Elijah Graham is of course the main feature in our lives now. He is doing great - eating, sleeping, burping, farting, pooping, growing, vocalizing, doing all the usual baby stuff.

Rachael’s labor and delivery were difficult and complicated, and her recovery is and will continue to be challenging. We have had several return trips to the hospital (1 hour drive away) for dealing with problem symptoms. He recovery is heading in the right direction, just slower than we’d like. But we are thankful she has a generous allotment of maternity leave to heal and spend time with the little dude.

In the beginning of the new year I’ll be thinking about whether and how to continue this series of our farm newsletter Substack. Maybe I will come up with a variation on Then & Now, or a new and different idea for a monthly feature. Not sure yet - stay tuned.

Composing these monthly installments has had a salubrious, even therapeutic effect on me. It’s so easy to get caught up in what I have yet to do, what I am frustrated is being neglected or is breaking down and needs repair, what needs to get done first just so that other thing can get done, etc. … the sheer number and magnitude of projects, chores, and tasks needed to develop our farm to a state of ecological resilience and sustainability (especially including economic sustainability). Being compelled once a month to put together photo collections from the past three years has helped me to reflect on what we *have* accomplished and appreciate the developments and improvements thus far. It’s a good practice that I hope I will keep up in one form or another.

And I/we hope you have enjoyed these little installments. Please reach out and say hi! Better yet, come visit!

December 2020

I don’t have too many choice photos from December 2020, for whatever reason. This porch pic is nice though, and shows a few things.

For one, I had finally finished bucking, splitting, and stacking firewood from the giant pile of logs the previous owner had left behind the house. (Note the muffin-shaped stack with the tarp over it, and the bare spot of ground near the center of the photo.)

Weather conditions can be highly variable in December - it can be 65 F (18 C) and sunny, 20 F (-7 C) and snowing, hovering around freezing and icy, or 1 F (-17 C) with gale force winds blowing as we learned in December 2022. The mid-December 2020 evening pictured above looks pretty pleasant.

Cold and wintry weather was on the way, though. Luckily, Emmy was prepared with her stylish jacket.

December 2021

We completed the hunter’s shack demo begun in November 2021 in early December, salvaging as much usable wood and tin as we could.

the Kearns Lumber Yard

We spread plenty of straw in the pigs’ area - to provide them nest-building material for warmth and comfort, and to put organic matter into the soil.

Some evenings the sunset provides beauty among the bleakness of early winter.

Millie, always mugging for the camera…

December 2022

An eventful month with a newborn at home…

I bought a firewood sling and a hanging scale and started tracking our firewood consumption.

As a reminder: We use a wood fired boiler during the cold months to provide home heat and hot water:

From December 6 when data collection began until about the 22nd temperatures were pretty mild with averages in the 40s F (5-10 C). Over this period we were consuming about 1/2 cord per month.

(A cord is 4 ft x 4 ft 8 ft, or 128 cubic feet by volume. The mass is dependent on density of wood species, moisture content, and stacking density of wood. Given our circumstances I am assuming a cord of wood weighs about 1,700 kg or around 3,750 lbs.)

A cold front blew in on the 23rd with strong winds and it got really cold! Our consumption jumped to a rate of about one cord per month for ~5 days.

Our running average is now about a cord every 45-50 days. I plan to track this all winter to see how our wood consumption correlates with ambient temperature, and to be able to plan how much wood to lay up each year.

Christmas was pretty challenging this year and not very relaxing.

Strong winds started whipping up during the day on Friday, December 23rd as the cold front approached. We got home from doctor appointments after dark as the brutal cold was setting in while harsh winds howled.

I went down to feed the pigs and a huge tree had fallen in their pasture. I did a partial survey of the damage, mostly just to make sure they weren’t injured. It would have to wait for daylight to make a plan about what to do.

By 5 AM (Christmas Eve) our well had frozen. Not having water in the home with a newborn is not really a workable situation. So I suited up to go out in the pre-dawn dark with the temperature reading 1 F and the winds ripping across our mountain, threatening more downed trees around the house.

First I crawled around under the house to determine if any pipes were frozen. Under the house was just (barely) above freezing so I suspected the problem was at the well head.

