cash money melons

Well, we sold the babies, finally. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a good price. Two kids for $90, total. That barely covers the cost of their vet bill, and certainly doesn't cover the cost of Mabel's vet bills from when she died... But, that's not really relevant. Just for comparison: we paid $125 each for our does when we bought them. Last year, we sold four kids for $80 or $90 each, I don't remember exactly. This year, no one wanted to buy, so when I finally did find someone to buy them, I was soooo desperate to sell that I just took his offer. Hey, they are going to a good home and now I have milk. So, I shouldn't complain all that much.


The melons have been good lately, we are about done. There is one more honeydew on the vine; it should be ready in about a week. We have had a lot of melons: honeydew, gali, muskmelon, watermelon. Of all of them, I like the galia the best for its purely sweet flavor, medium size and full slip ripeness. It's like the muskmelon's ease of determining ripeness with the honeydew's flavor but in between the two for size. Perfect in my book. My wife likes the muskmelons better. I think next year I will just grow muskmelons and galia, and not mess around with watermelons (weren't worth the space) and honeydew (so hard to determine ripeness!).

A word to the wise: if you have a need for hundreds of cucumbers, grow armenian cucumbers. One blogger, in discussing how productive they are, described them as being like "rabbits on ecstasy". I can confirm this productivity... I grew 6 plants. I have been harvesting, on average, 5-8 large cucumbers per week for the last 2 months. That's a lot of cucumbers. But, they are tasty.

Anyways, things are going well on the farm. I've been making cheese, harvesting eggplants, planting fall tomatoes and generally biding my time till september for fall planting. Can't wait!!

Peaches, Melons, Figs

The title says it all. Our little peach tree produced its first 'crop' of ripe peaches, and it's only in its second year! OK, it is just three peaches, but I can only imagine that will increase as the tree matures. Here's a picture of a peach.


We have also ben enjoying the first of our melons. I've counted about 10 melons of the cantaloupe/galia/honeydew sort and maybe 5 or 6 watermelons. The galias are ripening first, I think the cantaloupes then honeydews, followed by watermelons will be next, over the course of about 4 or 5 weeks. A really tasty summer! Here is a ripe melon.





I was riding my bike home from the library the other day and came across a fig tree (that I have admittedly gone past for this very purpose several times before) LOADED with ripe figs, in the front yard of a house being 'flipped'. No one lives there and the ground below the tree was covered in ripe and rotting figs. So, naturally, I spent about ten minutes picking figs to take home. I would say I picked about 2 quarts of ripe figs. If you have ever eaten warm, ripe figs right off of the tree, you will understand that 2 quarts (half a gallon!) of such fruit is a real prize.

It took about 2 days to eat them all. Here they are. Our own fig tree is still far too small to produce any quantity of fruit, but perhaps in a few years it will be loaded down, too.

Summer Sets Slowy In

Well, the first few eggplants have been harvested and eaten, along with plenty of green beans and tomatoes. We've been whipping up puree for 'you know who' (not Voldemort) from the beans and some carrots stored in the fridge. It's a very gratifying feeling to have grown food for a loved one.

All of the onions are harvested and are new cured. Total harvest: 24lbs of onions! According to John Jeavons, the low end of the yield spectrum for onions is about 1lb per square foot of bed space if you use his methods. Hmmmm.... I'm a bit under that... I figure I planted about 120 sq.ft. of onions, and only got 24 lbs... BUT, i did harvest a lot of spinach, lettuce, and carrots from the same beds, and I know that set my onions back pretty badly. So, I guess we'll still be buying onions from the store after a few months. I wonder how long 24 lbs of onions will last, anyways.

The garlic was much more productive, probably because I was more intentional about keeping other plants from growing up around them and choking them out. I think I had something like 32 bulbs of garlic, all pretty good size and healthy looking. Not bad for about 15 sq.ft. of bed. (Well, I don't think it's bad. Jeavons might. But I have never seen anyone get anything CLOSE to the yields he reports. Does he lie? Is he a god? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop?)

