Portage River Farm

On the evening before the chicks where scheduled to arrive, I made a brood box to serve as their new home. It is a little hard to tell the scale in the photographs. The lid is a 30" square.

The box has a fine mesh bottom to give the chicks something to stand on. The mesh also lets their droppings fall through to prevent them from getting covered in their own waste. This helps to prevent disease.

The lid at the top has a large hole to allow a heat lamp to shine through to keep the chicks warm. I stapled chicken wire across the opening just in case the dogs decide that a chick would be a good snack or playtoy.

I thought that the brood box would be big enough for all of the chicks but now I'm not so sure. My intention is for them to remain in there until at least mid-April when the weather warms up. If they grow too quickly, I may find myself making a second box!

Prior to our move to this farm, we lived in the city of Ypsilanti. We lived on a little postage stamp of a yard in a little brick ranch house surrounded by a sea of little brick ranch houses. Our house was located two blocks from a major freeway and the roar of it permeated our existence. We also had neighbors who would sit in their cars late into the night and listen to their car stereos until 2 or 3 in the morning. Those cars sat in the driveway a dozen or so feet on the other side of the wall from our headboard!

Since our move, I have been reveling in the serene quiet of the countryside. Whenever I am outside I am always listening to the birds and any other sounds that come to me. I have been shocked at how easily I can pick up conversations from my neighbors' houses that are a quarter mile away. When our dog Finn barks to be let back into the house, the sound rolls and echoes through our woods and back again like a shock wave disturbing the tranquility of the world around us.

In late winter, I happened to be walking through the woods with my seven-year-old son Aidan. We were intently listening to the sounds of the nuthatches and woodpeckers as they flitted from tree to tree around us. It was then that he looked up at me and said something that I just couldn't wrap my mind around. "Dad, it's so noisy here!"

I remember expressing my dismay at his statement. "How can you say that?" "It's amazingly quiet here!" His statement made no sense to me. He didn't offer an explanation that I could grasp and I gradually forgot all about it as I immersed myself in the pleasure of our walk in the winter woods.

It wasn't until Aidan had uttered the same phrase to my wife and I several more times that it finally dawned on me what he was saying. Aidan has lived his whole life in the sonic shadow of the freeway. To him that background noise was normal and it drowned out or at least diminished everything else in our surroundings, especially distant bird songs and conversations.

Now I understand that his experience of having the background noise turned down is one of suddenly being conscious of so many noises around him. The birds, dogs, people and cars out on the gravel road are all so much louder to his perception than they have been in the past. While I am confident that the overall sound level is much quieter here, the individual sounds against a background of relative silence make them seem so much louder.

So I guess I have to agree that it is noisy here but it's the kind of racket that is music to my ears!

On Saturday, Aidan, Sean and I went into Pinckney to watch the St. Patrick's Day festivities. Pinckney, our new hometown, is about two miles north of us. It is a friendly little country town that reminds me of the town in southern Ohio where I grew up. Pinckney has about 2,400 residents which makes it just a little bigger than McArthur.

The heart of Pinckney is a little downtown district that is barely two blocks long. The storefronts face a little park that forms the central town square. It has several nice restaurants, a bakery, a hardware store, a quilting shop, a public library, a pilates studio, a pharmacy, a grocery store, a couple of gas stations and a car wash. They even have a McDonald's and a Wendy's!

On this particular Saturday, the residents of the town and the surrounding countryside were out in force for the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. The festivities were kicked off with some traditional Irish step dancing by four local girls at the park pavilion. Afterwards, there was a bed race down Main Street.

The main event was the parade. We loaded ourselves down with some hotdogs from a street vendor and some souvenirs from table set up by an Irish gifts shop from a nearby town. We sat on the curb and watched the entrants go by which included the local 4-H club on horseback, the girl scout troop, the 4th grade class of the town's Catholic school, the local Rolling Thunder motorcycle club, representatives from the Michigan National Guard in their Humvee (Aidan liked that), a few politicians, a number of veteran's groups, the Michigan Military Mom's and the town firetruck.

For me, the highlight of the parade was the Scottish Pipe Band from Flint. They were smartly dressed in their kilts and military uniforms complete with swords and bagpipes. They made an impressive sound as they came down the little street with bagpipes blaring.

Once it was over we made our way back to our van and home again to return to our farm work. It felt nice to get out for a bit and enjoy the small-town atmosphere. It reminded me that I have spent too much of my life leading an anonymous existence in large towns and cities. I look forward to getting to know some of these people better once our children transfer into the local schools next fall.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that we had a radon issue when we moved into this house. The house inspector tested the air and said that it read 11.4. You are supposed to do something about it if it is over 4.

