Electricity returns

There's so much more to write, but no time to write it in. Life is going by so quickly. It seems like I move from one more huge thing that I have to focus on, to the next.

This week, it's Christmas.

But last week, it was ice storm city. The electricity was out for four days... if it hadn't been for the generator, I don't know how we would have watered the animals (and ourselves) since our well has an electric pump. We also wouldn't have had heat, since despite a wood furnace, we have forced hot water that distributes the heat around the house, that is, if there actually is water. Kind of makes you think how precarious the whole system is. Today, almost a week after the storm hit, there are still 100 families with no electricity in our town, and almost 4000 families without electricity in Western Massachusetts.



The damage was extraordinary. There are trees down everywhere. For several days there were dangling electric lines crossing the road. The schools are still closed.



As with any disaster, community spirit and helpfulness was abundant. When I walked into the Hardware Store, I found a box of emergency analog telephones for those folks who didn't have or couldn't find their own.

It probably doesn't help that we got several inches of snow last night and are supposed to get a foot tomorrow...



More ice storm pictures here.

Monarchs in Bloom

My son said yesterday, "Mom, the monarchs are about to bloom!" And they were. In fact, we found one of them already hatched early this morning, but the second was kind enough to wait until we had all gathered around at 10:30 or so. I took lots of pictures.

They are so amazing and so beautiful to watch.

Chickens Should Eat Grass and Bugs

Our chicks are now 4 weeks old and ready to be outside. Besides making the meat much more healthy, raising chickens on pasture makes the chicks themselves so much happier. You can tell that they love wandering around, pecking at things, finding yummy bugs to eat and fight over. The chickens we bought this year are a mix of Colored Range chicks which are "derived from the American and European old heritage breed of chicken and developed in the early 1960’s to meet the highest standards of the French Label Rouge Free Range program".

Before we could bring them out, I had to fix the chicken tractor. Last year, the chicks we got insisting on roosting on the roof and since the coop is only made out of PVC pipe, welded wire, and a tarp, they made the roof sag in. So, today I added two new supports to the inside of the coop. I cut new pieces of 3/4" pvc tubing, attached elbows to each end, and then made an arc with a larger piece of 1/2" tubing. The tricky part was that I had to crawl inside and assemble the pieces there since the completed arc wouldn't fit through the door. Then I attached the new arcs to the existing frame with some bits of wire. I think it'll hold up to some outdoor roosting now. (If you click on the photo, you'll jump to Flickr where I've added some notes to identify individual parts of the photo.)



The chicken tractor is covered head-to-toe with 2" x 4" welded wire, including the bottom. That way, the chickens can peck the grass, but they can't get out unless we open the door for them. They're also more protected from predators.



We also enclose the whole contraption in an electric fence so that when we eventually let them graze outside of the tractor, they'll still be protected from our not-very-ferocious-but-still-very-fond-of-chicken Laika.

Crows are watching you

Just read an incredible article in the New York Times. It turns out that crows (and their relatives, ravens and magpies) can recognize human faces. Not only that, they keep a lookout to see if someone they know (and fear) is nearby.

Researchers donned "dangerous" masks, and then trapped, banded, and released birds. They then walked through the same area without the mask: no response. Then they walked through the area with the mask and they were scolded not only by the birds they had trapped but by other birds, who were perhaps taught by the trapped birds that that person was a danger. There's a very illustrative video.

On Wikipedia, they tell about New Caledonian crows who have been studied for their ability to use tools, including human cars: they drop seeds into the roadway and wait for us to crush them!

Growing in the night

Growing in the night

One of the things I love about gardens is how they keep going even when you go off and do something else.

Bringing in the Sheaves

Oh, what a lovely morning! Our friends, Dave and Joanie, invited us to see their wheat field and to watch them harvest the wheat with a scythe. I couldn't pass up the offer.



They've got 900 square feet of three different kinds of organic wheat. Dave thinks they'll harvest about a bushel of wheat berries. Joanie told me they started with a no-till system, first covering a patch of the field with 2 inches of leaf mulch, then Kraft brown paper, and then another 6 inches of leaf mulch. Then they seeded the wheat right in the new garden. It seemed like a manageable size. I don't think I ever realized that you could just grow a small amount of wheat like this.



Of course, part of the reason that growing a very small amount of wheat is so unusual is that people think you need to have huge machinery for harvesting. To solve that issue, Dave uses a scythe. It looks like it came straight out of a Halloween costume store, except it's real. It has a big wooden handle on one side and when he got going you could tell there was a clear rhythm to it. He has a whet stone in a holster in his pocket because the scythe must be sharpened every few minutes. He was done cutting the wheat in less than an hour, and would've gone even faster if we hadn't been chatting and experimenting and thinking about how to separate the wheat from the weeds (not the chaff, that comes later).



We ended up separating most of it by hand. It was time-consuming, but it's amazing how a job divided between friends can get done so quickly and happily. And watching the pile of golden wheat grow at our sides was downright intoxicating. It was really beautiful. I felt really inspired. Perhaps we'll grow some winter wheat this fall ourselves. I love the idea of the no-till garden. And the thought of making bread from our own wheat is really enticing. It felt just like the first time I spun wool... that delicious feeling of going back to the source and doing it all yourself without relying on any external power.

Parsley, Dill, Caterpillars, and Time

My friend Nancy Bea recently wrote about the plethora of pests in her garden this summer. There was one that was so beautiful she couldn't bring herself to kill. I think she was talking about the Black Swallowtail caterpillar, one of the few that is beautiful as a larva as well as an adult. They love parsley, dill, Queen Anne's lace, and carrots. I have a few in my garden as well that I, too, leave alone. In fact, I always have the urge to plant a whole crop of something they'll love in hopes of attracting them. This year, they were lucky enough to find some dill volunteers, since our gardening was completely thrown off by our trip to Barcelona. Course, if you're kind to them, remember they are as ravenous as any other caterpillar (look at the second row picture!)