The summer heat is setting in. Highs lately and for the foreseeable future are in the mid 90's.

The bugs, birds and blight have been attacking my tomatoes. :( I think i have another few 'big hauls' of tomatoes before they really poop out for the season. Oh well, I have had a lot of tasty 'maters already.

This post's pictures include:

All of the onions for the season piled up on the floor.
A couple of recent harvests from the garden.
The garlic hanging in the kitchen in a long chain.
The baby goats.


~g

So much news...

Summary:
Tomatoes are ripe!  Baby goats were born (3 babies)! Onions and garlic are harvested. Peas are over and done with.  Green beans are ready. 



Wow, it's been busy lately.  Since last I wrote, PJ had her kids, 2 girls and a boy, all healthy.  The sugar snap peas came and went, beautifully, and the aliums have all been harvested. It's early for garlic to be done, but it was ready and is curing nicely in the shed.  Curing?  To get garlic ready to store, it must cure.  This means hanging it up in a dry, warm place with good air circulation for several weeks/months to let the skins form over the cloves.  The onions need this time to dry as well.


The sugar snap peas were a real success.  I harvested about 3.5 lbs of peas from the 6 ft of row, so that's a decent yield of a tasty treat.  They were only producing for about a week, and were in the ground for 3 months, but they sure were good!

The carrots have been coming out too.  I only have a small plot of carrots left in the ground, and with the thermometer hitting 97 degrees today, they are going to need to come out soon.  Summer is here already.  :^/
I think I'll have harvested a total of about 30 or 40 lbs of carrots from the various plantings this winter/spring.  The main lesson I've learned is to give them space and time, and grow a longer variety next year.

Wow, I can't believe it, but I harvested my first ripe tomato on APRIL 30.  Yeah.... an APRIL tomato!

I planted them a few days after Valentine's day, and with our unseasonably warm winter, they did just fine.  The Early Girl is the best producer, followed by Celebrity.  Better Boy is crummy, not a single green fruit.  All of the vines, however, are infected with early blight.  There are a few hybrid varieties resistant to early blight, which I may try out next spring.  I bought all indeterminate varieties this year with the hope that they would continue producing through the summer and into the fall, but with the disease pressure, I don't think this will be the case.

My experiments in the garden include an okra-long bean poly-culture.  While working on a local farm several years ago, I noticed that the best cucumbers were the volunteers growing up in the okra beds, where they had some shade and a good trellis.  I am hoping that the long beans, which are basically black eyed pea, will vine up the okra like the cukes did.  Black eyed pea can take a little shade, so maybe it will thrive amidst the okra plants.  I'll keep you informed.

Other new plantings are sweet potatoes, melons, watermelons and amaranth greens.  So, we're definately moving into the hot time of year.  Which in Austin, lasts most of the year!  Yay!  Swimming, melons and peppers!


My yellow frying peppers, which were supposed to be sweet peppers, are extremely hot.  I mean mouth on fore hot.  This is a real problem because I didn't WANT hot peppers, but I'm not so keen to replace them now that they are cranking out peppers.  I started some pickled peppers today, if that works I guess I'll keep them and make a bunch of pickled peppers.  I did rip out two pepper plants and replace them with eggplants from Home Depot, at $6 per eggplant....  But, these are in 5" pots so I am hoping that, even though it's technically too late to plant eggplants, they will be far enough along and have a large enough root system not to die and to thrive and produce.  We'll see, I'm not too optimistic about Home Depot plants.

ok that's all for now.

Threshold

From the voice of the one indoors, watching from the kitchen window as Greg tends to and cares for our little .17 acre and that which is nourished from it... I have been absent from our goats and garden ever since our own human baby was born, and that has been intentional. I have much less room in my consciousness for others' young. And I have been wary of this preparation for the goats' kidding, keeping a distance from it this year, having some small idea that bad things can happen (to other people's goats, of course).

