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Broccoli still flowering among the weeds, 9/28/2012

A few little items from the last couple of weeks --

• The pumpkin vine that planted itself in the old hay pile, giving the pile quite a decorative look, has now got 2 decent-sized pumpkins.   If the frost holds off a little longer, maybe we'll have a couple more pumpkins for the cellar.
• Arthur (sheep) tried to jump out of a pen and caught his back leg between the fence bars, flipping himself upside down and getting stuck.   He didn't break the leg, but it was pretty sore for awhile.   He seems better today - at least I had a harder time catching him.
• We grew some yellow tomatoes for the first time this year.  Verdict on the yellow tomatoes - worth growing again.  They are great on toast, with melted cheese.
• Vet from Foxcroft Veterinary Services came by and vaccinated the two remaining ancient sheep here.  He said that the practice was coming down to Orono routinely now.  Hooray!
• Monarch butterflies  seem to like to ride the hot thermals rising from the tractor's diesel engine, when it is being driven home across the hay field.

Bit of this and that before it pours

Got in that second cut hay a few days ago.   It is always so much softer than the first cut.  I brought in a few loose bales - I hadn't run the baler for awhile, and forgot to tighten down the screws a second time.  Oh well, the sheep are getting the loose ones.

Other than my husband George helping me attach the cutter to the tractor, and helping stack the last few bales, I did this run all by myself!  Cutting, two teddings, raking and baling.   The whole process is much more pleasant in cooler weather.

The garden is still hiding under all the weeds, since I lost control of it earlier this summer during a period when a leg and a back were very uncooperative.   It is about to pour here, so I've been scavenging around and weed diving for things to put in the cellar, freezer, or a stomach.

The beds full of tall weeds seem to be attracting a lot of small birds.  I flushed several, along with the neighbors' tabby cat.

The achorn squash are a bit small, probably because the plants didn't get enough sun.  They'll go into the cellar anyway.  The tomato plants don't seem to mind the weeds.   Amazingly, the carrots survived, so I processed some for the freezer.   I need to get to Park's Hardware and pick up some sand, so I can put some fresh ones in the root cellar.  That will be after this coming rain.

I picked a few New England pie pumpkins and put them on pallets in the garage to harden.   Again, far fewer pumpkins this year, and those are a bit small.  But they are enough, if I get thinking about pie in the winter.

Second cut weather

We are having a lovely run of weather with low humidity, breezes, and sun.   I cut a bit of hay yesterday, tedded it (spread it with a tedder), and tedded again this morning just after the dew was off.

It looks pretty good, but never know for sure until it is in the barn.

We do an "unusual" second cut.   Most people will harvest a first cut in early spring, then come back for a second in late summer or early fall.  Our field is not fertilized, so it won't support that.   But, we are finding our way to getting a bit of sustainable second cut.

Sheep and small ruminants like second cut.   It is softer, less stemmy, and easier on small mouths.  So, we always try to get a bit.  We do this by mowing part of the field in early spring, but not haying it.  The hay is tedded, and left on the field, leaving the organic matter to go back into the field.  By this time of year, that first cut hay is complete gone.   We can come back through and get the softer, "second" cut.

We also rotate some parts of the field.   In some years, certain areas only get mowed, sometimes more than once, and not hayed at all. 

Most of the area where I just did the "second" cut has been fallow, except for mowing, for a couple of years.   The hay looks pretty nice....now just to get it in the barn!

Alice

We lost Alice to coyotes.

That is Alice in the foreground at left.  The picture was taken a few years ago, in the fall at my old place in Augusta.  The sheep in the back with the white nose is Alice's older sister, Ophelia (the ewes in that family line all had names from Shakespeare).


Many years ago now, I got a disease in my flock that sheep people know as "CL".   This was before there was a vaccine in the US for CL.  I unknowingly bought a ram that had it.  The disease can be slow to develop and slow to transmit, but it is contagious among sheep.  It is an easy disease to buy.   When I found it was in the flock, I stopped breeding and selling lambs.

I decided to keep a dozen or so sheep, just to have them around.   This was an un-economic thing to do, but I felt like I owed them something.   That flock gave me some very good lambs.  Some lambs had been sold to spinners in prior years, and some went to slaughter.

I've had only three sheep for quite a long time now.   Been putting old ones down from time to time over the years, as they got sick, injured, or tied up with arthritis.   The three remaining were descendants of the first two ewes I owned many years ago, Cordelia and Chloe.

The sheep in the flock were mostly Shetland/Finn, which are highly intelligent.  I know that isn't the common view of sheep, but it is true sometimes with relatively primitive breeds.  Each has his or her own personality.   Alice was special to me because she'd always been friendly and relatively calm.  She got spooky the last few years because I didn't spend enough time with her, but she always calmed down quickly when I did.   She was the first one to check out any offering from my hand, like a bit of apple.

