Hibernation Station

It has been a cold and snowy winter here in beautiful upstate New York. Because of the animals and our snowshoes, though, we have been outside a lot this year, and it's really not so bad. In fact, the break from constant activity is nice and it is awfully beautiful here.

If the chickadees don't mind, then neither do I.

We even have a pair of cardinals this year!

The domesticated birds have been laying all winter.

And the mammals all are happy, indoors...

...and out.

The thaw last week got us thinking spring, so hopefully we will make it through the rest of this month and the next without losing our minds to cabin fever. It's time to order seeds, chickens, and bees and get ready for what promises to be a busy and wonderful spring season.

I can't wait!

Cotton Hill Christmas

Clockwise (sort of) from top left: The tree; chickadee; Fin; Vardaman; Bird; two bucks eating frozen apples, from office window; Beatrix with squash gifties; Courageous Celeste; Bird and Feather in winter walk wear; big boys!; Chixmas II

Have a marvelous and merry week!

Winter for Real

Happy solstice, friends of Cotton Hill Farm.

We've battened down the hatches
and hope the holidays find you warm and well.

The Portable Farm

Sometimes when neighbors drive by, I swear I can see them doing a double take. Hey, they might be saying to themselves, wasn't that barn over THERE yesterday? Occasionally I go out to tend to the goats or chickens and momentarily forget where they are located. This is not because the neighbors are delusional and I am absent-minded, but because all of our animal housing is portable. We move the chickens every day, so they always have nice fresh grass and bugs to nibble on, and there is no smelly chicken yard. The goats get a new pasture every two or three weeks, which lessens their exposure to parasites, provides them with new and delicious plants to eat, and saves us from having to muck out their barn. In exchange, though, we have to endure the process of moving them, which is exhausting, but ultimately worth it, we think. Here's what happens:

Packing Up

Farmer Fin Clearing the Fence Line

First, we measure out a 300-foot area. That's how much portable electric net fence we have. Then, we weed-whack the fence line. The stalks have been getting pretty tough in the past couple months, so we need to use heavy duty trimming line, and it still breaks three or four times. Fun! When the fence line is clear, we make a small pen for the goats with half of our fencing, and pick up the other half. There are about 12 12-foot panels of netting anchored by step-in posts. More about that later. Once the fence is out and the manger, milking stand, and feed dishes are removed from the barn, the real fun begins.

Moving Out

The barn is built on skids so we can drag it all around the hill. We pull it around with our pick-em-up truck. This can be kind of nerve-wracking, as clumps of weeds or anthills can cause the skids to bind up, which could potentially tear the whole thing apart. Farmer Fin drives and I run along beside the truck, shouting observations, warnings, and encouragement.

Setting Up

Now it's time to fence in the new pasture. Our portable electric netting is awesome. Because the "soil" on our hill is solid rock beneath a few inches of clay, you have to find the sweet spots to step the posts in. Farmer Fin wears heavy boots.

Moving the Milking Stand from the Former Barn Site

After we set up the first fence, we free the goats. The first couple times we did this, we felt like we had to lead them on leashes or corral them from the old location to the new one, or else they would run off to live with the deer in the woods. This was really stressful. I think the goats are smarter than deer, though: they recognize the benefits of shelter and electrified enclosure. Plus they just like to follow us around. For a few minutes they run around, all keyed up on sensory overload, wild raspberry bushes and mouthfuls of leaves. Meanwhile, Fin pounds in the ground rod and sets up the charger while I trim weeds around the fence line. The goats get pretty curious about all this activity and soon discover that their shiny new pasture is as rad as the rest of the hillside around it.

Chilling Out

For the rest of the day, the ladies get fat on green leaves. We gather up all our tools, head on down the hill, and crack a couple of well-deserved beers.

The Wagon

Once upon a time (in the 1950s), there was a feed grinder. It worked very hard at its job.

Gehl MX65 Feed Grinder/Mixer

But eventually, it was disassembled. The frame was left to rust away, until a nice family called Andrews rescued it. With love and care, they sanded away all the rust, gave the frame a nice coat of paint, found some wheels (which they painted grass green) and tires, and built a wooden body on it. Finally, they attached the finishing touch: a beautiful sign. Hooray! The wonderful wagon was a wing-ding of a wedding gift for the wide-eyed whippersnappers at Cotton Hill Farm.

Our tractor is indispensable here on the hill, but the wagon truly completes it. We use it to haul things up the hill, like this:

Here's the wagon transporting the chicken pen up the hill.

Thank goodness we don't have to drag all this brush up to the firepit!

The wagon is also a crucial part of our current irrigation system for the garden, which unfortunately involves transporting 50-gallon garbage pails full of water across the property.

We drag all kinds of stuff around in it:

I'll catch a ride in the wagon any old time, and a certain fuzzy farmdog thinks it's the BEST place for a nap in the sun.

Strange Bedfellows: Companion Planting Experiments

We gardeners appreciate the benefits of companion planting. Plant marigolds, nasturtiums, onions and other strong smellers around the garden to repel insects. Grow beans with corn to replenish nitrogen in the soil. And of course, as Louise Riotte's classic title states, carrots love tomatoes.

