Getting Ready for Spring

I know I haven't posted in forever. Summer kept me busy outside and I just couldn't get back into it this winter. I was having my morning coffee, reading Mother Earth News and mentally racking up a to-do list when it hit me: I've got to write all this down! I started to open a word file, then thought, What the hell. Might as well put it on the blog and see if I get any suggestions. So here we go...

1. Order fly predators! My house is in the middle of three paddocks and every time I open a door, a handful of flies dart in. Then I turn into a mad woman hunting them down and making threats while waving around a dish towel. It scares my dogs, who run and hide. I've heard wonderful things about the predators, so this is the year I'm going to try them.

3. re-seed the chicken pen. If I do this, I'll need to move the chickens to what is now the goat pen for the summer. Then I'll have to move the goats to the back paddock (the horses' winter paddock). The pygmies can get through the wood slats in the fence, which means I'm going to have to plunk down some money and time and (sigh) effort on putting electric wire between the spaces. Or I could just get rid of the piggies and...

2. Get a dairy goat. I still want to find a real dairy goat and maybe I'll get around to it this year. I gave up on the pygmies. Baby Bonnie, who is now full grown, still shoves her (horned) head under Bella to nurse. There's also the issue of quantity. I drink a LOT of milk...like two plus gallons a week. I'm also kind of lazy and I don't like mornings. It would be nice to have a dairy goat with a high enough production that I could milk once a day and still have enough.

3. I ordered Heirloom seeds this year. I hate starting seeds indoors. I just don't have the space, so I just got seeds that are direct sow this year, then maybe next year I'll develop a system for indoor sowing. I got corn, green beans, carrots, peas and some greens for the doggies.

4. I'm going to contact the local organic farm in my area. They have a CSA and I want to see if they'll let me take their greens/veggies that aren't fit for human consumption to feed my dogs. I make my own dog food by grinding veggies and raw chicken/bones. I would love to feed them organic, but it's just too damn expensive. Slimy, gross veggies are even better for dogs because they have already begun to break down, mimicking the stomach contents of foraging prey.

5. I'm so excited. I ordered bulk seeds from Americanmeadows.com . I'm going to attempt the cottage garden of my dreams. Last summer I kept the ducks and geese in the back yard along the fence. They made a royal mess of the area making mud puddles and pooping everywhere. So this year I'm going to till it up and plant lupine, delphinium, foxglove, snapdragons, gladiolas, lobelia, hollyhocks and a few other wildflowers. The seed company specializes in species that naturalize and grow abundantly in meadows. So, if all goes well, I'll have a no fuss, bed of beautiful surprises. Some of the flowers, like foxgloves and hollyhocks, won't bloom until the next year, but even the annuals are apt to self-sow. It will be an experiment, but I hope it turns out well. It is certainly cheaper than buying individual plants. There's no way I could afford to do a mass planting of that scale, by buying individual plants.

7. Compost. This fall/winter has been too soggy to get the tractor out to turn the compost pile. The tires would leave muddy ditches in its' wake and it's just not worth tearing up the yard for that, so the manure has accumulated in the paddocks and I'm itching to get out there and start shoveling. Treely is a dear and likes to keep hers in neat piles...something I truly appreciate. Having the front loader on the tractor is going to make the process so much simpler. That and having the extra gate me and my dad installed on the side of the paddock near the compost pile should really streamline the process. I'm hoping for a large, hot pile of shit this year.

6. Firewood. After the ice storm last winter, I had plenty of branches to cut up for firewood. I had a pretty big stack against the garage...or so I thought. Turns out, it was only about a tenth of what I would need to run the wood stove, even for a few hours a day. If I was going to run the stove 12 hours a day, I would probably need 20 times that much. Holy shit, is all I have to say. Add to that fact that because I stacked the wood against the garage, it didn't have enough ventilation and a lot of the wood ended up rotting. Lesson learned. My romantic looking stack of wood piled neatly next to the garage was just that: nice to look at, not so useful. I ended up buying most of my firewood for about $180 a truckload. Not so romantic.

I now see that I would have to be cutting firewood every spare second of every day all year in order to have enough for the winter. Luckily, I don't use the wood stove to heat the entire house...just the poorly insulated back room. So, I'll probably focus my efforts on ripping out the cheap paneling and installing proper insulation and dry wall in that room.


