Pleasant Valley Farm

We've had such lovely Indian summer weather lately! It's a refreshing change from the rain we've had for too long this fall. It has truly been an extreme growing season- either far too much rain, or not nearly enough. We were so excited to have the earliest-ever hay made this year- we had it dry and in the barn on June 1. The second cutting was looking great as of late August, but with rain in the forecast and falling every day or every other day, we had to wait. We needed 4 or 5 days of clear weather for the ground to dry, then cut and rake the hay, then load it up and get it into the barn. That clear weather finally arrived on Wednesday, and Dan cut the entire hay field. That is a massive undertaking for us and the horses, as we usually cut the field in 2-3 sections. This time, however, we didn't foresee any other possible time to get it in, plus delaying the cutting had allowed weeds to take over in places. We thought it best to cut the whole field, and even if we didn't use what was cut, it would at least mow the weeds away so part of the field wouldn't start out with a weed problem next year.

After cutting hay, we were fortunate that Dan and his brother spotted a rotary hay rake for sale nearby. They were able to bring it home Thursday. While by no means new, it's new to us and in much better condition than the one we would have been using. After greasing up the moving parts, Dan put it to good use on Friday and it worked great. Yesterday, the hay had finally dried and Dan and I were able to bring 3 large wagon loads into the barn, the equivalent of about half of the hay field. Although I love watching my Steeler football games, it was too pretty of a day to be inside and too important a job to skip out on. (I did have the game on the solar powered radio and my Hines Ward sparkly jersey on while driving the hay wagon and walking down the hay loads. I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person in the country that combines things like that- Steeler football and making hay with turn of the century methods & equipment.)

Making hay is the most important thing we do each year, even more important than spring planting. Hay is the staple that gets our livestock through the winter. It's what keeps our cattle growing and healthy through the winter, it feeds the sheep and goats and provides food & bedding for the pigs, and fuels our horses all winter & early spring, so they in turn can provide the pulling power to clean the barn or plow the fields. So seeing the mow fill up with hay is always a beautiful sight! It's always exciting to get hay into the barn without it getting rained upon. Dan finished up the final load alone on Sunday, and let me go off to do another important job, making dinner. Haymaking is hungry work!

By the time he came in, I already had a tasty potato salad (with our heirloom Mountain Rose potatoes and bacon) done, as well as a no-bake cheesecake type dessert I make with homemade blueberry butter and caramel. For the main course, I had T-bones from our grass-fed beef. Dan also talked me into making it surf-and-turf by cooking up some shrimp to go with it. Seafood is one thing we don't raise, but we do grow and process so much of our own stuff I don't feel bad about treating ourselves to some good seafood every so often, and this seemed like a perfect excuse! So as the shrimp were defrosting, I quickly headed outside to my secret chantrelle patch to see if I could scare up some late season mushrooms. Sadly, any I found were too old to be much good to eat, so I turned around and headed back to the house. On the way out of the woods, I spotted another kind of mushroom. It turned out to be an oyster mushroom, also very prized for eating. So I made shrimp with wild mushrooms, sauteed with a bit of garlic and my own champagne vinegar, making a wonderful sauce. I even had some curly parsley on the counter to dress up the plate, it really looked like a meal from some sort of 5-star restaurant. It's been crazy busy around here lately, so much of my cooking has been quick stuff, it was good to make a really nice meal. And I do get really excited when I can make something great by using a lot of what I've made here. Anymore I can just throw things together and it turns out great, I really don't follow a lot of recipes, unless I'm canning, and then consistency is very important.

Today, Dan and I along with Matt, got another 2 loads in the barn. Some of the hay is weedy, so Dan is out raking it to the edge of the field where it can smother some of the weeds along the fencerow. It doesn't really have enough edible stuff in places to make it worth the work of bringing it in. Then he'll rake the rest of the field once more, collecting all the bits that escaped the fork into one big row. We'll put that up, and that will be the end of the 2011 hay season. Ironically enough, although the first cutting was the earliest-ever, this will be the latest into the fall that we've ever successfully put up hay!