Our pressure tank is at the well head. A pipe comes up from the well and into the pressure tank. Another pipe leaves the pressure tank and goes underground to the house. These are the most vulnerable pipes for freezing. In our first winter here they froze during a cold snap but as the day warmed up I exposed them to sun and they thawed easily. The original insulation was poor so I added a bunch more insulation under the goofy fiberglass fake rock well cover. This particular cold plunge was just too much though and the pipes froze anyway. So I ran a drop cord to the well, plugged in a heat lamp we use for brooding chicks, stuck it under the well cover, and prayed it wouldn’t set the whole damn thing on fire.

Later in the morning when Tractor Supply opened I bought a small ceramic heater and rigged it up under the well cover. By 10 AM we had water flowing again!

Now I have another project to add to my list: build a small insulated shed around our well with a heater, a light, and a window. It will rarely be used, but when it is we will be very, very grateful!

My buddy Mike the millwright awoke to a frozen well the same as us. He had to go off to a job that day, so after I got our well flowing I went over to his place and thawed out his well too.

OK so about that downed tree in the pig pasture…

Yeah that’s gonna be a bit of a job.

We were actually pretty lucky. It missed the pig shelter. The fence it landed across was an interior fence between two pasture sections, so the girls couldn’t get out and free roam everywhere. The exterior fence and gate were unscathed. The interior fence and gate to the farrowing pen are gonna need some work though. And the water tank got crunched. Not sure yet if it will still hold water - have to wait for it to melt to survey the damage.

And the biggest thing: the girls weren’t hurt by the falling tree.

Christmas Eve, Christmas day, and a few days that followed still presented some challenges though. I loaded down every shelter on the farm with plenty of straw for the animals to bed down in as protection from the brutal cold.

Of course, all their water tubs froze. I ratchet-strapped a propane burner and brewing kettle into the back of my truck and drove around dispensing hot water into their tubs to melt the ice at least long enough for them to get a drink.

As you can see from the photos, we did not have any snow. Just cold!

As New Year’s Eve approached temperatures warmed up and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

As my first official “Dad Project,” this month I built a tree swing as a Christmas gift for Elijah and Rachael.

I don’t have a proper workshop - yet - so I had to get over my procrastination for cleaning up and organizing the tool shed. I made it into a good-enough-for-now workshop and ran a drop cord to it from the house so I could work after dark while Rachael was inside with the baby.

The swing seat was made from a piece of walnut cut and milled into lumber by her best friend’s dad on their farm near Appomattox, VA about 40 years ago. He found this slab in his wood shop, ran it through the planer and sent it to me. (Melvin is the secret hero of this story. He is a true genius. Maybe he will let me do a profile on him for a future article…)

I experimented on scrap wood with a bunch of different router bits to see what kind of chamfer might look good. In the end, I did the exterior edging with a simple 3/8” round bit.

I sprayed on a few coats of spar urethane to protect from the weather.

I went with a synthetic pro-manila rope for longevity.

Wrapped, gifted, unwrapped, and installed once the temperature had warmed up a bit!

Testing it out:

https://youtube.com/shorts/8JA--7-Os8s

Happy New Year all!

2023 is going to be a big adventure for sure.

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Still, there are many many many cool things to appreciate in Novembers past as well as in this year’s November leading up to the Big Event.

It’s clearly an auspicious month in any year in our Brushy Mountain spur of the Blue Ridge of Southern Appalachia.

With that said, let’s set our time machine for November 2020…

November 2020

As October transitions into November the fall colors transition to bare trees, and the mountains that surround our farm become visible once again through the naked forest.

To assemble these photo-essays I begin by looking back through my photos from the month in question. What was it that I was mostly photographing? Whatever I was mostly photographing is what I take to be clues to the possible “story” or “stories” for that month.

And secondarily - is there anything that I notice in a photo, now one or two years after-the-fact, that may have been there accidentally as I was composing the shot for another reason but now stands out, triggering a memory or inadvertently showing how something was that now has changed?

In my photo collection from November 2020 the only shot I have that might fall into this second category is this one:

To be honest, I’m not sure why I took this photo. What was I trying to show? I suspect that I was trying to show something that’s not there. In the bare spot in front of the trailer, there was a huge overgrown junk pile, amassed during many farm cleanup operations. I suspect that I texted the photo to Rachael to show her that I had finally cleared the junk pile and reused, repurposed, or otherwise disposed of all the stuff. I freed the abandoned (but valuable) scraper implement from the brambles, and I dug all the little concrete landscaping forms out of the ground and set them aside to use for…something…

This photo doesn’t look like much, and normally I’d have skipped over it in my monthly hunt for “nice” photos that tell the story of our farm. But I’m glad I paused to consider it. It does show how things have changed, and it shows how our long, hard efforts here do achieve modest and incremental improvements.