Therefore I installed a big pipe through my house from my sump to carry the radon gas out through the roof. A vent fan in the attic now runs all of the time and is supposed to be depressurizing the soil beneath our house. There was some question in my mind as to whether I was getting enough suction since it only measures 0.9" water column.

Last week I bought a radon gas monitor and it has been sampling the air in the basement ever since. It reveals that the readings are down to 0.9. That seems like a big improvement from 11.4. When I get some spare time I may seal up the system a little more to try to improve the numbers. In the mean time it is at least at a much safer level.

I was away from home until late on Thursday evening, arriving a little after midnight. Everyone was nestled in and fast asleep as I made my usual rounds to check on them and deliver the expected goodnight kisses. As I was trudging off to bed, I realized that I had neglected to freeze the day's batch of maple sap. It was still sitting on the stove and now needed to be reboiled.

I sighed wearily with the realization that I had to stay up for another thirty minutes to give the sap time to boil. Turning the knob, I heard the familiar "tick, tick, tick" of the pilot on the burner beneath the pot but the expected "woof" as the gas caught the flame did not come. I soon realized that there was no gas!

This new home is my first experience with LP gas. Everywhere else that I have lived has been piped into the vast network of natural gas lines and I have never had to pay any attention to it before. Ironically, our farm is bisected by a 900psi natural gas pipeline that runs from the Texas panhandle clear across the country to a storage facility in mid-Michigan. On its way it passes within 300 feet of our front porch.

Going down to the basement, I checked on the furnace and the water heater. Sure enough, both were making futile attempts to complete their tasks while neither had the accompanying blue glow that showed their efforts were succeeding. Next I headed outside to have a look at the gage on the "pig", the 400 gallon gas tank that sits beside our house. Peering at the gage with flashlight in hand, I could see that it was bone dry. I returned to the living room to place a call to the gas company.

To understand how I was feeling at that moment, you need to know that we are signed up for the "always full" option for our gas supply. By selecting this option and paying the corresponding monthly rate, they are supposed to regularly visit and top off our tank so that we never have to worry about it. As I waited on the phone my mind kept returning to the image of their billboards which read "Trust us to keep the heat on for you."

The emergency operator for the gas company office in Kansas City was very friendly and apologetic. She said that she would notify our local gas driver on night duty and that he would be here as soon as possible. She tried to convince me that I should wake everyone and leave the house immediately in case there had been a gas leak.

I thanked her for the advice and said I would check again for any odd smells and heed her warning if it seemed necessary. The fact that I didn't smell any gas and the anticipation of the tongue-lashing that I would take if I attempted to make them all get up to go sit in the car in the middle of the night was enough to convince me that I should leave them in peace. Instead, I resolved that would I stay awake and monitor the situation until the gas truck arrived.

Roughly twenty minutes after hanging up from my first call, my cell phone rang. On the other end a very sleepy driver asked me if I needed him to come out with the gas truck immediately. It was clear that he was praying that I would tell him that it could wait until morning but I was insistent. In response, he sighed and said he would be here as soon as he could.

As I waited, I entertained myself by watching video excerpts of performances by comedian Lewis Black on YouTube. He is the angry commentator who frequently appears on the Jon Stewart show. If you don't mind the frequent f-bombs included in his delivery, he can be very funny and insightful. The time passed easily as I snickered at his angry protests about everything from bottled water to politics.

The gas truck finally came backing up the drive at 3:30am. The driver, now fully awake, was very friendly as he went about his work. He came inside to check that all of the pilots ignited properly before bidding me goodnight and steering his lumbering truck back out our pot-holed drive.

My head hit the pillow at about 4:30am for a short nap before I had to get up for work the next morning.

Friday was incredibly warm. In the afternoon, Janet called me from somewhere out in the brushy field to the front of our property. She was enjoying the nice weather and her new knee-high boots with a tromp out to the cottonwoods to see how much water was standing there. She told me that I should try to get out of work a little early to enjoy the warm day. Of course I couldn't, but I suggested that we take a walk around the farm when I got home.

Shortly after I finally managed to arrive, Janet, Aidan and I headed out for a stroll. We talked about our plans. I showed them where I wanted to build the barn, the woodshop and the chicken coop. We talked about the berry patch location, where the orchard would go, how much of the field we would try to get plowed up this year. All in all, it was a great little tour and long overdue.