I can't help but think about our child's birth since Mabel's early kidding and death. How forceful and sometimes violent entrance into this world can be, and how dangerous. How my child is such a miracle, as is each of us, who comes through that threshold safely.

Think of this: each one of us is here because a woman sacrificed her body's safety and comfort. There are no exceptions. And we are, each of us, before we are able to become anything else and from the moment of our first breath, evidence of astounding sacredness.

more bad news

Mabel is dead. She developed a prolapsed uterus and serious infection. She spent the night at the veterinary hospital but we had her put down this morning on the doctor's recommendation.

Sadness and Disappointment

(Warning, this post deals with death and has a sad picture)

Each morning I get up and put the coffee on to brew. While it is brewing, I feed the goats. This morning, my brief foray into the out of doors brought with it unexpected and very sad developments. Mabel was in labor, about six or seven weeks early. Given that goats have a roughly five month gestation, this is very premature. I'll spare you the truly gory details but suffice to say there was much blood, sticky icky and heart wrenching sadness in my day. All told, she had six(!) babies inside her, all but one of which were delivered dead. One had a weak heartbeat, which I could see though its tiny ribcage. Unfortunately, at such a young age the babies do not have the ability to breathe and thus cannot live in the outside.

I have spent the day searching around on the internet and reading about what causes miscarriage in goats and what to do. The internet is a great place to find terrifying information about diseases that can spread from goats to humans and hide in your brain tissue for years (true story), but a really bad idea on cold rainy days when you've just buried six baby goats in your yard and need to watch your own baby all day. I've never used so much purel in my life. I even pureled my cell phone.

It's interesting and unexpected how the more time I spend with livestock and growing/raising food at the small scale, the more I understand how we have come to have the gigantic scale modern american industrial food system. There are so many authors out there who decry corporate agriculture/factory farming/etc, but when you have animals dying in your backyard and you don't know why, reliance on expert opinion and powerful medicines is very appealing. In the least, this has been a very discouraging and frightening experience.

I am reminded of some dairy cows that lived on a farm where I once worked. The farmers loved their cattle and had been raising them for a number of years, and had two cows, a steer and two calves. One cow had a pendulous udder that would sometimes touch the ground and was prone to mastitis. This cow, had she been living on a big, heartless, corporate farm, would likely have been hamburger long ago, but on the small, loving family farm got an udder bra and special attention. Unfortunately, she also developed a botulism infection in the udder, which spread to all the other cattle and killed them slowly and horrifically. The week or so of decisions and dying cattle that I watched the farmers and animals go through is etched in my mind as a particularly significant and difficult time. Now one of my own dairy animals is out in her pen, having delivered six dead babies and still no placenta, and I am worried about toxosis and all manner of possible scary diseases potentially oozing out of her into my backyard.

Buying milk in a little plastic carton with a sealed cap and expiration date is so reassuring, so simple, so disconnected from the emotional and physical fact that this liquid is coming out of ANIMALS that have given BIRTH. There is blood, mucus, noise, sadness and joy, work and pain, hoping and waiting, and sadness and disappointment in every ounce of milk from your own animals. Now we have to make the decision of whether or not to keep Mabel in milk. She is producing milk now, since giving birth. Monday we'll take her and PJ to the vet to be screened for TB and Brucellosis, both potential abortive agents and milkborn diseases, but both very rare. If she is clear, will we consume the milk? Even if we know it is safe, it will never be cleansed of our knowledge of its origin: the body of an animal who had a miscarriage in our yard. When you remove consumption of something from the market you suddenly see the many complicated other costs and values associated with it, the multiple connections between where the food comes from and where it goes. It is more complex, more multifaceted, more interesting, but it is not easier and does not (always) bring peace of mind. It is richer, but more costly.

Rest in peace, little goats.