Population Explosion!

Since I last wrote a lot has happened at Outlaw Farm.
A friend of ours got into Nigerian Dwarf goats last year and he found himself this year with three doelings and a buckling. We had talked about also getting into goats so he offered me the three doelings. I built a pen using cattle panels and then built a bit to clip to it using the design I had used for the hen house, u sing a wooden B add board and a couple of bent cattle panels. The enclosure is circular and it clips to either side of the hut. The hut is open on the back so the goats can enter the hut to shelter from the weather and the front has a door which we use to enter the enclosure. We move the pen every week and this gives them fresh pasture and helps to keep the problem of worms and other pests to a minimum. They share the enclosure with the rabbits. I grew tired of seeing then caged and they help to contribute to fertilizing the ground. The only problem we are having is they are having having a problem with keeping any babies alive but we are working on having a weatherproof box that the does can keep them dry and warm.
We are raising two batches if meat birds this year. The first batch is a mix of Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpington. Out of sixteen, fourteen are roosters so it's going to get noisy pretty soon. The second batch are Rhode Island Reds and Cornish Cross, with one solitary Wyandotte. We plan to save a RIR from the first batch and hopefully the Wyandotte from the second batch to add to our later hens. We are not too sure yet whether the Wyandotte is a hen so it may be replaced with a Buff Orpington. There are fifteen birds in the second batch but we will be processing the Cornish Cross very soon, even before the first batch is ready. They produce a huge amount of meat but I can't help being a little disgusted with the Cornish Cross.
We are also now beekeepers. I built a top bar bee hive using a 55gallon barrel cut in half. It is called a honey cow because with the fat body and four legs it resembles a cow standing in a field. A friend has Langstroth hives and he split a hive and gave me half. We tied the Langstroth frames to the top bars and early indications show good growth.
We are never going to be wealthy while running this little farm but the riches we discover while bungling our way through, cannot be bought with money.

Another rant

I started this blog a few years ago to journal our life on our small homestead we call Outlaw Farm. But it has developed into a page of rants. Not something I wanted or intended to happen.
But my wife and children are Outlaw Farm as much as the grass, the trees, the animals and all the wildlife that surround us. So when my children have been treated badly, then the whole farm is treated badly.

Recently, the girls were invited to a sleepover at the weekend. As we already had plans they politely declined the invitation, as did their other friend.

It was then disclosed that the reason for the invitation was to recruit new members for their church and to convert any non church going heathens.

When the parents were informed that my girls are half Mexican and the other girl was Jewish, they stated that they wouldn't have been made welcome in their house anyway. So apparently this church only accepts you into their fold if you are white. That there are bigotry and hypocrisy at their finest.

I'm white. I'm whiter than white. I'm Anglo-Saxon. You can't get any whiter. But if we're going to use color to judge, then those people are as black as the preacher's robe.

I am proud of my kids, and of their Jewish friend. They are all A honor students. Good musicians. Accomplished in sports. They show responsibility in their community. They are kind, thoughtful and caring for others. They mentor children younger than themselves. All in all, they are really good kids.

I will tell you why I am not a fan of the organized church. When I was a small boy back in England, I attended a Church of England run primary school. There were two schools in town. That one and a county council run school. My mother decided to send me to the church school, thinking it would be the best school although we were not CofE and were Methodists. I went to Sunday School every week and chapel once a month. Every day we would have a school assembly where we would sing hymns and pray. I was even in the school choir.  But once a month the local vicar would come to school and lead the assembly and serve communion. All of a sudden, the Methodist kid and his Roman Catholic buddy would be asked to sit in the classroom and read a book. At the age of six I discovered the hypocritical world of the organized church.
Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of very good people who go to church and believe in the unity of the organization. Some of my closest friends are devoted church goers. But these people are truly good people. If you took the church away tomorrow, they would still be truly good people. They don't wear the church as a badge of honor. They live their lives with honor. You won't hear them quote scriptures while interpreting it to suit their needs.

What kind of cult is the church these other people attend, that send kids out to recruit other kids? If the church was such a great place to go then surely reputation would fill the pews rather than subterfuge.