One portion of our walk took us up the driveway past the beehive. My eyes happened to detect a familiar motion where none should have been. I swerved away from the others to investigate and discovered a cloud of bees at the front of our hive, busily coming and going as they did all last summer. The problem is that Aidan and I had discovered that the bees had all died in the late fall!

My mind cast around for an explanation for what I was seeing. I briefly entertained the thought that our poor little hive had somehow survived and was now stirring itself into action again. I recalled that only this morning I had mailed off a check to the local beekeepers association for the purchase of a new 3lb package of bees. I thought, "Oh great, now what am I going to do? I'm going to have to come up with a second hive for the new bees before they arrive since our existing hive isn't empty afterall!"

Then the other side of my mind began to recall how very dead the bees had looked when I had last checked them. I leaned down and took a close look at the bees that were pouring in and out of the hive. They were actually a mix of bees. Some appeared to be the usual domesticated Italian honeybees but others were much darker in color. Those darker bees were probably from a wild hive somewhere nearby.

Then it clicked. We were being robbed! I had left the honey in the combs assuming that it would be fine in the freezing weather. I had been planning to extract what I could of it before installing my new package bees when they arrived in April. Now that the weather had suddenly warmed up, every bee in the neighborhood was out to steal our honey!

Since the sun was setting, I knew the bees would soon have to return to their own hives. I left them to have their fun at our expense for a short while longer as we continued our farm tour. I even managed to forget about the crime that was being committed for a while as Aidan capered along telling me about his day.

Around 11pm this evening I headed out to the hive with my wheelbarrow and flashlight. I probably looked a bit like a thief myself. After knocking on the hive and receiving no buzzing in reply, I opened it up and peered inside. The vast majority of the honey was intact and the hive was otherwise empty. I loaded the whole heavy thing up, wheeled it ponderously around to the back of the house and shoved it into the basement door where the bees would never find it.

In the morning, Aidan and I will uncap the comb, spin out the honey and package it up in bottles. In the meantime, I am going to wander off to bed, all the while doing my best to shove the thought out of my mind of the hive somehow raising itself from the dead yet again only to find itself locked in my basement!

Etymology has always fascinated me. I could read about the origins of words and phrases all day. Lately I have been studying everything that there is to know about chickens in preparation for our upcoming coop building project and I have been surprised at the number of common phrases that we use that relate to chickens!

Apparently chickens are very hierarchical. From an early age they begin squabbling until they have worked out where each of them stands in the dominance structure of the flock. I have heard the term "pecking order" many times relating to dogs and people but never connected the fact that it originated with this behavior in chickens.

The hierarchy in the flock is usually topped by a rooster. In the case of a flock with a very young or very old rooster, the top of the hierarchy will be held by an older hen instead. In this case, the female dominated rooster is referred to as "hen-pecked".

Roosters have an elaborate set of gestures and postures that they use to convey dominance and to challenge other roosters or potentially dangerous strangers. One of these postures involves the rooster subtly moving in a sideways direction toward the offending individual while seeming to stare fixedly at something on the ground. All the while the rooster is actually staring down his opponent with the one eye facing him. This behavior is referred to as being "cock-eyed".

This last one is mostly my own conjecture. I have been learning that chickens have a wide range of sounds that they use to communicate. Among these sounds is one that a chicken will make when they see a large bird flying overhead. In that case the chicken sounds the alarm for the flock to take cover by literally shouting "HAWK!"

That leads me to think about that odd sounding English word that we use for those winged predators. I have checked the etymological explanations in the dictionary and really don't see anything that would dispute the possibility that some early ancestor or ours may have begun referring to the birds going after her chickens by the term suggested by the squawking livestock themselves. Hawk! Hawk!

I may be wrong, but I kind of like the notion that we might be carrying at least one word in the modern English language that is a borrow-word from chicken-ish!

Mildly Bad News:

As it turns out, the previous post should have been labeled "Two Major Improvements". My attempt to fix my syrup filtering aggravations had mixed results. It is true that the thin liquid that had not made it quite to concentration went through the filter material much more quickly. The problem is that the next morning, Sean picked up one of the syrup bottles and noted that it was a little bit cloudy. That cloudiness is slowly drifting to the bottom of the bottles and it won't affect the taste of the syrup, but it shows that my idea didn't work out so well.

Since then I've also noticed that my first batch of syrup is considerably thicker than the second. That was caused by my failure to reduce the heat below the pot and overshooting the specific gravity measurement. That is probably why I had such a hard time filtering it in the first place. In any case, I'm learning something with each mistake. For the next round I will go back to filtering after the boiling is completed and hopefully having the correct concentration will make it easier.

