Sugar Creek Farm

A crazy day, but a good one nonetheless.

After work our carpenter showed up and we talked about the porches some more.

While I was getting supper together Matt planted 50 feet of onion sets.

After supper Olivia and I planted 2 kinds of carrots and a mixture of radishes.

It was nice to have some one-on-one time with each other. We talked about the tooth fairy and whether or not she “recycles” teeth to new babies. We talked about tornados. We talked about whether we’d rather be a chicken, who has no teeth but only lives 9 weeks, or a person, who gets to live a long time but has teeth and cavities. Can you tell we had a trip to the dentist today and Olivia had a couple of cavities? “Mom, if you tell me to brush my teeth and I don’t do it, ground me for a week, okay?”

So with all of the things we’ve planted in the past 4 days, I hope we get the rain they’re predicting!

Now I’ve hauled 6 or 7 loads of laundry up 2 flights of stairs and I’m off to get it all folded and put away before I collapse for the night. Night!

2 more calves this week, only 1 to go. As we’d hoped, these older cows have this birthing thing down pat. No problems.

Art – because his face looks like it was done with a paint brush.

Socks – because he has white “socks” on his rear feet. Not terribly original, but then again it’s usually a cat or horse name.

This afternoon we did some planting – 200 potatoes, 85 strawberries, mesclun mix, 4 apple trees and 3 raspberry bushes. Madeline was our big helper today, planting most of those strawberries behind Matt digging the holes.

Rafe has been banished from the garden after he un-planted the peas and trampled the spinach bed. He now has his own garden to dig in, outside of the main garden.

The eagles are still around. Matt was within 2 fence posts of one today. At this point I’m wishing they’d move on. We’ll be moving our little chicks outside in just 2 weeks and I don’t want any of them being carried off.

A beautiful, productive, and tiring day. Time for something cold to drink. With alcohol in it.

Today was one of those days where everything was just right with the world.

As Rafe and I were leaving to take him to the babysitter this morning, a train was going by. We just stopped to watch it. There was no freaking out about getting in the car right now we are late! Lately “living in the moment” has been difficult for me, but there it was this morning.

Then I had my car serviced, and when I picked it up the dealership guys had vacuumed it. Anyone who regularly transports 3 kidlets in their automobile can attest to what a treat this is. I’m thrilled whenever I manage to clean the stuff out of it – sippy cups, discarded sucker sticks, articles of clothing that have been stripped en route (how do they do that while strapped into a carseat?). But to have it vacuumed…ahh, pure bliss.

On my way home with newly-vacuumed car, I stopped at the mailbox and there was a piece of mail addressed to Sugar Creek Farm. Cool! It somehow makes us more official, to actually have people acknowledging our existence on an envelope.

Mid-afternoon our carpenter stopped to discuss what projects we’re wanting him to do. He told me we’re at the top of his list and our projects will come before everyone else’s this year. How often do you hear that?

When Matt got off work he and Troy gave the garden its first tilling. Wow. The soil was like butter. Soft and fluffy, with a nice amount of moisture.

I made pizza for supper, which is something I usually do on Friday nights. But this time of year, with all the busyness, we too often end up resorting to carryout pizza. I perservered and came through with the homemade pizza.

After supper I actually got to put some seeds in the ground. This is at least 2 – if not 6 – weeks earlier than we got to last year. It was so much fun, so restorative to get my hands in the dirt. Got the first succession of garden and snap peas sown, and the first of the spinach.

Once it got dark we all sat around the living room, eating ice cream, and watched the end of Sixteen Candles.

A really good day.

Tonight I got together with a group of friends I’ve been part of for I think eleven years now. We meet once a month and play Bunko, taking turns hosting in our homes.

We decided to do something special for our final get-together until fall, so we had a Do-It-Yourself Murder Mystery at the fabulous Blue Belle Inn Bed & Breakfast in St. Ansgar, Iowa. The setting of the mystery surrounded two young lovers – Virgen White & E.Z. Ryder – who have eloped to the “Love Me Tender” wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The bride’s father objects, crashes the wedding, and winds up dead on the floor with a bullet in his heart. But who fired the shot?

We had wonderful food and a lot of laughs. This may become an annual tradition!

