The goats found a loose board in the fence and made a break for it.
I was running out to my car when I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye and thought, "Oh, somebody has lost their goats." Goats? Goats? I have goats too, but mine are locked up. I had a tough time wrapping my brain around it. Fortunately, my dad, also my next door neighbor, happened to see the shadow of a fleeing goat running down the driveway and he came to my rescue. The problem for me is not catching the goats. I am a natural born sheep dog. I chase the goat down the driveway and round her up from the neighbors ivy-filled front yard. Buttons and I make eye contact. The problem is picking her up!!!! How do you grab a goat? My dad did it. My sister, my son, my husband have all done it. It seems I'm missing the goat pick-up gene. There is something slippery about goats. They have horns and hooves. I don't want to make contact with anything on the back end. I don't really want to hug the front end either. So I'm stuck. It's that awkward moment when you wish you hadn't gone in for a hug and suddenly you feel like you have extra limbs and you know before it happens that your heads will collide. So I pause, and the goat gets away. "Pick up the goat," hollers my dad, who is under no small amount of duress and holding Calypso in a firm embrace. So I try again, but I can't get past the geometry problem in front of me. My two arms, the goat's big squishy belly, the back end, the front end, the hooves. I'll never fit the pieces together. My son rushes over with a length of rope, and suddenly it all feels even more futile. More impossible geometry. A length of rope we had set aside for such emergencies. I start fiddling with it, because I'm pretty sure that if I can remember how to tie a slip knot this could be the first step toward success. Buttons bolts for the ivy. "Pick up the goat," dad yells again, not sure why I'm just standing there idiotically while his arms are full of goat. The rest is a bit of a blur, perhaps because my amazing sheep dogging skills all kicked in and I did some amazing goat herding right back up that driveway and into the yard, but more likely I stood there and waved my arms around (still like an idiot) while my dad rescued not just one, but two escaped goats. I really don't remember anything else until it was all over and dad looks over at me and says in the authoritative voice reserved for your grown children, "You have to pick up the goats! Just pick up the goats!" Not gonna happen, I guess. It's a good thing my dad is also my next door neighbor, because I didn't get the goat pick-up gene.
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I think of Clarice Starling and her need for the silence of the lambs on mornings like this, mornings when Buttons won't shut up.
The decision to add goats to my backyard came with a few sleepless nights. It sounds crazy, even to me. Goats sound like a heavy commitment, and when I got them the first comment that dropped from the majority of my astounded friends and family was, "Wow, now you can never go on vacation again!" The verdict is not in yet. There are still many mistakes for me to make, and so I can't claim to be able to answer the question of whether or not this was a smart move- not yet. But if you're wondering how the adventure feels to me so far, I can answer that. I'm assuming that like different breeds of dogs, different breeds of goats have their own personality. I have Nigerian Dwarf goats. They are cute, sweet, and little. Their milk tastes like the best, richest cow's milk you have ever tasted. It was not at all goat-y or grassy, although I'm sure it matters what you feed them. For me, the milk is the whole point. I greedily dream of fresh milk, ice cream, yogurt, butter, and feta. Mine are four and a half months old, and at nine months they can be bred. If all goes well, five months later you have kids and milk. Many of the details are still a little fuzzy for me, but I know a super nice lady who has been explaining it all to me step by step thus far. They are little itty bitty goats, but when they give milk I should get from one to two quarts per day. It is entirely possible that this time next year I will get a gallon of milk a day. I am already researching yogurt makers. I can't wait! The adorable goat babies will start out about the size of a shoe, and at eight weeks they can be weaned and sold. Again, I haven't done this part yet, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed. The goats are very quiet. You have to have two or they cry, but once they made the adjustment they have been nearly silent except for the occasional little "Maah." They do like to climb, which I should have known but never paid enough attention. They are little acrobats. They are also escape artists, so fencing is a must, and my husband went so far as to learn to pour concrete before the goats arrived. A worthy investment of his time! Their droppings look like little black beans, and they're too small and disappear too quickly to collect and compost. I was a little disappointed