October 21, 2016
Stories this photo appears in:
It's the time of year again, the short period when the Mason Ditch shuts down for maintenance.
Well, there were no babies for Babs this week. I'm not sure what this means. It could be she's not pregnant but would like to be. Or it could mean she got pregnant a week later when she revisited Buddy. Or perhaps she just likes the idea of a baby box. I don't think rabbits can have hysterical pregnancies.
Like the returning sunlight after the solstice, joy is beginning to once again creep over the farm. Bear is finally recovering from Moosie's death.
A few warm afternoons and all of a sudden everything is thinking spring has arrived. Of course, "warm" is subjective in this case. Since New Year's Day morning chores have required me to walk out in temps below freezing.
I'm sitting at my desk, looking out the window at thick dark clouds. Rain, or even snow is predicted for Christmas day. That has me thinking about moving my truck across the road. This is because I didn't move my truck last year when we had an unusually heavy snowstorm for New Year's Eve. I was stuck on the property for three days because snow became ice and my driveway has a steep angle. Not that being stuck at home is a hardship. This year, I took the prediction seriously and stocked up for everyone. Lord knows I won't starve to death, and neither will my animals.
Well, I did it. I got Radha her own puppy. This past week Bear hasn't been able to play with her at all and she was clearly bored.
I finally got the first rabbit tractor finished! Is it perfect? No, it's definitely a prototype, although I fully intend to house a rabbit in it. However, it has square corners and is solid, and light enough to be pulled easily across bumpy ground. And it is so completely covered by wire (some of it pieces I hand wove together) that I can't imagine any predator in the world breaking into it. This includes Radha the puppy, who is at the top of my predator list.
Hey, if cats can have their own word for a situation gone seriously wrong, then sheep certainly deserve a word to describe yesterday.
I'm late this week because yesterday was harvest day. (Non-meat eaters should skip the rest of this paragraph.) Ten ducks, all twenty-four of my full-grown and startlingly heavy Red Ranger chickens, plus six more chickens for a friend. I started around dawn. My ranch manager/farm assistant Christina, bless her, joined me later to learn the process.
That's right. It's weaning time. Yesterday afternoon I locked the seven little lambikins into one of the alleyways, away from their mothers. No more sheep milk for them!
Yes, I'm borrowing from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, but that snippet is the only piece of poetry (if that's poetry) that I know, and I kept repeating it today, "Chins" being the way I was saying the shortened breed name for my new rabbits.
Once again, I'm going to offer a couple of updates before I start talking ram lambs. That's because in my last post I mentioned that Moosie was hurting again.
I know, I know. I mentioned I was installing new fences last week, but with the chaos of that day, I didn't really appreciate what I'd managed to make happen. Now that a week has passed, I think...I hope...no, I'm certain this was exactly what I always wanted.
Of course, it wouldn't have taken much to improve on last week, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Summertime, and the living is easy.
First, a turkey update since the black hawk just interrupted my blogging by trying to take a baby turkey. Tom's girls laid about three dozen eggs and settled down to brood at the beginning of May. It was bad from the beginning.
No, not the puppies, although they are growing by great big leaps and bounds. Only two weeks ago they were cute cuddly not-very-heavy things. Now I swear they weigh twice what they did when they came and are all legs.
Before I get to today's post I want to do some updating. The puppies are doing very well. They have mastered "sit" and the art of herding chickens and sheep, when they are not herding dogs.
I thought I had them. But N-O-O-O. I have burrowing chicks.
First, I apologize that this post is a day late. Work came out of the woodwork yesterday, chores and tasks falling over each other, all needing to be completed NOW.
I intended for my new chicks to arrive a few weeks ago, but their delivery date coincided with Oak Creek making its foray onto my property. Fortunately for me, I heeded the warning of the USGS and put off delivery until "sometime in early March." "Sometime" turned out to be Friday.
It started with posts on Facebook. Folks from my local area were sharing maps of the predicted storm. It looked like a lot of snow was going to come down in a very short period of time.