Alice was descended from Cordelia, and was born the year that a Finn ewe I had named Lily gave birth to a bottle lamb named Chester.  Alice and Chester used to follow me around.   Chester followed me because I was his adopted mother.  Alice followed me because she wanted to.  I will miss Alice.

A word about coyotes -- this is the first trouble I've had with coyotes, over about a 15 year period.  Most coyotes don't bother sheep, and the American Sheep Institute recommends leaving coyotes alone that don't bother sheep.   Coyotes are territorial, and will keep other coyotes out of the area. I'm still going to leave the coyotes alone, but I'll bring the last two sheep in the barn at night.    This time of year, they like to graze at night when it is cool, but now that needs to stop.

The two remaining sheep are Arthur (Alice's twin) and Sparrow, and they've both been shy since they were born.     Arthur has never been aggressive, but he likes to keep to himself.  Sparrow wants to flit away, although she is descended from Chloe, who was rock-solid, calm and friendly. 

Alice always gave me the benefit of the doubt.  Being brown and a ewe, she looked like a delicate little white-tailed deer right after shearing in the spring.  So pretty.

Alice was a very good sheep.

Alice in Orono (at left).  Ophelia and Sparrow at right.

Bird update

We don't hay the whole field, so bush hogging is a normal chore.  We knock things down to prevent weeds from going to seed.

I spent most of yesterday bush hogging areas that we skipped when haying.  We skipped haying an area in the middle of the front field, where there was a nesting pair of bobolinks.   We skipped large areas in the back, where the hay quality was poor, and there were other bobolink pairs.  We skipped a big, wet swale where the baler would have sunk.

I expected all the bobolink young to have fledged by now, and was surprised to find an adult pair still down in the grass in the area we had left in the middle of the front field. I think the young were gone, as normally they fledge by now, and I've seen young flying around.  But this pair were still there.   They flew up when I came through with the bush hog.

Most of the day, I was in the far back of the field, methodically going up and down, knocking down the weediest areas.   We have not hayed back there but have hopes that the area may become suitable with enough mowing. 

Much of the afternoon and into the evening, a male harrier hawk (marsh hawk) was hunting in the area around me, which kept things interesting.   I got back to the house and looked up their nesting habits.  They nest on the ground.   I got a bit worried about him.  I didn't see a female, or any behavior that looked like anything but hunting, so I am hoping that if he had young, they would have fledged by now.

It is a tough balance, bush hogging areas early enough to keep the weeds down, and bush hogging late enough to allow some field nesting birds to fledge.  We can't avoid taking out some nests when we hay.   Hay needs to come in relatively early, or the protein content drops.

A field that has to be maintained by humans is a pretty unstable habitat.  But, it may be the best these birds can find.


This morning, when I went out to feed and water the few ancient sheep here, I found that the barn swallows had fledged.   One youngster was sitting on the big metal tube gate that leads to the sheep pen.  I need to go through this gate at least twice in the morning, so the youngster's location was problematic.  He or she was doing his best "I'm invisible and you can't see me" pose.

I came up to the youngster and scooped it up in my hands.  It responded with an alarm call.  I tried to put it on top of the stacked hay bales, figuring the parents would find it and feed it there.  As soon as I released the youngster, it flew toward the light, out a crack where I'd left the barn door open a little.   Pretty impressive flying for something that young and small. 

I'd like to think that all the youngsters this year do so well.

Mid summer

It is that lovely time of summery when things are coming too fast in the garden for me to keep up.

I hurt my leg, then my back.   The jungle weeds took advantage of almost two weeks of inattention to try to take over the world.   Hey, I'm talking about 4 foot tall weeds here.

I've put around 10 packages of blanched beans into the freezer, and there are two more rows that need picking today.   More beans will be coming along later.    The broccoli is also heading out now, and needs to be steamed and frozen.   I very much like broccoli with melted cheddar cheese on top for lunch in the winter.

I've started making huge piles of weeds in various open spots in the garden.   I may haul them out later, or just turn them where they lie.   I worked on clearing weeds around the pumpkin plants this morning, starting with the good-eating pumpkins.   The  pumpkin plants probably would have been happy growing up and over the weeds, but I don't want all those weeds to go to seed in the garden.

If they all go to seed....next year the weeds may slip in our back door....at night....and crawl up the staircase, and grab us in our beds.

Heat, then storm, then cool

I was bush hogging an area in the back of the hayfield yesterday using the farm tractor, and ignored some storm clouds, which were riding in on the heat.   Got caught out in a huge rain, which was a bit scary, since the swales already contained standing water, and there was the real possibility of getting stuck out there.   Got drenched to the skin.

When I made it back to the pasture fence and turned south to follow it, the wind suddenly picked up massively, hitting me side ways.   I could see the rain moving horizontally, hitting the back of the sheep barn hard.

