When last we met....

When last we met;
the Garden was struggling.
Daisy was in jail.
July weather thought it was October.
the trees at the station were having to be pampered every two days with the garden house.
the chickens were crazy.

So fast forward to THIS week in July.  We've been hotter than the surface of the sun.  Then, gloriously, we had three days only in the 70s and low 80s.  The garden was much happier in this weather. The heat, even with watering, is tough on the plants.  My poor neighbor has 3 foot tall corn in full tassel. My tomato plants are only half the size of normal, and the tomatoes are splitting in the heat, if they get tomatoes at all.  The cucumber plants are leggy and the fruit develops so quickly and sparsely, it looks as if they'll be no pickles this year, unless I buy pickling cukes. We get a large handful of raspberries every other day from 4 plants, and the grapes are looking well. 

The white onions started falling over this week, a sign they are ready for harvest.  The poor things have endured hail, cold, and blistering heat, so I'm happy they made it this far.  I harvested all the white onions, and they are only half the size of normal.  This is actually fine as it is the perfect size for cooking without having to freeze or dehydrate left over onions.  They are now in their harvest box in the sun to dry their outer skins before I braid them to store.  The yellow and sweet onions are still going gangbusters!

In the empty onion, and soon potato, beds, I will plant with cow peas to add nitrogen back into the soil for next year.

Daisy was tough to break and spent almost a week in chicken jail.  This was immediately followed by Olive spending a three day hitch.  (I'm going to dub this the broody summer.)

After our glorious three day break from the miserable heat and humidity summer will be back upon us with a vengeance.  We are looking towards 7-10 days of 90-100' with a heat index kissing 115'.  Mercy.

Knowing this misery was setting upon us, I pushed up one of my Station projects up to NOW instead of this fall.  The trees on the station, especially the new transplants, are suffering in the heat and the lack of rain.  To combat this problem, I would spend 45 minutes every two nights, with the hose, watering each of the 30 trees in the orchard.  Not only was this a mindless, boring task, but it was HOT!  My plan was to eventually install a drip irrigation system, which would gently water each tree over time, with little evaporation, and best of all, wouldn't cook ME!

One tree hid her apples from me during the post hailstorm picking. 

The don't look too bad either.

So off the hardware store I went.  Drip irrigation can be relatively simple.  Usually used at nurseries or in flower beds, or well planned veg gardens.  An orchard is a large project.  Each of my rows is 150 feet.  I designed it so that it is a giant, elongated, capital E.  With the long connector at the topmost portion of the hill.  This is also where the hose connection is.  When the hose is turned on, water fills the 100 foot laterals and then the small feeder tubes that are snapped into the main truck lines and run to each tree with a small drip head on the end.  The downhill ends all have screw off caps for full water release in the cold months so it doesn't need removed in the winter. It took two additional trips to the store, and spanned two days, but it works brilliantly! (Total cost of supplies, about $130.)

The chickens?  Well, they're still crazy.  I did hear from the little chicks new mommy this week.  Little Doris, the polish pullet, was taken by a hawk this week.  Poor little thing.  Chicken keeping is hard when they make such an impression on us, but we are better for it in the end.

First time we've seen this one near the Station.  It's a golden headed blackbird.  He hung around a few days and left again.

The cattle have come up the hill for a visit.  The next camera shot was of the chicken running up

to the fence to make faces at them.  My chickens LOVE BEEF!

Ethyl being, well, Ethyl.

Until next time ...

Doc here:
Caryl forgot to mention a couple of things she's done to help the chickens beat the heat.  The first is the old standby:  a block of ice with strawberry tops (or other yummies) in it:  cold, rehydrating, and fun!  The other is a loose-weave tarp that she bought and hung off the southwest corner of the run to provide some shade against the afternoon heat.

Andy (on the left) is starting to resemble Zap, except
that Andy is black where Zap was blue

The other recent development is that we finally got our Pollinator Habitat certificate in the mail.  Looks like only four people were faster than us in getting registered.

