Spring is in the air, and its cold

That madeline is a wild baby goat always crawling through the part of the fence that i put upside down, doing 360 tail grabs off of the playground we set up for her, but the even more magnificent thing that has happened since she was born is that floretta has calmed down her neediness towards us humans. 

We have had 7 bardrock laying hens for about two weeks now and they are supplying us with about an average of 3 eggs per day right now so it has cut down the cost of the one grocery item that we actually buy for now, but soon we will never have to buy another carton of eggs again once all 25 chickens start laying those magnificent sources of protein. Noel and i tagged teamed this chicken tractor from some plans that we got online, well actually just by looking at the structure and just going with it. Noel built the yard and i built the house cause he seems to think that my carpentry skills over-powers his, which they might but he is coming up strong with all of the pointers that i shout at him every now and again. But all in all the project looks great and once we get a rain barrel we will set up a gutter system to catch the water from the roof and have it go right to the chickens waterer.
We finally got the first hugelkulture bed finished and planted with some potatoes last week which was nice cause that was a pain to find all of that rotting wood without taking away the vital force of the forest. We also made another one last week cause we have too many potatoes for just one or three, and we tried a different approach for the new one which was not to dig out 6 inches of soil to put the logs in which was a relief for our backs. So now we are going to just have to build a couple of raised beds to house  the rest of the potatoes that we have.
Summer crisp lettuce that we seeded out and just got put outside awaiting to be transplanted into the ground hopefully very soon, so that we can see how much of a deer problem we are going to have.

The apple tree's that we have are blooming real nice even though it has been raining for what seems to have been weeks to me and i cant wait to just pick one off and just devour it on site.
Our last dumpstering attempt that has trumped any ive been apart of so far here, we actually had to pull noel out of the dumpster cause we already had 5 full boxes and we had just skimmed to top of the dumpster which is a beautiful thing at least to us.
The ones with the purple centers are going to delicious once they sprout, so watch out.
I got to try my hand at seeding out some peppers, peas, lettuce and primitive marigolds the other day when it was cold and rainy outside, i looked today and saw the first sprouting's of the peppers today which made me very happy to have bleached my hands that day to avoid giving the peppers tobacco mosaic disease.

Here's to giving up modern conveniences! Part 1

This morning the weirdest thing happened to me after breakfast as i was going to go and check on the animals and the plants as i usually do every morning and i as i was walking up the path towards the greenhouse, i walked by were floretta was tied up and low and behold there were two baby goats that had just arrived into this world lying right in front of me so i yelled i guess floretta was pregnant! Even though one of the baby's was a still borne, the runt of the two was still alive and floretta was licking off all of the placenta juice right off her new child Madeline.

So this miraculous event changed the whole plan of the day cause all of us were now so entranced in the wholesome beauty of the new born baby goat, so while noel went of to do some research on the Internet about baby goats cause they had no idea what to do since we were all not aware that floretta was pregnant john cranford and i finished putting the fence up to so that we could keep both goats in the area that they needed to be in and so no dogs could get in to mess with the goats. Even though i think floretta would have handled that situation very well we could take no chances, i was even the one who first put madeline on the tit which was pretty fun cause she was sucking on hair underneath floretta's hair and after a call from noel i tried to the best of by ability to milk floretta but my technique was all wrong so it didn't work. It only took madeline about an hour to start walking with a lot of help from danielle and noel, but after awhile she was able to get up and walk on her own which was a sight to see.

  Last sunday was a trip back to the old days for me and the Circe Acres clan cause we set up an outdoor shower harnessing the sun and our modern ingenuity to clean our filthy bodies, for me the lack of a shower had left me dirty as hell for close to 3 weeks so i was in dire need of a refreshing shower. but before i could do that i had to have some clean clothes to go along with a clean body, so the day before i had picked up a old timey washing board and borrowed a clothes plunger from noel and danielle and set out to wash my clothes by hand for the first time in my life. this was a hard task to do cause first off my clothes are disgusting from the clay and my body odor so it took a lot of plunging and three cycles of water to get them clean, then since there clothes wringer was back in Ivanhoe i had to do all that by hand also which was by far the hardest part. Earlier that day while everyone was putting there finishing touches on the outdoor shower, i hung up a clothes line and let me tell you hanging up the clothes to dry was the easiest part of the process, but now i have some clean clothes so all the hard work payed off.

