Farm Fresh…Poop!

Posted on May 21, 2013 by boxcarkids

Farming is not a get rich quick scheme.  In fact farming isn’t a get anything quick scheme! Everything moves at nature’s pace, not your pace.  It doesn’t matter if you bought your farm in September, nothing will grow until spring.  Ordered a bunch of chicks from the feed store?  They won’t be laying eggs for 6 months or so. Planning on starting a beehive? It will be 18 months before you can expect to harvest honey. Everything moves slowly, naturally, and if it’s livestock you are raising you can just keep feeding them.  The only thing you’ll get back, for months and months (and in the case of cows, years) is POOP.  Farm fresh poop!

Sure, we have fresh eggs from the chickens we serendipitously (overheard someone wanting to give away 19 chickens and jumped on the opportunity) added to my relatives flock, but since she feeds, houses and cares for them I really consider them her hens.  We have a few bags of rabbit hair from our Angora rabbit, Dusty but I haven’t learned how to spin it into yarn.  We have one baby dairy goat, and a few bags of frozen goat milk that I hope to make into soap.  But so far our number one product from our little hobby farm is MANURE!

During the winter farmers deal with the buildup of animal excrement in stalls and pens by adding more clean, dry bedding on top.  It might not sound very hygienic but believe it or not that layer of composting manure and straw actually helps to keep the animals warm in the freezing weather. But once spring rolls around it’s time to muck those pens out.  I understand that some farmers, with barns full of cows, just let the manure build up and up and up but with only four goat pens it seemed like a good idea to clean them out and start fresh.  Mind you after dozens of wheel barrow loads full of decomposing goat excrement and bedding, damp and heavy and odiferous, I was second guessing my impulse towards spring cleaning!  And when tipping over the loaded wheelbarrow tipped me over and I landed on my butt in the middle of our compost pile (the dry side, thankfully) I wasn’t all that happy that our number one product was farm fresh poop!

On the other hand, while we don’t envision trucking it to the local farmer’s market, manure mixed with the pine or straw bedding is a useful product.  Piled up in heaps it slowly decomposes into rich compost, full of nutrients for the garden.  Goat, and rabbit, manure can be applied directly to the garden without composting; however the composting process provides an even higher percentage of nutrients, with 1.5 percent nitrogen, 1.5 percent phosphoric acid and 3 percent potassium.  Studies have shown that composted goat manure increases crop yield among a variety of vegetables and even suppresses some serious plant diseases.  So while we don’t have much to show for our hobby farm effort just yet we plan to start spreading some of our Number 1 product on the vegetable garden and I think we’ll finally see some return for our investment!

 

Posted in compost, Farming, garden, goats, hobby farm | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Spring Green

Posted on May 17, 2013 by boxcarkids

I don’t know how I came to buy into the poetic notion of spring being a gentle awakening of the earth with green buds shyly appearing after the cold of winter but I can state with certainty that it isn’t so!  There is nothing slow, shy or stealthy about spring around here!  It is a dramatic, exuberant, forceful and almost frenzied season.   Overnight the brown wizened landscape was thrust aside as blades of grass exploded out of the ground, and leaves popped out of tree branches.  Great armies of bugs appeared, crawling, flying, spinning webs and nibbling on flesh; birds sang loud frenetic songs from every bush as they competed for the attention of prospective mates; peeper frogs joined the chorus, overwhelming the distant sound of the farmer’s tractor plowing the muddy fields.

Green vines appeared alongside the road, covering the ground and twining around tree trunks.  On our way up to the barn we eyed them uncertainly, sure that last summer someone had pointed out the poison ivy to us but not recognizing it after the winter break.  Wracking my brain for the mnemonic I paused, finger in the air for dramatic emphasis and stated “Leaves of green, plant is MEAN!”  My children stared at me dumbfounded. “Mom, all the leaves are green!”  Hmmm, maybe it was ‘three leaves of green’?  “How about ‘Leaves of three don’t eat me’?” one of them offered.  Unenlightened I told them, “Just stay out of the viney area and you’ll be fine.”

Plants are one thing, bugs are another.  We could stay out of the viney area, but avoiding bugs just was not possible.  “I wish it were still winter,” my son said.  “Really?  Why?” I asked.  “Because of the bugs!”  He replied.  Flies, ticks, spiders, mosquitoes, bees, and wasps surrounded us, both outside and in the house.  Worms appeared in the damp under the old barn timbers we were clearing out, prompting a trip to the neighbor’s pond and my son’s first fish.  The temperatures soared right along with the clouds of gnats and the barn swallows darting through the air and flowers dotted the fields and hillsides.  Spring had definitely sprung!

