Hurricane Farm

No doubt by now everyone has heard of the blight that has been ravaging tomato patches throughout the country.  Despite our hopes of avoiding its catastrophic grasp, it made its way to our gardens this past week.

We had many things going in our favor in our attempt to be "blight free":

--we started all our own plants
--we grew only heirloom varieties, no hybrid plants
--we added nothing "off farm" to our garden (all fertilizers were from our own animals)
--we live in a valley and are usually 5-10 degrees colder, which was in our favor
--the blight hit farms around the state for over a month, and we had no signs of its presence

Alas, given the ability of the blight to travel several miles by air, ultimately we had no chance.

Here is a shot of some of the tomatoes a day before we discovered blight.

Vibrant, healthy plants full of lush tomatoes.

Two days later...

The blight starts at the bottom and quickly works it way up the plant.  It is a fungus and spreads rapidly in wet weather, which we have had plenty of this summer.

Erica's first course of action was to pull off the infected leaves and then spray the plants and fruit with natural soap mixtures.  She and the kids experimented with several different mixtures.  Here is what was left after removal and treatment.

Some close-ups of the infected leaves.

Ultimately, the decision was made to pull all the tomatoes from the vines.  Erica brought in more than 300 pounds of tomatoes and there are still some left to gather.  Heirloom tomatoes are sold at a premium, especially this year when few have made it through the blight at all.  Fetching over $3.00 a pound, many find tomatoes to be one of their more important crops. 

Rinsing the tomatoes and washing them with soap mixture helps to rid them of blight and will allow most of them to ripen off the vine.  Currently there are hundreds of pounds of tomatoes spread out on tables on the porch.

Day by day, we have to pull the tomatoes that continue to show signs of blight but we are also able to gather the ripe fruit from the table.  Hopefully, most of it will survive long enough to ripen.  Here are some examples of tomatoes that made it.

The blight has been traced back to seedlings shipped up from the South to large stores like the Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart.  One can only wonder if we would be blight-free if more folks started their own seedlings or shopped in local establishments and avoided those large retailers altogether.

Now we're all lamenting the days when the biggest predator was this little guy:

This is our second late summer here at our farm and just about now it seems we have an annual invasion!  First, at night one begins to hear chirping.  It begins low, and then builds to a piercing crescendo as the twilight gives way to the summer darkness.

In the morning, when looking around on tree trunks, truck tires, sandbox lids, and swingset legs, one finds empty shells...all that remains of the night's symphony.

Here is one newly hatched cicada with two empty shells.  These were all over the tires on the trucks and most everything else near the spruce trees in the front.  They seem to emerge from dozens of holes around the base of these trees.  Look closely and you can see how the back splits open on the shell to allow the transformed bug to emerge.

We are talking about cicadas.  For about a week this time of year, hundreds of these rather large insects emerge from holes in the ground to hatch from their beetle-like shell with newly formed wings.  They climb up a few feet on whatever they can find, emerge from their shells, and fly off in an ungainly fashion only to mate and disappear underground again to repeat the cycle.

We found one cicada that had yet to hatch.  It was looking for something to climb upon.  We set it on a stick and took a series of photos as it emerged from its shell.

Eventually, with all of us crowding around watching, the bug fell off the stick.  We then put it on a railing to continue watching its emergence.

Over the course of about 30 minutes, the bug underwent its metamorphosis.  The kids were very surprised and excited to watch it up close.

Luminous at first, it slowly fades to a dull, speckled grey.  It's nice to have traditions, and we now have the late summer concerts of the cicadas here at the farm.

One of the projects that was on the slate this summer was to install gutters along the front edge of the barn.  Mainly I wanted to keep some of the water out of the pig pen, but also I wanted to try to keep the rain splashing on the barn sills to a minimum. 

We decided to run 1/2 of the legnth of the barn to start.  This would take care of the pig pen area and also it would be pretty hard to run more than 50 feet of gutter all in one direction.  Too much water would get in there and there would be overflow.

Pinning up gutters seemed like an easy task:

1. purchase gutters
2. install them on barn

Not SO simple, it turns out.  This project called for lots of pre-steps before we even got near the gutters.  One step was even involved paint (I loathe painting, anyone can tell you).  I mean, seriously, putting up gutters involves PAINT?!  What the heck...