Labels

First of all, I can't believe it's been so long since I posted on here. I promise to do better in the future.
The reason I am posting is because of a comment I was told about yesterday that involved my son.
He is a freshman at High School and currently enjoying all the new social horizons that come with moving from a small to a bigger school.
Even if I say so myself, he is a great kid. He is polite, intelligent, caring, funny, considerate and basically an all round nice guy. But there are two things about him that make him less than socially perfect. Well at least to a few people that live around here.
The first one is that he does not 'belong' to a church. But that is not his fault, it is mine and his mother's. We do not believe in the ideal of a structured church style Christianity. The only time Jesus went into his Father's house was to kick the merchants and moneylenders out. He was more concerned with making sure people lived a good life rather than spouting praise and scripture once a week to make up for all the shortcomings throughout the week.
My son lives his life following the rules and guidelines of Christianity without knowing it because that is the way we have raised him and his sisters.
The second reason he is not socially perfect is that his skin has a tint of brown. Yes, he is not of the Aryan race. He is actually my step son. His natural father is Mexican, although my wife, his mother, is caucasian American. I look at him and see my son, not someone else's son, my son. We raised him, we taught him his ethics, and manners. He is the result of our forming and moulding.
Those few people that find my son less than perfect are themselves, upstanding pillars of the community. They hold responsible roles and go to church regularly. They are fully paid up members of their social club (church).
Well I have a message for these upstanding people. I find you less than socially perfect yourselves. You are bigots and hypocrits. You looked at his skin and saw someone less than you. You did not see an A honors student or an acclomplished musician. You did not see a well mannered young man who would speak quietly and politely when spoken to. You saw an Hispanic kid that did not go to your church, therefore a punk. Well let me tell you something. You are all descended from immigrants that failed to make it work in their home country. Unless you are pure blood Native American, you are all less than perfect. But wait a minute. If you were pure NA, that would make you brown skinned. Is there an ammendment to your social rules if that occurs? Afterall, some of the biggest business folk in this area are NA. It is at moments like that, when your hypocracy shines like a beacon.

Symbiosis

Symbiosis. What a great word. It means two or more entities working with each other. Our garden is becoming a symbiotic haven this summer.

Firstly I planted corn, beans and squash together under the rows of hay I had put down last fall. I am experimenting with the Ruth Stout method of no till gardening, along with the Native American 'Three Sisters' method of companion planting. I have also planted potatoes and onions under the remaining hay rows.

The corn is doing very well, as are the beans. The squash was a bit of a disaster as I only have two of the twelve seeds I had planted germinate. One thing I have notices with the corn though is that the row that is higher up the hill has grown much faster than the other two. There could be several reasons for this. One is that it gets all the run off from the field when it rains. Another is that when I laid the hay down last year, I used some bales of hay that had spoiled by being left out in the field on the top row. The lower rows had old hay form the barn that had gotten damp. Either way there is a definite different in the growth rate, but not the germination rate. I had almost 100% success rate.

The potatoes have also been very successful as far as plant growth is concerned. I have not harvested any yet so I won't know if the potato yield is successful. I have had a small problem with Colorado Beetle, but we now have a daily ritual where I shake the plants and let the beetles or larvae drop into an old drinks bowl. I then visit Henrietta and Penelope, or two barred rock chickens. When they see me coming with that bowl they start clucking and dancing which I can only think is a chickens way of salivating. I drop those bugs onto a bare patch of ground and they gobble them up in a second.

Doing this is not only a safe way to control the pests, but gives the girls a welcome treat. Symbiosis! I feel we have finally started to advance in our endeavors after two hard years of seeming to get no where.

The chicken coop is moved along once a week and where the chicken have been working that week is raked and then sown with oats. This is then covered with hay. Time will tell if this will work, but it is all part of my no till experiment.

All the seeds I have used this year have been heirloom seeds from Baker Creek and it feels good to know that if I get a harvest from them, they will be wholesome food with a really natural taste.  We actually drove over to Baker Creek this Sunday and attended one of their monthly festivals that they run throughout the summer. It was well worth the drive and I encourage any of you if you live near one of the three locations to pay them a visit. You won't be disappointed.

Summer Success

I really must post more regularly on here as there has been a lot going on since I last wrote.

The rabbits have finally started breeding. Well one of them has, but unfortunately both times she has kindled on the cage floor and the kits have died because they were cold. Partly my fault as I didn't get to them in time.

Continuing my experiments with the Ruth Stout method of gardening, I had laid down four hundred foot rows of hay last fall. I planted potatoes in one of the rows and the other three I attempted a three sisters planting of corn, beans and squash. All the seeds were heritage seed from Baker Creek. The potatoes were from one of the local feed stores.

The potatoes started to grow really well and then we were hit with an unexpected frost one night which looked to kill about thirty potato plants. I trimmed off all the black damaged leaves and hoped they would recover. They did and I now have over sixty well established planted that I have hilled up twice with more hay.

The corn is doing really well also. Out of all the seeds I planted, about six have not shown. The beans and squash didn't do so good. For every corn planting there was a bean planted next to it. I have about fifty percent germination on the beans. The squash did very poorly and I only have a couple that germinated. I may need to start them off in pots when I do it next year. Actually I have recently learned of a way to use eggshells as seed starters and I will try that. You take the eggshell and carefully bore a hole in the bottom for drainage, fill it with compost and plant your seed. When you are ready to transplant them in the garden, you just squeeze the shell to crack it and plant the complete thing in the ground. This gives the plant lots of vitamins and calcium as the shell breaks down. The roots 'hatch out' the bottom of the shell. This idea came from a really cool family that post video on YouTube. They go by the username Survival HT. Thank you guys.