Before I get to the dog part of this story, I thought I'd update you all on my newly completed brooder coop. At last, after sorting through all the many bits and pieces of this and that cluttering my barn, buying as little as possible and when necessary from Restore, the coop is done and the barn is clean.
If you remember, oh plucky reader, the last time I got chicks--the Brahmas--was two Januarys ago. For their first two weeks they lived in an old cast iron tub that had dirt in the bottom and was covered with several hardware cloth-filled frames to prevent cat intrusion. This worked really well. Not only did the cast iron tub have round corners, thus preventing chick death from all of them trying to squish into a square corner (a strange chick behavior), but the heat lamps warmed the cast iron which radiated even more heat back at the chicks. However, with thirty chicks they very quickly outgrew that small space and I soon moved them outside the barn into a thrown together pallet-and-baling-twine built coop inside a chicken run.
OK, be kind, dear relatives from Duluth. I know you sneer each time I mention it, but I have snow!
The conversion of Lonely Girl from pig to sheep is now complete, at least in her mind and much to Tiny's complete aggravation. That aggravation is complicated not just by Tiny's certainty that Lonely Girl isn't a sheep, but because the pig (She-ig? P-eep?) treats her the way Lonely Girl and her porcine sisters treated June the Cow.
It's that time of year and four out of my five piggies are now gone.
"Really?!" I said, my head tilted up to the gorgeous blue sky on Thursday morning. I was limping again, having tweaked a tendon even though I don't recall stepping wrong.
Saturday evening, June gave me the spotted heifer I wanted so much. My first inkling that all was not going to go well was when I saw Little Iris's hooves appear.
Sigh. There's no calf yet, at least not outside of June's body. All the signs are there. Her tail's loose as are the muscles around the birth canal. Her pin bones are low, her bag is filling up, and every day there are gooey strands wrapped around her tail. That cow! I swear she's doing this on purpose.
For those who don't know the story, there was once a beautiful and talented weaver in ancient Greece named Arachne. She was so talented that the goddess Athena, also a weaver, challenged her to a weave-off.
The other day I sadly swept a small, dead, completely desiccated toad out of my basement. I love my toads. I love them despite the fact they make the weirdest sound of all the creatures on the farm.
That cow! Remind me the next time I decide to buy a cow that I need to ask if she was raised by other cows or raised by humans. I definitely prefer cow-raised cows.
Our Monsoon season opened with a storm so powerful that it sent a flash flood right through my property.
It's official. I'm not selling the farm. What makes my decision official? I bought piglets.
Over the past eight years (and this month it's officially eight years that I've been a co-owner of this property), I've only once seen a beaver. That was about five years ago in July, no less. I was standing on the porch when all of sudden Moosie, then just a pup, went racing down to the Mason ditch. I watched as he walked along the ditch bank his attention on something in the water.
It's only been a few years since I last had dairy cows on the property, but in that short time I completely forgot how awful the flies are. However, before I get into discussing the pestilence of flies, I need to get you caught up on general cow news.
And how am I certain that summer has arrived? Because on Friday the temperature got over 100 degrees while Saturday brought us a lovely all-day rainstorm. It was overcast, drizzly, and cool, and I had all the windows open. Welcome to summer in Northern Arizona.
I wasn't a helicopter parent with my kids, and I'm not a helicopter farmer when it comes to my animals.
That title should read More Sheep Tales, but it's been a week of sheep giggles for me. First up is Mari, who has made an amazing turnaround. I had her sheared ten days ago. Like her father Cinco, that wool of hers is a throwback to the Hampshire side of the family. Unlike most Dorpers, who shed their hair (Dorpers have hair, not wool), Mari has wool and it just kept getting thicker. So as I did with Cinco, I hired a shearer.
I've never owned a dumb farm animal. That's not dumb as in unintelligent. From the cows to the pigs to the turkeys, every one of my critters has proved capable of figuring out how to get what they want. That includes opening gates, breaking down fences and crossing hot electrical wires.