Yesterday was a busy day here.  We needed to move around some of the livestock as the trailer from our processor, Hirsch's Meats, was coming to pick up a cow, a couple of pigs, and the first of our spring lambs.  Dan and I had already moved the pigs from their tractor to a pen in the barn, but it was my job to get the sheep and Louie, the cow into the barn.  Louie wasn't hard as he eagerly followed the sound of a scoop full of feed into the barn. Emotionally it was harder than anything else though.  Louie has been here since early January of 2009, when he was just a weanling calf.  He was a character and I'll really miss seeing him, but that is the nature of raising beef.  I try to content myself with knowing I gave him a good and happy life while he was here, and that it was the complete opposite of the lives led by most cows destined for beef who must endure feedlot conditions.

Physically, rounding up the sheep was the most difficult part of the process.  Our sheep have been roaming 20+ acres of pasture all summer.  Being completely self-sufficient makes them much less tame than during the winter when they look to us for food.  They are also usually up in the far reaches of the pasture, so I don't have the daily interaction of feeding them treats.  I figured if I could just get the whole flock into the little paddock by the barn, Dan and I could pick out which lambs we would send.  So I walk off to find my sheep, armed with a small white bucket filled with feed and cookies.  This wasn't part of the usual routine, so the sheep started to run away.  Except Rosa.  She is one of the oldest ewes in the flock and is so tame she is somewhat of a pest at times.  But I was grateful she accepted my offer of snacks and as we began to walk towards the barn, the other sheep began to follow. I got Rosa and one of her twin lambs into the paddock, but the rest of the flock just wouldn't follow.  The more I tried to herd them through the gates, the more agitated they became until all of them ran back into the pasture, including Rosa.  I figured I would let them calm down and try again a bit later.  Later even Rosa ran and wanted no part of my cookies.  I needed to move them, I needed to do it in the next couple of hours, and at that time I was really wishing for a well-trained Border Collie or something that could help me.

I went back to the barn, where the horses were.  In addition to the work horses, Dan and I also have a miniature named Ponyboy (bought as a pet soon after our wedding)  and I have a Morgan mare named Sara.  Sara has been a part of my life for many years now.  She was 6 when I adopted her from a humane society and she is celebrating her 25th birthday tomorrow.  (Yes, that's correct-25 people years!)  Although 25 is retirement age for most horses, Sara hasn't slowed down much at all.  We've only started to train her to work in harness the past few years. She's descended from government-bred calvary horses, some of whom lived well into their 40's and I hope I am that lucky with her.  Giving her new tasks to do or new trails to ride truly seems to keep her young.  So I threw a saddle on my pony, tied a lasso to the horn and headed outside.  I left the barn door open because at this point I didn't care if I caught the sheep in the barn or the paddock.

Now I am no cowboy and Sara is no roping horse.  I didn't really think I would rope a sheep, the lasso was more to wave in the air to scare them in the direction I wanted them to go.  I tied it to the horn because it was raining and I didn't want to have to stop and get off if I dropped it!  Sara hasn't been ridden much at all this year, and like most horses she'd rather not go off by herself leaving her herdmates in the barn.  Plus I'd never herded anything on horseback so she had no idea what we were doing riding around in the rain in the pasture.  I tried to get her to trot, but she wanted to buck every time I got her out of her foot-dragging walk.  Once I got around behind the sheep, we were pointed back towards the barn and she was much happier to get up.  Things were going really well and I was quite proud of our work.  The sheep were thinking about going into the barn, and I figured this would be easy until Ponyboy, who had gotten himself loose, came blasting out of the barn, whinnying and chasing the sheep back into the pasture with glee.  I was so mad!!  I rode into the barn, shut the door and tied Ponyboy up very short. Now the sheep are back out in the pasture (for the 3rd time of the day) and are pretty spooked by all this action.  Sara, by this point, seemed to have grasped the work at hand and was eager to move quickly for me.  We got behind the flock again and pushed them into the barnyard.  They were even down by the gate to the paddock, but this was the tricky part.  Not only were the sheep scattered between a few pieces of machinery, the gates are located near the corner of our workshop building.  As the sheep headed back towards the hog house, Sara and I raced around the backside of the building to cut them off.  They turned, but I couldn't let them get up past the barn either, so back around the shop we would go at nearly full speed.  This happened multiple times.  At this point Sara was really seeming to have fun; she would get impatient when we had to stand for more than a minute or two.  It's like we were playing a game and she had just figured out the rules.  (If this sounds like too much credit to give to a horse's brain power, all I have to say is that you've never met Sara!)  At what seemed like long last, Rosa moved through the gate into the paddock.  She may have remembered the feed I had dumped on the grass earlier as sheep-bait when I was still working on foot.  One by one, then two by two, the rest of the flock followed.  Sara and I ran up to shut the gate and finish the job.  By now, both of us were soaked from the past hour's intermittent rain showers, so we went into the barn where I unsaddled her and gave her a few cookies as a thanks for her cooperation.

