2012 – Cast Iron Farm

Monday, July 9 2012

Well, the sun finally hit, and summer, as we usually think of it, has arrived in the beautiful Willamette Valley. The sudden onset of heat really does dramatically change the chores that I must start doing.

I REALLY don’t like to work in the heat so I try to rearrange my schedule so that I get up early and work while I am fresh in the morning. The problem is that instead of then taking a rest at some point in the day, it means I try to cram as much as possible into a day and reach a potential burn out. I burned out about September of last year, and it was really hard to recover from. I have less tolerance and more burn out these days, so I try to be really careful.

The need to water seems urgent, and I find myself carrying water to our various plants that demand attention because of their new delicate conditions. I planted more trees this week. While it feels incredibly pointless to plant something now that won’t produce on a large scale for year. I like to believe that the sweat and tears I put into setting up my farm this summer will mean that future summers will be full of delicious handfuls of freshly grown food.

Speaking of… we picked blueberries this morning. We started off picking 25 pounds, and I got 30 pints into the freezer. Not too bad for a first pick. We plan to return tomorrow, so it will be good to possibly wrap up the blueberry pick this year for good. We sure have been enjoying the sweet, summery blueberries this day.

Passage of Time Saturday, July 7, 2012

It has been hot around here, and when the temperatures start to climb above 80 degrees, the garden needs some watering attention. I usually attack this chore first thing in the morning. The plants can get a nice drink of water before having to endure the heat of the day. It is also a time of day that no one else in my house dare be awake, so I get to work in solitude. As I was watering the perennial herb garden I took note of my rosemary plant. When we first moved in, some very thoughtful person had planted a rosemary, but it was planted in a shady spot with no drainage. The plant was surviving, but barely. When I started my perennial herb boxes, the top of one box called out as a place to transplant the rosemary. I planted it, put some rabbit manure around it, and wished it the best of luck in it’s new home. The next month, my friend Rebecca gave me some pruners for my birthday, and she suggested I test them out on the rosemary. She told me to cut it back considerably and see what happened. I was loath to torture the poor plant more, but after a few months of deliberating, I took her advice. The poor plant, that was spindly and thin to begin with, was lopped back to almost nothing. It didn’t look particularly attractive, and I was sad to think that we would have to do without rosemary for quite some time.

That image of that sorry rosemary was what stuck in my head, and every time I went out to the garden, it was what I saw the perennial herbs through. Well, this morning, as the sun started to make its grand entrance into the world and I was out comfortably watering my rosemary, I realized that it had come alive! With the love and attention and the food from the rabbit manure, this rosemary bush went from looking like a sad plant on its way to death to a healthy, vibrant, productive plant. It is beautiful!

While I see a lot of the big changes that go on around here, new rock on the driveway, posts for barns being put up, new additions on old buildings, it is easy to miss the little things. The project that I planted a year ago that has made it through one full season and is looking healthy and strong ready to please the eye and the palette.

I moved on to watering the blueberries, and I really took note of how the plants that I planted last year with scant foliage have come to grow into bushes, not yet full size, but big enough to bear some fruit this year, yet just a teaser for what we will see next year! It has been easy to focus on what we will get in the future from things we have planted or are growing, but today, I am appreciating what I’ve got right now.

Blueberries planted last year waiting to be picked.

The strawberries I planted this spring have decided to surprise me as well. I expected nothing from them this year, but was surprised this morning with this little gem.

A post including the perennial herbs would never be complete without a view of the echinacea that my friend Rebecca gave to me a few years back. What a joy and a surprise to see it so happy in my care.

And of course, I’m looking to the future. While blueberry season is upon us, we’ve decided to expand our patch by another row. That will go in the ground in the next day or two.

I will also be heading off to pick some lavender from a farm today, but 22 fresh lavender plants wait on my porch to be planted this year. Oh what will they look like next year after surviving the seasons we have yet to experience.

Notes from July 6, 2012

July!?!? REALLY!?!? Though the years seem to go by so fast, it is hard for me to get used to the idea that it is July already, and July 6th at that! I’ve been meaning to write more notes here, so I’m just going to start writing notes, and not make any promises about what I plan to do in the future.

Exciting things are going on around here. The crew showed up at 7am this morning to put the very long posts in the ground for our new barn. The ground work to get to this point has been long and exciting, and I bet that the building goes up very quickly from this point, but it is hard to believe that the posts I see NOW will be barn in a few short weeks. The view around the farm will change a lot, but this new barn means so many exciting things for the farm.

