04/05/2015
just this once I would like it not to rain tonight or tomorrow. There is a tremendous amount of stuff I'd like to get planted while Chris is around, and I'd like to make beds for other stuff. I've got seed for row crops and seed for beds, and I have neither ready to plant. I can blame some of that on the weather, but not much. Either way, this seed is going in the ground soon. All of it. I reckon the first order of business before that happens is still containing the birds to keep them from destroying my garden before it matures. We'll string chicken-wire tomorrow rain or shine. I'll lock up the birds tonight and leave em locked up most of they day tomorrow.
I need to get the small orchard area between the house and the old chicken yard cleaned up so I can put perennial beds in it amongst the figs and plums. I should receive my Valley Oak broadfork this coming week, and that should make it quite a bit easier. I may hold off doing much mowing and use that instead and then work in composted horse manure from next door after I remove the tall grass around the trees.
Incidentally, it occurred to me that even if I don't get swales dug up at the top of the property, I can still take the broadfork along contour and achieve some good effect just doing that before the heavy spring rains hit. Swales would be better, of course.
The asters are coming up again in the front flowerbeds, and I'll plant a ton of other flowers there if I can get the chickens to quit dusting themselves there and fouling the entire porch at the same time.
I don't have any lantana or turk's cap or rosemary. I want all three, and quite a bit of each.
If I have the money, next week I'll order a wheel-hoe from Hoss tools. Then later I'll get a seeder attachment for it. My tractor's been broke down for a year'n a half, and I don't know when I'll ever get it running or even if there's much I need it for anymore. I'd like to move the front acreage with it, if I could, I reckon. And I'd like to mow all the paddocks down and scalp the back pasture to help break up the Bermuda grass and get it ready to plant with row crops and beds. But really, I can do most of all that with my scythe and my broadfork and the tools I have coming soon. I just wish I had it all yesterday and everything was ready to plant.
I got another baby chick today, and the eleven Welsh Harlequin drakes are doing well and running loose in the chicken yard. Another reason I'm eager to get the chicken wire up is to protect them from any predators that currently only need to scale some old shipping pallets to get an easy duck or chicken dinner. The juvenile chickens are running loose as well. The rest of the birds are cooped up, and the guineas are in the trees. I'll pick up five American Buff goslings in the coming week over in Springtown, and I'll get turkeys in a couple of weeks after that. These will all go into that same bird yard that is now seeming quite a bit denser suddenly. We'll get tractors for them all soon enough, however, or we'll make some arrangements to expand their range while protecting the rest of the farm from their activity and them from predation.
I'm getting twenty to twenty-four eggs per day now. I boiled thirty-six of them this morning, and I'm about to peel them and put them in brine with some dill and garlic and red onion in quart jars. I'm tired of giving away eggs all the time. Everyone else out here in the country sells fresh eggs, so I figure a value-added twist on that might find me an overlooked market niche, as well as give my product an extended shelf life over the competition. Besides, fermented food is the deal, kiddo.
I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment, or perhaps just intimidated by the notion of layout and design. There's so much information that I want in my mind about what companions well with what, and how I can lay out perennial beds to accommodate the interspersing of annuals among them and also how I should lay out row crops in relation to those beds. It's looking more and more like the closer to the house (zone 1) anything is lends itself to it being more likely to be bedded and perennial, or at least self-seeding. Those things, like kitchen herbs and flowers, that I will be among most. But also things that require less room or less uniformity of production for ease of harvest. My canning garden is going to spill out into the back pasture when I plant large amounts of blackeyed peas in a couple of weeks.
Someone the other day said, "Show me your Zone 1," and it stuck with me. For a while now I've been fixated on mainframe design elements way up at the top of the farm, and the area where I spend all my time remains something of a wasteland, design-wise. There are a bunch of pecan trees around the house, and the backyard is shaded. I've planted it with mayhaws and paw-paw trees, but there's nothing else happening there yet. My greywater recycling doesn't exist yet, nor does my rainwater harvesting. There are a lot of things I could plant that would do well in the shade there and be edible or useful. It is also valuable living space that I'm not taking full advantage of, and I want the life of the house to spill out into that area.
I also realize that now is the time to start planning house to heat the house next winter. Electric heat is insane and unnecessary.
Right now, however, my head is all wrapped up in garden design and layout, and more broadly the design of the entire farm and how it integrates various elements. I lack working capital, but most of what I'm doing requires very little of that anyway. It's just the volume of it that is daunting. I want to make twelve copies of me and set each of them to work on various projects. All of this should've been done last autumn, really.
My real goal here, I guess, is to have a farm sufficient to provide for all of my needs year-round and then also to be capable of being a single-source vendor for a local restaurant on top of that. That means there is so much more to do and so much more to plant. It also means I need to get facilities ready for housing, handling, caring for and processing more animals on the farm. It means chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, quail, pheasant, rabbits, sheep, pigs, beef and dairy cattle, and, possibly, fish or crayfish. It also means all the attendant costs associated with that, which means retiring my debts as quickly as possible is equally as important as each addition I make to the fauna of the farm.
Everything needs to pay for itself eventually, or it at least has to be able to take care of itself and contribute to the system in some way.
This is such a wonderful and busy time of year here. What I really need is more people to help and more revenue streams to help fund what I'm doing here. It's fast becoming time to take those things seriously and start making this an actual working farm and not just a place in the country that gets me an ag exemption for selling hay.