Talking of eggs, the main project this year was to start keeping laying hens. I built a chicken coop from plans I found on the net that use cattle panels bent over to form a Quonset structure. It has a wooden frame around the base and the two panels are attached to it. More panel is used for the ends and a door is built into one end. The whole structure is then covered in poultry netting and then tarps for weather proofing. It can be moved around the field so the chickens improve the ground it is on, they are then moved to a new spot and the first spot is now clear for planting. We were given two Barred Rock chickens by a colleague at work and we have had them for about two weeks. It took them just over a week to settle in but they are now giving us eggs!

As the laying program is now successfully under way, I am looking at meat chickens for next year. Again they will be on a pasture rotation system and after reading up on the subject, we have decided that the usual Cornish Cross chickens are not for us. If we are going to raise our own meat then it will be tasteful in more ways than one. The CC birds suffer too much when they get to slaughter weight as their legs are not strong enough to carry them around. This would make it impossible to use them in a pasture setting. Instead, we will try to get Freedom Rangers. These are colored birds that grow a little more slowly than the white birds. They don't get as heavy as the white birds either, but the taste is so much better. We may even try raising our own stock once we have the initial flock.

We haven't made any hay this year as we have so much still left from last year. The two year old hay is being used for the no till garden and if we run out I will just cut some from the field and bale it as I need it. I have a friend lined up to come and brush hog the field at the end of the summer. The reason for this is mainly to hammer the Horse Nettle population. This is a poisonous plant that is not good for livestock. We are hoping that cutting it just before it get to flowering, we can knock it back some. We will see if it works.

I eventually want to run some small livestock over the land: I'm still not sure whether it will be goats or hair sheep. Whatever it is, it will be dual purpose for bot meat and dairy. I'm still reading up on that one.

All in all, we are having a good year. There has been quite a lot of rain so far this year and it has definitely helped the plants to grow. Unfortunately it has also made the grass row and I hate mowing the lawns. Let's hope we don't get infested with the locusts and grasshoppers like we have done in the last two years.

A lesson in life

About this time of year, my life gets all consuming. It's the end of the school year and I always seem to have a hundred and one projects to complete before we can all relax for three months, or in my case, change jobs and become a full time farmer.

But yesterday I was given a lesson in life when I heard news that one of our eighth grade students had gone down to Little Rock to have tests for leukemia. This young lady is one of those rare students these days. She is bright and intelligent, quiet and well mannered, pretty without the trim and frills of the current fashion. All in all she is a super nice girl.

She will miss all the end of year celebrations, and she will miss the Eighth Grade Promotion where she should have received awards for her schoolwork.

Her father came into school today to let us know what was happening, and I was called to the office to speak to him. He had a favor to ask of me. As she couldn't attend the Promotion, could I stream it live so she could watch it while in her hospital bed? I have never meant it more than when I told him I would do my best to make it happen.

It's at times like this that a person starts to question the god he or she looks to and asks the question "Why her?" It's also at times like this that you rely on the power of prayer to help you come to terms with the situation.

But who are we praying for? Are we praying for the child that is hooked up to an IV that is pumping poisons into her body to try and kill the disease in her? Or are we praying for ourselves so we can come to terms with the fact we are supposed to protect these children and we failed?

Perhaps it's a little of both, and I must admit to not being a church going christian and announcing my faith very often. But it doesn't mean I don't believe in god, it just means I don't believe in church.

Today I received a copy of a text conversation between this girl and a friend and colleague who had taken it on to tell her how we all thought and send her some words of hope. I read that text conversation over and over again, soaking up the strength from their words.

Today I prayed. I prayed that she will make a full recovery and go on to be the woman she is meant to be. I prayed that I can fulfill the task her father asked of me. I prayed that her friends can find the strength to carry on with life and to be there for her when needed.

Today was a lesson in life.

We need eggs!

The title of this post was the exclamation Sophie made recently. She has become quite the cook over the last year, and if Momma is ever out of the house, then we know Sophie will take over the kitchen and keep us fed. But she does tend to go through quite a lot of eggs. So much so that we have now decided that this year's project will be a chicken tractor.
I've been looking at different designs over the last year, to see which one would suit us. It had to be cheap and easy to build, predator proof and easy enough for one person to move.
After a lot of studying, I have finally found one that matches our needs. Its a Quonset design using cattle panels curved and attached to a wooden base frame. The cattle panels supply the form of the tractor with finer mesh covering it to stop predators getting in. The nest boxes are attached to one end and there is a door at the other. The nest box end is also covered with tarpaulin to provide shelter from the weather for the birds.
As soon as the weather allows us to work outside again, then the construction will begin. It may be a little while yet though, as we are experiencing one of the snowiest and coldest winters for a long while this year. This may be a freak of nature, or it may be a sign of things to come. Either way, it has shown us some of our weaknesses that have to be resolved. We had a dam of snow still on the roof at the back of the house one night and it decided to pour with rain. Because the rainwater couldn't run down the roof because of the snow dam, we started to have drips coming through the ceiling in the living room. I had to climb up and release the snow from the roof, in the pouring rain at 11pm at night. Not something I want to do too often.
We are all looking forward to another year on the farm, and the adventures it brings us. Lots of new things to try and hopefully succeed at. If not, then we learn from the experience.