by this at first, but the good news is that they don't stink! The side of my house doesn't smell at all. They don't require much in the way of housing but what amounts to a dog house. They HATE to get wet, and they do need shelter from the wind. Since our goats are in a very sheltered spot on the side of the house, we just used a tarp to cover an old play structure, and so far this had been enough... Until this morning. I came out to lots of heartfelt bleating and a miserable, wet little Buttons. I toweled her down, brushed her, pet her, whispered to her, and loved on her. She was quiet the whole time, right until I walked away. Maah! I sent the kids back to her and the quiet Calypso with apples, carrots, and celery. They were quiet for a few minutes, presumably because they can't bleat and chew at the same time. Maah. Maah. Maah, maah, maah. After last year's failings, I began this year's garden with a much more relaxed attitude. Ambition doesn't always guarantee success. I waited until March to start my tomatoes and peppers, and started almost everything from seed directly in the beds. In one spot in particular, I replanted seeds three times before anything came up. At first I thought it was the birds again, but now I think I just didn't water anything enough. I didn't overcrowd anything, though I didn't grow much either for a while. The verdict is in- next year I will start my seeds in February, and I will probably never ever work with anything other than transplants. In other news, my "farm" is slowly becoming a zoo. First the goldfish, then the hamsters. The bees (fortunately very low maintenance). We hatched five more chicks, and then recently my dad asked if we would take some of his chickens. Then we paid for dairy goats and came home with a dog. As if that wasn't enough, the next day a rabbit showed up in our yard. I'm not sure if I feel more like Dr. Doolittle or perhaps Noah as he placed the finishing touches on the ark. The decision to get Nigerian dwarf goats made everyone nervous, but as you can see they don't take up much space. The first couple of days they bleated, and it was loud. I was in a sweat over what the neighbors would think, but the goats calmed down after that and hardly make a peep anymore. I didn't realize until later when they nearly knocked over a lactating visitor that they hadn't been fully weaned and they missed their mommy! They are only four months old, and very sweet little creatures. My nine year old picked one up, so though I don't know exactly what they weigh, you can see they are small. It's very difficult to get good pictures because when they see me they run up looking for love and snacks. We had sectioned off nearly a third of our yard for them, the portion previously dedicated to play space, but they prefer to stay up on the side, as high up as possible. We will probably put them in with the chickens soon. The rabbit appeared out of nowhere. I don't know if she was abandoned or an escapee, but she's ours now! We put her in a roomy hutch which fits over the raised beds. Rabbit pellets can go directly into a garden without composting, and she has been a great source of bunny berries. She has devoted one corner to be a toilet, and if you look closely at the picture you can see the pile of bunny poo beneath her. She's not as cuddly as I thought a rabbit would be, but the kids liked to go in and pet her for a while. Now that she's off the ground it's a little harder for them to get to her. I don't know if the bunny is lonely or relieved that the kids aren't jumping in her cage with her, but I'm betting she's relieved. All my vegetables got a thick layer of composted chicken bedding this month. I've started a new way of doing things that I learned from a talk at the Heirloom Seed Expo in September. It was intended for a real farm, not raised beds, but I'm hoping the logic behind it will still work for me. Instead of pulling plants out by the roots (unless it's a beet or a carrot, you get the idea), I cut the plant at the soil level, leaving the roots in the ground. There are many potential benefits since any time you turn soil over you lose a lot of the good stuff, but the immediate benefit for me is that I don't have to replace half the soil every time I pull stuff out anymore. Then I could put down any powdered fertilizers, or maybe some azomite powder, and then a layer of compost. The new plants are planted in the compost layer, and hopefully by the time they've grown the old roots have broken down. It's only been a month, but so far, so good. No more seeds in the soil. Transplants, transplants, transplants! We also added space in the chicken area for the compost. This way the chickens can pick through it and aerate it instead of me doing all the work. All the chicken bedding goes in there too. My father did this, watered it regularly, and produced lots of amazing compost which he generously shared with me. Here is a late watermelon I started in the greenhouse. It's roughly cantaloupe-sized, which for me is a huge victory. Last year I never made it past golf ball size watermelons.
