The lil' farmstead is on the move...

Well it's finally final! We're finally home owners. We started looking at this place I'm sitting in right now way back in March. We believed we would be moving in beginning June, but things kept getting in the way, and I'm very happy to say that we are HOME!! Well it doesn't quite feel like home just yet-- our chickens and Maremma and rabbits are still at the old place, as well as tools and things in the storage sheds. And I've only got the kitchen set up and the clothes put away-- still many many things to do before we can have a house-warming soiree.

We bought a place on three acres overlooking Kachemak Bay and Mount Iliamna. It has good western exposure, with some flat grassy areas to the south of the house. There is a new shop on the property and.... a barn!!! Of good size too. I've moved the goats here in order to keep a closer eye on Belta, as I believe she will be kidding here very soon. I think she might be on gestation day 142, but I never actually saw the coitus happen. I love that word. Coitus.

The dang camera is still packed up somewhere in this woodpecker's boardinghouse. I should have dug it out yesterday, but instead I foolishly believed that the sun was going to stick around a day or so. Not so. Today, nothing but rain. Anyways, pictures to come.

This parcel has never been cultivated, save a few cottonwoods transplanted in the yard. I'm super excited to layout the new garden, but not too enthused to actually do the work of clearing what is there. Right now, it's just a bunch or fireweed where I plan to have the kitchen garden, and I thought the goats could help me out on that front. HOWEVER, both times I've let them escape the barn, they've gone the opposite way straight up the driveway toward the road where a big husky lives two plots up. Fearing the worst, both excursions have ended shortly after this by tying the buck up in the barn and luring the does in with grain. It takes a lot of coaxing, let me tell you. I've had the girls for almost a year now, and they're still just about as flighty and wild. I think I'll just wait and enjoy the fireweed bloom, them pick it and feed it to the goats in order to clear the garden plot.

Then the layering begins. Maybe. I'll probably have to terrace a bit. That'll be good anyways to see what the soil consists of. But layering. I'm excited to try this no-dig stuff. Well, I'll dig salmon carcasses into the soil about a foot, so that and the terracing are hopefully the extent of my garden groundbreaking. No till, baby. No turning over. Leave that soil structure alone once it's in place. So back to the layering, the building of this beautiful soil structure. Salmon one foot deep. Thick cardboard to keep the weeds down. All that bedding in the old barn now. Everything in my compost heap at the old place. All the vegetable harvest stuff the animals won't touch. Kelp deposited on the beach by late summer, early fall storms. Then the pile of old bedding that has been piled up outside the old barn all summer. Then, alder leaf fall right before the snow flies.

So, I think I just about have the barn ready to bring home the cluckers. I'm going to try a bit of a different layout than I was using at the old place. Instead of having completely separate areas dedicated to each animal, I'm just going to make the chicken feed area inaccessible to the goats. For the time being, I think I'll just toss the goat's hay onto their platforms twice a day instead of using a hay rack. The reason being that I am still not looking forward to picking all that hay out of Olga Petunia's fleece from this spring!! (I had the rack hung too high.) Also, at the old place the hens started laying eggs in the hay rack this summer, and I can't get them to go back to laying in their nesting boxes. I'm sure I'll end up tweaking this set-up quite a bit as the winter progresses, but one of the main draws to it is that I'll only need one pop-door for all the animals, and fewer interior walls makes for quicker cleaning. I'll eventually have the feed storage area fenced off, as well as a milking parlor, but right now I'm not even sure I'll be able to get my hands on my soon-to-be-milker's teats without wreaking havoc and pandemonium.

As for the rabbits, well I butchered all but two of them, and I only plan on keeping one of them to continue my breeding program. A friend in town bought some Flemish Giants this spring and I'm hoping to get a doe from her to start breeding this fall. From what I've read, the Flemish Giant isn't usually considered a very good meat breed because the bone to meat ratio is high, but I think if I cross bred with the satin I have, I may get a good product. Something I learned from cross-breeding goats of differing size is to always be sure that the doe is the bigger breed of the two, otherwise there may be tremendous birthing complications. Note to self: brush up on sexing rabbits and confirm the gender of each before throwing them together to go at it.