 Who says you can't teach an old horse new tricks?!?

July is here, bringing hot weather and a number of rain-free days in a row.  That means it's hay making time!  For us. it's as much a normal part of July 4th weekends as picnics and fireworks. We've been fortunate to have a stretch of dry weather, so we have been able to spread the work out over several days.  At this point, we've filled one side of the barn up and are working on filling the other mow.  Although the weather is 90 + degrees today, we're going to try and push to get the rest of the field in.  Even though there is only a slight chance of rain, the longer the hay lies in the field, the more it gets bleached by the sun.  So we're in for a long hot day, but hay making is one of the most crucial farm activities for us.  The amount and quality of the hay we put in determines how many animals we are able to support over the winter months.  Doing it ourselves is not only a significant cost saver over buying hay, we also know what quality we're feeding and that the hay is organically grown.  We are also able to complete the entire process with our horses, using no tractors or motorized equipment.  We use the horses to cut hay, rake it, and pull the wagon across the fields to pick it up. Instead of running a baler, we put it away loose.   Dan uses a pitchfork to load it while I walk back and forth packing it down for a nicely balanced load.  Both jobs are physically demanding.  Unloading is the easy part, as we have a hay claw on a trolley that lifts large amounts of hay, that carries it along a track and drops it in the mow.  If you'd like to see more, we have pictures and descriptions on our website at http://pleasantvalleyfarm.weebly.com/hay-making.html.  This picture shows our mares, Dolly & Dixie, with a nearly full wagon load of loose hay.

Although this stretch of dry weather means we need to irrigate the garden and the creek is running low, it did give us the rare opportunity to take a day off yesterday and enjoy a rare summer holiday.  Since we were confident that the mowed hay wouldn't be rained on, we had time to relax and have a cookout here.  July 4th is all about freedom and independence, and without our farmers, this country wouldn't be self sufficient.  So it made me smile as we sat down to our meal, to see how much of it we'd produced ourselves.  The steaks were grass fed beef from a cow who was standing in our pasture just a week or two ago.  The potato salad made great use of new potatoes dug from the garden just hours before, and was flavored with homemade mustard and dill from the herb garden.  I made deviled eggs as well with eggs I'd hand collected from my chickens.  A truly enjoyable meal, and I feel so fortunate that eating fresh from the garden isn't an isolated experience.  I'm frequently able to make an entire meal using just what we make or grow ourselves.

We hope you & your family had a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend too!

I'm commonly asked how we control weeds if we don't use pesticides.  The rototiller and hand weeding between plants are the main tasks once the plants are up.  For other veggies, like peppers & tomatoes, we put down a thin layer of black plastic, called mulch, and then make small holes to put the transplants in.  The black plastic absorbs the sun's warmth, heating the soil surrounding the roots up more quickly, but since light doesn't pass through, weeds don't grow underneath it.  The past two season Dan and I have put it down by hand, stretching it tight and straight before heaping dirt along all sides so it won't blow away in the wind.  This year we wanted longer rows, and frankly, putting it down can be a real pain, especially if even a tiny bit of wind kicks up.