So what have I done all winter? Obsess. Worry. Freeze. I had this weird smell in the house. I thought it was because I put mouse bait in the walls and I was smelling their dead carcasses (lovely, I know). The same thing happened last fall and it went away on it's own in a couple months. So I waited and waited for the damn things to decompose. I noticed the smell was worse when the furnace was going, so I decided that they must have died in the ducts (adorable!). I kept saying, "It smells like propane!" and the sole man in my life (my dad) said, "Not likely. Just wait it out. It will take a while for the mice to decompose."

Even with the gas turned off at the tank, the smell remained. That and the fact that I had candles lit, the wood stove going (since I couldn't stand to run the heater), and had used the burners/oven without exploding seemed to eliminate the gas leak theory. I toyed with the idea that it was a sewage smell...possibly a blocked septic vent. Well, My dad came over last week and said, "It smells like propane." So I called the gas company and lo and behold, the regulator in the gas range was out and was leaking gas...for months. on. end. I guess the furnace helped circulate the smell, making it impossible to pinpoint. I googled "long term health effects of propane exposure" and it seems I'm in the clear. I got a new stove out of the deal. Actually, the stove was the last of my appliances that worked properly, but since a gas leak is pretty serious I figured replacing it was more important than replacing the leaky fridge, the leaky washing machine or the dryer with the broken timer.

I Have Power!

It's been eight days of shivering. Eight days of always seeing my breath. Eight days of constantly boiling water just so that I have some way of thawing out my hands (and chicks). Eight days of breaking up ice buckets.

The first five days without power was kind of an adventure. Sort of like camping or going back to the turn of the century with a good book. I drank lots of tea and hot chocolate and made a big batch of beans and corn cakes on the griddle (thank god for gas stoves). Me and the dogs got under five comforters and that was plenty warm for me. I don't even have a working fireplace, so it got a little chilly. I had week old chicks upstairs that are totally dependent on the heat lamp, so I ended up filling several tupperware containers with boiling water and kept changing it out throughout the day. They were grateful for that bit of extra warmth and huddled around it like vagrants by a tin can fire. The worst part of it all was not being able to take a decent bath. My face is all broken out from having greasy hair. I did, on a couple of the warmer days, take a whore's bath (I just love that term) with hot water I heated on the stove. I'm actually glad that I didn't have internet for a week. I read LOTS of books and played violin when my hands weren't too numb.

I took some pictures, but my 5 year old camera battery isn't holding a charge like it used to. I had been meaning to order a new one, but didn't get around to it before the ice storm. So, it died on me after about 30 minutes. I'm kind of bummed about that. Ice just makes everything look so much cooler. After it snowed on the already iced landscape, everything had this eerie Tim Burton-esque appearance. Trees looked like they had been plucked out of the ground and replanted upside down with branches touching the ground instead of the sky. Thursday the river flooded the road a bit and in the morning all the steam came off the river and seemed to fill the whole valley. It was so strange to see a foggy mist when everything was so cold and icy.

Friday, when the roads were finally clear enough for me to go to walmart I was driving home and there was a bright pink sunset. All the ice in the trees and on fencelines took on the pink glow of the sun. There were a million tiny suns reflecting off all of the ice. It was stunning. I am still mad that my camera battery died. Not that I would have been able to really capture the beauty of it.

The last couple of days have been, well...miserable. The romance has worn off. The outside temperature dropped to the teens and the inside temperature has been about 20. The dog's water bowls froze, the pots on the stove with water froze in just a few hours. My dishrag froze. I leave the milk on the counter to stay cold and anything that I don't want to freeze, I put in the refridgerator to keep warm. I decided to go to my mom's today to do some laundry and take a shower and just thaw out for a few hours. When I got close to home I saw each house lit up as I past and I kept telling myself, "Don't get your hopes up. You're not going to have power." As I started down the steep hill, though, I saw my big, gaudy, brash, annoying utility light that I hate so much glowing like a little beacon and I think I actually may have squealed with joy.

Well, here's a few notable pictures. The rest can be seen here.

This is my street. It's hardly recognisable.

Riverview Farm in the style of Tim Burton.