We first had to install some trim work upon which to attach the gutters.  There was only about 1" of existing trim, not enough to provide the angle we'd need to run 50 feet.  So we tacked up some  6" pine to make a nice surface.  But, then we had to paint it.

Lucky for me, my kids love to paint!

They did such a great job that I only had to touch up areas here and there...I know where to turn ANYTIME I need any painting done.

I'm not sure how it happened, but I got more paint on my clothes than the kids did!

101 feet, 8 inches of "gutter-mount" painted and ready for the gutters...

The next step was the kids' favorite.  When I was building the new out-building, we often used the chalk-line.  They love snapping it and then reeling it back in.  We snapped a 51 foot chalk-line and proceeded to mount the gutters.  We bought these nifty little clips that simply clip into each channel of the gutter and then screw in with a power drill.  Nice and quick!  What was not nice and quick was all the sealing that had to be done to the seams between gutters, to the downspout, to the gutter end, etc...I dislike the caulking gun almost as much as the paint brush.  It especially becomes a chore on the third try at sealing it all correctly to keep it all from leaking.  Pretty soon, though, the kids will be able to handle the caulking gun, too.

The gutters are now up (ironically all the rain has gone away) and we're all ready for some dry less-wet-than-before hogs for the Fall.  Next time it rains, the gutters will whisk the water away to the edge of the barnyard where it will soak into the ground without making mud.

In order to sell meat here in Connecticut, one must visit a USDA inspected processing plant/butcher.  There are not any here in the state, believe it or not.  There is one in Rhode Island, that once one pays a membership fee, will process meats.  They do not, however, smoke any meats.  Not too useful for farmers who want bacon, ham, and the like.

So, we found a new place in Athol, MA.  It is 100 miles from our farm to theirs, but they are USDA inspected and will package our meats in individual cuts, labeled, and ready for farmers' markets.  They, also, do not have a smoker, but we found a place just southeast of Hartford that will smoke our meats.  They make a tasty kielbasa, too!  Until we have our own labels that can be approved by the USDA, the smokehouse makes up some for us. 

Not only do they do all this for us, but they offer curing WITHOUT nitrates and nitrites!  Whoo hoo!  Our customers have been pleased about this, for sure.

All in all, a good tasting product this time around!  Next time we'll be trying some of their Bratworst and maybe some other German preparations, which seems to be their specialty. 

Our grass fed beef is dry-curing as we speak, so we'll have that all packaged up in a couple of weeks.  Grass fed, all beef hotdogs, anyone?

We finally finished the general building of the new chicken coop/outbuilding.  There are still some things left to do, though, like add siding, roofing, a step, maybe a window box with some flowers...

But we have moved all the meat chickens and some of the young egg layers into it.  It took an extra couple of days to get the outside run portion put together.  I ended up using more of the leftover cut-offs from the lumber mill to frame in the run, which gives it a kind of rustic look.

When the moving day came, we first had to load up the chickens.

We backed the little truck right up to the barn and the kids and I loaded them into cages.  It took four trips in all to get every last one.

Violet and Liev especially liked being able to ride in the back of the truck as I drove it from the behind the barn to the new coop.  I remember riding in pick-up beds back from baseball games, to the movies, and all over the place when I was a kid, but that sort of thing is kind of outlawed now-a-days, I suppose.

We probably could have done the whole job with more cages and fewer trips, but the kids really liked the whole driving back and forth and catching chickens aspect of it.

Here is a shot of those lumber mill cut-offs in action.  They were well over 12 feet long, which allowed me to set fewer posts.  To the right you can see one of the windows that we reclaimed from the transfer station (there are 4 in all in this building).  I hung them so they tilt in (old-school chicken coop style).  This allows the air to circulate in the top of the window and then the warm air is sucked out through the openings in the joists atop the wall.  In a house one would block those openings up (with soffits) to keep out all the nasty little critters that try to get in.  But here in the chicken coop it makes for a nice air flow.  Standing in the coop with the windows open you can actually feel the breeze as the air circulates.  Pretty amazing.