Shortly before the farm went on hiatus, Dan and his family purchased a piece of horse drawn equipment called a plastic mulch layer.  It holds a large roll of plastic as well as a roll of drip tape, which goes underneath to provide irrigation.  There is a seat and a foot pedal which can be used to turn the wheels in case the horses step aside, since it's pretty important to keep the row of plastic as straight as possible. There are also two discs in the back to cover the sides of the plastic as you go along so it won't blow away. It had only been used a year or two, and besides the cobwebs from being stored in the barn, is practically new.

 The trickiest part was remembering how to thread everything through the rollers, but once that was finished  the job went very quickly.  I've been wanting to learn to operate more of the equipment this year, so I got to drive.  Once Dan covered the end of the plastic with some garden soil for a little tension, we put it in gear and away we went!  Overall, it was fairly straight...good enough that we didn't have to pull it up and do it over!  Although I'm getting much better at driving the team, this was absolutely my first time steering with my feet and hands at the same time, and it took a bit to get used to the feeling!  The plastic and drip line were cut, we turned around, centered the freshly tilled row, and Dan again covered the end.  Getting the hang of it a bit more, it was much straighter this time.  I was excited to learn about a new piece of our equipment, and was wishing just a bit that we needed to put down more than two rows.  I know it's pretty unusual for a non-Amish family to farm with horses, even more so for young farmers.  Also, few teamsters (originally the word referred to those working horses, not driving trucks) are women, so I'm both excited and proud to be one of those few.

The view from the driver's seat is pretty neat, don't you think? 

Every family has holiday traditions, whether it is the food we eat, the people we share the day with, or other special things that become part of our annual celebrations.   One thing I have wanted to make a tradition here at the farm is taking a Christmas Eve sleigh ride with my husband, Dan.  We got the sleigh ready, I brushed Sara, my little Morgan mare, put on her fancy harness, and I even added a few pieces of Christmas garland for a festive touch.  We started out into the snow-covered hay field, and it was magical.  She trotted away with a pace which felt like we could keep all day.  The sun gleamed off of the holly-like tinsel, and the single bell I adorned her hames with jingled merrily. It was a picture worthy of a Christmas card. At least for the first round.  

She began to pick up a bit too much speed, and as I slowed her down, the strap around her backside tightened.  She hates this feeling, and before I could blink an eye, she began a kicking fit.  Pieces of harness and sleigh shafts began to break apart, and soon there was nothing connecting pony to sleigh besides my grip on the reins.  This caused me to fly from the sleigh, with none of the grace of Santa's reindeer, breaking the front board before I hit the snow-covered ground, face down.  Still Sara kept going.  I was now being drug on my belly behind her flying hooves, which suddenly seemed much closer than when I was safely aboard the sleigh.  My shoulders were now functioning as snow plows, and I couldn't see much beside those hooves. There was nothing to do at this point besides let go.  She continued racing across the field as I picked myself up and assured Dan that I wasn't hurt.  Sara turned around at the far fence and came galloping back toward us, but was in no mood to slow down and be caught, so I didn't try anything foolish like jumping in front of her.  She broke a gate and was into the barnyard.  By the time I made it down there, a switch had flipped, and she calmly trotted over to me so I could take her inside.  We stood there for a minute, catching our breath, and Dan arrived to help me unharness her.  She was ok; missing a bit of hair on her leg, but no blood.  Nothing would swell, and when we let all the horses out for an evening drink at chore time, she was prancing away from Dixie, just like any other night.  I have a fair number of bruises on my legs and knees and my hands have a bit of rope burn, but the skin will grow back, so no major harm to me either besides some major stiffness that will fade in a day or two.  The harness and sleigh are both broken, but both can be fixed.  We live near an Amish community, so we'll take the harness over to the Amish harness shop, where they will fix it like new.  I want to get a new set of lines and replace the nylon ones that burned my hands as well.  Dan is confidant that with a trip to Home Depot and a new coat of paint, the front of the sleigh will be fine too.  We had been meaning to replace that board anyway. Even the digital camera in my front hoodie pocket escaped intact! I remarked that at 24 years old, Sara should be too old for such episodes, but I'm very fortunate that she is still healthy enough to be bad.  I'm also happy that I did not get the sleigh bells I had been wanting for Christmas this year!