Since everyone in the household has been doing a great job of checking the local dumpsters there has been an abundance of food for us to indulge on, and it has lead to us having a lot more communal dinners as well with a bountiful amount of delicious food to be enjoyed by us all with a side of conversation. it is also great cause someone is always stopping by to check out the farm and even though we have no crops yet we can still feed them a great meal if they are in to eating food that has been liberated from a dumpster, which most of our friends are.

Last week we got some more baby chickens(12 more bardrocks, 3 black australorps) which were as cute as could be cause they were a day old, and i even got to pick the bardrocks up from trace at ECO and listen to them chirp all the way back home and once i got there i got to dip their beaks in water so that they would know how to drink water which is pretty fascinating. But tragedy struck that following saturday when we all left in the morning to go to the grand opening of the new Habitat for Humanity store which was awesome cause i got that washboard and a headlamp, but since it opened at 10 and not 8 like the sign had said we were gone to long and came back to 12 of the baby chicks baked in the greenhouse which was sad cause we had not lost a single animal yet which is very uncommon in the farming world. So after a burial ceremony and whole lot of grief we nurtured the remaining chickens back to health and vowed never to leave the chickens in the greenhouse when it is going to even be close to being warm ever again. But yesterday trace brought 1o more bardrocks back into the flock so even though the pain of losing them is still there it appears to look like we had never lost any at all cause the new chicks are the same age.

Kollapse Fest

This trip has been a long awaited one that is the one i took last weekend with Noel and Danielle to Richmond,Va to mingle with a bunch of krusty punks at the 2nd annual Kollapse fest. So i don't know why i decided to give myself a stick and poke tattoo the night before even though i knew the consequences of it getting infected while mingling with people in a large quantity who are either more or less dirtier than i was at that time, but i said what the fuck and did it any ways, but i am glad it came out better than most jailhouse tats i've seen. we were probally the only people at that show that left at 7 in the morning to get there, but we wanted to do some exploring at a record show Vinyl Conflict before we went to the venue which opened at 4pm and was slated to have 14 bands playing. 
When we first arrived at the venue and were waiting around to find some trouble to get into, Noel had to first prove his masculinity and overall strength by beating me in a arm wrestling competition on some chicken crates that were in the back of the van and he won only because i was off balance, you know.

Probably some of the biggest highlights of the show were the bands and not the generally chaotic nature of these punks who had crowded into this awesome venue which i spent most of my time up top leaning on the balcony with a cigarette, but i would have to say that Appalachian Terror Unit, Critical Issue, and Direct Control which our friend Mike plays drums in. The show lasted until almost 1:30 am and i had already taken a nap in the van missing a few bands cause it was way past my farm bedtime that i have been accustomed too, then we drove to Fredricksburg, Va to stay at Danielle's parents house for the night.
When we awoke and decided to venture out into the suburban mess of a town that we were in to get coffee, there had been talk of maybe doing some day-time dumpstering. So after checking starbuck's dumpster before getting coffee and finding nothing, we headed down to a grocery store i had never heard of called Bloom where we when we open the first dumpster and saw all the fruit and vegetable's for the taking we knew that we had hit pay dirt, and they even had a separate dumpster for bread and other perishables like hotdogs which we didn't take. Even though the day-time dumpstering expedition did have one casualty being in Noel cutting his hand inside the dumpster(dont worry it hasnt fallen off yet), i believe that it was a 100% success. Also it was by far one of the biggest and baddest finds i have ever been part of, and we are still eating off of it 5 days later.
This would be one of the first fine meals that we would be cooking with our payload, even though the pizza was out of Danielle's parents downstairs freezer it still made for a fine mid afternoon snack along with some garlic and cheese bread.
You will never see the pizza fully cooked cause when i took it out of the oven and started to drain the abundance of juice and grease of it and in turn dumping the pizza face first into the sink, but dont worry we scooped it out and put it all back together and then called it a twice dumpstered pizza for obvious reasons.
Here are some sandwiches that i whipped up while sitting in the back of the van during our 8 hr snow adventure back home to Silk Hope which is twice as long as it took to get up there, and since it was snowing we couldnt pick up the 6 laying hens that we were going to get on the way back, so there went our farm fresh eggs for a couple of days.
All in all a great trip since i hadnt been to Richmond in quite a number of years, and had a most crusty blast of a time, weather permitting.