Hay. hay, hay

Last year we struggled in the heat to make some hay. This year I decided to try and make it easier for us all. One of the hardest parts is to rake up the hay and bring it all to the barn for hand baling. I decided to first of all, rebuild the baler so it was upright, to compress it easier and thus make more solid a bale. I then secured it to a pallet and then fitted sled runners to the bottom of the pallet. This way we could drag it with the lawn tractor and bale the hay along the windrows. This was a big hit with the family, and you can see a few pictures of this on my daughter's blog Two girls and a farm blog. The link is on the side. In the end we ended up with eighty five good looking bales.
The hay from last year is being used for rabbit litter under the cages. The rabbits are eating me out of house and home and do not care that all they are producing for me is a steady pile of manure for the garden. At the moment the buck is trying to do his part, but the two does are not recipricating.
The rest of the old hay will be used as cover mulch for a section of garden that we will be sowing winter cover crops, wheat and sumflowers. We have decided after breaking the tiller four times this year, that we will be practicing a no till garden.
We were recently given over thirty raspberry canes. I chose eighteen of these and planted them in the orchard. Tony's job each evening is to water these. Because of this, and wanting to set up an irrigation system for the orchard, I have been looking into using gray water from the washing machine. It would not be practical to fit a permanent system, so what we have come up with is to run a hose out to the patio, where we will have a barrel fixed to a cart. The cart can then be wheeled to the top of the orchard and connected to a drip irrigation system.
We have just started picking blackberries and this year I intend to put some by to make some wine. If we get as many as last year, we will have plenty to make wine, jelly and the family's favorite, blackberry cobbler.

Summer and wood chippings

School is out and we become full time farmers for the next three months. We have now got the rabbitry up and running with one buck and two does. They are New Zealand Whites and will be ready to start "working" in the next week or so.
Our garden has been converted to a no till garden. We recently aquired about three hundred cubic feet of wood chippings from a local tree service and three quarters of the garden is now covered. the remaining quarter was already planted, but once these have been harvested, then it will also get a covering. I have planted some shallots in the wood chippings and they are coming up nicely. We have also planted a row of sunflower seeds in the mowed area to the side of the garden by making a hole and dropping the seed in the hole. To my surprise they are also coming up. I am growing these for food supplement for the rabbits.The swale is working well keeping the garden moist. The bank infront of the swale has also been covered with wood chippings and we plan to plant peas in it.
Hay making has started and I have made an agreement with a friend to supply him with as much hay as I can.

A little soapbox time

As I have mentioned before I don't get involved in politics or religion, but when something makes me react like this, I feel I have to do something. 

My wife likes to watch videos on Wimp.com, in fact we all do from time to time. Anyway, we were home from school due to a snow day and just wasting a little time on the computer. She then read the title of a video she was about to watch. "This video should be seen by the whole world". Okay, usually when you get emails like that it means that you are about to get attacked by viruses, but this wasn't an email and I didn't really want to be the only person in the world who hadn't seen it. Before I give yo the link to it, I must warn you it is not pretty. It shows baby albatrosses in the Midway Atoll, dying a horrible death due to ingesting bits of plastic. This is a trailer for the full feature film made by a guy called Chris Jordan. At the end of the trailer, he gives you the address of his website and yes, you guessed it, I went there. 

The link to the trailer is http://www.wimp.com/beseen/ and the link to the website is http://midwayfilm.com/index.html. 

I'm pretty certain that if you read my blogs, it is because you are the same kind of person as I am. You love nature in all its forms. You probably feel you have a responsibility to leave this planet a tiny bit better than how you found it. I know in this age, that is a hard thing to accomplish, especially when one group of experts tell you one thing, and another group tell you the opposite. But every now and then you see something that you don't need experts telling you what to think, because it's there right in front of you, and this was one of those moments for me. 

What the hell are we doing to our planet when we dump all that crap into the oceans. If you watch the videos on Chris' website, you will see some guys cleaning up a beach. They shovel loads of stuff onto the sidewalk and heave old fishing nets that have been discarded by commercial fishing boats. As soon as they finish, one of the men takes the camera down to the wash line and already there are loads of small pieces of plastic being washed up onto the sand.

In another clip, a wildlife officer does an onsite necropsy on a corpse. In that one bird he pulls out about six bottle tops, as well as other unidentified bits of plastic. Bottle tops are the most common item found in these bird. 

I have never been a fan of bottled water. At all the meetings I have ever had to attend, there are always bottles of water handed out, as if it is more of a corporate badge than a source of hydration. If I have ever wanted a drink, I have always provided my own bottle that I filled up from the faucet. After all, that "spring water" they pass out is probably from the same place I got mine. 