On the other hand, the main story of November of 2020 according to my bias of stored photos is… Ursa!

I was clearly enamored of my new puppy. As I mentioned in a previous article, she was a “foster fail,” meaning, we were just supposed to foster her for a weekend but ended up adopting her.

Ursa - Latin for “bear.” Because she looks like a little black bear cub, duh.

Rachael’s clinic works with a non-profit that transports dogs and cats to other places in the country where they can be adopted into good homes. Our area has an excess of dogs and cats and not enough adoptive homes. But other places, like the cities of the northeast, have a lot of people wanting to adopt but not enough strays and orphans to meet demand.

Ursa was one out of a litter of 11. Her mom and siblings all got scooped up by the transport and adoption non-profit and whisked off to, I believe, Philadelphia. She stayed behind because she had worms and a skin problem that needed treatment (note how the fur had come off her paws in the photo above). Rachael brought her home to treat her worms and skin issue for a few days with the intention of sending her off on transport, too. But I liked her and wanted to keep her and Rachael said yes (which I am pretty sure she has regretted since…).

Anyway, most of my November 2020 photos are of Ursa looking cute…

…Ursa laying on a blanket

Ursa trying out a too-big dog bed…

…Ursa trying out a different too-big dog bed

…Usra helping me brew beer on an unseasonably warm day

…Ursa hiding in a basket under the coffee table

…and, by the end of the month, snoozing under a chair and having obviously gotten over her worms and started to grow!

Ursa Minor starting on the path to becoming Ursa Major (Ursa Major-Pain-In-The-Ass according to Rachael)…

I might be the only one who loves Ursa, but I love her extra for it.

November 2021

And one year later…she’s enormous. She’s def not gonna fit under that lil chair anymore. She barely fits in the big chair.

OK that’s enough Ursa for now.

This photo does, however, jog my memory for a storyline with a call-back at the end of this November 2021 section. The chair Ursa is not-fitting-into is a big leather chair that we rescued from one of our dilapidated farm buildings. The front part of what we call “the hunter’s shack” was chock-full of all kinds of stuff. Much of it junk and garbage, but some real gems in there, too. This chair and matching ottoman were such gems. We call it “the baseball glove chair” since it’s like sitting in a giant worn-soft leather baseball glove. It was a great find once introduced to Rachael’s elbow grease to scrub off the mold and restore the leather.

November 2021 also had a few interesting principal storylines as revealed by my photo stash.

One - stunning early November fall colors!

Two - our first hard frost in 2021 came in early November.

Three - farm work at our neighbors’ farming operation and with my millwright buddy Mike was in full swing.

Some views from atop my neighbor’s grain elevator;

Driving the tractor pulling the grain cart during the corn harvest.:

And grain bins galore, working high and working low with Mike AKA “The Grain Bin Troll” (ironically, Mike hates working on grain bins)…

welding an auger connection on the top of a new grain bin…

…and replacing the rotten floor and bottom ring of an old grain bin.

Four - on our own farm it was time for the fall herd health check!

We rounded up the sheep and goats onto the trailer to trim hooves, check for worms, and try to tell if anyone’s pregnant (though it’s pretty early to tell…).

trimming sheep hooves

Alarm! I found an escapee!

Checking for worms by looking at the flesh around their eyes. If it’s pink like Emerald’s here, she’s good-to-go — no worms!

Forrest got into some Spanish needles…

Handsome Moh

Ornery Onion

Once everybody’s checkups were complete they were released onto a fresh new paddock!

What about the pigs? Can’t forget them! How are they doing?

I’d say they are well fed and happily napping away in the November afternoon sun in their cozy straw nest!

Chickens? Ducks? Y’all hanging in there?

Right on, right on, y’all are lookin good.

And lastly, our call-back photo to the one at the head of this section - referring to the rescued “baseball glove chair” that Ursa has claimed as hers.

It came from this structure - the front half of the “hunter’s shack,” which was crammed full of treasures and trash since before we moved in.

We cleaned it out and salvaged whatever treasures we could. Then we called Mike one Sunday afternoon and invited him to come over and help us tear it down.

