Hay there!

One of my favorite bloggers, Suzanne McMinn, just posted about transporting 55 bales of hay in her car and she and her daughter loading it into their barn Hay the Hard Way 

Our hay story is a bit different but just as hard!

Dennis, the nice gent who owns the picturesque barn across the road, just mowed the field around it.

  
It's been hot, hot, hot, so the hay dried thoroughly in a day.

Tom went over and started raking. He brought over several loads in the lawn cart and I went over later and did several more.

Then he had a brainstorm.

 Why not use one of our gigundo tarps?

He raked several piles into it.

Dragged it across the road, past the garage, and to the shed.

We pushed and shoved and got it inside to unload.

The shed is now partly full of lovely, FREE hay. There's plenty more left and if our backs recover and the heat lets up, we'll be over there raking it up.

Chickens in the Road gets it done with woman power, we do what we can with old people power!

Animal Husbandry?

I will never understand why men are in charge of the human world, on the farm, females rule.

To raise rabbits, we have 3 doe rabbits and

just one buck.

To produce lambs we keep two ewes and

one ram.

We have five hens but 

just the one rooster--and the ladies don't even need him to give us eggs.

Even when I kept bees, it was thousands of females to a handful of drones. And when the guys had served their purpose and were not contributing to the winter hive, the worker bees shoved them out to fend for themselves--there's a lesson there, ladies!

The females provide meat and eggs, milk and honey. The males provide sperm. That's it.

A farm is a matriarchy; maybe we should rename it animal wifery.

Magic Beans

It starts with the names:

Jacob's Cattle, Bumblebee, Black Turtle, Vermont Cranberry, Tiger's Eye, Ying Yang. So evocative and alluring.

And the pictures--blacks and whites, reds, swirls and dots. A visual feast.

Vermont Cranberry, several generations removed from the seed company.

Dry beans.

We don't eat a lot of beans. Chili, baked beans, and bean soup are the sum of the recipes we use. But every year, I'm sucked into dreaming about growing all of the different varieties.

And for a lazy gardener like me, dry beans are the perfect crop.

You plant them like any bean, chuck them in the ground after the soil is warm. They'll grow under the worse conditions and neglect. And repay that neglect by adding nitrogen to your soil.

Then you just wait. With dry beans there is no pressure to harvest young for continued production as there is with green beans. Dry beans you want to grow old and mature on the vine.

In New York State, it was late September until beans were ripe and dry on the vine. Here in Indiana, I just picked my first ever crop of Jacob's Cattle.

Jacob's Cattle is an old bean of unknown provenance. It is supposed to be especially good in baked beans which is why I decided to give it a try.

I planted 2 ounces on May 27, marked the plot and basically forgot about them for the summer. Yes, I did weed once or twice but that was it.


Harvesting dry beans couldn't be easier, just pull up the entire plant.


This is what I gathered today.

And this is what it looks like shelled--9 ounces. 

Not a great yield, but enough to save some for seed for next year and make a small batch of baked beans.

Which brings up two more benefits of dry beans: saving your own seed is as easy as picking the ripe pods and dry beans are ready for your larder-- you pick, pod, and that's it! Ok, clean up the debris a bit, but then you just pour them into a jar--no boiling, no peeling, no canning necessary. They will last for years and years, looking pretty on your shelf and ready to warm your tummy on those cold, winter days.

Make room in your garden next year for a variety of dry beans. Or two, or three...

A rabbit by any other name

Meet our new rabbit buck, Mr. Nutterbutter. He's a lovely Dutch bunny and a proven sire.

Obviously, we did not name him and I can't blame this one on the grandkids. The breeder I bought him from had saddled him with this moniker and I see no reason to change it.

First, because he's used to it and second, because I won't be using it anyway.

Sometime this past year, I have given up on naming the livestock. Ok, we did name the sheep and will probably name the kittens

as soon as we can discover a way to tell them apart. 

But by and large, most of the animals around here are just "Sweetie."

"Hi, Sweetie, how are you this morning?"
"Here ya go, Sweetie, nice, fresh water."
"Thanks for the egg, Sweetie, it's beautiful."

Simple, easy to remember, gender nonspecific, and nondiscriminatory. Kind of my farm version of a waitress's "Hon."

Would you like a warm up, hon, and thanks for reading my blog, Sweetie.