We are now on day 2 of rather warm weather. I’m a true Oregonian in that I really can’t stand the sun. I am happy for the 9 months a year that it is cold and rains and is mucky, but the days it tops 80 degrees, I just can’t take it. I guess that’s why I’m not running a veggie farm here, I’d rather be in the barn with the livestock!

Speaking of livestock, I got a call today from someone asking if I would take in her 9 angora rabbits and help find homes for them. I begrudgingly agreed to help. I’ve had some unfortunate turns in my breeding this year that has left me wondering where to go next, this rescue might just lead the way for me.

The kids’ Papa is in town for the visit. He surprised us all by bringing a play structure for the kids. They are so excited they just can’t bear it, and I have a feeling that I won’t be seeing much of Cyprus in the next week or so. He’s just climbing the slide and going down over and over again.

With the chores all done now for the day and the cows out happily munching their dinner. I’m going to head off and celebrate the 4th of July weekend with a good old fashioned visit to the St. Paul Rodeo. Yep, even farmers take a break to go have fun, even if it is by going and looking at more animals!

We’re Going on a Cougar Hunt

Yep, you read that right. A COUGAR. I’ve been flapping my lips lately about how our location close to the city means that we have few predators. While I did deal with a skunk last June, I haven’t lost any thing to any of the usual suspects. We can hear the coyotes call out the bedroom window regularly, but our professionally built fence keeps them on the outside.

Enter the cougar. I was alerted about 3 weeks ago that the News Register had run a story about some sheep and house cats being killed by what looked like a cougar. The kill matched a cougar’s MO, and they had some tracks verifying. Concurrent to that, a cougar was seen walking down the road. What’s more the kills and the sighting were less than a half mile from our property. I started to lock the livestock up tight at night thinking that the danger would pass eventually and that that would be the end of it.

On Tuesday, we discovered that our neighbor had a ewe and a lamb killed that night. It looked to be the same cougar and the kill happened about 45 feet from our property line. My reaction–HELL NO. I called it in to the police and fish and game and then I called all the friends I have that hunt. Very kindly, one of my dear friends headed out that night and had a go at calling it in, but it had just got a big kill the night before and wasn’t interested.

This all led me to hone up my shooting skills and get out the rifle. I headed out and got a cougar tag myself. While many of the people around here have livestock just for fun or for lawn mowing, my livestock is valuable breeding stock, and a loss of just one animal is a huge loss for me. That coupled with the fact that I have small kids and I spend a lot of time outside at night (cougars are nocturnal), has led me to decide I’ll be doing a little hunting of my own.

We have a friend who has first hunting rights on our property each year, and I called him up, and he was game to catch a cat, so we headed out at midnight to have a go at it. We got some things set up and potentially saw something in the distance, but it never came in close enough to get a good shot on it. We had a few visits from some other wildlife and almost got a shot or two off at a coyote, but no cougar.

And so, until I’ve got myself a cougar rug, I’m going on a cougar hunt!

Meet Pascha

We had another adventure at Cast Iron Farm this morning. Yesterday, we had a large gathering to celebrate Greek Easter or Pascha. We were all having a great time, but my cow was getting ready to calve any day, and on Saturday, I was starting to think that she might calve during our large party. I pulled her into the barn as the party was drawing to a close, and I got the idea that she was really ready to calve. Her udder was rock tight and she was acting kind of funny. In fact, she stuck her head under the gate and was trying to get out. Silly cow.

I happened to get chicken pox on Saturday as well, so I was laying in bed at 4 something this morning feeling kind of crummy, and then I had a thought come into my head “I’ve got to go check that cow.” I then tried to talk myself out of it, and the calling from the barn was too strong, so I opted to head out and check. I told myself that of course she wasn’t calving and that I would get to crawl back into bed when it was all over. I also happened to be wearing my standard calving check attire, a shirt, no pants, a house coat and some flip flops. The rain started again in the night so it was wet outside. I grabbed Jared’s big flashlight and headed to Fancee’s stall only to discover that the stall was empty! The cow had lifted the gate off it’s hinges and escaped.

I searched the entire property for her, and I couldn’t find her. Oh great! I had just happened to leave the gate open to the big pasture last night, so I thought I’d check in there again. Finally, the flashlight shone on two big eyes down by the bottom of the field. I rushed down through the wet grass to see that she was laying down working on pushing a calf out. To the looks of it, she’d been working at it for a while. I rushed into the house, woke Jared and got the OB straps and some towels and we drove the John Deere down to the cow. He left the lights on while I got the straps around the calf to pull her out. I managed to get the straps on, but even with all that force from the cow, the calf wasn’t budging. Finally, with all the strength Jared and I had, and all the force Fancee could give, we got the calf out. That’s the thing about extremely small cows like Fancee, sometimes they have calving problems because they are just so small.

