Critters at New House

Wildlife is abundant here at New House.  On the day of our closing, we saw a doe in the woodlot behind the house, and we saw a brook trout in the brook- seemed like things were off to a good start!  I've seen a doe cross the road twice now, once with the teeniest spindly-legged fawn in tow.  The neighbor told me that bears regularly rip into his bird feeder.  The yard is full of frogs, chipmunks, mourning doves, and robins.  There's definitely a mole around.  And every other day or so, I swear I see something rustling through the ferns, just deep enough for me to not see it.

Both neighbors (yup, we have two) have told me there are tons of deer around, and turkeys usually start showing up toward winter.  I'm hoping to get lucky this year in deer season, because I sure don't have time to figure out travel patterns or anything like that.

We've got a mommabird on the front porch, and we're just content to let her stay there.  Naomi said she saw the babies in there quite a while ago, and that they probably fledged already- long before we moved in. 

I look forward to more positive critter encounters, but not the potentially bad ones.  I hope the birds will be ok until I put the permanent (two-foot deep) fence up.  When I asked one neighbor if he ever sees cottontails, he said no, and he's been here for a few decades.  There doesn't really seem to be the right habitat for them here, nor woodchucks. I'll miss the rabbits, but not so much the woodchucks! 

Adjusting to Life at New House

A week has passed since we moved into New House, and we're adjusting (me slowly, Naomi is probably fine) to life here.  Some things are drastically different, some things are drastically more awesome, and some things are going to take time to adjust to (for me since I'm apparently bad at change according to Naomi).

I'm gonna start off with some of the bad things so I can move on from them into the awesome.  For starters, my commute is an hour long, but at least I've traded the rat race on the interstate for a pleasant bob along a two-lane road through beautiful country, at least until I have to cross the river.  For the first week, we didn't have any internet access (not really a big deal on its own) but the part that sucks about it is that I'm in a totally new place in a region where I've never lived before, and I don't know where absolutely anything is.  I learned really quickly where Home Depot is because I've been there every single day, sometimes twice.  Without internet access, I was very productive.  I can guarantee I wouldn't have gotten half the work done around the house had I been able to look at non-essential stuff for as long as I pleased.  I went to bed before 9:00 every night except the first one, when we went to a party.

We were also here for the first week without our chickens, and of course, Penelope too.  That was hard, because it didn't feel like home without our birds.  My dad graciously took care of them at our old place.  He even said he would miss them when they moved here!  I spent every waking moment that I wasn't at work preparing for their arrival by making new hoophouses that they could live in while I put in their more permanent fence.  On Friday, with the help of a friend (and his trailer!) we moved the coops here and set up the new hoop/tractors.  The birds seemed happy to be on nice fresh grass and have tons of bugs to eat.  Some downsides are that they're in the direct sun now, whereas they've always been under a canopy of oaks.  As a result, they've been hot.  We rigged up some high tech (lean something against the fence) shade panels for them today, and they liked that.  I improved the door on the little coop so it pulls up like the big coop, and attached the wire to the coops a little better than I had previously with staples.  On Saturday, with the help of our brother-in-law and his son, we took down the old run and brought it here to be reinstalled. 

old run's worth of wire

New people-sized gate posts

the Tweeters flopped out.  Notice Fabio in the front

the Big Birds, and the old gate! I'm thinking about adding it to the end of the tractor for easier access

The week before we moved here was spent putting in some 4x4 gate posts for the big-sized gate I'm going to put in.  No more tiny gate! Yay!  I'll have to bend at the neck slightly to walk through instead of crouching all the way down to go through the waist-high gate we used to have.  I can't wait to have everything permanently set up.  That will be awesome.  I have dreams of rain water collection with a gravity feed so I don't have to haul buckets every morning.

Our new little kingdom

The topic of hauling buckets leads me to my next point-  our well failed the potability test.  We had already been drinking only bottled water just until we found out, but we're stuck on it for a few more days.  We had been showering and washing our dishes in the well water anyway, just not drinking it.  This morning we shock chlorinated the water, and it has to sit for a bunch of hours.  I've been hauling water up to the house from the brook.  It seems I can never escape hauling water!  It makes me wish I had some buckets with plastic handles rather than just the metal wire one.  It'd be so much more comfortable.  Tomorrow I'll be bucket-bathing in brook water before work.  Hopefully the shock treatment will be enough, and things will be back to normal in another week.

