Garden Before and After Photos

We've been hard at work on our garden over the past few months and we have some before and after photos to share with you. Hopefully we'll update these with pre-harvest photos to show how much it grew!  Inbetween the "before" and "after" we amended the ground with a few things and then used a large rototiller to till almost everything in the garden.

 

March 17th, 2013

 

June 22nd, 2013

 

March 17th, 2013 (The dark stuff is a vermicompost amendment that we spread prior to tilling)

 

June 22nd, 2013 

 

And a bonus panorama of one of the garden and the orchard right after the sheep had grazed it. :)

Water system failure!

  

 One Thursday night we were suddenly without water. An inspection of the spring house revealed that our well pump had been freaking out, turning on and off quickly, over and over again. After not too long it overheated and a safety shutoff prevented it from running until it cooled off again. Clearly untenable.

 

Joel and I spent the better part of two days in the 100F+ heat replacing the well pump and finding out that one of the pressure tanks had failed as well.  In the end the system is better off than it was and we know a lot more about this antiquated, eccentric system. For more background there's a old blog entry about it.

 

During the two days without water we drank from our stored backup water supplies in the house. The garden was a different story. Nicole and I hauled many 5 gallon buckets of water out of the creek to make sure our garden didnt succumb to the summer heat. Well worth the effort though!

Goat Slaughter

A few friends of ours had a goat that they loved but had become overwhelmingly unruly. So, they made the hard decision to slaughter him which we gladly helped with and offered them space to perform the work.  I only took a few photos of the whole ordeal because most of the time my hands were in a state not fit for holding a camera. :)

 

Some of the folks that keep bees on our property know a thing or two about slaughtering and butchering so they came out to show us the ropes. 

 

After butchering all of the meat and sharing it with a few friends, I took the skin, scraped it, soaked it in limewater, scraped all the hair off and then stretched it out to dry. When it's all done we'll use it to make new drum heads for some drums we have here. 

 

This whole goat slaughter adventure won us much good-natured ribbing from some close friends who drew this photo of us. Actually, quite an honor in the strange circles we run in :)

SuperAdobe bench update #2

 

Again, not exactly related to our adventures at the homestead but we've made significant progress on the bench that we started last year.  It's taken on a somewhat different but more creative form than we first imagined. The serpent dragon on the top is a real hit with the kids at the preschool it lives at :)

Still to come is a final layer of smooth plaster that we'll embed decorations of various sorts into. 

There are lots more photos of our work on this here.

Spring Additions

 With spring here, we have all kinds of things popping up

 

The Trillium are back again for their yearly show. These deep red ones are beautiful!

 

Some of our beekeepers  set up 5 new hives this year, a welcome addition!

 

This is Jack. He came to us with nowhere else to go. Now he's our top mouser and earning his keep quite well.

  

The figs have just started to form but they're getting bigger every day.

History

 

This is a photo that I took at the County Assessor's office. They kindly pulled out all the info they had on our parcel and I found this gem from 1962. Our parcel had been colored in with green colored pencil after an ordinance (ORD 629) was passed declaring it Residential-Agricultural (RA) land.  If my understanding of county history is correct this was around the time that the county first started cataloging all of it's land into a zoning system.

Grazing sheep

The sheep have been here for a few weeks grazing our pasture grass down. Financially it worked out to be a much better deal than paying to mow it and we get the added pleasure of watching the sheep. They are quite comical. There are about 30 male sheep of various ages and breeds. They are accompanied by a female guard llama. The Sheep spend their entire time eating grass except when they aren't chasing each other around or mounting each other. We have you even seen most of them up grazing in the middle of the night. The llama does her share of grazing too but remains constantly alert of sounds around her.

 

The kids both really enjoyed having the sheep here. They were contained in a portable electric fence that was moved around every 4-5 days. Over the course of a month they grazed everywhere twice.

 

 It was beautiful to behold such simple animals going about their lives each day. The llama was particularly amusing.

 

 You can see how good of a job they did. On the left side of the road in this picture they were left for 6 full days at one point. They started to get down to just dirt in a few places!

Watchful eye of the beekeeper

This morning I watched Martha, one of our beekeepers, walk out across the pasture and stand about 15 feet from her hives. She, and the other couple that also have hives in our pasture, come and look in on their bees a few times a month. Sometimes they come in with full bee suits and smokers to do seasonal maintenance but mostly, like today, they come in just to observe from a distance. A few days ago she was out to rearrange one of the hives. As I watched her peacefully observe I imagined that she was checking in on them. The moment was so peacefully perfectly still and I couldn't help admiring the beauty of the relationship between the bee and the beekeeper.

While we don't get any honey from these bee hives, they do provide a valuable service by pollinating all of our fruit trees. Really it wouldn't be much of an orchard without them.

There is much that we want to do out here and much that must be done. Having our own beehives is on the list. We'll get to it soon hopefully.

[EDIT: Later in the day after this original post, all three beekeepers showed up to inspect one of the hives. Earlier in the week they split an overpopulated hive into two hives. When they were done they reversed the locations of the two hives so that field bees returning at the end of the day would populate the new hive in the old location and balance out the two hives populations. They came back today to see if the new hive had a queen in it. Despite getting out a magnifying glass they couldn't find her but there are a number of queen eggs, hopefully one will take  up her crown. :)]

Spring musings

The pear trees are unbelievably gorgeous right now. most of them are in full bloom and the bees are loving it. The days have turned mostly warm now but the cool breeze and the occasional rain remind us that we're only just out of winter now. The air is full of bird song, multi layered conversations I'll never understand but am thrilled to hear each and every day.

The grass in the pasture grows again at an alarming rate. Last year we had to have it mowed, all 3 acres of it. At literally 6 feet tall it was quite a fire hazard. This year we have arranged for a shepherd ( sheep owner? livestock guy?)  to bring his flock here to graze it down. His sheep will be here for about a month contained in a portable electric fence that will be moved around to knock down the whole pasture. Clearly addressing the fire hazard is the primary concern. Thankfully this will allow us to do that but turn the resource of the grass into something beneficial for the land in the form of manure.

For now life is good and the weather is beautiful!

First crazy woodpecker of the season

Today we heard the first crazy woodpecker pecking away at our roof antenna. I have been wondering when he would return. :)

Spring is in full bloom here. The wild cherry trees, the pear trees, and some of the apple trees all full of beautiful white blossoms. Meanwhile the first little tiny leaves are emerging from their winter slumber. Pasture is also growing by leaps and bounds. in the next few weeks someone will bring 30 sheep here to graze it all down. Maybe next year it will be our sheep eating the grass. :)

Everything in bloom

Everything here is in bloom. So nice to see the end of winter fade away and be replaced with new life. hooray spring is near!

Winter Wonderland

 

We didn't get much snow in 2012 but finally in February we got a decent dusting.

 

Just enough snow to make us glad to have an AWD vehicle.