After a little clean up, we got the calf in the John Deere and brought mama and baby back up to the nice clean barn with a heat lamp. The calf, a heifer we have named Pascha, got all cleaned off by mama, and was up nursing like a champ while I was milking the other two cows. And so, meet Pascha, the most recent addition to our herd.

Milk!

It has been a very busy past couple of weeks. I am a very happy farmer with babies of all types running around. Though we have been busy, the craziness has been cut with moments of watching the goat kids jumping around full of new life. And so, I EXPECTED to start milking again on March 1, come hell or high water. Of course, we experienced both hell and high water. This crazy early spring has reinforced my belief that the only constant in this farming gig is that things never happen as you expect them to. I apologize deeply for the lack of communication, but I’ve got some good news.

I have decided to reorganize our milking stock to more exactly meet our dairy goals. After careful examination, it was decided that our cow Daisee does not fit into our program. This was a tough decision. Hand milking the cows means that I spend a lot of time with them, and I like to think that I have a special relationship with them. Deciding to sell a cow feels a little bit like deciding to sell one of my children. However, we are limited to three cows in our dairy, and no matter how I look at it, Daisee just can’t stay. She is going to make someone a very nice milk cow, and in fact, it looks like she’ll be going to California to do just that. She will be missed.

With that decision made, we have moved on and have purchased two more cows for our dairy program. I am over the moon with excitement about this decision for many reasons. We are committed to working with the heritage breeds of livestock. This is why the Milking Shorthorns have been so appealing to me. I raised beef Shorthorns as a kid, and I had always wanted a Milking Shorthorn. It made sense to use this breed to start out our milking program, as there are only 3000 cows left in the American Registry. Due to the wonders of AI, I have been breeding and raising registered, Native Bred Milking Shorthorns. What does this mean? Well over the past several years, the Milking Shorthorn registry decided to open it’s herd books to cross breeding with Holsteins. This was done to up the milk production of the Milking Shorthorns so that they would again start to look appealing to commercial dairies so that the breed would not completely disappear. While I have nothing against Holsteins, they are not Milking Shorthorns. Luckily, the registry decided to track those lines that were not mixed with outside blood. My cows are of the pure line, which means that they go back to the first dairy cows brought over from England used by small farmers as triple purpose breeds. I love working with this breed and plan to continue to. Our Milking Shorthorn cow, Fancee, is staying in our program.

Enter, our new cows. These cows are both heritage breeds, but the kicker is that they are not the same breed! We are getting a beautiful golden Guernsey named Tillie and a beautiful Brown Swiss named Clover. I am over the moon with excitement about these girls because we are now not only working with one heritage breed, but three! These are the three breeds of cows that are slowly dying and falling out of favor with commercial dairies because they often can’t compete with the high production rates of the Holesteins or the butterfat content of the Jerseys. I was lucky enough to find two cows with good production level and decent butterfat. My first milk cow years and years ago was a Guernsey named Bridget. Bridget and I did well in the show ring, and she has always been in the back of my mind. Guernseys have become rare and hard to find. The people that own them know how valuable they are and are not selling them. It has taken me 3 years to find a Guernsey and convince it’s owner to let her go! Brown Swiss are graceful cows with high production. Clover will be my first Brown Swiss cows, but I cannot wait to get to know this cow.

Purchasing these cows does two important things for our dairy. Firstly, we will now be milking a high quantity of quality milk. This will allows us to raise our calves on real milk without outside supplementation. It also allows us to take on enough milk customers to make this endeavour financially viable. Secondly, we are transitioning our herd over into an A2 herd. Haven’t heard of A2 milk? Here is a small bit of info to get you caught up. http://www.a2milk.com/ Basically, milk used to all be A2 milk, after a genetic mutation, cows started producing A1 milk, and these cows happened to also be high producers. Dairymen caught on and started selecting out those cows/bulls for breeding, and the milk with the A1 mutation became overwhelmingly the norm. Luckily, our decision to work with heritage breeds also leads us down the path of getting good, quality A2 milk. Keeping our ancient genetic lines true means that we are headed down the path of having unique and healthy A2 milk. While some call the A2 milk a marketing trend, none refute the benefits of having milk that is more nutritionally available to those who consume it.

And so, this is all a very long winded method of apologizing for the delay in milk but that the wait is going to be worth it!