This year, I took companion planting to a new level. You see, we love eggplant. Last spring, when we started our seedlings, Farmer Fin's eyes lit up at the possibility of a summer filled with tubs of baba ganoush. A few months later, I watched helplessly as flea beetles made lace of the little leaves, killing the plants within a couple weeks. This has happened every time I have tried to grow eggplant. I hate those little bastards. You can't even squish them, because every time you close in on one, it jumps to another leaf. Grrr. I never seem to get it together to protect the seedlings with row covers, so I've tried spraying various concoctions of garlic and soap and hot pepper, year after year, to no avail. So this year, I decided to trick them instead.

beets love flowers

In some ways, it worked great. I think the insects really were fooled. We have lots of gorgeous veggies this year, eggplants among them. We maximized our space, always at a premium with raised beds. Visitors to my garden remark on the vibrant snapdragons, and the cucumbers that surround them.

watermelon loves peppers love basil

There are a few negative aspects of extreme companion planting though. One is that if I'm cooking a big dinner, I can't easily send anyone else out to harvest things. It's much easier to send someone looking for a bed of basil plants than it is to direct them to one basil plant, in the first long bed in the back, between the nasturtium, the pepper, and the slicing cukes. More importantly, I kind of forgot that some plants need to cross-pollinate, which may explain why the lone eggplant in the kitchen garden isn't doing too much.

peppers love eggplants love basil loves nasturtiums

All in all though, I'm pretty pleased with it, and will definitely repeat the experiment, with some improvements, in next year's garden.

VICTORY!

Chicken the Bird or Chicken the Meat?

Peeps!

We love our laying hens. They are entertaining, smart (really!) and tough little creatures who have each laid a delicious giant brown egg every morning for over a year now. So this spring, when Agway's chick order form came out, we decided that not only would we get another six pullets for eggs, we'd also try our hand at raising some birds for meat.

Our first surprise was that the hatchery was overwhelmed with orders this year, or so we were told, and we didn't get the chicks until the end of May. The meat birds were your typical Easter peeps, little yellow fluffballs. They were super cute for about a week. Then we noticed that they had totally outgrown the cozy little brooder we had set up for them in our woodshed. We got another brooder, but they seemed to have gone from ping-pong balls to footballs by the end of the second week. By the beginning of June they were definitely overcrowded, but it was still too cold at night to put them out on pasture, so in the woodshed they stayed. Besides their distinctive aroma, the overcrowding was making them kind of mean. Their beady little eyes took on sinister expressions, and they tried to take bites out of my hands each time I refilled their food or water. Inspired by their impressive digestive systems, I was bustling around the house one morning singing, Jimmy craps corn, and I don't care at the top of my lungs. My catchy little tune led me to do something we had sworn we wouldn't: I accidentally named the meat birds.

Jimmy's Awkward Phase

Jimmy finally made it out to pasture in late June, when the weather warmed up. The birds seemed delighted to be able to waddle around their pen on the hillside eating grass and bugs. We were pretty pleased too, that they were no longer pecking the hell out of each other in their smelly sardine-can right outside our kitchen. I gave the laying hens (who were growing at a less maniacal rate and were still not ready for their new home on the lawn) nice new bedding, and they were happy too. After the big move, there was just one unhappy individual: one of the chickens was laying down right in the middle of the pen, and he (she? it was too soon for a novice like me to tell) wasn't looking so hot. I scooped him up and carried him down the hill. He waited patiently on the ground, making pathetic little peeping sounds, while I set up a hospital room for him in one of the recycling bins. We figured he'd either die that night or recover and join the others on the hill.

No dice. The next day, he seemed about the same. He'd taken quite a bit of the sugar water we'd given him, though, and we felt hopeful. For several days, he remained in the same condition: half-feathered, immobile, and emitting frequent diarrhea and little chirps. We adjusted his heat lamp, fed him honeyed herbal tea that I had made for the bees, and shouted, "Live, Jimmy, live!" every time we passed his little pen. And live he did, for over a week. The irony of trying to help a creature destined for death and an afterlife as part of a pot pie to survive nagged at us a little, and eventually it caught up to little Jimmy Jazz as well. We buried him unceremoniously. His brethren up on the hill, however, were thriving.

By mid-July, it was easy to tell who was a rooster and who was a hen. The boys' first weak attempts at crowing transformed into marvelous alarm clocks by the end of the month. By August, the birds were starting to look really tasty. We're not really equipped for that level of chicken slaughter, so we started making some calls, and finally got a call back from a nearby farm that had USDA approval. We set a date, Farmer Fin and Olivier built some transport crates, and last Monday morning we loaded Jimmy into the truck, drove to Sap Bush Hollow Farm, and said our farewells.

Enjoy it while it lasts, Jimmy!

Jimmy's Last Ride

The Stage is Set

Six hours later, we picked them up, organs and gizzards in a separate bag; hands, feet, and feathers nowhere to be seen. Even without all that stuff, they were huge! None weighed less than five pounds.

"After"

By nightfall, the creatures FORMERLY known as Jimmy were safely in the freezer, except for one that was slathered with spices and roasted on the grill with a beer can up its ass. We made potato salad to go with it. Yum!