This spring I built a tractor hutch, and was planning on building another one so that I can house one doe in each and also have a separate hutch for the buck. I designed the hutch so that in the summer it can be a tractor in the yard, and in the winter it can hang on the wall in the barn. I'm also exploring vermiculture bins beneath the hutches for composting what kitchen scraps the animals won't eat, possibly chicken manure, and of course the rabbit droppings.

As it is right now, I don't have fencing up anywhere, so that's another project I need to start thinking about very soon. I'm sure Tufo the LGD will grow to be a wonderful protector, but those goats wandering up toward the road worries me so much that I'm not sure I should even let them out again until I have some kind of fencing up, even temporary. As for (semi)permanent fencing, I'm thinking about working on a wattle fence. I've got a large hillside covered in alders, and I think this would make a fairly impenetrable fence. I've also got access to electric fencing, but I know that takes quite a watchful eye (perimeter walks) to keep the current from grounding out on new growth. For the time being, I can borrow some 6'X6' chain link panels to at least let them out to get air and light. Currently, there are no windows in the building. Add that on to the honey-do list!

So for any of you folks reading this out there, I'd be interested in your take on a few topics:
Has anyone done the no-till gardening method long term? Does anyone know how long sheet composting takes to break down?
For anyone who has chickens and goats, do you house them together? What is your layout and how does it work out for you?
Livestock fencing: what works best for you?

Hope your summer has been bountiful and beautiful!

Chickens & Weasels

I started my flock out this spring with 9 chicks from Sterling Meadows Hatchery, a motley little clutch of 3 Orpingtons (Black, Lavender, and Black and White Splash), a Black Copper Maran, 2 Mille Fleur D'Uccles, and one each Rhode Island Red, Aracauna, and Barred Plymouth Rock.

They pretty much took care of themselves this summer while I was on overload with setnetting, and grew into beautiful (and handsome) pullets and cockerels.

Well, this fall wreaked havoc on them, particularly the influx of weasels looking for a good meal or just a good massacre. The first to fall were my noisy bantam Mille roos. Both of them in the same night. I never did get a good picture of frilly little Tilly and Dilly! Although they were slated for butcher anyhow (too much cocky action with three roosters), it is a seriously unfortunate event to find that some little foot-long bastard already finished them off for you & tainted all that good stock you were looking forward to! We set a livetrap with one of the Mille carcasses, and caught a slinky little ermine, of which we promptly dispatched to smithereens.

Shortly after that event, three pullets escaped their newly-expanded run on nightfall, and the Rhode Island Red didn't make it back the next morning. So we were plodding along modestly at about an egg a day (the Orpingtons or Aracauna hadn't started laying yet) for about two weeks, everybody pretty content with one big ROOmonster, Pharaoh, and his 5 hen harem.

Then the little bastard struck again. I found my beautiful big rooster sprawled out in the sopping duff by the light of my headlamp. By the way his beak was tucked down into his chest, it looked to me like he had been drug around by the neck a bit. I guess I had gotten a little lackadaisical about securing them in the coop by nightfall after I started giving them supplemental light in the evenings until 8. The light did not deter the ermine as I thought it would. I didn't make it out to the coop until 830, and by that time Pharaoh was already cold and stiff. Now not only was this a magnificent specimen of cluck-cluck cockiness to be simply appreciated and missed, but he would have provided a good hunk of meat too.

I panicked and felt my heart up in my throat as I buried Pharaoh in the compost pile and worried about the hens. I set the livetrap again (baited with salami now- just couldn't deal with hackin' off a hunk of Pharaoh at this point), and while I was fumbling with the contraption, I saw the nasty cute little bastard scampering through the run IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!!! Now, from everything I've heard and read, these small weasels pretty much only hunt during dusk and dawn.  And here goes this brutally brash little bugger traipsing through the chicken yard, darting between scrawny pullet legs, and nary taking a nibble! My dog Hazel and I spotted him and yelped, barked, charged, and generally raised a ruckus. I dashed inside to grab the cat, and staked him out (not physically literally staked) near where I saw the ermine skitter away to.