The back corner of the roof had fallen in, which had caused part of the back wall and floor to rot away. Mike pretty much single-handedly tore the rest of the roof off. I ran around scavenging usable bits of wood and tin, and sorting the refuse into burn-piles and haul-away-to-the-dump piles.

All-in-all we figured we salvaged $2,000-$3,000 worth of materials from taking the front building of the hunter’s shack apart. A lot of it was good rough-cut 2x4’s - like, wood that actually measures two-inches-by-four-inches. So grateful to have this source of project materials! Especially when lumber and building materials have gotten so expensive.

Whew, November can be an action-packed month, apparently! (Hint: foreshadowing…)

November 2022

OK I won’t bury the lede: —November 2022 we got a baby human comin in hot—

Jeezy Creezy there’s a lot to do to get ready

Such as

Gotta rig up a shelter for our new mower

Good Lord I have got to get that hornets’ nest out of the light fixture

Gotta try to bribe the hateful bird with coins from Ecuador to see if she’ll shut up and be nice and not screetch and wake the baby when he gets here

Oh man we’d better make some instructional videos for our farmsitters for when we have to go to the hospital

Rabbit care - quick and easy! Trust us!

Ok what about the pigs? Easy peasy!

And since we’re so busy how about we kill two birds with one stone?

I’ve been making a video series on pastured pigs and how much land you need for how many pigs and how often you move them and how many pigs per hypotenuse and that sort of sciencey stuff. The video above is part of that series, and the final product was the “Pastured Pigs Starter Kit” produced this month - check it out!

OK - NEXT?!?!?

Gotta move the sheep and goats to a new grazing area where they’ll have plenty to eat and be easy to look after by our farmsitters when this baby thing finally starts to happen!

OK I’m on it!

I’m always evolving my approach to moving animals - trying to make it simpler, more efficient, more predictable, etc. Sometimes it’s easier to round them all up on the trailer, hook up Tulsi (the navy blue 95 Toyota 4x4 pickup) and tow them over to where I want them. Sometimes it’s easier to play games with movable fence netting and see if they’ll just joyfully hippity-hop themselves in the approximate direction of where I want them to go.

So far I have not found a one-size-fits-all approach for every livestock moving situation, probably because there isn’t one.

This month my goal is to get them from our permanent-fenced-in main pasture up the hill through the peach orchard and down the other side onto my neighbors place where there is a great cold season buffet of fescue to munch on.

So far so good.

Alright, alright, alright baby’s comin soon, what else we got to do?

My sister showed up one day with a bunch of stuff for the baby plus a couple of extra does (female rabbits) she didn’t want. OK, cool. Let me whip up a Joel-Salatin-inspired “racken” (rabbit-chicken) barn setup real quick.

Groovy.

My sister also brought a small haul of jack-o-lantern pumpkins left over from Halloween that she got for free. Let’s cut ‘em up as for snacks for the pigs!

Pig snacks done!

OK, this is getting serious. Baby’s coming soon and Emmy’s sure of it. (Catahoulas do a great “concerned” look…)

But…Holy smokes, Thanksgiving’s almost here! We’ve got to help our friends at Sheraton Park Farms process pastured-raised turkeys!

Processing turkeys?!?!?!? Cah-mahwn!!! Emmy is very emphatic that something is about to happen!

And Emmy was not wrong. Always trust a Catahoula.

On November 25th our son Elijah Graham Kearns was born.

Look out world is right!

At least one of our two crusty old parrots seemed to like him at their first meeting!

Elijah Graham Kearns - where does a name like that come from?

That’s all for now - see you next month, folks!

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October might be the best month of all in the Brushy Mountains. Peak fall colors happen in the last two weeks of October, and just stretch into early November.

The heat of summer is gone, so it is an excellent time of year for outdoor projects. The nights get cool, even dipping below freezing. Our first frost can happen anytime after mid-October, as best I can reckon. The cool evenings provide perfect conditions for sitting around a bonfire.

We hope you enjoy the photos and videos linked below!

October 2020

In last month’s installment of Then & Now, we highlighted Rachael’s developing skill at hatching out birds (chickens, ducks, guineas…).

This little group of ducklings started out in a bin in our bathroom.

Ducklings are messy, so from time to time we’d give them baths in the kitchen sink.

It’s always nice to snuggle a duckling while watching a scary movie on a spooky October evening…

They grew fast! As they got bigger they graduated from living in a bin in the bathroom to living in our shower.

