Friday, March 16, 2012

predators and other natural disasters

It will be a short post. I can't think too much about this without becoming a shivering wreck so typing a lot about it is pretty much out of the question. Sometime in the early morning hours on March 14, 2012 a predator, or several of them, got into our back yard and killed three of our ducks. They were Trout Runner ducks, the only three we had, and among the dead was probably my favorite drake in the whole wide world, TBA, also known as Teebs. He was one of two ducks from my first successful hatch and the younger by about 24 hours. He was my first Trout colored Indian Runner - his hatchmate is a white runner - and is the reason why I fell in love with this obscure (by American standards anyway) color. Of course with my luck the moment I decided I wanted to have more Trouties, Holderreads had discontinued breeding them. Persistence in the art of Google found others who could be persuaded to sell me hatching eggs from their existing flocks and that's how I ended up with Mistress Page and Beatrice (characters from Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado About Nothing for those of you who have the slightest interest). The rest of their hatchmates went to other homes since we are a suburban lot and can't have as large a flock as I might otherwise want. Because I was already stocked to the gills with as many birds as we are legally allowed to have, I wasn't saving any eggs for future hatches. And now they're gone. We think it was one or more coyotes who got over our fences but we'll never know for sure. There were three eggs I hadn't washed and put away for future omelets, one from the white runner, one from one of the Trout females, and one unknown so they've been popped into the incubator as a sort of last forlorn hope. It's too soon to really know for sure, but it looks like the Trout/white cross might be developing.

The geese made it through without harm. The two Saxony/Trout cross drakes (Teebs was an ambitious fellow!) are fine. My tiny chicken flock was in a tall dog run so they were all right. And Sir Edmund, TBA's hatchmate and despite the name very much a female, is my only surviving runner duck. She keeps looking for her flock. She keeps looking for Teebs.

I have a line on more hatching eggs. I'm about to spend money we don't have getting more secure runs in place. I keep moving and I keep planning because if I don't, I think about that gallant little bird and I dissolve into tears. He always tried to take such good care of his little flock and I let him down.



Sunday, March 11, 2012

Fits And Starts

Some days I go great blazing guns, and some days I putter around looking for my lost focus. This whole last week looks kind of fuzzy in the rear view mirror; I shoveled a few wheelbarrows of dirt, shifted a few old bales of straw to the compost heap and kept thinking that I really needed to get into a higher gear. The gear will get here eventually, sooner rather than later, and I have to keep reminding myself that my life is a 48-hour schedule crammed into the normal 24-hour day. Some things are going to get back-burnered, delayed, and rescheduled. Sometimes the Banshees need so much of my attention that everything else takes a lower priority. That's what happened to last week: The Banshees needed my attention more than shifting the backyard geography did.

What did happen? Well, I restrung the clothes line. It looks better and hangs more clothes. I still have to move it into its permanent position but right now it's functional and that's all to the good. I sorted out the garlic. Sure I'll be planting it three months late, but I will have a wonderful opportunity to find out which varieties will stand that sort of mucking about. I established the new location of the compost heap and am slowing moving more material into it. I've been keeping up on the egg gathering and even more importantly, improved my egg handling. The eggs go into the fridge as soon as they've been scrubbed and they get scrubbed as soon as they hit the house. Yorick has started laying again, so I'm getting a brand new 177 gram goose egg every two to three days. She's also gone very moody and has decided that under the clothes line is the perfect place to lay eggs, which means she's given to attacking Banshees if they're out doing laundry. Oh yes, it's time to get that girl a new living arrangement. I also finally got up the courage to get some different potting mixes so I can find out what's going to work with my soil blockers. So far I've only played with the mini 20 and I love it. My 3/4-inch by 3/4 inch squares are a little wobbly and possibly not as compacted as they should be, but they're holding shape and I can hardly wait until I can start planting a whole bunch of seeds. Of course I'm going to be doing that tomorrow, before I really have any place to handle all of the much bigger seedlings they're going to turn into. I really am going to have to work on this leap before looking problem I've got. Still, I'll probably get into various tomato varieties tomorrow and then I'll move on to the other crops that I've been thinking about putting into the garden. Broccoli, lettuces, cabbages, beans, peas, beets, carrots, onions, melons, pumpkins and other squashes, Serrano and Anaheim chilis, radishes, spinach, and probably half a dozen other things I can't remember off of the top of my head. Oh yeah, and the herb garden. I need a bunch of basil and oregano and savory and thyme and tarragon and other goodness. I have no idea where I'm going to put it all but that has never stopped me before.

This is why my husband's idea of completing Goal One (creating the farm) before Goal Two (planting edibles with hopes of an actual, gatherable crop) is never going to work. He could do it, but I'm the one who is doing the grunt work. And I am a hopeless, hopeless optimist.

So not a lot got done last week. At least I can say that some small things got started. And next week even more will get done. Fits and starts.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Isn't This Where I Came In?

I started a blog called The Ballad of Brown Thumb when this project was just going to be a hapless home gardener story. So far, it's still about as hapless as it is possible to get. However, with the crushingly high gas prices, followed by even more crushingly high food prices, compounded with my lack of employment and the woefully inelastic nature of my husband's paycheck, the back yard fiddlin' around gardening has taken on a much more serious tone. We don't have a lot, but one of things we do have is a fairly large suburban yard and absolutely no lawn. (Wild Bermuda grass doesn't count. It isn't a lawn, it's a scourge.)

Sort of like the homeschooling issue, my spouse was either vehemently against cultivating the yard or very vehemently against cultivating the yard (I think his choices were wide-spread herbicide or as much cement as the city would allow us to cover the place with). We achieved a sort of detente: He wouldn't grouse about what I did with the place as long as I didn't ask him to pick up so much as a stray dandelion. However, when push comes to shove (i.e. aforementioned sky-high gas prices combined with a perilously vacant bank account) spouse becomes extremely flexible. Growing as much of our food as possible doesn't sound quite as end-times-apocalyptic-nutjob or hippy-dippy-backwoods-counterculture as it used to. It sounds like a reasonable response to having little cash flow and three growing children to feed.

So, after a little discussion wherein he learned that I have been thinking about this a very, very long time and have some very, very firm opinions on how this cat should be saddled - and I learned that he's still the same stubborn quarter-Irish that I married all those years ago - he heard my goals and agreed with them. We're just going to have some lively discussions on how to meet those goals. I've never been threatened with a boring life.

Goal 1: Establish Hopping Goose Farm. This is going to take a lot of cleanup, digging, building, and general blood/sweat equity.

Goal 2: Replace as much of the grocery list with homegrown as is feasible. I'm not giving up dairy, the city won't let us run miniature sheep let alone miniature cattle, and the cost/benefit to me making my own laundry soap is dismal. However, I can see replacing a lot of staple goods in our fallow square footage.

Goal 3: Earn at least a little pin money by selling excess at farmers' markets.

Right now I'm struggling with the script that has followed me all of my life, to wit: I can learn how to fail at just about everything. Unfortunately for the script, I have a household to feed and it won't get fed on my curling up in a corner and refusing to even try. So the question isn't: Can I do this? It's more along the lines of: How do I get this done?

Welcome to Hopping Goose Farm. It ought to be an interesting ride.