At this point, I'm resolved to lock up the chickens and rabbits snugly before dusk, which is an aggravating task with a toddler in tow in the pouring rain when the animals aren't quite ready to hit the hay. I could take the more proactive road and set out to kill that ermine bastard, but I know another one would quickly take his place, and the trapping and drowning (how I imagine offing an ermine) would never end. Another (impossible) option would be to try and make the entire run weasel-proof. They have been reported to fit through an inch opening, can climb, gnaw, dig, and rip welds. Nah, I think I'll take the more preventative, precautious, permaculturally trodden path of avoiding predators, like our native prey would naturally do.  Perhaps over time and generations, evolution and natural selection will give my strain of chickens and rabbits a heightened sense of predator evasion? For now, I just have to be sure their safe-havens are just that. Ramshackle bomb-proof. And put the cat on duty.

I'd be interested in other peoples' approaches to rodent-control. I've done a bit of poking around in online forums, and I've only come across the two options of trapping and fencing them out. Does anybody out there have any other ideas? Some kind of voodoo herbal mojo chant or the likes?

Background Noise....

I'll start out on this journal venture with a little about this place and what we're doin' here. We live on 42 acres of steep coastal northern temperate rainforest land in Seldovia, Alaska. The ridge slopes down to a flat meadow which almost borders the slough lagoon, emptying into and filling up with Seldovia Bay waters. In the forties, the original owners of the two-acre parcel pastured a few cows in the meadow, so even before the mud-wracked road was laid in the nineties, this was a farm. And we have always called it 'the farm' from the time my dad purchased it in 2001. But a decade ago, our intentions of farming were limited to a small kitchen garden and landscape renovation.

More recently, we purchased 200 bloomin' blueberry plants from Michigan, planted them in rows atop rotting spruce logs, and failed miserably at protecting them from their first Alaskan winter (which was unusually cold and barren of snowcover), and hence also failed at cultivating our blueberry ranching dream. Temporarily, at least. I did manage to have the foresight to plant a small nursery patch of each of the various cultivars, and those are thriving, albeit needing elbow room and row-covering to truly reach their potential. I'll write more on that at a later date, as I do plan on dividing and expanding our berry patch in the near future.

Around that time, my dad also acquired two wethered dairy bucks (which was another adventure worth a few jaunts down the memory lane of goat antics), and my sister and dad dabbled around in beekeeping.  They kept them for two years, and actually had enough luck to see quite a few bees through the winter. But the second summer was a year notably low in pollen availability, and they ended up providing the bees sugar water throughout most of the summer, and the quality of the honey suffered. No color or depth, but still worth harvesting. In retrospect, both my dad and sister say there was probably enough spruce pollen at least to suffice. This is another topic I'll revisit later in this blog, as I do plan on rejuvenating the hives with a spring bee order.

This property was purchased in two parcels. The lower 2-acre piece came with a two-story 2 BD, 1BA gingerbread ticky-tacked cottage house tucked back in a sitka spruce copse, a pooshky & fireweed field flopped out before it, with a protected but spacious cathedralesque view of the saltwater lagoon, that briny artery to town. There was a redwood snorkel hottub and faded shingle shopshed, a rotting log bridge across our tricklin' crick, and no direct sun in winter. Dad weed-whacked a ton that first summer, then finally bulldozed the field of native herbaceous growth. I started my inaugural garden here with a covered double-swing to enjoy it on. We shoveled labrynthine pathways through the snow and I returned from college & settled in. A couple years later, Daddy-O bought the forty-acres caddy-corner to the lower field. 40 acres of steep lowlands alder scrimmage and prickly thickets of spruce and devil's club understory. A year-round creek, and one top corner of the parcel even corralled the gorgeous gorge biting into said creek. South-western exposure.  Dad had a road cut in up the mountain the same summer I put up a wall-tent over-looking Seldovia Bay.

We've made a lot of changes to this little slice of landscape, and we've gone through a lot of alterations in  other aspects of life, too. A whole lot happens in 10 years. We've added on to the shopshed to accommodate goats and chickens, turned a relocated greenhouse into a new workshop, fell and milled choice swaths of spruce, expanded gardens and tinkered contentedly. My man and my son and I currently live in the original 80s era cottage and keep up with the continual maintenance. Future projects include building a milled-log house, sauna, and greenhouse out of salvaged windows. Current preoccupations include chickens, goats, rabbits, and permaculture intentions.

Here are a few shots of our place & life.

So that's the short story on the neck of these woods. What's led you to deliberate your intentions?