I'm getting to this post late today because I wanted to finish the last bits on the coop so I could take a proper picture. And I did, both finish the coop and take a picture. The wooden structure is now wrapped in hardware cloth and chicken wire. There are a pair of wheels at the back of the coop although I haven't yet strung the rope handle at the front that allows me to move it. A technicality. It's well and truly done.
As you, my patient readers, may recall I recently stretched my "I can build it" muscles and added flooring to my stairway. In that process I conquered my fear of a table saw. For more than forty years I'd been haunted by the two missing fingers on my first father-in-law's hand. He had removed them while using a table saw. I need all ten of my fingers to do my job and I know very well that I am a certifiable Klutz. That, and nothing else, is what has kept me from venturing too deeply into the massive workshop that fills my front barn.
For the record it turned out that six sheep is better than simply sufficient. Having just the new moms and their babies has been both peaceful and easy. Tiny only calls now when one of her babies is lost (this usually means on the wrong side of a fence) or she wants me to open a gate.
Tiny, as usual, was late but efficient. Her lambs finally made their appearance on March 28th. At birth both of them were larger than Mari's little guys. That didn't stop Tiny from pushing them out one right after another with less than 5 minutes in between.
What a change. January brought days in the 80s but now that it's late February we're enjoying a stretch of cold, wet weather. Today, the wind is howling, the sky is heavy with thick dark clouds, and it smells like snow.
When my ex-husband and I bought this place back in July of 2010, we were told that Sam, the previous owner, had upgraded the house from a tiny, tar paper shack to a 2500 square foot McMansion.
Before I throw myself into this week's post, I have to kvetch over the recent full moon. I know everyone was going on about it being this blue-blood-full-eclipse moon, but why didn't someone warn me what that meant? Here I was, figuring this was a full moon like all the other full moons I suffer through, what with the coyotes showing up and Bear barking all night.
It appears from this title that I am on a "D-D" kick. Perhaps this is apropos as my initials are "D.D." Over the years a few people have tried to call me Deedee, but I'm really not a Deedee. I am Denise, named for a villainess in a Frank Yerby novel. (Hmm, do you think that steered me into authoring historical novels?) My father tried to soften the somewhat awkward name by calling me Den-den. No one else was ever allowed to call me that. It's even worse than Deedee. Enough about me. Let's talk ducks.
Once again, I've managed to work my way through another week of barn cleaning. OMG! Whole counters are bare. How awesome is that? Another few days and I'm going to call the "great clean out" done.
It's time to come clean. I admit it. I am not a spit-wife.
Well, it's happened again. Somehow an entire year--a full 365 days--has slipped past me at light speed. Where does my time go? Into writing books and farming, of course.
Nothing really funny has happened on the farm since the pigs became pork. This is very frustrating for me. I mean, the high point of my day has been walking out during my breaks and observing the hi-jinks that always seemed to occur while I'm outside. Sigh.
I caught him (or her) in the act! Friday morning I was preparing to take a load of household goods to Prescott for donation. I had just called my friend who runs the organization to which I donate, warning her I was leaving, and stepped outside onto my porch. From my porch I can see the full two acres of pasture that fills Tier Two and a good part of Tier One, the lowest portion of my five-tiered property.
I can hardly believe that the two little guys (who don't have official names for a reason) have been around for almost 3 months now. Not only that but in three months time they've gotten huge! They're almost as big as Peanut and Mari, their biological if not chronological siblings. Another three months and they'll be--gulp--rams!
The Mason Ditch (the stream/irrigation ditch that runs through the center of my property) was well on its way to being empty. Like "down to a trickle" empty.
It’s 3 PM on Sunday and I’ve had a glorious day. I’m still in my robe and jammies. This is the first time in more than five years that I have refused to dress for the day.
Ya-HOO! I completed enough of the sheer drudgery work on my list that I took the day today to plant my first winter garden. The drudgery included putting the dirt back into the hole for the plumbing fix Al and I did a few weeks back. The fix is holding and it's now safe to refill the cavern. After that, I emptied the dirt from the somewhat smaller but wider cavern where Al and I fixed plumbing two years ago.
Dang it, I just finished editing the print version of the book and opened this page to start this post, only to remember that I have water running on my trees.