(Sorry if this is too technical to be very interesting. I get that way sometimes!)

Really Good News!:

As you may have read, I calculated the sugar concentration of the sap from my first run of syrup and came up with 1.07% sugar. That meant that I would need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

This most recent run yielded a whopping 1/2 gallon of syrup from 22 gallons of sap. That was a much greater yield than I had expected and indicates that it would only take 44 gallons of sap to make a full gallon. That puts the sugar concentration of those 22 gallons at a much more respectable 1.96%.

Sugar maples generally have a sugar concentration of 2-2.5%. From my previous results, I had assumed that we mostly had silver and red maples. These improved numbers are a good indication that we probably do have some of the prized sugar maples afterall. This summer, I plan to positively identify the species and we'll know for sure. In the mean time, it appears that our yield of syrup will be better than I was anticipating after the first run.

Conditions must have been perfect on Thursday. When I went out into the woods on Friday morning the sap sacs were bulging heavily on the trees. The task of emptying and hauling the sap back to the house became quite a chore. Equally problematic was finding enough containers to hold it all after it had been briefly boiled to stabilize it.

The take for that single day was 9.75 gallons. That's more than 1 1/2 gallons per tree! That one-day flow beats the previous best day by a mile and represents roughly one-third of our total sap collection for the season thus far.

I now have every large pot and container in the house full of frozen sap and Janet is just about fed up with not being able to use any of her cooking pots. Saturday morning we are going to fire up the woodstove evaporator and start boiling down the accumulated 21 gallons. If all goes well we should end up with three times the syrup that our last run yielded.

Noise

I am a night owl and don't require as much sleep as the rest of the family. Most nights will find me knocking around the house until 2 or 3am. At a little after midnight a few weeks ago I walked out into the dark to retrieve something from my car. As I approached the vehicle a sudden explosion of unfamiliar noise stopped me in my tracks.

Hopefully if you click on the link above you can hear what I did. It is a crazy collection of high-pitched wailing, wavering howls and barks. It sounded as if somebody was torturing a large number of puppies nearby. It was very loud and seemed to be coming from the wooded area across the road to the west of our farm. It sounded as if it would have taken at least ten individual animals to make that much racket.

Since that night I have figured out that the noise comes from our apparently sizable population of coyotes. Most evenings, I can walk out on the deck and listen to them howling back and forth. On the occasions when they gather together for a group howl, as I had heard that first evening, it can be amazingly loud. Now that I know what to listen for, I can hear them in our closed up house, even over the furnace and whatever other noises are around me.

I imagine that we are destined for a rocky relationship in the future as we fill our farm with tasty treats such as chickens, ducks, turkeys, calves and goat kids. It has me thinking about strong fences and even worrying about our dogs a little. I would think they would avoid a scrap with Finn, our 90lb yellow lab. Sirona, on the other hand, is a frail and elderly 40 lbs that would probably be much more tempting.

Since it took a while to gather enough to justify boiling it down, I have been briefly boiling and then freezing the sap until I had a little over nine gallons. Then I fired up the woodstove evaporator in the back yard and tended it late into the night (click on the video). Last night I finally finished the syrup by boiling it on the kitchen stove until it reached the correct specific gravity which I measured with a hydrometer.

Once it was officially syrup, I filtered it for bottling by pouring it through a special wool syrup filter. This proved to be the least fun step of the entire process. Because I had so little syrup, it was difficult to keep it hot enough for it to easily flow through the cloth. By 2am I finally managed to get the result bottled as you can see in the photo.

In the end, I only got 16 oz. of syrup from the original 9.1 gallons of sap. By my calculation that means the sugar content of the sap was originally 1.07%. That is unfortunately about half that of a typical sugarbush of proper sugar maples. At that rate, I will need to boil down 73 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup. I assume that means that my planned tree identification exercise next summer will reveal that we have Red and Silver maples.

Nonetheless, the resulting syrup is light amber and very tasty. I passed out samples this morning and everyone was surprised that the taste was a more creamy vanilla-caramel than the expected standard maple flavor. Aidan was ready to haul out the griddle and fire up the stove for a pancake breakfast. I told him that we may wait a while before cracking that bottle open. It took too much work to make it and I just wanted to put it somewhere prominent and occasionally hold it up to the light to admire the maple magic.

Aidan, Sean and I headed out this morning into a dripping world. The warm air was making quick work of melting away the snow accumulation of the past weeks.

