Radish, etc.

The weather this week was trying to be fall. It was cool, breezy, and cloudy on some days, but it still managed to get into the upper 90s. We spent most of the week processing the radish seed, and we finished! Hundreds of pounds of duff that needs to be run through a machine to winnow it. We also spent quite a bit of time putting the puppies back in the goat pen only to have them escape several minutes later. Talk about annoying. We moved the cows, sheep, and goats also. Nothing exciting is planned for this weekend because the Franklins are camping, so we're in charge again, but we're planning to take a delayed Labor Day and go down to the coast either next weekend or the one after that. No pictures this week because all the batteries are dead, so I can't get the photos off the camera. Hope everyone has a good week.

Aug. 23

The final week of being in charge of the farm went well. No major problems. The dogs and quarantine goats kept escaping but other than that, all the animals and plants are growing well. We finished harvesting the radish and began processing the seed. There are a few pictures of that. We also have been preserving the harvest by freezing squash and peaches, drying tomatoes, and making pesto. Hope everyone else is doing well.

Absess

This week was HOT!! I checked the thermometer read 107 in the shade one time when I checked on it. The heat makes it pretty tough during the day, but at least we have the creek to hop in as our natural air conditioner. We haven't really had that many calamities this week. Only about 3. First, one of the chicks lost the ability to walk. Apparently it's common with the modern meat chicken. They grow so fast that their legs (and internal organs) can't support them. Regular factory farms combat this with subtherapeutic injections of antibiotics that reduce inflammation in the joints. We put the chick in the brooder with food, water, and kelp (a mineral supplement). The key is prevention, so we put the chicks on a diet, so hopefully they won't outgrow themselves. Then Grant noticed a sheep that was scooting around on its front knees. We caught it and checked the front hooves which were really rotted, so we cleaned them. Grant and Daniel ended up catching a couple more for some emergency hoof treatment, until we can get the squeeze and trim them all. Then yesterday we noticed some bulges on two goats. They turned out to be abscesses, a common goat ailment. We had to quarantine the goats, but one escaped. One of the abscesses burst, and we had to catch the goat, squeeze out the pus, irrigate the wound with iodine, and hope it heals up. The goats are supposed to be fine with them bursting naturally, but we can lance them if we want. We hope that we can lance them, but we have to wait until Tim gets home to get the ok. It was pretty fun doing surgery on the goat, Falfy (Falfy stands for False Malfy because the goat looks like the other goat, Malfy, short for Malformed, due to the deformed horn bud and folded up ears.) We caught another raccoon, but to our knowledge, no chickens died this week. We harvested radish in the evening, and next week you should have some photos on the radish seed cleaning process.

Random Tasks

This was a pretty slow week. We are in the late summer slump when most of the crops are maturing their seed. We banded the cattle which is along the same idea of castrating. We sorted out the bull calves and ran them through the squeeze where we used a bander to put a rubber band around their testicles. The rubber band is set to a specific tension which cuts off the blood supply, so they just dry up and fall off (like an umbilical cord.) It was pretty fun. Then we were the farm cleaning and organizing brigade. We got the barns, the nursery, and the greenhouse all cleaned up. We also began to havest the radish for their seeds. We will get some pictures of the process next week. We are now in charge of the farm for 2 weeks because the Franklins are going on vacation. It's going to be fun. Hopefully we don't have any calamaties to deal with. I hope everyone is doing well and will write soon!

It is definitely cooling down here but not enough to kill off mosquitoes. This week we moved the sheep twice and the goats. We also set up the yurt only to have it fall down again. However, we may have found the problem. The rafters are all different lengths. We'll see what will be done about this, but for now, the yurt project is on hold. We also helped Daniel put up rails on a fence in the corral. They had to be replaced because they were rickety, and it is time to band the male calves. On Wednesday, Grant and I went to two farms to cut flowers and arrange bouquets for the CSA. We don't exactly know why it became our job this week, but it was fun to do something new. On Thursday, the chicks went into their tractors! On Friday, we found two legs and some other chicks were injured. Apparently, something (possibly a fox) came up to the chicken wire sides and started gnawing on the chicks as they slept pressed against the sides. We spent some time cutting boards and filling sandbags to protect the chicks at night. We transplanted the last crop, kale. It will overwinter and make seed next year. We also planted some fall crops for us to eat-carrots, lettuce, beets, peas, chard, spinach, and pok choi. On Friday, we also weeded a perennial flower bed. We left for a little backpacking trip on Friday afternoon. Expecting advice on where to go, we went to the ranger station, but instead we got a senile lady and a complete psycho who was no help. We ended up deciding on a loop around Applegate Lake. It was a very nice trip except for the mosquitoes and some horrible people at our second campsite that were yelling at each other for what seemed like hours. We saw two snakes- a milk snake (red on black friend of Jack) and something else, probably a gopher snake. There were also lots of nice ripe blackberries that we stopped multiple times to gather. It was great to hike again.