There was one major casualty in the whole fiasco.  My pockets had been filled with animal cookies to give to the critters as treats.  Snow + cookies = soggy mess.  However, my goats love cookies, soggy or not, so they cleaned them all up. Jerry was happy to take all the broken bits of legs and elephant trunks from the palm of my hand, and the whole herd was very pleased with their Christmas treats.

Now Dan and I are anxiously waiting for the Christmas ham, glazed with my mulled blackberry vinegar, to come out of the oven.  We'll have a feast of sides, like homegrown squash and frozen corn from the summer.  We hope your holiday is a merry one as well, completely free of sleigh wrecks and other fiascos, and full of love, good food, and happiness.

 Merry Christmas! 

Don't you just hate when you type a great entry and then the computer crashes? I guess I'll try again and save this time!

It's been one of the busiest weeks in memory.  Moday was for running errands in town (20 miles one way) while Dan mowed hay.  Tuesday brought a day of canning.  Today we had to pick up feed, meat from the butcher shop, and come home and begin the process of sausage making as well as package ham & bacon. Tomorrow we will butcher chickens.  Friday we will be stuffing and packaging sausage and beginning prep for Saturday's stand.  We have a big, thick field of second cutting hay to put up as well.  To top it all off, we've been helping a friend move too, so it's no wonder I'm feeling a bit tired!

Also I've been trying to take more pictures, especially of the horses working and the different equipment we use.  Eventually I want to put it online, but the pictures are the first step.   It is a beautiful late summer day here, with temps in the lower 70's, no humidity and not a cloud in the beautiful blue sky.  I went out into the field with Dan and took a few pictures of the side delivery hay rake in use.  It dates from the turn of the century but still works great.  We pull it with a forecart so there was an extra seat for me to ride along.  It was so nice to take time and just be still while Dan drove.  It gave me time to truly appriciate the biodiversity we foster on the farm by not using chemicals or planting large monoculture crops.  As I relaxed, it was easy to take in the late summer wildflowers; jewelweed, Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, Chinese lanterns, and many more I recognize but cannot name.  The fencerow between hayfield and pasture was stunning in the golds and purples of this time of year.  Artists know those two colors are opposites and emphasize each other, but I'm sure it was nature who taught us that.  The sound of hoofbeats, harness leather and metal machienery was soothing to me, but also allowed the creatures who share our field to get out of our path.  Goldfinches looked for bugs, replacing the red winged blackbirds which were so plentiful during the first cutting.  Butterflies took flight before the horses' hooves to alight on the freshly turned hay behind us.  A vole scurried away.  Not long after I saw a small snake slithering, possibly looking for dinner in the shape of that vole!  Crickets, believed by some to be omens of good luck, were plentiful, as were the lime green grasshoppers as long as my palm.  If you were looking at all, they were hard to miss!  The most surprising (to me) inhabitants of our field were the praying mantis.  I saw both green and brown ones, but I don't know enough about these benificial insects to know if that means two seperate species, a life stage, sex difference or just a color variant.  I do know that people pay money to release them into gardens to keep down bugs considered pests, so their abundance is a great thing for us and our crops.  While it's easy to appreciate the majesty of a bale eagle over the farm or a big whitetail buck in the hayfield in the early morning fog, these little guys I watched today are easy to overlook.  That's why I think, especially in today's world of high-speed everything, it's easy to forget the value of stillness.  

