They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
We are deep into the dry season. The rainstorm at the beginning of August was nice, but it didn't last long. The pasture is dry and grasses are not growing fast enough. We are still moving the sheep through the pasture, but with very large paddocks, only for one day. We are also feeding hay… Continue reading Pasture Plans
Cows like to scratch. They will scratch themselves on anything available. If the only thing available is their mobile shade/shelter, they will scratch themselves on that. It that shelter is covered with a light duty tarp that hangs over the edge of the frame, they will eventually wear through tarp and shred it. Like this.… Continue reading Re-tarping the Shade Mobile
Tuesday was the easiest day of putting up gutters I have ever experienced. This was true for three reasons: The weather was gorgeous, warm but not hot, with no wind. This side of the roof is low enough I can reach it from the ground. This makes moving back and forth much faster, since I… Continue reading Finishing the Gutters
Weather on Tuesday was what Koreans call 호랑이 장가가는 날. (Ho-rang-i chang-ga ga-nin nal, literally translated means "the day of going to the tiger's wedding" but is an idiom for a day with clouds, rain and sunshine all together). After a rainy morning the sun came out brilliantly at lunch time, so I decided to… Continue reading Guttering.
Saturday was a brief spell of good weather between two rainy stretches. I took advantage of it to replace one of the frost-free hydrants. Taking off the old hydrant is easy. Just pin the elbow on the bottom and twist it off. I took the extra step of cutting the poly pipe and installing a… Continue reading Closing up part of the ditch
We dug a ditch yesterday. Why? Because we are the dwarfs. And therefore we are digging a hole. (Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hoooooooole!) Actually, there is more to it than that. Last year we knew that we had some leaks in the water line somewhere so we spent a good chunk of the autumn… Continue reading More Plumbing
This week has been too busy, we have only had a grand total of two hours to work on farm projects all week. One of those hours was spent gathering information. In the garden beds, in direct sunlight in the middle of the day, soil temps are about 50 degrees. Under the cold frame the… Continue reading Hoop Bender
It is ironic, but one of the biggest challenges on our farm has been water. We receive 41 inches of rainfall annually, yet water is one of the biggest limiting factors to our productivity, because most of that rain falls between September and May and correspond to cloudy weather, while the periods of greatest sunshine… Continue reading Cold Weather
Coldest morning of the year this morning. 25 degrees when I got to the farm at 5:30, so of course all the water troughs were frozen. This picture is from about 6:45, not 5:30. We've been having issues with this particular frost-free hydrant, one of the oldest ones I think, that the previous owner put… Continue reading Disappointment
We have learned a few important lessons these past few weeks. One is that Christmas time is really busy for everyone, so very little gets done on the farm. The other is that the project of installing gutters on the chicken houses is long overdue. We recently picked up a trio of sapphire gem hens… Continue reading Gutters
Little Farm in the Big City 