Category: Farm Life

Reward

This is the scene this morning. The ridge a mile away is hidden by the snowfall. The snow is not heavy, just steady and expected until sundown, so we may see our first seasonal snowfall. It is later than usual, but we are approaching the 8 weeks when we are most likely to get snow cover. We are in the Allegheny mountains in southwest Virginia at an elevation of only about 2300 ft (700+ m) on the south flank of the ridge. The ridge north of us rises to about 4400 ft (1341 m) so that it shelters us from most heavy storms. The snow is welcome for the garden moisture it provides, the seasonal beauty and to indulge my inner child who will bundle up and walk or play in it after morning chores are done.

The dogs hit the deck this morning and delightedly took off, leaping; well the German Shepherd leaps, the English Mastiff lopes, and chasing each other around and rooting around like hogs with their noses in the snow. Often when it snows, one of them will come up with a mole or vole with which they play, tossing it around until they tire of the game.

The chickens were less delighted. I filled their water pan with tepid water and hung their feeder beneath the coop to keep it dry and opened the pop door for morning greetings. The first one to poke her head out stopped short as soon as her foot hit the snowy ramp, gave me an accusatory glare and ducked back inside. All of them were milling around in the coop making agitated sounds, but no one came out. It isn’t very cold yet, only 32°f (0°c), the cold is expected again tonight dropping to low single digits and remaining well below freezing for the next week or so. I may have to make a concession and at least put their food inside the coop. We have snow predicted again in a few days.

The woods are looking like a wonderland and with the snow cover, you can see well into the woods and see the foraging deer and turkeys. I love the mountains and the snow. Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 21, 2014
Anticipation

The day is mild, almost springlike. The thermometer has risen to 53f (11.66C) though we still have gusty wind. The forecast is for our first real snow, not a huge one, but 3 to 6 inches, I’ll settle for that. The transportation departments are out in force, spraying their salt mixture on all of the roadways in anticipation. We live on a 2/10 mile gravel driveway, downhill from a 2/10 mile state maintained gravel road, downhill from a real paved road. With only 6 inches, no drifting and the 4 wheel drive feature of the vehicle engaged, we can get out if necessary. The only time we couldn’t get out, we had 20 inches two weeks after we had 22 inches that had not all melted and the second snow drifted. We were stuck for 3 days until our contractor/farmer neighbor came down our driveway on his huge tractor with a blade and plowed us out, then waited to make sure that hubby’s vehicle could get to the top of the driveway. For about 2 weeks, that is where the car stayed and all supplies that we had to bring in here hauled down to the house on plastic toboggans, sometimes with us racing each other down the driveway in two of the them. That was 4 years ago, the year of the last Winter Olympics and we posted many photos of our Cave Hill Olympics, our antics in the snow. We may both be senior citizens, but we still like to play in the snow.

As the transportation folks are preparing, so are we. Knowing that snow and wind often mean power outages, some for only a few hours, some for days on end and when we don’t have power, we also don’t have water, I have preemptively filled the downstairs tub, the water jugs and will shortly go bring in a couple days worth of wood into the garage for the wood stove and fireplace. We went to town and resupplied some of the staples that were low from the natural food store. I added another 8 or 9 inches of dry straw to the chicken coop and put a fresh layer under the coop and where I enter their pen.

With this potential snow, we are facing single digit temperatures at night for the second time this winter. We will have to leave the hot and cold water faucet in the utility room dripping, pull out the space heater and hope the pipes don’t freeze in there again. I also need to figure out how to keep the washing machine drain from freezing, though I can always drain it into the utility sink if the water is running.

With any luck, we will have a layer of white to enjoy for a day or two. The dogs will love to romp in it, the chickens will be less thrilled, but I am still kid enough at heart to be anticipating some snow and a long walk in the cold white world.

January 20, 2014
Egg hunts

Do you remember the excitement of an Easter Egg hunt? Each morning brings that momentary thrill when I walk over to the chicken’s coop area, laden down with a bucket of water for their dish, another of feed pellets for their feeder and whatever leftovers they are getting as a treat, today it was sauteed cabbage and a few green peas with the last piece of cornbread crumbled into the dish. Once the waterdish is filled, the feeder hung outside the coop for sunny days and under the coop on bad weather days, the treat dish placed somewhere in the run, just for variety, I open the pop door and greet each hen with a back scratch as they exit and a good morning. Cogburn only tolerates being touched when terrified like the day recently when the dogs charged and everyone scattered amid yells and barks.