We will have milk available starting on Sunday morning. Plan to pick up on your regular day starting this Sunday. You might want to plan a few extra moments to see all the new babies around (we will be expecting Fancee’s calf mid April, so there is that to look forward to as well. Oh.. and since we have a lot of milk available now, tell your friends. You get two free gallons of milk for everyone you bring into our CSA. Feel free to email or call with any questions!

Twin Lambs

My daughter and I went out to see the ballet, “Giselle” on Friday night to celebrate her 5th birthday. I came home and walked into the barn, and had just missed Lexie giving birth to twin lambs about 30 minutes previously. There’s one ram and one ewe! Hooray, we’ve got a ewe to keep! Of course, the kids are all over making her welcome into the family. Black seems to be the color of this spring!

First Kid of 2012

It seems like everyone is birthing late this spring. I’ve got several ladies overdue. I went out to the barn this morning for another “check” eager to get back into the warm house. I was sure there wasn’t going to be any baby activity. I looked into the goat stall to see a little black spot. I shined my flashlight onto this sweet thing born probably about 15 minutes before my arrival.

It’s a boy! Our first baby of the year, and my first EVER angora kid. The other kids in the house were excited too.

He’s been named “Snow” by the kids (apt name for a black goat eh?). He’s snuggled in the barn with his mama this morning.

The Farmer

Chris asked me to write a regular post here about farming from my perspective. And since I’m usually involved in some of the crazier aspects of this whole endeavor, it will probably turn out to be quite fun to cover them all again. Before I start off on my wild rehashing of farming a .1 acre plot in the middle of a city or rescuing llamas from a rising river, I thought I’d start a little more domestically.

The root of this whole farming adventure can be traced back to my wife. If it weren’t for her, I’m sure I’d be living in a major city doing who knows what. I should have known when the wedding vows were changed to include a donkey. But it’s been an amazing ride. She’s an amazing organizer, world traveler, fully professional photographer and now farmer, mother and whatever else she decides to take up.

She’s a “stay at home mom”. Which means I’m a “working dad”. Luckily my commute is about 6 feet out the back door to my office so I still get to keep tabs on what happens looking out the windows of my office, but I must say that she takes all doubt out of the idea that “stay at home moms” might be busy. She’s usually up at the unholy hour of four in the morning (you better be missing a limb if you try to wake me up before seven). She’s getting things done before the kids wake up. And then she’s cooking and cleaning and milking cows and feeding the horse and and and. And that’s usually before I head off to work.

Then she hangs out with the kids. I think this is one of the best things about how we have things structured. And don’t take this as any kind of anti-feminism, as I admire women who are accomplished in the business field also, but I love that we don’t hand our kids off to someone else to care for and raise and educate. I’m sure it pushes her tolerances to rarely have a break, but our kids learn an immense amount. Not only are they learning regular school stuff like reading and math at an early age, they are also experiencing “crazy” things like how to drive a pony and cart, how to milk a cow, where food comes from. I love that my two year old son asks in all earnestness on the way to his grandpa’s house if he has cows. And then asks about goats, sheep, alpacas and on down the list of all the animals he knows that people can have. And that my kids came up with the conclusion that since he did have a barn that his dogs stay in, that it is possible he might have other animals.

The types of things that you usually read about kids doing long ago in books; my kids do many of them with their mom. There’s virtually no TV and the only video game is occasionally played on a phone when we are out. It’s hard to beat the amount of attention they get.

And lest you think she just spends time with kids, let’s not forget that she’s back doing animal chores again in the afternoon rain or shine, shearing rabbits, spinning the whole, knitting all sorts of clothing and gifts, remodeling parts of our 100 year old farm house, teaching the minature horse how to pull a cart, off bartering with one of her many connections to bring new animals here or get rid of some more. Nothing surprises me much any more.

And then it’s off to ballet or knitting get togethers or spinning groups after the kids go to bed. She’s amazing and though we only see each other in passing (I just can’t get over that four in the morning thing and she doesn’t last much past seven at night), I must say that I love and admire her more and more as we wend our way through this crazy adventure of farming, raising kids, running a computer company and just generally trying to get by.

So with that proper foundation of respect and admiration, I can now proceed with my series of posts about the wild adventures and incredulous activities that take place at and around Cast Iron Farm. I’m sure I’ll emphasize all the wrong things, but it should be a fun trip down memory lane and for those of you who don’t keep close track, you’ll probably never look at us the same!

Help With Kids

With kidding season upon us, THIS is what goes on in our house.