July, Glorious July

Since we had July in June, Mother Nature decided to turn the first few days of July into October.  It's been pouring rain, foggy, and COLD.  Our high yesterday was only 62'. I was actually wearing a sweatshirt last night.  NO ONE is complaining.  We all need the rain desperately.  We also needed a break from the hideous heat.  But not to worry, it will be back to a heat index of 105 on Thursday.

The clover in the yard is filled with pollinators and it is almost 6 inches high.  It smells so fabulously delicious when it is freshly cut.  It also shades the lawn and keeps evaporation down and holds the moisture in the soil by shading it.  It spreads like mad, but even so, I ordered another 15 pounds of seed from stockseedcompany.com so I can help it along in the fall.  That said, we applied for our pollinator safe/friendly certification and were one of the first to have been accepted :D  OH, we heard out first cicada July 2nd, so by folklore, 90 days to the first frost.

For my local readers that are interested in pursuing this here is the link. http://entomology.unl.edu/pollinator-habitat-certification

On the chicken front, the silly 7 - dot, doris, peaches, honey, katrina, bb, and lacey- have moved to their forever home about an hour and a half from here.  They will be the little siblings to 4 RIR, two ducks, and a great dane!  I KNOW they will enjoy all the woods and the giant barn and coop/run set up.

The fox has been taken care of.  She was not lactating, so no young.  She was just moving into a new territory and chose the wrong prey.

Doc installed a new shelving unit in the barn.  We set the top shelf quite high for storage, and the middle shelf just the right height for taking care of chickens in cages.  This is our new Chicken Jail set up.  As you can see, Daisy is our first customer.  It took her a week to break, stubborn little beast as she is.

She had a buddy for a couple days, as we pulled our cream legbar pullet, Bea, to treat her for whatever was ailing her.


I have also drawn up the plans for a run extension that will act as a year 'round wind break.  I won't be getting to that until the weather cools way, way down!

The hailstorm mentioned on earlier posts did some serious damage to the orchard and the other trees around the property.  The damage to the leaves was damage to the tree's feeding system.  The wet and cool Spring was quickly followed by searing heat and a serious lack of rain.  By last week, we had cracks in the orchard that were 3 inches wide and went down 12-18 inches.  When we watered our sad trees, you could hear the water racing down around the root balls, and just disappearing to heaven only knows where.

By early this week we knew the trees were gone.  Of the 10 new trees planted this April, 8 were dead.  The stores graciously took them back and replaced them.  Every tree on the property was amazingly watered by nature, 1.5 inches last night, and today we planted new trees and gave every tree an 8" water saving blanket of cypress mulch.  After all, we still have July, August, and September to go!

The third week of June is Mulberry picking time.  BUT since we got so hot so fast, it came early this year.  And this year, I was busy with a fox.  So I entirely missed Mulberry season :(


But let's get down to happier business. 

Late June is CHERRY season!

This year, instead of driving two hours to pick my own cherries, a local market was selling fresh Washington State cherries for only $14 a lug, which came to about $1.50 a pound.  Needless to say, two lugs followed me home.

I also brought home two of THE CUTEST cherry pitters EVER! 

Sure I could use my antique hand crank pitter, but it knocking out the pit and tossing it clear of the meat is hit or miss. (Last year at the fruit farm I had them pit 10 pounds of fresh cherries on their giant mechanical pitter from the 60s, and it failed to pit over 80% of my cherries.)  I could have handed Doc all 22 pounds of cherries and just let him enjoy them, spitting pits as he went.  But I suspect that he would get sick of eating them, and probably couldn't eat them fast enough before they went all green and furry.  So hand stemming and hand pitting was the way to go!  No matter what you make with the cherries, they have to be pitted first. 

My adorable pitter allowed me to hold the pitter in my right hand, feed it with my left and catch the pit, and then toss the pitted cherry with a flick of the right wrist into a waiting bowl. IF the pit fails to hit the pin, or fails to be ejected, I know it immediately and plunge it again.

It went quite quickly with The Boy helping with the stemming. 

22 pounds of cherries in two hours.  I ended up with 3 pints of seeds, which I dried in the Excalibur Dehydrator overnight and popped into mason jars with oxygen absorbers and tossed into the back of the refrigerator until Fall, when I will plant them and see what comes up in the Spring!