After the feeding and greeting chores are done, the straw in the coop must be forked over and freshened with new straw on top about twice a week.

Then, I get the thrill of peeking into the nesting boxes. There are 6 boxes, but generally the hens only use one, adding their egg to the clutch that has been started. Sometimes a hen can’t await her turn and will use the next nest over, or lay her egg just outside the boxes, probably while the box was occupied. Some days, there is only one egg when I let them out, or none, but as the day progresses, several more will appear, always in the same nest. Last thing at night as they are being closed up, one last check is done and sometimes there is a late treasure.

This time of year, there are generally 4 to 6 laid during the day, one day last week there were 8 and yesterday after being on strike since October then molting in late November into December, the Olive egger left us a green egg (no ham on the menu today.)

The hen gems are all varied in hue and shape. One hen lays a nearly round egg, one hen’s eggs are sharply pointed. One hen lays eggs that are lightly speckled with darker brown confetti, one hen’s dyer is faulty and she leaves a darker brown spot on the wide end. One hen’s eggs are rough textured and others so smooth that they are difficult to remove from the deep reusable cartons they are stored in once the counter bowl gets too full to use in a couple of days. I have tried to figure out who is laying what so that this spring when one hen gets broody, I can tuck a collection of Buff Orpington eggs under her and raise babies the natural way and not have to buy chicks this year, but I just can’t be sure. Perhaps I will have to buy pullets this year, then next year when all I have are Buff Orpingtons and Easter eggers, I will know. Until then, the egg hunt continues to delight me each day.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 17, 2014
Weird Weather Year and It’s problems

Yesterday it was snowing here. We didn’t get much accumulation, just a dusting as each of the other snows this year have been. This snow triggered a memory of one of my first blog posts, a voyeuristic peek into the bare woods that nearly surround our homestead. Our 30 acre farm is primarily hay fields. There is a rock bar at the top of the property above the barn, a sink hole that swallows our two creeks to the west of that rock bar. The upper part of the property is returning to woods, the west side and south edge of the property are wooded, the upper east side belongs to a neighbor and it is also wooded. These woods give us a sense of isolation, we can’t see our neighbor’s houses at all in the summer and can see their lights at night in the winter, but the winter with the falling of the leaves, clears the view the brush obscures during the summer and we can see the wildlife that a mountain side farm supports.

Last summer, we thought we were going to need to build a boat if the rain didn’t stop. It rained well into the time of the summer that is usually too dry here and it affected the garden, severely reducing the produce from some of the crops. The young pullets and cockrell that we had started in March spent most of their day under the coop and the design of the coop, allowed rain to enter the drop down window on the east side.

I struggled with an idea for sheltering that window so that the chickens didn’t get wet when perched below it inside. My solution was to tack an 8 foot tarp just under the roof on that side, stretch it over three flexible poles that were anchored to the fence with cable ties. That seemed to work for a few months, providing shade and rain shelter on that side of the coop. This winter, however, we have had wind. The farm is in a hollow on the south flank of John’s Creek/Salt Pond Mountain and it funnels the wind sharply across our land. The wind tore the tarp free at two points and the flapping raised 3 of the fence stakes from the ground on the coldest day this winter, when our high only reached single digits. The fence came down, the ground was too frozen to hammer the stakes back in, but the chickens were cooped to try to keep them from frostbite. Unfortunately, the rooster and one hen suffered some on their combs and wattles anyway. Our winter has alternated between mild, up into the 50’s days and frigid windy weather. Today is the later, the sky is clear and gorgeous and 22 f.

The coop problem however, still exists. Generally the rain comes from the west and the west side of the coop has two glass windows that can be raised opposite the perches and an overhang that helps shelter them from all but a horizontal driving rain. The fence posts have been reanchored, but the fence is really inadequate and has no real gate. I guess when the weather and budget allow, we will begin the fencing for our pastures and at that time, perhaps the orchard in which the coop sits and the garden on the edge of it, will be fenced as well and the chickens will be able to have a larger area to free range. Right now, their free range must be supervised because of our dogs, the neighbor dogs and the coyotes.