I am a year late posting this, but I thought I'd put it up anyway now that it doesn't make me cry anymore. Something about a phoenix rising from the ashes? Whatever. This was supposed to be a post about my fall garden, but the word "fail" seemed more appropriate given my lack of gardening prowess and the fact that it is already winter. So here are the particulars of the journey since the devastation of August... It was a hot September afternoon and I was watering the garden in my bathing suit when I felt a pinch on my thigh and looked down to see what looked like a bark chip. I swatted it with a gloved hand and the little sucker wouldn't come off. Full panic ensued, which is probably why I can't remember what it looked like except that it resembled a bark chip. There are lots and lots of bark chips in my backyard, so this has made gardening less of a joy. It did eventually come off, but it left me a little afraid of bark chips and swelled to the size of a dinner plate. An itchy dinner plate. I'm not sure yet, but I have considered the possibility that I was implanted with alien DNA. Only time will tell. I thought about posting a picture with this, but it wasn't very flattering. I had a small "harvest" of a few random miniature things. A watermelon the size of a golf ball, butternut squash the size of a tennis ball, and a giant pumpkin that wouldn't even pass for a soccer ball. Sad days, but I'm trying to laugh. The itsy-bitsy watermelon even contained mature seeds... I must be really bad at this! All I can say is, if I depended on my gardening skills to eat, I'd be dead. I think about Cuba's two year struggle to grow food after the fall of the USSR (which Cuba had formerly relied on for food) and shudder for them. My family wouldn't have made it. If my area is hit with a catastrophic event, I am not under the illusion that with a bag of seeds and some dirt I will feed my family. I can learn from my mistakes, it's just that there are so many!! I planted kale and collards twice already this fall, once from seed and once from seedlings I purchased. Nothing can survive the birds. But the best thing for me right now, the thing that warms my heart, is that the potato plants I killed last year all came back! Somehow, this year I will keep them alive. Experts recommend food and water, and here's hoping I can manage that. And in the greenhouse, I am trying to learn a few new tricks so that next summer will produce less death and more bounty. Next summer is going to be amazing! And incidentally, if you read this far, I would like to add that there has been no evidence over the last year of alien DNA or Lyme's disease (that I know of).
Purslane is one of the wild greens people the world over collect in parks and sidewalk crevices alike. In Israel and Palestine it is used to make a stew, and it is supposedly one of the most nutritious plants on earth. How had I never heard of it? So I went about it entirely backwards and bought a seed packet since I have zero foraging experience. The seed packet was last summer, and it took FOREVER to germinate- probably because I chronically underwater, but I didn't know this yet. Once it finally grew, I waited too long to eat it and the entire container went to seed. A few seeds somehow made it into my seed starting box, and a few of those hitched a ride with other plants out into the garden. I am on my way to a purslane paradise. Then I found it at the farmer's market, where presumably they had a similar problem (or success, depending on your definition). And finally, there at the park, no doubt carefully nourished by generations of dogs who mark their territory, I found the real thing. Purslane free for the foraging. I left it there, but apparently that's how you're supposed to eat it, not the cultivated version for cowards like me, but real, wild purslane. According to The Wild Wisdom of Weeds, purslane is ubiquitous as well as ancient. Seeds have been found from Australia to Iceland. The ancient Greeks, Ghandi, and Thoreau alike praised purslane, whether for taste, the self-righteous joy of eating weeds, or health benefits. It's high in vitamins, minerals, and omega-3 fatty acids. But, you ask, how does it taste? Like a slightly lemony cucumber, occasionally bordering on sour grass level of tartness, but for the most part very mild. I loved it in a salad, and once the patch in my garden grows back I will try it boiled or sautéed with other greens. I paired it with ribs, because it seemed like to best way to balance out such an aggressively healthy food.