So you have 22 pounds of fresh pitted cherries, and the clock is ticking.  What do you do?  WHAT DO YOU DO?!

The obvious thing to do was to fill every square inch of all 9 trays in the Excalibur. Done.

I then took my largest cookie sheet and covered it in parchment paper and tossed them into the deep freeze overnight to freeze them individually. Then I simply tossed them into a freezer bag. Done.

What else?! Oddly enough, I made NOTHING with the fresh cherries.  LOL.

MARISCHINO cherries are a MUST! So here is my recipe for an alcohol free cherry.  When you are done, you can process these in your water bath canner for 15 minutes for pints at sea level, add 5 minutes for each additional 1000 ft.

This is SO simple it is silly.

2 cups of CHERRY JUICE (Read your label and do not use mixed juices or flavored juices - like JUICY JUICE kids flavored drink.)

1000 grams of clean pitted cherries
100 grams of granulated white sugar
2 Tablespoons of almond extract.

Mix it all together and place into a plastic or non reactive container ( NO ALUMINUM).  Store in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours covered, stirring at least once during this time.  You can then fill your sterilized jars and process.  If you need for liquid simply top with cherry juice.  You can also store in the refrigerator for up to three weeks. 

The menfolk have trouble staying OUT of these.

Since we are speaking of fruit.  I purchased a bunch of bananas this week and like normal, hung them on my flip away banana tree.  When Doc wandered into the kitchen Saturday morning, he was met with quite a surprise.  SERIOUSLY?!  All on their own!  Crazy nanners.

The continuing fox saga

Rather than make yet another update to the previous blog entry, we'll start with a fresh one.

Caryl's prepared a couple of blinds and has waited for the fox to show from sunset to complete loss of light (astronomical twilight).  The fox hasn't yet shown while she's out during that period.  Yesterday the fox appeared briefly in the morning, enough for the chickens to make a ruckus but then trotted away, and so Caryl tried again this morning, no joy.

Yesterday evening, though, the fox either got remarkably bold or suffered from a bad case of target fixation.  Caryl was sitting in a camp chair watching the chickens while they had some supervised free range time.  I was on the lawn tractor pulling the "water pig" (a 35 gallon tank that kinda looks like an over-sized piggy bank) to water the new shade trees around Dunrovin.  With Caryl in the midst of the chickens and me making a lot of noise with the lawn tractor and trailer, we didn't think the fox would do more than watch us from concealment -- and so we didn't have the rifle handy.  You can see where this is going.

I finished with the shade trees and drained the last of the water in the fruit orchard, and then I drove up to the garage to take care of a few things.  We figure the fox must've thought I'd gone in, and between Caryl not moving for sufficiently long and the fox becoming fixated on its target, it must've forgotten that Caryl was there.  It broke out of the hayfield near the garden and made straight for Violet.  Right in front of the game camera.  It would've been a great video if the memory card wasn't still in the house from us reviewing the previous night's videos.

I became aware of this when I heard Caryl yelling and then trying to make dog-like noises.  (It came out as her yelling Bark! Bark! but the fox decided this was close enough.)  I took off in a sprint just as the fox released Violet.  Now, back in high school track, I ran distance.  The only time I ran less than 1600m was as part of a relay.  An all-out burst of speed isn't my thing.  It's been three decades since I ran high school track.  Nonetheless, I think this would've been my fastest 200m sprint ever.  Even the half-dozen hens who were high-tailing it for the basement door (where they expected the Boy, aka "chicken king," to be) decided to go around me rather than insist on the right-of-way as we ran past each other in opposite directions.

We lost the fox when it dove into the cow pasture.  Even still I continued my run trying to locate it while also contemplating whether I could hurdle the barbed wire (the hurdles being another track event I never trained for) until I decided I wasn't going to find it.  Later we did see the fox's trail through the grass, but it was long gone.

We promptly rounded up the chickens and did a head-count.  (Cirrus, she of the previously-injured wing, had wasted no time at all in hiding, disappearing into the hayfield as soon as she saw the blur of the fox, and re-emerged only as we were wrapping up the chicken rodeo.)  The damage:  not much.  Fortunately, Violet is a wyandotte, and so she has a big, fluffy tail.  The fox misjudged the location of her body and ended up with a mouthful of feathers.  She does have a laceration from one of the fox's lower canines, so we sprayed that with antibiotic and hoped for the best -- so far she seems to be doing fine.  As the fox was retreating, it tried to grab Nugget on the run as a target of opportunity, and got even fewer feathers from her.

