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.

Heartland

When I look around our new home, I see hills and trees,

tame life and wildlife,

past and present.

When Tom looks around Indiana, he hears music.

We've now been at Lick Skillet for a year. Early on I challenged my guitarist husband to produce an album with a farm theme (I was especially keen for him to do an arrangement of the Flight of the Bumblebee. He tried but wasn't happy with the results; my plans for acquiring honey bees didn't work out either. 2013 just isn't the year of the bee, I guess).

He wrote and arranged, expanded his inspiration to all things Hoosier, and HEARTLAND is the result.

Tom's latest instrumental album is 15 songs; it's a mix of fingerstyle offerings, some with a country flavor, many his patented smooth and melodic style. Samples and downloads are available on Amazon, as well as iTunes, or via Tom's website. You can stream the album on Spotify and other stream-y type sites (can you tell I don't listen to music on the internet?).

We've done several videos to showcase the album, Wind Farm is up first.

We're anxious to share our new home with you all, I hope you'll spend a few moments with us in the HEARTLAND.

Farmhands

The garden has, once again, gotten away from me. Weeds and pests abound and I just can't bring myself to spend more than 5 minutes out there since this heatwave started.

This morning's 5 minutes were spent watering the tomatoes (I think I have an issue with blossom end rot, so I've dissolved calcium pills* in some water. It can't hurt and just might help). I did a double-take when I saw this tomato hornworm and it's hitchhikers.

These are the coccoons of braconid wasps. These tiny wasps lay their eggs inside the hornworms; the larva hatch and eat the caterpillar's insides (almost makes you feel sorry for the beggar). The wasps are tiny and don't bother people.

And luckily for me, they don't mind heat and humidity. At least, someone is working in the garden!

*I had stocked up on calcium pills on sale and now don't take it anymore. If this works, I'll feel good that I've found a use for them!

Tangled

Electronet is a wonderful invention. It is portable, electrified fencing with built-in fenceposts. It is designed to be used as temporary fencing, very useful for rotational grazing.

The theory of the stuff is sound. The reality has a few quirks ready to catch the unwary.

First, even though you probably want to put your fencing in the pasture or, if you keep goats, the shrub, the bottom strand of wire will ground out if it comes into contact with too much green stuff. That means you need to force your mower over previously nonmowed ground to clear a path. A string trimmer is a poor substitute and bush-hogging just doesn't cut it (get it?).

Of course, you can't mow where the fence will go until you are sure exactly where the fence will go.

That brings us to the second quirk, the math doesn't add up.

Our sheep fencing is supposed to be 164' long with each panel 12.5' feet. Somehow ours has 12 panels which are 13' each and one that is around 11'. Think about that. Thirteen sections. We have found it impossible to set up a rectangle using 13 sections of fence. So our pastures end up being odd shapes and we guess where to mow, often having to mow again to make it come out right.

Thirdly, never, never, never, never attempt to put this stuff up with only one person. Two is the bare minimum, a dozen would be even better. This would be the time to have an Amish size family so each kid could grab a fencepost to move the pasture. Of course, the Amish wouldn't be using electric fence anyway.

Since we want to use our electronet for rotational grazing, we need to move it every few weeks. But the sheep were already inside the fencing. We thought "easy, peasy. Just move it a bit at a time and the sheep will move along too." 

This worked fine the first time. The second was a good chance to learn how to catch escaped sheep.

The fourth problem with electronet is it has a mind of its own. Like Skynet, some time while it's stored in your garage, it develops self-awareness, decides humans are the enemy and plots and plans for our downfall. The favorite strategy towards this end is entanglement.

Do not ever turn your back on electronet before you install it. Somehow while it's laying on the ground, it subtly weaves its strands into snarls and tangles. Unless you have someone with the patience to undo the Gordian knot (in our case, that would be Tom), you face a session worse than Rapunzel with a hairbrush. Over time, we've come up with a system for tying strands together when we take the fence down, this reduces the mess but somehow the poles still snag strands along the way.

Despite these difficulties, electronet enables small-holders to move livestock around for more systematic grazing. And so far, it hasn't sent any Terminators our way.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

If you know the answer to that Lewis Carroll classic, let us all know. In the meantime, here's one that's a bit easier:


Q. Why is a small farmer like an independent musician?

A. Both work their tails off full-time for part-time income.


Nowadays, selling music is almost solely the province of the internet. Where once you might sign with a record company and hope to sell vinyl, you now write, record, produce, upload, and promote your own material online. And the rewards are...well, here's an example:

Spotify just posted, over 7 different reports for streaming of  28 separate original Tom Rasely recordings, a grand total of 10 cents in income.

Yes, that's right. A dime, one tenth of a buck.

Ah music, the road to riches.

While the internet has kaboshed a lot of the old ways of selling music, some new ideas are springing up also. One of these is a website called Patreon, a new wrinkle on the traditional patronage system.

Wikipedia defines patronage as the "support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors."

Kings and popes being in short supply, Patreon relies on everyday fans and music lovers.

Please watch this video, 

check out Patreon and consider supporting us. But whether or not you do, Tom's videos will continue to be available for free at youtube.com/tomrasely as well as free tabs for guitar players on request.