bit further . . . we plan to have a few highland cows for beef and also for eating up the grass in the larger pasture. We pan to turn a corner of that pasture into a small orchard and berry area as well, which is also where the bees will live (Mike is very excited about bees). There is a vague possibility that there will be a small pond and some ducks in this general area as well. There are pigs in the future, too, because pork is delicious. We would like to have a small care-taker's or mother-in-law cottage back in the Shire. And somewhere way out on the horizon the house will be converted to solar and wind energy and we will start relying more and more on just us.

So that's the basic plan. It's really just about the food.

Greenhouse

Here is a few pics of the greenhouse

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Our farm, so far...

#Written by Mike Cawley

So, this is our first blogging session for our farm.  We figured this would work well for record keeping and just basic historical reference.   If you are so inclined to read the boring shit we put down here then great, have fun.  We hope you can excuse the crude humor if you are offended, otherwise laugh on brothers.

We purchased our 32 Acre farm in July of 2010, today is November 5th, 2010 so that's what? 5 months?  sounds good to me, so lets just go from there.

When we purchased the property it had a nice sized barn that had been converted into a church.  Drywall was up and the moisture had not done well there.  I really don't know why the hell someone would do that in a barn that was obviously not water sealed.  Maybe they thought Jesus would keep them dry?

We also have a half done greenhouse, it also has drywall (yea) and is insulated.....   I will post pictures to explain later.  It's about 1000-1200sf....  it's nice, could be nicer.  We will work on it.  It works well for now, we have a few good things coming up now and should be done in a few weeks.  We are rotating vegetables every few weeks and we are slowly getting a schedule together, but shit, we are new to all of this.

The house is great, it has it's issues though.  It was built in 1910 and has had two additions.  It's about 2100sf with 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

Back to the farm itself.

The property is 32 acres, mostly forest land.  We have 2 pastures, one is about 7 Acres that we plan on pasturing cattle in.  That plan is about 2 years away though.  Our other pasture is about 3 acres, this is our primary area.  It is located next to the barn and the greenhouse.

when we arrived here in July the property had been unmaintained for about 18 months, the grass in the pastures had grown to about 5 ft. and still growing.  Our first order of business was getting the grass down, we had a guy come out and cut the grass for a day, we were now ready to see what we had to work with.

Our next order of business was the barn, FUCK!  This was not a project that you want to get into.  It was piled with shit from the last owners...  to include paystubs.  really?  paystubs?   They also glued carpet to the beautiful concrete floors.  Let me remind you, this barn is not weather proof by any means.  We decided that this project was not for us to do alone, so we had a party (actually, just an excuse to get free labor).  2 days later, the carpet was up and the walls were free of drywall.

I was lucky enough to have a shop available  in the barn area.  I bought a few tools and saws, got some stuff for free and I was set to do some work.

First big project was the goat pen.  I had no idea what I was doing so I just made a gated structure and a feeding rack.   it turned out well, I learned a lot from building it, and I am sure future projects will go better.

We deeded to work on the land a little to make it work well for us, so I purchased a tractor.   A Kubota with a front scoop and a brush hog.  I was able rework the ground with the scoop and now it was time to fence the pasture.

We have a friend that is giving us a Mule to have on the property, we are hoping to use him as security to keep the coyotes out.  Maybe with some training we can get him to help out on the farm.   We also have a pair of goats that are coming to us bread and ready to milk, so we also setup a large area for them on the back side of the pasture.  We also setup an area for chickens and our garden area in the center of the pasture.

I went all electric with the fencing, also I used polywire.  The reason I chose this is due to the high wind (Tape was out) and the ability to adjust the wire easily (I may want to move some areas around).   It was a bit more expensive and the longevity is decreased by a bit, I think it was the best choice for us.   We set wood posts at every corner and "T" we had in the fencing.  We dug down 24" at each post and set them in concrete.  We let these set for about a week, then it was time to run the fencing.  We went with a 5 line fence that is 48" tall, I left room to go to 5 ft. with a 6th wire if needed though.  We ran about 2 miles of fencing in the pasture and set it up with a few new gates, and an electric rope gate for the mule.  I only address this project in a paragraph, but holy shit!  This was a big project, it took a lot of time and a lot of land grooming...  cutting blackberries all day for 3 days.  It was hard.  That's it.

I now had to get a daytime pen setup for the goats, I decided to house them in a nice covered area that is just off the barn.  I also built a heavy duty gate and fencing out of Fur, I weather sealed it as well.

I'm now in the process of making a milking area for the goats, they should arrive here within the next few weeks.  We are ready for our mule after I build a little dry area for him....  That should be easy, right?  We will see.

This last week while it was dry we tilled and planted cover crop for the winter.  What a job, the tiller kicked my ass.  I used a rental from ACE Hardware.  It did the job fine, but my body didn't like it too much.

So that's what I have for now, Megan will also post up here with things....  maybe cheese making stuff, garden stuff, or other stuff.   Who knows.