Only one chapter left! Well, one chapter--the hardest one, of course--and an epilogue. But I don't count epilogues because they're more postscript than chapter. I just read through the book again to check for any loose ends that I haven't pulled through. As I did I thought of all my knitter friends. Miss a stitch and the whole thing is off. So, because my mind is still stuck in 1211 AD, this is going to be a quick post.
So, I'm sitting at my desk watching the day steadily darken with the eclipse. Unfortunately, there's nothing to see. Here in Arizona, the place famous for 360 days of sunshine a year, it's cloudy. That fact is likely to save my eyes. I can just imagine myself shooting a glance skyward without thinking. Yep, with only four chapters left in the book, it's safer for me to stay inside.
When I say "free water" I do not mean the stuff that's been falling from the skies so copiously of late. Although that free water is really nice and has saved me much time dragging hoses and running sprinklers this summer, the free water I'm talking about is the water that comes from the spring, my drinking water. Having that sort of free water is the kind of thing that makes real estate agents sing. They might tell me things like "You will have more water than you know what to do with" and "You'll have water forever."
Yesterday afternoon, we had the storm of the summer. I hope.
It's been quite a couple of weeks for predators out here. This is because something large--the mountain lion, I assume--killed something equally as large between my fence and the creek. (Of course, the mystery writer in me spun a completely different story. Morbid is now my middle name.)
India isn't the only place where Monsoons are a given. Northern Arizona has its own rainy season and it started with a bang last Friday. Well, not a bang as much as multiple crashes of thunder.
For anyone uncomfortable with the idea of animals being slaughtered for meat, you may want to skip this post. I promise there will be nothing graphic, just a difficult description and a little sadness.
Don't ask me why the title of that movie (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) came into my mind as I looked at the little black hen sitting on nine turkey eggs. It just did. From that moment on, she became Miss Jean Broody to me.
Yes, that is a picture of dirt. Well, not dirt. It’s compost, specially made for me by piglets and chickens.
Once again, I lost a day. Monday whizzed by while I was caught in the early 13th Century, researching just how long a Medieval courser can gallop on summer-dried ground. "Arcane" is my middle name. (Not really, but I'm not about to reveal my middle name to anyone. I hate it.) Oh, and I finally found the "soundtrack" to this new book.
Oh man, and I thought the sheep were a ravening horde! They got nothing on piglets. Today the eight of them decimated my new chard on my new hugel. When they were done eating greens, they did a little tilling for me, although not quite where I needed it.
This is a hard post to write. However, I feel if I don't write it I'd be painting a false picture of farming life. Last week was a week of death.
After much schedule juggling my granddaughter Judah finally made it to the farm for a twenty-four hour visit. She's sixteen, is joining the National Honor Society, and has two part-time jobs. The first job, working in the kitchen at UCYC in Prescott, actually provides her a little income. Her second part-time job as an actress feeds her soul.
Well, this time my post is late due to the weather. As I sat down to the computer to write this post on Monday, I glanced out the window to discover that the sky had gone black and the wind was howling. Figuring I had about 30 minutes to get all my critters into their safe zones, I dashed outside. If you live in the Cornville area, you know what happened after that.
I don't know what to do with that ovine girl! She isn't in any distress so I'm still willing to wait (im)patiently for the big event
Butcher n. 1 a person who slaughters or dresses meat 2 a person who mangles, ruins or bungles something...
After almost six years living smack-dab in the middle of this predator superhighway, I've figured out the cycle. On normal nights, the hunters come out just after full dark and hunt until around 2 AM, when most of the nightwalking critters settle into their burrows or nests. The predators then return to give it one more shot just before dawn when the daywalkers begin to stir.
Vacation–real vacation, not just a hiatus from the computer–was GREAT! I can hardly believe how much fun I had. There wasn’t much “doing” but there was plenty of high-class wine and five star food—the highlight of my trip was sharing meals with relatives I adore.
I haven’t left the farm for “time off” since July 2015. Prior to that excursion, I think I’d only been on vacation once since I moved onto the property in 2010.