For now they have to enjoy the bugs that hide in the old hay in their run, the pumpkins and other treats that I offer and the supervised outdoor time they can be afforded when the weather permits supervision.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 16, 2014
Details

I have posted a number of times about various topics related to the construction of our home on our retirement homestead. The house is a log home, pictured at the banner of this blog at various seasons. The site work, log erection, and rough carpentry were performed by a contractor we hired and later banned from our site. The interior carpentry and stone masonry were performed by our eldest son, his wife and an assortment of “helpers” from grad students at the nearby university to neighbors to me. The finish site work was contracted by us after we had lived here for a couple of years to a neighbor who finally got the drainage around the house right, repaired/constructed a driveway that didn’t threaten the oilpans on our vehicles, and smoothed the septic field so that it could be mowed without feeling that you were about to be bucked off the tractor.

Our son visualized many of the problems that had been wrought by the contractor, some where he blindly followed the blueprints from the log home company without seeing the issues those plans would have caused. Some of these issues were corrected by our son after the contractor was off the site, some are still issues that we can not deal with such as the water pipes in the utility room (last week’s post entitled Deep Freeze and the Thaw) and the water that somehow seeps below the metal roof to run down the logs on the front of the house where the 8 foot deep porch joins the house. Eldest son was a stickler for detail. Several times work that others did was redone by him later.

One of the issues he caught and fixed was that the hall wall made the kitchen so narrow that the stove and the refrigerator would have touched.

He deconstructed the contractor’s wall and moved it over far enough to put a narrow drawer cabinet between the appliances. This also gave us a narrow upper cabinet that is perfect for the storage of oils and vinegars used in cooking.

All of the upper cabinets were hand built by him. My vision was open shelves on which to store the pottery dishes, glass jars of colorful beans and grains, cookbooks and space above for seldom used large objects such as the roaster, wok and some larger pottery pieces. He took my vision and built the cabinets, lined them with cedar, trimmed them with oak and hand oiled them all. The only upper cabinet that is commercial is the one over the microwave that hides the ductwork and provides storage for cleaners that I want to keep out of the reach of grandkids.

Two of his challenges were the dormers and the doors. The house has 3 dormers on the front. The right hand one as you face the house is in our master bedroom, but the other two are off the heavy timber cathedral ceiling in the living room. After all the work had been done installing cedar, pine and log siding on interior walls, we couldn’t bring ourselves to install cheap commercial doors, so he hand built each of the interior bedroom and bathroom doors from a sandwich of yellow poplar, aromatic cedar siding and local red cedar trim. I helped him with the last of these doors and realize what a labor of love they are.

Son is not formally trained in the construction field. He finished high school with honors, entered The College of William and Mary and was graduated in 5 semesters in English, again with honors. He spent the next several years learning construction as a helper then independent contractor and learned the stone mason skills the same way. After finishing most of the house, he enrolled back in college and earned his master’s degree in English and he now working on his PhD working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. He still comes home for parts of summers and holidays to do projects, such as the stone fireplace in the basement prior to the finishing of that area as a recreation room.

And to change out a light fixture over the dining table and installing a fan with light as recently as the past holidays. We wouldn’t have this beautiful retirement home if it wasn’t for his effort and his attention to detail.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 13, 2014
The Thaw

The last couple of days have been, well, tough. A taste of long ago without central heating and water that fills our glass at the turn of a knob. We experienced sub zero temperatures two nights in a row like a good portion of the USA. With those temperatures, or lack thereof, we also had strong wind, thus serious wind chill and power loss. Last summer’s efforts by the power company to clear trees and branches from near the power lines has helped with the outages, but in the rural mountains, they are the inevitable. We buried our lines when we build, but that is rare here, except in new development in the nearby town.

We build our home with an efficient fireplace on the main level and a woodstove in the basement rec room and a good thing we did. The house is total electric, heated with a heat pump. The electricity started flickering early in the morning and failed right after I got my coffee made. Due to expense overrun during construction, the whole house generator was scrapped. The other construction flaw is a utility room joining the main house and the garage. It is not real logs like the house, but log siding and unheated except for a wall installed space heater. We keep the door open to the house, so it stays warm without the space heater during normal winter temperatures. Our contractor, foolishly put the water pipes in a poorly insulated north wall instead of flipping the room and facing the pipes south to benefit from passive solar warming. When the temperatures are expected to dip, I leave the laundry sink dripping, and I did, but the hot water line froze anyway and during the day with the power out, thus no water pump and no space heater, the cold water line froze too.