It is reported that there is a flotilla of plastic and other garbage floating in the Pacific, the size of Texas. We have got to stop crapping on our planet and ruining it for future generations. We have got to clean up our act and start being responsible for our actions. The technology is there to convert plastic back to oil. Oil that we can use elsewhere, instead of further messing up the planet with deep sea drilling and fracking. The main problem with that idea, as well as other cleaning systems is no one is making enough money out of it. We are just too greedy for our own good. When all the fish in the sea have gone, or are too poisonous to eat and the water is too toxic to swim in, then maybe someone will do something about it, because someone will be losing money. 

It's time to wake up and smell the pig shit, because no one is smelling of roses anymore. We are all guilty and it's time to man up and fix it. No excuses.

Almost coming of age

We are almost farmers! We have been busy building rabbit cages and they are now hanging in the barn ready and waiting for the occupants to arrive. I have a couple of extra jobs to do before we go and buy any stock. I have an idea to hang some hardware cloth under the cages to catch the manure. The urine will drop through to the floor which will have straw. The manure will stay on the hardware cloth until it is swept off the end into a worm box. The straw on the floor will be changed regularly and the soiled stuff will go on the compost heap.
I have also got to build a rabbit tractor that the young rabbits will be grown out in. I intend to use some of the pallets I have been given to make the frame and the shelter for the tractor. It will be heavier than most but I want it to be. That way any predators will have trouble getting under the cage.
We have an old storm shelter that was built in the cold war era. In fact I think it is as old as the house, which is over fifty years old. Apart from the obvious use of being a haven when the tornado warnings go off, it sits idle. I had the idea of using it for the majority of our food processing. The rabbits can be processed in there and when we eventually get broiler chickens, I intend to set up the plucker and such in there. I can take a water supply from the well-house which is just above the Hobbit House as we refer to it. The inside has to be repainted as the damp has got into it and the lime wash or whatever they used has begun to peel off badly. I will repaint it with latex paint which should help seal the stonework.
We intend to grow grain crops this year to offset some of the feed bill for the rabbits and eventually chickens. That will be my next major task, to prepare the ground for oats, red clover and sunflowers. We will be trying seed balls for some of this. They are a mixture of seeds, compost and clay, which is mixed together to form small balls which are hardened in the sun. You broadcast them and wait for it to rain. The rain dissolves the clay and hopefully the seed has been in contact with the compost and has germinated. They then send their roots down into the soils and away they go. This is all a ploy to get away with not tilling the ground. The vegetables patch it being switched over to no till as well. I will be trying to grow potatoes and the like under mulch, rather than dig into the ground.

Agrarian Nation: —1876—Patents onFruits & Plants

Agrarian Nation: —1876—Patents onFruits & Plants

I have recently found this blog and I spend quite a bit of time reading about how it was all done before the petroleum era. I think we should all start relearning these skills so it doesn't come a too much of a surprise when we run out of oil or it gets too expensive to buy. Apart from that, it is really interesting reading about the old days.

We are still here!

Well Dec 21st 2012 came and went and I still haven't seen a zombie, unless you count the kids when we get them up for school in the morning. So now we have to plan for the  coming year and hope that it isn't nearly as hot and dry as last year.
The main project this year will be the rabbits. We plan to get a buck and three does, either New Zealand Whites or Californians. They will hopefully be supplying us with enough meat to negate buying any from the store. I also intend to use the boat this year and provide us with some fish.
I have two cages already made for the breeding rabbits. I need to build a couple more and also a rabbit tractor to raise the young rabbits in once they are weaned. They should grow nicely on fresh pasture each day.
The adults will be mainly fed pellets, plus greens and hay, but I intend to start producing my own feed for them. I have looked at sprouting wheat and barley, also growing them to seed in the field. Another thing I want to grow is sunflowers. This is all experimental this year, but my intention is to be self reliant for all animal food eventually.
One of the other projects I have in mind is to build myself an extension to the barn for food processing. A friend of mine has been supplying me with pallets and I am going to use them to build the structure. As there won't be mains electricity to it, I will either run batteries charged by wind or pedal power.
I have been reading  a lot about the different ways you can use pedal power to run different types of appliances. There is even a design for a field winch, where you have the unit at one end of the field and it pulls a cultivator, plow, or anything else that could have been pulled by a draft animal. This idea really appeals to me as once it is made, it will cost nothing to run and you get some exercise in the process.
After all the hard work the family did getting in the hay last year, we have plans to make it easier and more efficient. The hand baler worked well enough,  but we spent a lot of labor moving the hay into windrows, then carting it to the barn, then baling it. We still had a stack outside of the barn which Tony has moved into the barn now. The plan is to rebuild the handbaler, but mount it on wheels so it can be towed behind the tractor. We will make the bales as we go and then move them to the barn. The raking will be done with a small dump rake that I am building from angle iron and old bicycle parts. The tines for the rake will be got from Orschleins, who sell them for a couple of bucks each.
The garden suffered from the drought and the infestation of locusts last year. This year we have dug a swale above the garden, expanded the garden plot to four times the area and will be experimenting with a no-till policy. We will use hay to mulch everything. We have plenty. I will also work harder on digging out the mud from the pond if it dries out like last year. The problem with that was getting the diggings up the hill to the garden. If we do get a pedal powered winch, then that will solve that problem.
All in all, it promises to be a more productive year in 2013.