This fox has a nasty habit of showing up when we aren't expecting it and then not showing up when we are.

Time for a foxhunt

I got a call this morning from the Boy.  The fox was trying to figure out how to get into the Little Lolly.  The timing is interesting.  Caryl left the house at 9:15.  The Boy called me at 9:19.  I've read before that foxes will watch humans' patterns of behavior to know when it's safe to try to get a snack, and clearly this one thought it had us figured out.

Look at that white-tipped tail.  Definitely a red fox.

I told him:  Be sure of what's downrange.  Aim for the center of mass.  If you drop it, then go in closer for a headshot.  Don't touch it since it's covered with skin parasites.

The Boy positioned himself on the driveway so neither coop was in his line of fire (and the cows in the adjacent pasture are all on the other side of the field this week), and he took the shot.  The fox ran away with a limp, so it sounds like the Boy hit its leg.  He then followed the fox back to its den.  Now knowing where its den is, we're setting up a snare tonight.

UPDATE/CORRECTION:  The Boy says that he hit the fox's hip.

UPDATE/CORRECTION #2:  The Boy didn't see its den; he saw where it left our property.  After some searching, we didn't find a good place for a snare, but we did set a live trap.  (The fox will enter the trap alive, but it won't leave the trap in that condition.)

A trap shouldn't smell like humans, but like the prey the predator is after.
The girls are doing a good job.

UPDATE #3:  The fox is sly.  It's also not as injured as we thought.  As you can see in the video, it's moving around just fine.  We know the Boy hit him--he says the fox's rear right leg faltered after he shot it--so perhaps it was just a flesh wound.  Why doesn't he trip the trap?  We think he was more interested in the "live bait" than in the catfood, but with an extra day to ferment we're hoping the catfood smells extra yummy today.  But about that slyness.  The timestamp is off by an hour and change -- the hour is for daylight savings time, and the other few minutes are due to clock drift.  The nighttime shots are about when we shut down the house, and it got spooked by us shining the flashlight out the window.  The morning shots are shortly after it saw a car leaving the driveway.  It's watching for the cars to leave.

Dunrovin's Most Wanted

Last night after we put the chickens away but while we were still relaxing in front of Chicken TV, I thought I saw a cat on the other side of the garden.  As soon as it moved, though, I recognized it as a fox.  (At first I was looking at it tail-on, about 70 yards away, hence the initial mis-identification.)  The fox got away, but we're about 75% sure it's a swift fox.  So I moved the game camera, and he paid us a couple more visits last night after we went to bed.  So far, no visits tonight but the game camera is still out there.

UPDATE: It's a red fox. Turns out not all red foxes are the rusty red that you've come to expect from Disney films.  The tail markings, however, are definitive.  Caryl confirmed with the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources that it's a red fox.

Still yet another sign you're no longer in the suburbs

You don't need to go to the gym to get a workout

Modern life tends to be sedentary.  For example, I'm sitting with less-than-perfect posture while I'm typing this blog post.  TV, video games, email, web browsing, word processing, reading, number crunching, meetings, preparing PowerPoint presentations, ignoring PowerPoint presentations:  our lives are full of sitting.  And so we join gyms.  Running, walking, swimming, spinning, lifting, stretching, isometrics -- these are all things we do keep our bodies healthy.

You know what?  Working around an acreage tends to work those muscles too.  I can't tell you how many times Caryl found herself dog-tired at the end of the day while she was building the egghouse -- lifting, cutting, hammering, twisting, hauling.

Caryl's gym

Oh, yes, hauling.  We store things in the barn.  If something can be done in the barn, hooray... but then you move the final product out to where it belongs.  But if we're cutting down a tree, that means we take the tools to the tree.  Same if we're planting a tree.  We did as much of the Oodalolly Egghouse in the barn as we could, but it wasn't much -- most was built on-site, which meant hauling the wood and the tools to the site.  That's lifting, holding, and walking.  For some things, the wagon saw a lot of use in the last year and a half, which is still a workout to move around the acreage.