It seems to be the time for caterpillars. I happened to see some gorgeous Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars the other day and didn't have my camera (gasp!), but of course images of them abound elsewhere.

And I've noticed more and more Monarchs flying around our rather weedy field. They love the clover and then lay their eggs on the also plentiful milkweed.



Right behind the house there are a few errant milkweed that have a collection of Monarch caterpillars in each possible stage (instar)... the tiniest dark green baby maybe an eighth of an inch long, the teeny half-inch long toddlers just showing their stripes, up to the beautiful yellow, green, and black striped adults ready to go into those gorgeous gold tipped chrysalises.



This one above is probably only in the fourth instar stage. (The fifth and last instar features longer antennae.) I found it on the side of a wooden step, below some milkweed, just hanging out. I think it's probably getting ready to molt.

Birth of a sun...

FLOWER!

This was three days ago:


This was two days ago:


And this was this morning (you can already see wear and tear in the petals):



It's the only one blooming so far. I can just imagine it saying, "Me first, me first!"

Baby gourds, pumpkins, and squash bugs

We have a whole new collection of small chicks, but I'm afraid I've given my heart to my baby gourds and pumpkins. This afternoon, I went out to my too-large pumpkin patch and spent a while watching them hiding like shy toddlers behind the huge, lush leaves of their parents.





It's been raining non-stop, except that today it stopped. I think all the rain has made it hard on the squash bugs; there really aren't that many. The squash bugs love pumpkins but not gourds (which are a separate family) and about a month ago I started seeing the tell-tale signs of yellow, spotted leaves. Turn over the leaves and there are neat little rows of orange-brown eggs, and sometimes whole menageries of baby squash bugs.



The curious thing is that often you find multigenerational groups of squash bugs, a couple of medium size ones along with a slew of babies. I don't know if they just like to hang out together or if they actually help each other.

They are awful to (all kinds of) squash. The leaves wilt away and the bugs swarm all over. And they are awful to squash, but I do it anyway.

New Chicks

We got the call this morning from the post office. Our chicks had arrived. There's about 30 in the picture. This year we ordered Colored Range Broilers from a new place we hadn't tried before: J.M. Hatchery, thanks to a tip from my friend, Embrace Create.

These are “meat birds”, which means that they should grow quickly and by November or so be ready for slaughter and our freezer. Last year, we had a terrible time. We had gotten Cornish Rock crosses and put them out on pasture in a portable coop that I rigged up with PVC and welded wire. But those chicks never got very fat. I thought perhaps they were getting too much exercise, but at the end of the summer, another friend said it was the grain we were feeding them, and that they had had the same problem.

So, this year, we are trying new chicks and the same grain. Doesn't seem logical, but there's no alternative provider of organic grain. Supposedly, they have changed the formulation, but we'll be watching more closely and won't be so willing to blame ourselves if the chicks stay scrawny.

Pigs love Whey

Down the road, there's a great CSA called Sangha Farm that makes yummy goat cheese. I asked them if I could have their whey for my pigs and they were kind enough to save me a bucketful. I finally gave it to the pigs yesterday and boy did they love it. They slurped it up.



Laika liked the whey too:


They didn't like it as much as grain, however. I found that out this morning when I gave them the other half. I only had two dishes, so I put grain in one and whey in the other. They fought over the grain. Once in a while the boy, who's at the bottom of their short hierarchy, would come over and sip some whey, but really he wanted grain too. So I dumped some extra on the ground. Then they were happy.

When we went back this afternoon, both the grain and the whey were all gone.

Gourds, too

This morning I was weeding my entirely-too-big gourd and pumpkin patch when I realized that pigs and chickens are the same group and that gourds and the other crafty things I do needed to be represented in this blog. I love to sew, to knit and crochet, to make just about anything. Lately, I'm obsessed with gourds... I've been carving them and photographing them, so they seem like a good standard-bearer for that part of my life.

I've also changed the name and address of my blog accordingly, to "Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis"... from now on, you can find me at http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com.

Making Eggs out of Japanese Beetles

This time of year there are so many Japanese Beetles!


They love my fruit trees and are really decimating the plum trees in particular.


This afternoon I went out and collected the Japanese Beetles in a plastic container. Their defense mechanism is to drop out of the tree when you go near them. Once they hit the ground they either lay on their backs and blend into the background, or burrow into the dirt. Either way, they're hard to recapture. If you position the container under them, you can often catch them as they fall. It also helps to collect them when they are least active: in the morning or at dusk, or in rainy weather.

Put a leaf in with the beetles and they won't even try to escape.


Then, my favorite part: carefully pour them out in the chicken yard:


The chickens come running and the beetles are gone before they even consider flying away. Chickens are generally not very smart, but they can spot a Japanese Beetle in tall grass with one single beady eye. No Japanese Beetles escape.


The beetles reappear in the morning as fresh eggs. I'm not sure this is the most effective treatment, but it is satisfying.

Moonflowers

Bushel gourd flower
Originally uploaded by Liz Castro

Yesterday morning, I weeded several rows of pumpkins. The bees were happily buzzing around the bright orange flowers.

But I looked over at the rows of gourds and they looked downright sad: wilted and closed up white flowers and no buzzing activity at all.

It was only because I forgot that gourd plants (lagenaria siceraria) only bloom from dusk to dawn and rely on night-flying insects for pollination, like hawk-moths.

This picture doesn't quite do them justice, but they are quite beautiful at dusk, very bright against an ever-darkening field of big lush (but malodorous) gourd plant leaves.