Books I read this week (I really am a nerd):

Flappers and philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb
The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield

and I started Jane Eyre. I haven't read it since highschool. As much as I love Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre is much more captivating compared to a lot of the books written in that era. None of the boring name dropping, and confusing old english language. Charlotte Bronte is pretty short and to the point. I like it. Very easy to follow.

Childhood Dream Come True

No. I didn't end up in The Neverending Story galloping on a white horse along with Atreyu and Artax in Fantasia, but it comes in a close second. My pond froze enough for me to ice skate on!!

I used to daydream as a kid that I had a pond to skate on. I remember I had this book where the dad made a skating rink in the backyard by pouring water on the concrete patio and the little girl in the book got to skate on it. When we lived in New Jersey, where it gets cold enough to skate on ponds, I used to beg my mom to take me out to the big skating pond at night. I would put on my flowy skirt and my mom would shine the headlights on me while I skated all by my self. I was an olympic gold medalist in my mind. I don't remember ever being cold out there and eventually my mom would honk the horn and make me come in. I was never ready, though.

I never really liked going to skating rinks where there were lots of people. It suited me just fine to be all alone where I didn't have to be embarassed. I did eventually, in my teen years, take up skating lessons and spent hours and hours at the skating rink. It was never the same as those nights on the pond with the spotlight on me, though.

So, with these frigid temperatures, I realized that the pond might freeze and had my dad dig out my ice skates and bring them with him when he came to visit today. After we spent half the day trying to thaw out the kitchen pipes (they didn't burst, thank god), I bid my dad goodbye, put the dogs in their kennels, and broke out the old skates. I became an ice princess for a couple hours, just like when I was a kid. I was giddy with joy, I'm embarassed to say...and I took lots of pictures!

The pond in the back corner of the farm and is the future home of the Sebastopol Goslings I'm getting in the spring! Treely was really curious about how mom was gliding around in the trees. She watched the whole time I was out there. Maybe she was just waiting for me to finish being an ice princess so I could bring her dinner.




I still had a few spins in me. I guess skating is like riding a bike. It's been close to 10 years since the last time I skated!


I never quite broke in these skates and my feet were killing me (still are).


These spinning pictures turned out really cool. I started to feel sick after a while, though. Why doesn't that happen when we're kids?


I had so much fun, I'm going to try to go out again in the morning. Temperatures are supposed to get up to 38 in the afternoon, so I don't think my pond skating is going to last much longer. That's okay, though, because I don't know if my blisters will hold up anyways.

It's cold

The electrician finished electrifying the barn just in time. According to the forecast (which I never quote as fact) it's supposed to get down to -4 tonight. The chickens all have their heated waterers plugged in. The goat has a heating pad, but I wish I had a blanky for her. Treely (the horse) has her blanket on and everybody's got lots of hay/feed to munch to keep their body heat up. I know animals up north have it way worse, but I feel like I'm not doing enough.

I wish I had more heat lamps for the adolescent chicks. I accidentally burned through the wire on my good one while I was cleaning the brooders. I didn't realize it was on and left the bulb sitting on the wire. I left to go clean the waterers and came back to smoldering rubber. Oops! Could have burned the shed down. So, now I'm afraid to use it, though it does still work. haha...somehow it doesn't seem worth the risk of burning down the barn and HAY (OMG NOO!!) not to mention the animals and all that fancy electric work. Any horse person would understand my worry of losing my hay mid winter. It's not like I can just go out and buy more...well, not unless I don't mind paying $10/bale to have it shipped in from California...For the record, I would mind that.

Here's a picture of Treely in her blanket from last year. Do you know how hard it is to find a size 84 ?! I did take a picture of her today in her blanket, but it looks kind of silly because it's so sunny. It looks like it is about 95 degrees outside instead of 15.

First post

I might as well get this first post over with. Since moving to my farm last March, I've had lots of adventures and lots of photos to share, but no way to really share them. Since it's winter and there's not much to do but sit inside and try to avoid the mud, I thought I would try to recap the last 9 months.

I moved in on March 5, 2008. The plan was to get some painting done in preparation for moving day when we'd load up the truck and move my stuff to the farm. The night before the big move it began to flurry. I went to bed on the aero bed in my new house and woke up to this beautiful mess.

This is the river across the road


It was a memorable first morning on the farm.