short and long term plans

Whatever this farm implement is, I'm guessing we won't need one.

I originally entitled this post "short and long term goals", but the word goal has always bothered me because it suggests that you have failed if you don't achieve whatever it was you set out to do. I am, however, very much a planner and much prefer making plans to setting stupid and potentially unattainable goals and thus setting myself up for disappointment. Plans are much more flexible than goals in my mind - they can be tweaked as circumstances present themselves. So since we're embarking on a pretty fantastic adventure, I though it would be interesting to map out (you know how I love maps - even mind maps) some things floating around in the old noggin that have to do with our future at the holler.

Paying off the land is one long-term plan, and we're hoping to do that sooner rather than later, but since we have no form of income lined up (yet), I'm just going to assume that will take 20 years since that's how long our mortgage is amortized for.

I think short-term plans are a bit more fun to fixate on, so here's the quick and dirty on what we hope to accomplish in the next two years:

Mid 2012: Sell our house and move. Hoping to walk away with a little cash, but if that doesn't happen, we should still have enough of a nest egg to take care of our financial obligations (debt and utilities), ourselves (food, including the pets), and vehicle maintenance for two years.

Late 2012/early 2013: Figure out what farm implements we think we will need and purchase them now while we have cash. I'm still not sure if we need a tractor and think an ATV might suit our needs better, but Jay might be on the tractor side of the fence. I can see the benefit of a tractor for moving things around, but I'm not sure how much will need to be moved anyway due to the permaculture-based approach we plan to take to growing plants and raising animals. Plus, riding ATVs is fun!

Early 2013: Finish the garden infrastructure (this sounds ambitious, but I plan to work on it from the moment we get out there and until my fingers freeze off in the depths of winter). Although I think it would be fun to have a fall 2012 garden if we get out there in time for it, I'm more interested in establishing the infrastructure needed for our long-term growing needs. I've found that filling raised beds with compost in the fall and letting it mellow out over winter worked great for spring planting for me in the past (albeit on a much smaller scale). A spring 2013 garden is essential in my mind for starting our food growing quest. I would like to have the entire garden base according to my OCD plan in place by fall 2013 and be using cover crops by that summer to minimize the need to purchase more organic matter.

A rainy afternoon in town.

Early 2013: Start fencing in areas for livestock. Again, fencing costs money, so we want to get going on that while we have it to spare. Temporary fencing is one option to save on costs, and I don't mind the idea of having to move it around regularly according to my paddock/pasture rotation plan. However, permanent fencing is preferable if affordable enough.

Early 2013: Acquire the start of our farm animal (aka, protein and dairy source) menagerie. I suppose that breeding stock would be logical first purchases, but I'm not sure if I want to dive right in with that or just get some trial animals to see how we do and then move on to semi-permanent animals that we will use for producing more animals. I don't want to overwhelm ourselves with too much at once, but making those purchases as soon as possible would be advantageous. I would really like to eat home-grown bacon by the 2013 slaughter season.

Early 2013: Clear the area for the forest garden and plant fruit trees (I'm not really sure when fruit trees are supposed to be planted, but at least the area can be cleared). How we go about clearing the area depends on what farm implements we decide to purchase. I think a bush hog would be a worthy investment because it would likely have a lot of use in years to come and can be pulled by either tractor or ATV.  I'm starting to think that we may not need a bush hog at all if we get animals that actively forage and don't have finicky palates (especially if our goal is to eliminate commercial feed costs).

Mid 2013: Start preserving the garden harvest in the form of canning, freezing, and/or root cellaring.

Mid 2014: Start making money in some form or other. Probe the local community for what niches might be filled with our skills. We have quite a few ideas and are striving to find income streams that can be home(stead)-based because we would like to avoid taking jobs away from the locals, and plus, we want to be working on the farm, not a nine-to-five (or even a nine-to-noon). But we must remain realistic in that regard because bills must be paid, and we don't pay bills late. As scary as being unemployed sounds, I'm convinced that we can make a home-based income work.

Whenever: Kill some deer on our land. Venison is delicious, and I'm really excited about eating it.

The sooner we start these projects, the sooner we'll be prepared to live the lifestyle we yearn for if we're able to earn a modest income (or return to the work force if we need to resort to that to pay our bills). These may sound like laborious chores to most people, but we can't wait to get started on what we see as interesting projects that will bring us closer to our homesteading goal (gasp, that word!). Jay's thoughts differ somewhat in that he more willing to find a real job sooner than what I have in mind, but we're on the same page with regard to infrastructure (and eating homegrown pork as soon as possible!).

~ Mitsy

future farm critters - part 5: chickens

As you might already know, I currently have two chickens: Del, a Delaware, and Jersey, a Black Jersey Giant. Such original names. Del and Jersey have been turned into pets and will live out their lives in chicken paradise, doing whatever they want, because they've been pardoned for ridiculous reasons I won't go into here again. Even so, it's been somewhat hard to not eat Jersey because she is a really big girl and would probably be quite delicious - she's only really been spared because Del would be lonely without her. I might want to get more Jersey Giants in the future because she (and Del actually) has proved to be quite the active forager in my small backyard.

What is wrong with this picture?
(She, of course, pooped immediately after this picture was taken.)