But more than any other sign of spring it was the green – light green, grass green, deep green, everywhere you look the landscape is drenched in green – that impressed me. We had green in California but it’s so much more subtle there – gray greens, olive greens, drab greens, brown with a hint of green – just a dust or brush of it in a landscape of tans, ochre, terracotta, and sun bleached white. Here the green of spring drips, oozes and enfolds you.  It is a comforting color, full of life and new beginnings, leading you to feel all is right with the world, even while news stories of carbon dioxide reaching 400 parts per million hover on the edge of your consciousness.   Unfortunately all isn’t right with the world (check out these time lapse photos from of the earth from space if you doubt me) and the verdant landscape should remind all of us of what’s at stake.  Maybe that’s why I detect an underlying urgency to the season.

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Posted in global warming, green, spring | 3 Comments

Arresting the Slide

Posted on May 16, 2013 by boxcarkids

Some of you have been with us since the beginning, when the combination of medical issues that required a move to sea level, a nefarious scammer who “rented” the house we were unable to sell, and the job-ending Great Recession teamed up to drop kick us off the edge of a steep and seemingly endless abyss.  Since then it’s been one fast and furious headlong plunge momentarily halted here and there as we landed on a narrow ledge or briefly grabbed hold of a tree root before gravity forced us onwards.  The crazy quilt of temporary, part-time, odd jobs, Ebay and Etsy sales, loans I haven’t been able to repay and gifts from friends provided those ledges that slowed our descent, but were never enough to arrest it entirely, much less give us any upwards momentum.  The inexorable conclusion of our path wasn’t one I could bear so we took the drastic step last summer of leaving friends and familiar surroundings and relocating to the Midwest with the aim of finding work, starting a hobby farm and moving into a place of our own.

We have made some small progress on certain aspects of our plan – I now have two part time jobs, one poorly paid hourly position and one that pays only commission.  And we have the beginning of a goat farm with (currently) four meat goats and two dairy goats.

Some months ago (while still unemployed and despairing of ever finding work) I decided to return to school to add a teaching certification to the bachelor’s and master’s degrees I already have and applied to the Transition to Teaching program at Indiana University.  Recently I was ‘conditionally’ accepted to the program and also conditionally awarded a fellowship that will pay for about two-thirds of the cost of the program.

The condition was (quite reasonable given the number of years since I’ve been in school) that I prove I had the appropriate knowledge base in the subject I wished to teach – Earth Space Science – by passing the Praxis 2 exam.  I had until August to pass but if I wanted the fellowship money the first quarter I needed a passing grade by June!  Of course there was no way for me to attend school without the fellowship so I gathered textbooks and study guides and admonishing the kids to fend for themselves and not bother me, crammed like crazy during every free minute for the exam which was scheduled for the evening of May 10th.

Last Friday I downed a triple shot latte at Starbucks, went through my flashcards again and then headed to campus in the rain to find the testing center. Trying to squeeze in just one more round of review and cutting it close was my first mistake. Relying on my clueless GPS (mind you it could find its way around the freeways of California just fine but it’s hopelessly muddled in the Midwest) was my second mistake.  My GPS had me wend my way through campus service roads and did bring me right to the correct address – but to the backside with absolutely no parking anywhere and by the time I’d made my way out of the maze and around to the front and found on street parking, I was no longer early and barely on time.

Leaving everything except my ID and car keys in the car, I dashed through the rain and into the building.  “Here for testing?” asked a lady hovering near the door.  She directed me upstairs, where after a quick stop in the restroom to try and dry myself off with paper towels, I went through the check in process.  It was clear that they took testing seriously, employing all sorts of methods to keep people from cheating, including barring you from taking anything into the testing room, checking IDs, and video and audio taping you while you took the test.  It was a little intimidating!

The test was simple though – 100 multiple choice questions dealing with the scientific method, geology, maps, weather, plate tectonics, the water cycle, basic physics and astronomy – but not easy.  You had two hours to complete it and I finished in about 40 minutes and then went through it a second time.  At the end you had the option of not seeing/not reporting your score or seeing and reporting it.  I didn’t linger over the choice and clicked on the See and Report button.  And I’m pleased to report that I passed!

So, conditions fulfilled, and fellowship papers signed, I begin school the first week of June!  I am feeling cautiously optimistic that our downhill slide is about to hit a plateau!

 

Posted in 2nd Career, back to school, economy, Future, jobs, teaching | 16 Comments