End Of The Summer

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, but there hasn’t been a lot to talk about. We spent most of the summer hidden inside because of the 100 plus temperatures. The heat didn’t do much good to the crops either.

Because of the dry, warm spring, we had a great number of grasshoppers this year. Watching one of the kids walking up the field with a cloud of grasshoppers bursting up around them was a tedious thing to see. They ate all the tops off the vegetables which lost me a good crop of potatoes and onions. In fact we had hardly any vegetables survive the heat and insects, even though I set up some row covers to try and protect them.

We spent most mornings working to get the hay in. After trying several ways to cut the hay, including a scythe, a trimmer with a brush cutter blade and a hedge trimmer attachment, we eventually finished it with a Husqvarna wheeled trimmer. It is the cheaper version of the DR Trimmer often seen advertised.  It was all raked into windrows and then hauled to the barn where we built a haystack. We are in the process of pulling it from the stack to make handmade bales. We have about thirty bales already put up in the barn and have come to the conclusion that we have more hay than we need at the moment.  I have offered it to a few friends to use if they get desperate through the winter.

We intend to make it a bit more efficient to make the hay next year. I am in the process of building a small dump rake to pull behind the lawn tractor, which will make the windrows.  Then I am going to build a new hand baler that can be hauled around the field so we can make the bales along the windrows and then haul the bales back to the barn with the truck. This will eliminate a lot of double handling and sweaty evenings. I must say I have never sweated as much as I have this summer.

Another project I have been working on is making bio char. For those of you who do not know what this is, I will explain. It is a form of charcoal made anearobically, in other words without oxygen. The difference between this and normal barbeque charcoal is that it has had all the cellulose and moisture removed making It very porous. When added to soil or compost, it holds much more water than the compost and also holds nutrients and microbes. It stays stable in the soil for thousands of years as well as sequestering all the carbon. It is claimed it will help greatly in reducing greenhouse gasses as well as increase food production. The industrial sized retorts also collect bio oil and syn gas; both being excellent sources of fuel.

Hot!

And the drought continues. We haven't had any rain to speak of for about two months and the pond is looking pretty low at the moment. I'm glad we didn't get the livestock now, as it would have been a full time job to keep them cool and watered. This week it has been hovering around the 100F mark, making it hard to stay out long enough to do any work.
We did get a good harvest of blackberries though. About none gallons in all off two main bushes. We are watching the persimmon trees now, to grab them before the deer come in and steal them. Most of the trees we planted earlier in the year seem to be hanging in there. The elderberries seem a little eaten up but apart from that, everything else still has leaves on.
I plan to get another package of trees again this year to plant along the top fence line, eventually building a living fence that will reinforce the wire fence as well as produce both fruit and nuts.
The vegetable garden has taken a big hit from both the dry weather and the grasshopper invasion. I erected a row cover over the peanuts I planted, but it was too late for the potatoes and onions. We pulled the onions and salvaged what we could.
We have been experimenting with ways to cut hay on a small scale this year. I tried a scythe but the snathe (handle) was too short for me, making it hard to use. Then I tried the trimmer with the string head and then a brush cutter disc. This was okay but was slow going. Then I started looking at the DR Trimmer. This is a string trimmer with wheels. This seemed the perfect tool for the job but the price was too high for our current budget. I then found a cheaper one made by Husqvarna at Lowes. The first one we bought practically fell apart on me, so we exchanged it and so far the new one is working well. Once we have it cut, we haul the hay down to the barn where we have a hand baler to make square bales. This is not top quality hay, but I will be able to use it at least for bedding or for mulching, even if the livestock won't eat it.