Caryl towing a tree branch with the
tractor.  Human labor got the branch to
where she could tow it. (LOL BRANCH- he
calls it.  The thing was 30 feet long and
almost that wide! ~Caryl)

Riding the mower or tractor over the uneven terrain works those core muscles as you try to stay in your seat. (We treated ourselves to a trailer that we can hook to the back of the small yard tractor and a water hauler for the trees in the meadow. ~Caryl)

Moving hay with a pitchfork may seem trivial, but in gym terms it's "low-intensity/high-rep."  Sure, each forkful may be light, but after you've moved a full round bale of hay from outside the garden fence to inside, you have literally moved a ton of hay by hand. (And I moved it TWICE! ~Caryl)

I'm helping!

Planting a 1500 sq ft garden offers repeated, lifting, bending, toe touching, and long walks to the barn for the odds and ends you've forgotten, running and screaming and twirling when you disturb the wasps.

We've made extensive use of our 4-pound engineer hammer.  By time I'm done with it, I can feel the burn in my deltoid, and my brachioradialis and flexor carpi muscles let me know they've been worked, too. (In common speak, his arms ache. ~Caryl)

Sure, my body totally
looks like that.
(image courtesy of Warner Bros.)

And the 16-pound sledge hammer.  That feels more like a whole-body workout, even cardio.  My day job requires me to spend some time in a gym, and I've seen personal trainers have their clients pound at a tire with a sledge hammer (and if you've seen Batman vs Superman, then you know this is also one of Bruce Wayne's exercises) -- there must be something to it. (hmmm, I wonder if we could trick those clients to come up here and bang some tree posts or fence posts in....? Or maybe instead of just running in circles, we could have THEM chase the cattle? Painting this fence is great fun, isn't it Tom? ~Caryl)

Caryl:
Funny, Chris hasn't mentioned the workout the chickens give you at the end of the day.  Granted, the evenings we actually get to SIT in a lawn chair and watch chicken TV for a bit is rare, but wonderful.  But you never get to just SIT.  Usually there is a skirmish to break up (Flora, I'm looking at you.), or there is a last minute quick chore that needs done (as long as you're out there), or my personal favorite- Chicken Round up time!  Yeeee HAW!

  Chickens will gladly go to roost on their own.  Something in their little birdy brains says, "hey, climb up high, go to sleep, or have your face eaten off by a mean critter".  So come late dusk they wander into the coop and disappear for the night.  The problem is, sometimes WE want to wander into our people coop, before THEY want to wander into theirs.  This requires chicken herding.  There's a reason you don't see TV westerns with great herds of ranchers on horseback moving chickens across the plains, or British herd dog competitions penning hens instead of sheep.  The herders would try it once and GIVE UP! Luckily, for you, our readers, we aren't that smart.

Chicken brains are ruled by food (Nugget is all about the food you are bringing her.  You could be carrying a 2x4x8 and she'd come running.) If they are out and about gorging on worms and grubs before bedtime, good luck trying to talk them into going IN.  We have 25 birds.  Upon shooing them towards their door, they can go 24! different directions.  That's 620448401733239439360000 different directions.  I don't know how they do it. Slow motion cameras can't see how they do it.  Physicists don't know how they do it.  I suspect a trans dimensional wormhole myself, but chicken mind control is talking me out of it.

The thing is, it takes at least two people to round them up, one to guard the door so they don't slip around it and make another go around and under the coop, and one to do the chase.  We figured 25 trips around the coop equals .25 of a mile.  If you get one pig headed bird, you can easily make that twirling trip around the coop into a marathon obstacle course.  It's not funny when you're the one trying to put them away, but it sure is a HOOT watching someone else try it!

Doc again:

Last spring we tried planting a small oat field. The number of oats that germinated isn't important to the story.  What is important is that clearing the grasses and preparing the soil was done mostly by tractor.  Even so, I ended up moving sod around by hand and other labors that left me sore for days.  It really makes you appreciate how much work went into starting 19th century homesteads with only human sweat and ox muscle.