The cold rain was steaming off the tractor but....at least so far there doesn't seem to be any damage.   Sucking water into an engine is not a good thing.

The temperature went from the 80s to the 60s, and today was much more pleasant.   The vegetable beds were too wet to walk around in much, but at least I got the tomato plants tied up and a bit of hand weeding done.  The picture above is part of Bed #1, weeds and all.  We have three planted vegetable beds this year, plus a new, small, blueberry bed.   Bed #1 includes:  tomatoes, rutabaga, lettuce, kale, carrots, onions, broccoli, nasturtiums, bush beans, and potatoes.  Bed #2 has all the squashes (pumpkins, achorn, yellow summer squash, and zucchini) and the cukes.  Bed #3, which is new this year, has more tomatoes and more beans.

So far, we aren't using any row covers or raised beds.  Everything is in flat, basic, beds.   Last year I mulched everything with grass clippings, but there was not enough time or dry weather to allow for that this year.   So, this year there is more hoeing, and I've also mulched some areas with hay from the back field.   They hay was cut early, so there is little weed seed in it.  

In between gray

Broccoli in the garden

It is foggy this morning, and I'm waiting for the fog to burn off and the dew to go away, so I check the hay curing on the ground.

In the mean time, I did some house chores, and hoed in the garden.  Status:

• The long rains followed by gorgeous clear days seems to have made the broccoli particularly happy.
• The rains took out the carrots, most of the potatoes, and some of the squash.  When I expressed displeasure with the drowned potato seed, one of my nieces, who grew up in Ireland, said "Oh, Aunt Hetty, these things grow in Ireland.  Think about it!"   She may be right...two plants popped up in the "wettest" trench over night!  I'll leave the trenches alone for a bit more.
• Rutabaga, lettuce, and beans are up from seed.  Tomatoes seem ok., but need to be staked.
• George and I got the first hay into the barn.  We also got the baler, wagon and tractor stuck in the hayfield twice, and got out by ourselves twice.  Whoo hoo!   As George noted, we now have lots of experience hooking and unhooking machinery for this year.
• The farm sign is in place by the road.   We've already had one person ask "Where is the island"?  The "island" is described on the bottom of the Rock Island Farm web page.

Potato plant in the least wet trench

Got hay?

Wildflower from August, 2011

It is really nice when one gets to the time of year when people starting looking at you sideways and saying..."Got hay?   We're going to need X number of bales...".

We had a gorgeous hay window, in terms of weather, this past week.   It had me standing, staring into the breeze, wanting to hay.   Unfortunately, like other people with clay soils, we need a few dry days before such a window in the spring to allow the hay field to dry out.   That kind of weather hasn't happened yet.   Haying on wet grounds mucks up the soil, and produces potentially musty hay.

But, the haying equipment is all out of storage, oil and greased, and ready to go.  Well, almost.  We're still messing around with the bale knotter a bit, but we'll manage that.  We just need the weather.

We'll list hay for sale on the farm website and on Craig's List when we have hay in the barn.   I know it would be easier for some buyers if we did advance sales, and I'd really like to say "yes" when we get asked.   But, we need to get the hay in the barn first, and then sell it. We're a small, local farm, relying on some older equipment and some older people, and we don't want to promise something that we might not be able to deliver. 

Producing and selling hay is an important part of our ability to keep the land classified as "agricultural", as we slowly improve soils and increase our vegetable production.  Please remember us when you need feed or mulch hay and pass the word.

Please support your local farms

Rain, potatoes, and ditches

It has been raining.  A lot.    Nothing like the amount it has rained in Southern Maine, but a lot.

I went out this morning to check on the garden, and found the potato trenches full of standing water, several inches deep.   It would be nice to have a "before" photo, but at time like these, one tends to run for the shovel first.

The picture at right shows a partially drained potato trench, with a bit of drainage ditch below.   I dug about 45 or 50 feet of drainage ditch along one edge of the garden.  Then, I widened it to hold more water, and started a side ditch to try to sheet the stormwater off into a buffer area.   I'm glad that it wasn't raining while I was doing this, and that there is a large vegetated buffer area beside and below bed #1. 

The water shown in the left side of the photo is in one of the potato trenches.  The water heading off to the right is in part of the ditch.   The rest of the bed #1 looks pretty good.  The paths between the plantings tended to drain off the water.

But..the seed potatoes may be rotting in the ground.   This would be unfortunate, because we store the potatoes and eat them during the winter.   If the seed potatoes are rotted, I wonder if we can still find any more around here?

On a cheerier note, the grass is nice and green.

The white temporary fencing is used to keep the groundhogs out of the garden. So far, we haven't had to electrify it.   We have nice groundhogs around here.

The wind is from the northeast, and more rain is coming.   No watering is required, happy and cool onion seedlings, pumps in the cellar working, and George just came home looking sharp from the barber.  Time for lunch!