Summer Heat

Well the weather has certainly warmed up recently. But it has brought with it some problems. The first one being the millions of grasshoppers hatching in the field. They have all made a beeline for my vegetable patch and eaten all the leaf material off my potato plants. I have had to dig them up and I only got about five pounds of new potatoes from them. I was hoping for a lot more, but it's all a learning curve. I will try and get some row covers before I plant anything else in that bed. They have now taken a like to my onion stalks, so I may be digging them up this week. The only other thing I have growing in those beds are some peanuts.
The other problem has been the heat preventing anymore than an hour or so work each morning. We are also experiencing a bumper crop of ticks this year,, so every time we come in from the field we have to check for the little bloodsuckers. I hate them with a vengeance and really enjoy killing any I find.
We have been busy every other evening picking blackberries. So far we have about five gallons of berries and there are still lots more to come. The birds seem to be letting us have all the pick of them this year.The mulberry tree on the west side has had a good crop of berries too, and it has been a grazing stop for us when ever we have passed it.
I have also been cutting hay, but on a small scale. I have been using a trimmer with a brush blade on it to cut the grass, leaving it in windrows throughout the week and then the family workforce goes into action every Saturday morning to bring it all to the barn where we have been making square bales with a homemade hand baler I made. So far we have just over a dozen bales that I will keep for litter for when we eventually get the chickens.
The orchard trees continue to flourish, even though we have had hardly any rain. I did have a worrying day or two when I found Japanese beetle on them, but I sprayed everything with soap spray and it seems to have stopped them.
More fruit is growing in the kitchen garden. We have some watermelons growing and the kids are looking forward to cutting them up. I actually prefer honeydew melons. I think they have lots more taste to them and they don't feel like you are eating water. We bought some recently and I happened to comment that it would be cool to save the seeds and try to grow some. Well I got ignored and the seeds were tossed onto the compost heap. A week or so later we had honeydew melons growing in the compost heap. Lea Ann tried to transplant some into the kitchen garden but they died off. Luckily she had left some on the compost heap so we are letting those grow and will see what happens. I love free food.
Future projects include a hoop house greenhouse, fed with water from a rainwater catchment fitted behind the barn. It will also irrigate the vegetable beds. I may eventually build an aquaculture system in the greenhouse with a wind generator to charge the batteries powering the water pump.
I also want to convert an old tiller into a walk behind tractor, so I can build attachments to use around the farm such as grass rake, snowplow, chain harrow and seed drill. Eventually all the gas engines will be replaced with electric motors with the batteries being charged by solar and wind power.

Spring Fever

It's been a busy time here at Outlaw Farm. We've dug two new vegetable beds and are about to dig one more at least. The first two were for the potatoes and onions, and the next will be for the birdhouse gourds and Jerusalem artichokes. Sixty one trees have been planted so far. The latest were native wild fruit trees. Blackberry, elderberry, black chokeberry and paw paw were planted on the edge of the wood lot, and serviceberry, golden currant, black cherry, wild plum, persimmon and red mulberry were planted in the orchard. There was five of each of these, except for the blackberry, where we had six. It took some digging to get all these in, because the ground is so full of rocks that I had to use a tree bar and post hole digger to get them in. I was averaging a five gallon buck of stones for every five trees.

These stones won't go to waste though. I am saving them to make corner posts for the livestock pastures. The idea is to make cylinders of welded fence wire and fill the cylinders with the stones. This will save me having to buy fence posts and then struggle getting them in the ground. The cylinders are kept in place by a couple of t posts and just sit on the ground rather than in it.

On a sad note, the kitten we found in the barn died. Whether mom had abandoned her, we don't know. I have seen Midnight about since so nothing happened to her. Hopefully the kitten was just one she had left behind, and the rest of the litter are doing okay.

The next jobs are more planting. I have more paw paw and elderberry to plant as well as two types of grapes. The grapes will be trained up and along the fence separating the orchard from the front yard.

I managed to get a truck load of manure last night. A friend of ours has cows and a mule, and this was a load from last winter when the snow storm hit us. He had struggled to get feed out the animals and the hay was frozen, making it difficult to  remove the netting. As he usually spreads his manure with machinery, this load was of no use to him as the netting would jam up the spreader. For us it's perfect as it's matured well and pulling out the odd length of netting by hand is no big deal. There is more to be had when this load is used up too.

One last point. This blog is more of a journal for our benefit, but if you are reading it and you find something we had done that you like, then please feel free to try it. That's what blogs are for in my mind. I'm a member of several homesteading forums, and although there are lots of great information on them, there seems to be a lot of politics and religious opinions posted on them, that tends to be a little tiring at times. I would like to state here and now, that apart from this paragraph, you will never see me write about politics, religion, prepping, conspiracies, or anything else that I consider to be private. If you do, then you are more than welcome to flame me.

It's a busy time at the moment. Just last weekend we planted ten flowering trees along the bottom of the front yard. These are all native trees and they are hopefully going to break up the monotony of all the green with lots of spring color from the blossom and the color throughout the summer and fall from the leaves.

We have also cut a vegetable bed behind the well house and planted three rows of potatoes. I am in the process of cutting another bed for onions. It's heavy going though, even with the tiller. I've probably picked up enough rocks to build a wall.

Lea Ann has been busy in the side garden with all her other vegetable seedlings. Also the Iris' we were given last year are starting to blossom so she is excited about them too.