For us, working the homestead is a hobby.  To give you an idea of how much work is done by people whose livelihood depends on working the land, we're told by our physician that it's pretty common for farmers to put on 15-20 pounds during the winter when they're not working as much.

People who write fitness columns often say that you should vary your workouts and keep things interesting to avoid getting bored.  Try working an acreage; it's always something and you'll never be bored.

Death From Above

On Monday night, we experienced one of the great hazards of living on the Great Plains.  Mother Nature entertained us for hours with a brilliant lightning show to our west.  Storms that were hundreds of miles away, but because of their height, we could easily see the illuminated clouds.

Two hours later and the gentle pitter patter of rain on the window pane was interrupted by a clink.  The pitter patter was quickly replaced with plink, clink, CLUNK.  Now, plink you can ignore. Clink is never a good thing, and CLUNK is downright worrisome, but then it was the THUD that really got my attention. 

HAIL!

I watched as rice sized hail turned into pea sized hail.  The rain picked up and the winds began to howl over 40 mph.  The pea sized hail was quickly joined by marble sized hail.  That usually only lasts a second or two and then moves on.  It didn't.  It just kept coming, and coming. 

Three minutes later and the gutters where clogged with ice and overflowing.  Hail littered the ground and was piled high in corners and around the base of the plants.  Then the rains came, 2.79" in just 20 minutes.

In all the years I've been sending in weather reports, and Monday night was no exception, you'd think I'd have learned to check out my own place.  Nope, the next (blurry eyed) morning, I went into work and didn't give the previous evening any more thought after hitting "send".

It wasn't until Tuesday night, when I went out to the garden to check on the charge of the electric fence that I noticed something odd.  At first, I couldn't quite put my finger on WHAT the odd thing was.  I was looking at what was left of a tomato plant, nearest the charger.  The stem was broken off at 5 inches above the ground, but the top was laying about a foot away.

Certainly a critter that would have managed to get through 10,000V would have gone ahead and EATEN the darn plant.  The cut worms and hornworms weren't even OUT yet. So what the heck?!  Then it happened.  My exhaustion glazed eyes wandered further down the 40 foot row of freshly planted tomatoes.  NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Every single one was completely leafless.  The stems were covered in white, pockmarked, bruises.  My jaw dropped as I scanned the other two rows.  My heart sank when I dared to look at the 200 square feet of onions, their 6 inch long leaves snapped off, bent, and bruised.  The cucumbers were crushed under the ice and had gone pale during the heat of the day.

The grape leaves were shredded. (potatoes aren't up yet). UNBELIEVEABLE! 

As I hung my head and closed the garden gate behind me, an apple tree caught my attention.  OH MY ... THE ORCHARD.  I didn't even THINK about the orchard!  Walking to the first of 30 trees, I knew what I was going to see.  I just didn't want to see it, shredded leaves, cut and bruised fruit and limbs.  There was simply no way to have avoided any of it.  It just is/was.

Hail is usually not a widespread event.  In fact the next acreage over swears that she not only didn't have any damage, she says she didn't even have hail.  Totally possible.  Back in the day, a farmer would have been able to borrow spare plants from their neighbor if it was early enough to transplant.  If not, short season crops would have been planted and you'd either trade for your missing crop, or just make do with the short crop.  You always helped a neighbor as you never knew when it would be your turn to need help.

In my case, June 1st is my go-to date for planting anyway.  I did it a week early this year to get into the garden before we got 4 inches of rain in a week.  Next year, I'll just plant in muck boots if it will save me the trouble.  A trip the to the village to the plant nursery and a chunk of change later, and I was navigating the slippery dirt roads with a load of new plants, now safely awaiting planting in the barn.

The apple trees will be fine.  They won't be pretty this year and all of the fruit has been pulled off, but I don't let young trees have fruit anyway.  A young tree's energy should be spent on growing and root development, and not fruit production.  I'll watch them for signs of disease, but beyond that, they're on their own.  After all, they aren't the first trees to be hit by hail, and we still have trees in the world.

At least the hail wasn't big enough for the roof, siding or windows to even blink at.

Just another crazy day on the hill.