I think I will miss our old floodplain place in that I don't have an endless source of drift gifts like we used to have.  All our buckets, trash cans, tubs, and wood came from occasional floods that would carry stuff downstream to us.  I guess the upside to that is that if I need something, buying whatever it is will give me a better quality, just not free.  Maybe I'll upgrade to some buckets with handles. 

On to the good-  I love this house!  I've been sleeping like a baby, thanks to the babbling brook directly outside our bedroom window and the cool air coming down off the hill in the evening.  Things are progressing slowly, mostly because I was preparing for the arrival of our birds, and that left Naomi stuck inside unpacking by herself.  I hope to make it a two-person effort this week and get the kitchen locked down and move on to the other rooms.  The ancient dishwasher didn't drain on its trial run, and then on every subsequent run, so I bought a new one.  It'll be coming this week, as well as a new washer, which we've never had.  I'm excited!!!

We got our little garden of tomatoes, peppers and strawberries started.  I started them all from seed about two months ago in preparation for spring planting, and once the house deal started coming together, we decided to hold off planting them.  Now, it's really late to be planting them, but at least its done!  That area of the yard gets great sun exposure, and I think they're going to take off.  I'm hoping to get some cucumbers in for Naomi this week, and maybe some beans.  That's probably all I'm going to try to plant here this year, so I can focus on the mountain of projects that need to get done, like rewiring the electrical outlets in the whole house. 

I forgot the rest of the tomato stakes back at the Big Garden

already- established blueberries doing their thing

So, things are coming together.  There is more to talk about, but those are the big things.  Now that we're back online, I hope to get back to more regular updates.  The Big Garden is taking off!  I picked a billion fava beans today, and lots of other stuff is going well over there, but I'll save that for a future post. 

RIP Sunny

I found Sunny laying flat on her back this afternoon in the coop.  It looked like she died in the night and fell off.  When I let the chickens out this morning, they were going nuts, but I didn't think anything of it really because the weather was awful, and well, they're chickens.

Sunny was in the first group of chickens we ever had 2 years ago.  She was the first one with a name, had a pretty egg song, and was probably the biggest chicken I've ever seen.  It comes at a weird time, too.

We were hoping that when our rooster(s) got a little bigger that we could breed Sunny, and she'll never see the new house.  I can only think that the stress of being moved to a new location might have done her in if she was already not doing well.  I buried her in the garden at our apartment.  It felt like a nice gift to the soil that has fed and nourished us for the last 4 years.  This sun has set. 



P.S.  It feels weird in a way to be writing a eulogy for a dead chicken, considering that we kill and eat these same animals, and would have done the same with Sunny had she not died unexpectedly.  However, we also care deeply for, and appreciate our animals. We would wish them no other harm.  I have no idea what the actual cause of death was, if she struggled, or any of the other circumstances.  Not to mention, her flockmates spent most of the day in plain view of her corpse.  That's not how we do things when we have a choice.  And with that, I say farewell to my friend.

Pickling Garlic

So, Will and I are preparing to make a move, to leave the Kern Farm that we have called home for many years into our own home.
Our new home doesn't have a root cellar already, so for the foreseeable future, we will have to store our food another way. This means that the garlic that we already have in the root cellar needed to be stored another way. So, I pickled it! The first step is peeling and weighing the cloves, without all the paper and stalks. This is what we still have had, at the beginning of May:

Armenian

1 lb 8 oz

Unknown

11 oz

Georgian Crystal

13 oz

Duganski

6 oz

Creole Red

4 oz

Siberian

15 oz

Killarney Red

2 ob 10 oz

Total

7 lb 3 oz

On leaving the Kern Farm

A calf was born today. Cows do this amazing thing where they can give birth without needing help, and then, while the placenta is still hanging (disgustingly) out of the mama, mama nudges the minutes old calf to get up and walk around. It only takes a few months before the mama starts pushing the baby away to go eat some grass and leave mama alone for once.

This past week Will & I bought our first home, which means that we are now living in a sea of boxes while we get ready to move into our home. This also means that we have to leave our current home. A home that we have cared for deeply and poured sweat, tears and blood into, and that has sustained us with great soil, and life.

This is the land where we decided to spend the rest of our lives working hard together. This is the land where we were brave enough to butcher our first chickens. This is the land where with hands covered in dirt, I pulled a ripe strawberry out into the sun and ate it. This is the land where we raised Penelope into the majestic angel she is now.

There are many reasons why I am happy to have our own place on this earth to give it a go, but I am also sad to leave this one behind. I know that the Kerns are good folks, and I wish them the very best.