The fifty native fruit trees arrived this week and we will be planting them this next weekend. These were bought at a very good price from the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Soon after we moved in we noticed a small dark cat snooping about the place. It would come sneaking around the house at night and occasionally I would see it around the pond in the morning. I assumed it was a neighbor's cat that visited for the cuisine. Well the kids were playing Frisbee around the barn the other evening and Lea Ann said she thought she could hear a kitten crying. I crept into the barn and sure enough, tucked behind a bit of baseboard was a single blond colored kitten. We had named the dark cat Midnight, so the kids named the kitten Sunshine. I've been quietly checking on the kitten each day and it seems to be doing okay. I wondered if it had been abandoned by the mother and she had taken the rest of the litter elsewhere, or that it was the lone survivor of the litter and the others had been killed by a possum or raccoon.

The dead oak in the front yard has been felled and the wood from that should keep us in fuel for a couple of years. It was a load off our minds as this was large, and too near the house for comfort.

We feel there is going to be a lot to do this year, but it will be worth it in the end. To think that by the end of the summer we will have our own vegetables and even our own eggs if I can pull my finger out and build the chicken coop.

Back to Plan A

What was plan A, I hear you ask? And why did we go to Plan B? Well let me take you back a few years. About 10,000 of them actually. Before that time everyone fed themselves on what they found, and they left it there because they knew that when they came back again next year, it would give them another bunch of food like this year. They moved about and fed themselves on raspberry from the edge of that wood, and then they ate hazelnuts as they traveled through the wood. Maybe finding some Oyster mushrooms growing off an old log.

This went well for a short while... about 50,000 years. But you know how it is. There must be change or else everything will stay just like it is. Also, we have to feed the growing population. Did you know that at the last stone age census, there were fifty people living in McDonald County? How the heck are we going to feed all those people with just a few raspberries and hazelnuts. I know, lets cut down those woods, dig it all up and plant some corn in nice neat rows. Then when someone eventually invents a combine harvester, we can quickly harvest all the corn we've grown and make lots of recipes that I saw on primitive Pinterest last week.

Well that's been okay for a while but now there are thousands of people in McDonald County, and do you remember Jed Clampit found that black gold that we used to make gas for that combine harvester we eventually got invented? Well it turns out that the black gold is running dry and the insects have started eating all our corn. But we sorted out that last problem because some clever people invented a spray to kill all those insects, and they also invented a bunch of stuff to put on our crops to make them grow quicker and bigger. What does it matter that the soil is turning to dust, we just have to pour more stuff on the fields each year to make the corn grow. What? You say you don't like corn? It gives you allergies? What are allergies? We never had them when I was a kid. Must be something else we need to invent to stop that.

Now I've heard there are some strange people about these days. Subversives I dare say. They say they have come up with a really great idea. They say they are going to plant different stuff all over their farms. They say they aren't going to grow just corn, and what's more, they reckon they aren't going to use any of that brilliant stuff that the clever people invented. They say they are going to bring the soil back to what it used to be like. And they are going to let nature take it's course with the insects and stuff. It all sounds a little far fetched to me, but I do like a raspberry now and again and apparently there are more calories in hazelnuts and chestnuts than all the corn we have been growing. I do think it's a bit subversive to me. I think it will cause a lot of problems for all those clever people in time. Those clever people will probably have to get a job at Walmart. What? Walmart will be turned into a Farmers Supercenter Market? Are you telling me that I won't be able to buy my chemical enriched food anymore?

Hello, my name is Graham and I'm a subversive.

Busy time ahead

I have recently been studying the world of permaculture. I had heard the word being used for a while but had never really known what it was. I just thought it was one of those buzz words that get bandied around. But when I sat down and started reading about it, I realized that it was something I had been trying to do for a while.

Basically it is a design concept that you use to get the most out of your garden or homestead without using up the natural resources. Using recycling, positioning and sustainability, you can keep a property feeding you as well as making it a clean and natural place at the same time.

We are awaiting the arrival of fifty native fruit trees that we will plant around the property to use as a food source, attractant for the wildlife and as a natural boundary. We have also ordered some Oyster Mushroom spore to grow in spent coffee grounds. There is a good example of recycling waste and reaping the benefits by growing what is a staple food in this house. Once the myceleum has eaten all the coffee grounds, it will be put on the compost heap to carry on the recycling process.

I have just finished building the top bar bee hive and it will go out on the edge of the property on the other side of the orchard. Now I have to build a trap hive, which is a smaller version of the main hive. I t will be set in a tree on some property that a friend of ours hunts. He has seen bees there and if I can get some free bees out of it, then I'm all for that.

We have also got to order some fruit trees for the orchard. These will be apple, pear, and plum. I was going to order some grape vine cuttings, but a friend gave us some from his garden. These are black concord grapes and I look forward to making some nice red wine from them.

One other thing I have been reading about is aquaponics. This involves keeping fish in a tank, pumping the water from it up to a growing bed where we will grow vegetables. The action of flooding the growing bed with the dirty fish water will feed the roots of the vegetables and then draining back into the fish tank as clean water. I f I can source all the parts, I am going to give this a try.

So as you can see, our family is going to be pretty busy this spring.