We hauled our maple tapping gear out into the woods and got right to it. We drilled each tree, tapped the spouts in place and hung the blue plastic "Sap Sacs" in place. We were a little late in the morning and the temperature was already 43 degrees when we started. It seems that we missed most of the day's flow.

The third tree that we tapped rewarded our efforts with a steady drip of faintly sweet crystal clear sap out of each spile. The boys took turns catching the drips in their mouths before we set the bags in place. You can see from the picture that Aidan would happily have stayed there acting as a human sap sac.

All of the trees stopped dripping shortly after they were tapped, most likely due to the crazily warm weather. We probably collected a few cups before it stopped. Now we'll have to sit back and see what the weather will bring us.

After searching the internet for a while, I came up with this picture. (If you click on the image, I believe it will give you a larger view.) It is an 18th century horse-drawn snowplow reconstruction that was built in Germany. I don't imagine this is anything like the one her father used.

Call me crazy, but that looks as if it would be really simple to build. It is basically a box with a wedge shape attached to the front of it to push the snow to the sides of the road. I have lumber that I could use sitting around and could make a scaled down version. What I don't have is a horse. This is where the crazy part comes in...I started wondering why I couldn't pull it down the driveway with our van!

I don't know if I'll actually try it but I think it's a cool idea and would probably work. The only problem that I have read related by old-timers who remember seeing them used was that they tended to wander back and forth behind the team as the snow drifts on each side pushed it sideways.

It would be fun to try it but I suppose it would let the neighbors know what kind of a nut moved into the neighborhood before I've had a chance to introduce myself!

This morning's 7 degree temperature did little to dampen my rising anticipation of spring. If you have a look at my Sugarbush page on the website (under "Tour the Farm"), you will see that I have been carefully tracking the daily highs and lows.

Since mid-January, we have been seeing an upward warming trend. It is true that there have been a few dips back into bitterly cold territory, but the trend is there just the same. We have had two days above freezing and are looking to have a third this coming weekend.

I am watching the charts for the best time to tap the maple trees. The best condition for sap flow is daily highs at least in the upper 30's and nights in the 20's. Part of the risk of tapping too early is that a return to colder weather will stop the sap flow and the cells in the tapped holes will begin the process of sealing up before the season is through. The risk of starting too late is that warmer temperatures of March and early April will cause the sap to get "buddy" and unusable as the composition changes to stimulate the opening of leaf buds.

If nothing else, the rush is really just my excitement to get out of the confines of the house and start doing something on the farm!

Two nights ago, I attended a meeting of the Huron River Watershed Council. They were holding a special meeting to kick off an effort to educate and mobilize individuals in our area to work at a grass-roots level to improve and protect the health of Portage Creek.

The waterway that flows through our valley is called "Portage Creek" for much of its length. The lower portion of the creek flows through the nearby town of Hell, Michigan, where it picks up the name "Hell Creek". The very lowest portion of the waterway, nearest to us, has also been called "Portage River". It empties into Portage Lake a few miles further downstream and then into the Huron River. From there it flows into Lake Erie, over Niagara Falls and ultimately through the St. Lawrence Seaway, past Montreal and Quebec, into the North Atlantic near Newfoundland.

The Huron Watershed Council is a non-profit organization that has been instrumental in promoting environmental awareness and local action to protect the health of the river. They have been working in each of the tributary watersheds and are now working on the last, that of Portage Creek. They have been collecting data on insect species, water conductivity, seasonal water levels and bottom silt sampling at two points in the creek for the past decade.

The Portage Creek watershed is very healthy for a number of reasons. It is very rural and a fair percentage of the land is state-owned nature preserve and recreational area. There are some problems in the upper reaches of the watershed from more intensive agriculture and there is one lake in the system that has a mercury problem that is slated for cleanup.

Our farm is at the extreme lower end of the watershed. Although the river passes only 200 yards to the south of us, our land actually drains through a large wetland that starts in our backyard, flows parallel to the river for more than a mile and empties directly into Portage Lake.

The meeting was well attended and informative. I met lots of nice people from the area and we discussed measures that we hope to take to make sure that the present health of our creek is preserved and improved. We plan to look into the master development plans of our local communities, work to educate landowners on the importance of maintaining buffer strips of vegetation to filter out sediment and approach the county road commission with concerns about siltation from erosion where our dirt roads cross the creek. I look forward to working with this group in the future and getting my kids involved as well.

(The photo is a bend in the mostly snow and ice-covered creek about 1/4 mile upstream of our farm.)