Working…trying to make AcuCOBOL and the Excel object library work together. A strange union, exciting when it works, ultra-frustrating when it doesn’t.

Listening…to selected songs from Heart’s Greatest Hits. What can I say, I dig chicks that rock. How about that keyboard solo in Magic Man? I’ve gotta sit down and learn that one of these days. For current chicks that rock, check out The Donna’s. But the girls stole my CD and I can’t find where they’ve hid it.

Farming…I thought I was going to be helping Matt build a bull pen tonight, but he just about got it done himself last night. I hope this one holds – in the 3 years we’ve had a bull on the farm we’ve not been successful at keeping one contained yet. I need to give the chicks some more bedding, and work on the garden layout, too.

Taking…Claritin-D. Ah, allergy season!

Cooking…Broiled wild salmon, steamed broccoli, and rice au gratin for supper.

Missing…
my friend Susan. I’m the one with the small hair. Dig our matching shades?

Thinking…about choices.

“Choice by choice, moment by moment, I build the necklace of my day, stringing together the choices that form artful living.” ~ Julia Cameron

“It’s when we’re given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.” ~ Dorothy Gilman

“Be unafraid to take a chance. Our lives are woven from the choices we make.” ~ Flavia

“I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can’t very well get out of it.” ~ Vincent van Gogh

“Life is a sum of all your choices.” ~ Albert Camus

“There are always two choices, two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it’s easy.” ~ unknown

“Choice. The problem is choice.” ~ Neo, from The Matrix Reloaded

What do you get when you send 2 girls to Fleet Farm to buy cattle panels with their father? A can of Flarp and a whole lotta fun.

I think this is Matt’s strategy for keeping the boys away when the girls are older. Make them as well-versed in the fine art of disgusting noises as possible. He won’t have to drive the boys away with a gun. The girls themselves will drive the boys away with their flatulance skills.

So far, though, it doesn’t seem to be working. Madeline has her first “real” boyfriend this year. It’s not like there’s much to having a boyfriend when you’re in the 4th grade. There’s no dating, no kissing, no hand-holding even. You buy each other candy. You might sit together at lunch sometimes.

It’s not working with Olivia, either. Last year – in kindergarten – the teacher had to have a talk with one of Olivia’s suitors who insisted on holding her hand in the lunch line and sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulders at circle time. Even though she’s our loudest child at home, at school she’s very very quiet. So her teacher intervened on her behalf and gave the boy a lesson in “personal space”.

I wonder if this will be one of the things they remember about their childhood – making their dad laugh out loud and their mom roll her eyes with a can of Flarp.

Friday the garden was in good shape for discing so Matt and Rafe did a little farming.

Saturday as soon as I got home from class we went to Tractor Supply and bought a 6.0HP Troy-Bilt rear tine tiller with counter rotating tines. A long longed-for addition to the farm. Matt says, “Soon it will be me and Troy in the garden.”

Today Matt and I spent three and a half hours putting up cattle panel trellis for the peas and cukes, and surrounding the garden with chicken wire. Then the hens had to be booted out of the garden, so we recruited the girls to round them up.

I caught 2 and Olivia caught the rest. She’s quite the farmhand. Madeline just didn’t have any luck at it.

By then it was suppertime, so we didn’t get so far as to plant anything.

The hens eat less and less of the feed I put out, now that bugs and worms are more plentiful again. I only put out a pound today. And they’re laying more eggs again – 24 eggs today out of the 27 hens. Now to get some egg sales!

Yesterday we sold Kickapoo, aka “the watch horse”. It was a sad day. Olivia cried. I cried. But I know he’ll be happier with his new owners.

The plan when we got him was to let him hang with the cows. Unfortunately he wasn’t down with that plan. He wouldn’t let the cows up to the bale feeder to eat hay. He chased the calves right through the fence and out of the pasture. He failed at plays well with others.

So he was relegated to his own little fenced-off piece of the pasture. He wasn’t able to go out in the main pasture to graze. We don’t have enough acres here to keep him separated. It just wasn’t the happiest life for a horse, which isn’t in keeping with our philosophy about raising animals.