On Tuesday, our neighbobr stopped by to ask if he could used our recently cut hayfield to work his new team of Haflingers, a small draft horse breed.  We had no problem with that, and shortly thereafter we saw them in the field.  The ponies seemed to be working well pulling a small two wheeled cart, and after watching for a minute or two, Dan and I went back to our evening chores.  I was harvesting salad greens in the garden about an hour later when I heard our neighbor commanding his horses to "whoa" loudly and repeatedly.  He was standing beside the wagon, and soon the horses got so upset that they took off running at full speed, luckily leaving him behind in the field.   They started running toward the road, and the wagon began to bounce high in the air behind them, and I could hear the sound of equipment breaking from a long way off.  The field ends and there is a 4 ft drop to the road, so the ponies swerved and started heading toward our barn.  When they came to the large wooden pasture gate they tore through our cornfield and back up into the field where they started.  At this point I ran to get Dan and we took the truck up to that part of the field to see how we could help.  Our neighbor is older and our first concern was that he wasn't hurt.  At first we though the ponies had run back to their barn, but as we rounded the bend in the road, we saw them at the far side of the field, against the fence where they had gotten stuck.  We parked the truck and began walking to avoid scaring the ponies, and let our neighbor walk up to them.  Then Dan helped to unhook them and drove them back to the barn while our neighbor caught his breath.  One of the ponies has a cut on his back leg but they were otherwise unhurt.  After returning the ponies, we took the truck around the fields and collected the pieces of the wagon and surveyed the damage to the corn field.  Luckily, they made only one pass through and stayed to the perimeter, as the corn in thoer path was destroyed.  We were also thankful that they didn't run through any of the fences.  We returned the wagon pieces and tried to piece together what happened.  The ponies were 3 and 4 years old andhad only been hitched to a wagon twice before.  They could have gotten spooked by something no one else noticed, maybe they were just fed up after an hour of work, or possibly something on the cart broke before they ran away.  All I know is that it really makes you aware of how dangerous a large animal can be and that even with a trusted team like our Belgians, one must always be aware of what is going on at all tiles to avoid being seriously hurt. 

Hope, our Boer/Saanen cross female, had twins last night, bringing our total to 11kid goats born this month!  We have had some torrential rain this week, and although Dan found them safe and sound in the barn last nigh as he was shutting in chickens, I haven't seen the babies yet.  The rain looks to be letting up so I am headed out there now.  The other babies are doing wonderfully, I truly think there is nothing cuter in the world than to see them playing and running about in the barnyard! 

I did my first fieldwork with the horses by myself!  Dan was finishing planting the hay field when I got home from work last week.  As he was sick of spending so much time up there, I got to drive the cultipacker.  It's like a big roller that presses the seeds into the ground just enough so they can sprout.  Dixie and Dolly, our Belgians, have gotten used to the rhythms of field work again this spring and were wonderful to work with. They are a mother (Dixie) and daughter (Dolly) team and both were born, raised and trained at the farm.  It's an amazing feeling to be out there working with them.  I look forward to doing more, possibly with my horse, this weekend.  It's supposed to be near 80 degrees and sunny.

Our seedlings are doing so well we'll be transplanting to larger pots this weekend.  We'll use peat pots and put them out under floating row cover when they start to outgrow these new pots.  We've done a little planting outside- spring onions, a few potatoes and Dan transplanted garlic so he could plow the garden last week.  I started to move the hay off of some of my herbs as well- the hay was starting to sprout!  This is my first year overwintering them and I am simply amazed at how well they've done.  I have so much green oregano I could make a great pasta sauce if my tomatoes were more than 2" seedlings!  The chives look great, I may have to try them on a baked potato if we grill out this weekend.  My sage seems to be coming back, as does the thyme and the lemon basil is huge!  It must not be directly related to real basil as that died at the first nip of frost last fall.

The rhubarb is well on its way up and will be ready for harvesting soon.  We have 2 great patches that produce the nicest you'll find anywhere.  I don't bake, so I have lots for sale if anyone out there is interested!!

Butchering went very well, other than running out of pepper for some of the sausage.  We let the sausage marinate in the spices for a day or two before grinding anyway, so I was able to fix it.  But I'm so happy to have a freezer full of pork again! We do have a a limited amount of extra sausage, chops and roasts for sale if anyone is interested.  Mmmm...pork chops on a charcoal grill...