So keep your eye out next time you're at the park. Dinner may await you there. I cannot lie; I saw this on Pinterest. But I have tried to grow chives, scallions and leeks and it feels like they never get bigger than sewing needles. And then they die. This method really works!
I promise I won't post every single time a chicken dies, but indulge me. This is the last time. I know no one cares, but this was truly awful. My pet, my beautiful rooster, the gentleman, the pimp... breathes his last today. He was beating up on one of the hens. I don't know what he had against her, but sweet little Martha, the first hen to accept him into the flock, has all of her feathers missing from the back of her neck. She is a bloody mess. She hides from the rooster all day in the nesting box, and beneath the feathers she has left it is clear she is skinny since he won't let her eat. It's really hard to say when you've never had a rooster before what is normal and what is not, but this doesn't seem normal to me. I know when to fold. Big Foot, a.k.a. Humperdinker, had a lot of really good days. He foraged. He mated with so many hens so frequently it would make most grown men jealous. He spent every spare minute crowing, confident that he ruled the world. He ruined an entire neighborhood's slumber at exactly 4:30 am every single morning. I've temporarily abandoned my plans to raise birds or rabbits for meat. It turns out I'm too sensitive to live. I can't help making pets out of livestock. This means I will never be able to raise a goat for milk. What would I do with the cute little baby goats? I probably couldn't even fish successfully at this point. Such a disappointment. A Few Days Later... Well, it certainly has been quieter around the neighborhood. I haven't slept this well in a few months. I'm no longer terrified that the neighbors are going to turn us in for an illegal rooster. Martha has been eating as much as she can and she already looks like she's put on weight. I do have to give Big Foot credit where it is due, however- the day after he left we lost a hen. He kept them in line and never let the stupid ones visit the neighborhood dogs. And finally, as thrilling as it was to experience some quiet, there are three wild turkeys gobbling away behind our house. Just listen. I am a novice gardener. I have no idea what I'm doing- but I thought this might be interesting, and a good way for me to remember next year what I did and when. If you garden, tell me what you're doing. All suggestions are eagerly welcomed. I finally learned the secret wonders of homegrown broccoli. After the initial broccoli crown is cut, if you leave half the stem, lots of leaves and small crowns come back. I pulled out all but three plants, and those three have continued to give me a little broccoli here and there. Enough for a stir fry last night, and enough for a steamed side vegetable the week before that. Sadly I ate it before I thought to take a picture. The broccoli is a deep emerald green next to the store bought variety. I cut a bunch of the leaves off last night to make stem pesto with, and if I have enough soon I will try to make broccoli leaf chips instead of the trendy kale chips. All my young hens are finally laying. You can't tell in the picture above very clearly, but eggs five and six were about half the size of the others. The first eggs from our two black hens. I tried all winter long to grow swiss chard in a raised bed, and nothing happened. I sowed the seeds at the end of September, and though they germinated, they never thrived. Then I tried to grow it in a pot in the greenhouse, and it did really well in there until the weather started to warm up. I had sown close together for a braising mix, but I decided to just transplant all the little seedlings outside and they're finally growing. I covered them with some netting because I think little birds were eating them. The birds really did a number on my pathetic snap peas. I'm not including a picture- too sad. I finally started cutting the outer leaves of the kale. This took a while too- I think I sowed the kale at the end of September too. Not a huge success, but not bad either. The spinach is growing. It took five months! It was a pretty warm winter, so I'm surprised. I had big dreams for the spinach. Maybe next year. Volunteer parsley did really well, though I didn't get much from the parsley I started from seed. The green onions above were all started from the roots I cut off bunches last fall. I was never able to keep them alive from seed. I started butterhead lettuce mid-January and realized that it was dying in the greenhouse from the heat on warm days. It's doing well outside. All the lettuce and arugula I planted did really well this winter, but I wasn't in a mood to eat any of it. Some years I just don't feel like salad. Fortunately my mother lives next door and she is composed of 80% lettuce. I tried to grow zucchini last summer to no avail. I planted a few seeds on a cold day in January (in the greenhouse) and now, six weeks later, I have four or five zucchini. I don't get it, but I'm happy. I had a lot of garden fails- the seeds that never germinated, the beets the chickens got into, all the plants I accidentally killed.