Anyway, for my future broilers, there are a few other varieties that I'm particularly interested in. While I do want eggs, quantity is not really an issue because Jay doesn't even eat eggs, and I'm more interested in egg aesthetics anyway (aesthetics seems to be a recurring trend with me, I know - plus I like saying aesthetics). I want those fancy blue eggs. In researching the fancy blue eggs that come from Ameraucanas, I also came to discover fancy dark brown eggs. There are also olive eggs that are the result of mixing the previous two. This is what I'm talking about, people. I am easily charmed by pretty colors, and I intend for my chicken fleet... er, flock... to reflect that.

What can I say, it's the artist in me that adores this.
[ image source ]

I'm not going to delve into the whole Araucana/Ameraucana/Americana/Easter Egger blue-egg genetics debate - I'm just going to get my chickens from a reputable source from people who know what the hell they're doing when it comes to chicken breeds and breeding. There are other things I'd rather spend my time doing that crossing this with that to get a pink-speckled purple egg with green hearts and sparkly rainbows on it. Although that would be pretty fucking awesome if it really existed.

There are a few dark brown egg layer breeds out there - notably, Marans and Welsummer. Marans actually have a pretty poor lay rate, but I'd rather have fewer, prettier eggs anyway, and the birds are supposed to be fantastic to eat. Plus they forage and shit, and you know how I feel about animals that take care of business themselves. Welsummer is the breed that the the Kellogg's rooster is, and I think that would be pretty awesome to have around. I also don't plan to incubate any eggs - I'll get a rooster and hens from a few different varieties, throw them all together, and let nature sort it out. If no baby chicks show up, then everyone gets eaten and we start all over again.

Both Ameraucanas and Marans are pretty birds, too, and come in all sorts of crazy colors. I envision them scattered among the food forest with all my fruit trees in various stages of bloom and ripening, pooping everywhere, eating bug pests, chasing the dog around.

In addition to Marans, Welsummer, and Ameraucana, non-industrial Leghorns (I will definitely need a rooster so I can call him Foghorn Leghorn!) are supposed to forage well and lay giant, pure white eggs. The Holland breed is also an active forager and supposedly raises chicks easily themselves but just has plain brown eggs. Several other breeds have good foraging ability, but you first have to be able to find chicks, and the previously mentioned breeds seem to be available relatively close to us or via mail order.

Off to the Lagwagon show at the Catalyst tonight, lates homies!

~ Mitsy

chicken shenanigans

Me around 1982 (I think).

Finally, a farm animal I have some experience with. I'm no pro, but I have successfully raised backyard chickens from chick-hood to slaughter. It is the one farm animal that I didn't need to wait to get out to our farm first to experiment with.

My first flock included two Barred Rocks and two Buff Orpingtons, all hens because I live in a neighborhood (with a "country club", if you can call it that - imagine Boulder Creek's finest white trash [including us] getting sauced down by the pool every weekend in the summer) and didn't want to piss of my neighbors (any more so than usual anyway) with a rooster. I was only semi-successful in not pissing them off because those feathery bitches ended up being LOUD. Let's just say I gave a lot of eggs away to my neighbors in a halfhearted attempt to maintain the peace (our neighbors are actually way cool and never complained, but if I were my neighbor, those hens would have mysteriously disappeared loooong before we cut their heads off).

I also had experience with chickens even before that because my Mom had a bunch when I was a kid. I have vivid recollection of a family get-together where my cousins and uncles and aunties were invited over for the mass chicken slaughter at the end of the summer. There were headless chickens running around and pretty much total chaos from the scalding and plucking and cooking (but fun, nonetheless). My city-slicker cousins walked away totally mortified.

Feeding a chicken... a shuttlecock? I do love me some badminton.

I still carry them around like that sometimes.

We also had various other fowl, such as geese and turkeys.

Modesty was clearly not a concern for me yet.
FYI, geese grow up to be MEAN.

An ill-fitting bikini and a turkey that got so fat, its own legs wouldn't support it anymore!

Jay doesn't even eat eggs, so keeping chickens is more for my own entertainment than to meet any resolution to become self-sufficient (at least for now) - we figured the homegrown meat would be an added bonus. Our 10-year old nephew, Anthony, was so excited to eat a drumstick from Auntie Sarah's first chicken (even after watching me eviscerate the thing - I explained every organ to the best of my ability because he was so interested), but I waited way too long to slaughter that first batch, and the end result was totally unpalatable (we tried doing beer-can chicken) - he kinda picked at the skin but couldn't even chew through the meat because it was so tough. I was drunk by that point, happy to finally have mustered up enough confidence to even do the deed, and cheerily wrote the bird off as a rookie mistake, but Ant was so disappointed! One of them later got taken out by an asshole neighbor's dog while we were out shopping one morning, and we ended up just making the other two into stock. What a waste.

Anyway, for my second flock, I chose one each of the Delaware, Black Jersey Giant, Black Cochin, and Wyandotte breeds - appropriately named Del, Jersey, Cochise, and Whiner. These breeds have been much quieter, friendlier, and I like them a lot better. Cochise got mauled by a fucking raccoon very early one morning (that was fun telling my co-workers why I was late for work), and we ate Whiner on Christmas morning. I did it right this time, and she was delicious (unfortunately, Ant wasn't there to enjoy it).

Del and Jersey have been spared the axe because I have this romanticized notion that we are going to move to our home in Tennessee hauling all our animals Beverly Hillbilly style with my chickens strapped to the back of the truck in a cage, feathers flying, cackling (don't worry, I'm not going to really do this - but we are taking them with us), and then finally reaching the holler and letting them soak up all that glorious freedom and sun and happiness that is our farm dream.

Next up: future chickens!

~ Mitsy