I mounted the windows with door hinges...see next photo.  Also see Liev trying to convince the chickens to try out their now pop-hole and chicken yard.  (I think that you can also see part of Violet through the pop-hole...she is testing out the chicken's new ramp.)  Those white chickens all around on the floor are meat breeds.  They grow heavy and fast.  Liev is holding an egg layer the same age as the white ones...It is about 1/4 the size and weight of the white ones.

Smile.

There is the new building from a distance.  We'll add additional runs off the right side and the front next year, but for now the rear one offers plenty of fresh air and shade for the chickens on these hot summer days.  We're planning to put on that tin/metal roofing material like you see on all the homes in Vermont and New Hampshire.  We were thinking maybe white, as it would keep the building cool, but since it has such great ventilation already we might opt for red.  After I build the garden shed we'll order the roofing material for both buildings at once and save on some of the cost. 

We have a whole bunch of old rusty machines on our farm property.  They look like they have lived a long, prosperous, and useful life.  Someone, or lots of someones, has been using them for many years.  In fact, we still get loads of use out of them almost on a daily basis.  They are expecially helpful for "mining" in the garden for rocks, worms, and other "discoverable" stuff.

Here are some of the photos:

Our Calf Dozer...

Our Grader...

Our General Utility Truck (it used to be a crane, I think)...

And, of course, our Loader...

So every once in a while we have to go out into the main pasture and clean up a little bit.  Fences sometimes need to be tightened, and sometimes we have to remove undesirable plants to keep the pasture healthy and useful.  Aside from finding various remnants of super-huge fireworks that our friend Jeff brings over for July 4th, we have to contend with giant "pricker/cactus-like things."  (See photo below.)

If anyone can tell us what these things are, and what their purpose is (if any are known), we'd be much happier when working to rid our pasture of them.  They do have a beautiful purple flower that comes around mid-to-late August.  Problem with that, though, is that when the flower comes so do all the pesky little seeds that scatter around to make more of these things.  We got most all but one of them last year, I think, but that one that we let bloom procreated all over the place!  I know right where it was, too.  Smack dab in the middle of the turkey's pasture.  It managed to spread over several acres all on its own.  What a great job it did!

You can see from the above that the cattle love to eat just about all that grows in the field EXCEPT these little buggers.  Now, Sarah, the milk goat, does enjoy eating these things, but I have kept her out of the pasture lately since the largest cattle is kind of standoffish around other four-legged creatures.  He likes (or at least abides) the turkeys, geese, chickens, ducks, and crows, though.  Check out the next shot where it almost looks like a carpet of grass except for the presence of these prickly devils.  We'll be putting the sheep in to clean up whatever the cattle missed and then after two weeks or so with this weather, the field will be ready for the next set of cattle to move in.

We all worked on getting the pasture in order that day.  You have to try to get the whole root out; otherwise, the pesky bugger just grows right back!

Here comes the reinforcement, pink shovel in hand!

If these plants have any value, then we have yet another thing that we're naturally great at growing (add to list of rocks, stones, poison ivy...).  I generally don't wear gloves, especially on such a hot day, but MAN, those things have a nasty bite to them.  The prickers are up to an inch long.  I have no idea how the goat can eat such a thing.

Maybe it's an acquired taste, say, like hot pepper or anchovies.

Liev came out with his shovel and worked pretty hard along side of us until he started to spot parts of the fireworks.  He then set about to collecting all that he could find, making a pile of the pieces, and trying to assemble his own "rocket ship."

A lush pile of "pricker/cactus-things."  This was merely 1/3 of our take for the afternoon.  It would have been a bountiful harvest if we were harvesting, say, ANYTHING but these things.

My Dad came down to lend a hand at the multitude of tasks that I had lined up for the weekend and three things were discovered:

1.  Pliers should be added to the "must have" list of farm tools.

2.  Cutting and chopping wood should not be done in 85+ degree weather.

3.  Where there is one skunk, there is bound to be another.

Just as I was about to make my way to bed I heard a soft, and then quite loud and nasty scratching outside.  It was ANOTHER SKUNK, apparantly trying to eat the cat's food dish.  I was wondering why, for the past several days, the cat's water dish was filled with dirt.  Well, the skunk must have been washing its paws in there before eating the cat's food. 

I set up the trap again and left a note for my Dad, letting him know that he might want to use the front door in the morning.  There just might be a skunk surprise at the back door in the morning.