He was also very aware of the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to horses. This was made obvious when his future owners came to have a look at him. They saddled him up and rode him right down the driveway. When I had tried that he’d only go so far, then turn on a dime and back to the barn at a dead run.

But he served his purpose in the months he was here. He was a kind and gentle old guy who loved kids. Perfect for the girls to learn how to be safe around horses. I saw this yesterday as Olivia was brushing him one last time. He started to walk away from her and she moved away from his backend. It is instinctive for her now, something she learned in her time with him. Now the girls know how much work is involved in taking care of a horse. And they’ll really know when Matt has them muck out Kickapoo’s old stall!

He’s going to a 15-year-old girl who will be working him and training him for the 4-H horse show. So we’ll be able to go and watch him at the county fair this summer, which will be cool.

Happy Trails, Kickapoo.

~

When I went out to check on the chicks before bed last night they were all asleep, in an almost perfect figure 8.

Drove down to Hoovers this morning and picked up the broiler chicks – 102 of them.

Box-o-chicks

When I get chicks home I take them out of the box one-by-one, counting as I go, and dip each one’s beak in water to get it started. Within minutes they’re running around as if, well, as if the sky is falling. And they are loud! Between the running about and the constant, loud cheeping it’s like a chick enactment of the floor of the NYSE.

As I predicted, I’m obsessively checking on them every hour. Good thing, too. Just now – after only one hour – I found two that somehow had half their bodies in the drinking water, wet and cold and shivering. Several others were also partially wet and shivering. Chicks do not handle cold and wet well at all. I took the two worst ones and put them under the lamp in the pullets’ brooder where they’ll have less competition for the heat. At this point I don’t know if they’ll make it or not. The others I moved underneath the lamp in their own brooder to warm up again.

Broilers are one of the few types of livestock where the term hybrid vigor doesn’t seem to apply. Usually crossbred animals (and vegetables, for that matter) are heartier than purebred stock, less prone to illness and disease. Cornish Cross broilers, on the other hand, are delicate. They’ll die over the littlest thing. Too hot, too cold, too drafty, too wet, too dry, not enough feed, too much feed. Things really have to be just right for them.

So for the rest of today – and probably tomorrow, too – I’ll be adjusting the height of the brooder lamps, checking feed and water levels, and just observing for signs of trouble.

Bellied up to the bar

I’m wishing I had something philosophical, something poetic, something thought-provoking to write tonight. But this time of year my thoughts and activities are necessarily directed towards the practical, the execution of plans made. The class is focusing now on accounting, and budgeting. I imagine there are CPA’s who might disagree but in my mind there’s not much poetry in accounting. (However I do happen to think there can be poetry in computer programming 🙂

Today I got the broilers scheduled for butchering on June 8th. I feel a bit sad when I think that their deaths have been arranged before they’ve even hatched. But while they’re with us they will experience the happiest, most chickeny life we can manage to give them.

My main goal with the chickens this year is to decrease death loss in the broilers. I’m trying to get it down to 10% or less. Last year was the first year we raised chickens. We raised 2 batches of one hundred broilers, and will do so again this year. Last year’s death loss was 20% on the first batch, mostly in the brooder phase. I made some adjustments to the feed and feeding schedule and lost zero in the brooder phase with the second batch. Most of the death loss in that batch came in a single day, which we will forevermore refer to as Black Tuesday.

I’ve been significantly more relaxed with the 25 chicks we received Monday than I was with any of the chicks last year. But the pullets and roosters are just for fun. The broilers are the money birds, so we’ll see if I revert to obsessively monitoring their every waking hour after they arrive on Thursday.

Happy and Blue 2’s comment about the chicks being airmailed reminded me of a story. The Amish around here don’t bother to meet the mail truck in town to pick up their chicks. My dad is a rural mail carrier. He carries the chirping box around the route in his car and delivers the chicks to the Amish at their homes with the rest of their mail. They take them right in the house and put them by the stove to warm up. I wonder how long they keep them in the house.

I did receive a bit of poetry yesterday in the mail. (Delivered by my dad, of course!) Poetry in a soap, via Natural Impulse. Yummy, yummy! Not only is Karen a talented soapmaker, she is also a gifted writer and photographer. Her blog is my daily dose of poetry.