I first read about borage in a Medieval cookbook. It is listed as a seasonal option for a ravioli filling. Of course I was curious. Later, when I read that the lightly cucumber flavored leaves and flowers were supposed to be great mood-boosters, I bought a seed packet. I think I read somewhere that they help with "feminine issues", but I was never able to find that reference again. They're pretty, and they grow year round in mild climates. That's convincing enough for me. True to its name as bee plant, it is always busy with honeybees. This sandwich is toasted sourdough bread, mayo, sautéed borage leaves, leftover chicken breast, pickled red onion, and pickle juice over the top. It was very good, but I think it would have made an even better quesadilla. The leaves didn't cook down much the way spinach does, and it still felt a little furry, but not prickly anymore. I can't say whether or not it boosted my mood, but a good sandwich always lifts my spirits. I read that the flower is beautiful frozen into ice cubes, and it kept my five year old busy for a half hour. I wasn't too concerned with the results. As you can see, next time I should take the furry part off of the flowers before freezing them into ice cubes. Still, the result was very pretty and I could see floating borage flower ice cubes in a tall glass of lemonade this summer.
I hear that a tea made by steeping the leaves for five to ten minutes in boiling water is supposed to help with the blues, but it is also supposedly extremely bitter. I didn't feel like suffering through the experiment, but thankfully there are other ways to cope with a downcast spirit. If you try it let me know. I don't think borage is going to be the next big thing, and maybe in the future I will devote a little less space to it, but it is pretty to look at. It's a good companion plant for tomatoes, and the bees love it. Grow it for the bees. I'm not sure why I feel the need to share this, but I am a beginning gardener and this stuff is still really exciting to me. I hope it always will be this much fun.
Everyone makes compost sound so simple, but of course they're lying. It's not as simple as all that- it's like baking bread the old fashioned way. If you've done it before, you get it, and it's easy. If you've never done it, it isn't quite so easy. You need brown carbon rich materials like dried leaves, green materials which are nitrogen rich, oxygen, and moisture- but not enough to drown it. My first compost pile was a putrid mess. I can't remember whose advice I acted on, but the stench was unbelievable. That was not a win. Probably a lot of green material, and nothing else, not even air. When I moved to this house, I started composting as soon as I could. One year later, with high hopes, I dug around and found not beautiful compost, but the dusty dried remains of a thousand meals. It was an incredible archaeological find, but nothing I could put in a raised bed. So I started watering it as often as I watered my garden, and a few months later the miracle I had been waiting for finally occurred. Beautiful compost, and lots of it. My garden had already been planted, so I opted to just shovel it around some naked patches in the garden where the chickens had scratched all the soil right out of the beds. The effect was immediate- my strawberry plants looked undeniably healthy. But the surprise was tomato plants which popped up ALL OVER. I had already spent so much time trying to baby tomato seedlings into life and health that I didn't have the heart to just tear them out. So I began the ridiculous process of planting and transplanting them as they grew. But here it is, November as I type this, and where the Juan Flamme tomatoes that I painstakingly sowed last spring barely survived, my compost tomatoes are still going strong. |
AuthorI love trying new foods, cooking, and gardening. I hope to share these experiences on this site. Thanks for taking a look! Categories
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