We spent the day hauling wood from the bin in the garage to keep the wood stove and fireplace going. Dashed into town for gallons of water and lunch and home to keep the fires blazing. The house holds heat well and we stayed comfortable until they restored our electricity in about 6 hours, but the pipes are still frozen.

It dropped to -3°f again last night, but is supposed to get above freezing today. There is a heat lamp on under the utility sink, the space heater is on high, probably causing the electric meter to spin off the wall. If it warms up some more, I need to go repair the chicken pen, the wind took down part of the fence. After one day of being literally cooped up, the girls went on strike and only layed 2 eggs and in the cold, I managed to drop and break one of them. This morning when I finally freed them, there were 5 and again I dropped one with my cold hands. They are glad to be out again, we are glad to see the warm sun and to watch the outdoor thermometer climb already well above yesterday’s high.

Hopefully, the pipes will thaw without incident.

January 8, 2014
The Deep Freeze

The wind howls,

The snow blows ( wish it would stick),

Chickens are locked in their coop with extra straw, food, water and scratch grain for entertainment and digestive warmth,

The wood stove is blazing and will stay stoked

As the temperature plunges to the negatives.

Wish I could stay in and enjoy, but eggs will quickly freeze in these temps so forays to the coop will have to happen til late afternoon.

Stay warm and safe my friends.

January 6, 2014
Return to Normalcy?

Last night, instead of sitting home like a pair of old fogeys, we used the internet to find a party at a hotel in a nearby town with a buffet dinner, a comedy show, then a DJ with dancing and a champagne toast at midnight. It took the DJ an hour or so to realize we weren’t 18 years old and he finally found some rock and roll music that got more folks onto the floor including an 87 year old partier who danced with all the gals.

Our New Year’s day tradition starts with huevos rancheros for brunch and the beginning of the packing away of the holiday trappings.

The tree has been removed, the needles vacuumed and the furniture returned to its usual seating configuration. The shelves dusted, all the Santas carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and stored in their large plastic tote. The windows and sills have been wiped down, the Christmas linens washed, dried and folded for storage for another year. One guest bed linens have been laundered and the bed remade. The basement guest bed still remains to be done.

The Christmas leftovers were removed from the freezer and tonight we will enjoy hot turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy with one of the green vegetables that I carefully froze and packed away last summer.

The helter skelter of the holidays is behind us to be remembered and savored until next year. The winter calm is settling over the house. The farm chores are returning to our daily schedule and it is good to be getting our own eggs again, instead of them leaving with the neighbor that cares for the chickens when we are away. We are glad to be home again.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 1, 2014
Monday Morning Chores

I am always the first up in our house and as the current farm animals are mine, the responsibility of them and of the pups falls on me each morning. It is definitely winter, gray overcast sky, snow flurries, and windy, bone chilling windy.

First up, the pups are turned out to romp and do what pups do after being indoors all night. The coffee pot is set up and turned on so that there will be hot coffee when I return to the house. Barn boots and barn jacket are layered on, the bucket for the chicken’s water is filled with tepid water, the feed scooped and since my hands are full of wet buckets and feed scoops, no gloves are added. It is cold enough that the water is dumped each night to prevent their dish from freezing, sometimes it has a skim of ice by coop up time. I have foolishly been dumping it near where it sits which is right off the front corner of the coop and several times there have been slips and near falls on the mud or ice that has formed there. The chickens get their water, their feed bin is filled and a partial scoop of feed and scratch it tossed out into the pen as they are single file exiting their snug coop. The reward for my now freezing fingers is checking the nesting box and finding 2 to 4 still warm eggs to hold in my cold hands as I walk back to the house. The girls are always thanked for their gifts.

Once layers are removed and pups are brought back inside, I am rewarded with a cup of hot coffee and the preparation of fresh scrambled eggs for pups and me.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

December 16, 2013
After Paradise, Winter

Snowy morning, white roof, icy windshield, freezing rain.

Chickens hiding, dog are romping. Christmas shopping.

Still need a tree and a wrapping session.

Knitting progressing. It will be here before we are ready.

December 14, 2013