Before showering we just rinsed the duck poo down the drain - easy! After two or three weeks of this they were big enough to join the flock out in the chicken/duck house.

October is a good month for home improvement projects. Here we used reclaimed wood from taking down the porch and deck off the trailer to make a decorative coffee mug holder.

I started building some shelves and a small desk in my office. Simple design using metal pipe sections and fittings for the structure, with stained pine boards for the shelves.

One Friday Rachael brought home an orphaned lab puppy with worms and some skin issues that needed treatment over the weekend. It was meant to be short term foster care, but I really liked her and wanted to keep her. In a decision I’m sure she regrets, Rachael said yes. I named her Ursa because she looked like a little black bear cub!

October 2021

Ursa got big quick! Here she and Ruby are slobbed out on the futon in my office. I gotta say, my office mates don’t get much work done.

We had some spectacular fall mornings when I’d go out to move the sheep and goat paddock.

I also started my millwright work, working on a grain elevator and bins during the corn harvest at a farm down the road from our place.

Lotta fun climbing around on grain elevator…

…and great views as a reward.

Accidents happen! Whoops!

Truckload o’ puppos!

L to R: Emmy (Ember), Roxy (Roxanne), RooBot (Ruby), Ursa, and Ginny (Virginia). And Lola of course (the truck)!

October 2022

More October home improvement projects!

Our house has a lot of design quirks. One thing that has annoyed us for the past 2+ years is that the back deck was closed - i.e., there is no back yard access from the deck. So to go out back, we’ve had to go out the front door and go around the house. Not a huge deal, but annoying and an inconvenience. So I finally got around to building that set of stairs I’ve been talking about since we moved in…

First step: materials acquisition. Here we are putting Lola to the test on a trip to the feed mill and the lumber yard. 800 lbs of feed, 300 lbs of cement and sand, 300-400 lbs of lumber, and a pregnant lady! Lola hauled it all back up the mountain just fine!

The boss lady inspects the work-in-progress.

Not bad for my first time building a staircase!

I helped my millwright buddy put a new roof on his mom’s house one weekend. This little clapboard cabin was built by his grandma and grandpa in the mid-1940s, and now his mom lives there. Roof leaks have gotten to be bad and the cabin has taken some water damage. We stripped off the original tin, and some of the original chestnut purlins that were rotted. Hard work and long days but we got it done over a Saturday-Sunday.

My neighbor had a bunch of watermelons in his patch that didn’t ripen well enough to sell at the farm stand down the road. He said I could take them for our pigs. I scavenged a whole pickup truck load of melons out of his field - the pigs loved them!

We also ventured out into the wild world of raising pigs in forest paddocks, using only a single strand of electrified poly tape (or wire) to contain them.

With labor help from friends who came to farm day, we built a training pin and put three barrows in it. After a few hits of 8,000 volts to the snout they learn to steer clear of the white poly tape.

After four or five days in the training pen I enclosed a ~2,000 square foot area of forest with the electric tape and turned the barrows loose in it.

I’ve been making a series of short videos that describe this experiment, and show how pigs transform an overgrown forest into a rooted and tilled up patch that can be planted with forage grasses and selectively logged for firewood in a process of succession towards creation of a sparsely forested park-like savannah grazing zone for sheep and goats.

Start of project

After one week

After two weeks

Tune in next month to see our continued progress with this project and what pigs - AKA, nature’s little skid-steers - can do to clear and improve land!

With nights getting colder, it was time to start up our wood fired boiler. This provides all our heat and hot water through the cold season. Here’s a video explaining how it works and showing the startup process.

Rachael’s best friend threw her a baby shower in their hometown in Virginia. I drove up so that Rachael’s sister could take some nice pregnancy photos of us. The fall colors were great!

And I got to visit Ruby at her new home! She spends all day playing in a big forest paddock with goats and another beagle her age named Daisy. I miss crazy lil RooBot, but she has a great setup on Rachael’s friends’ farm.

Baby’s coming soon! You won’t want to miss next month’s installment of Then & Now…

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September is a fantastic month in our little Brushy Mountain bioregion. The beginning of the month is still without a doubt full-on summer. By the end of the month you can really sense the season change. The contrast was especially remarkable for me this year, since I left the balmy summer weather on September 1st for almost three weeks doing fieldwork in the Amazon. When I got home on the 19th conditions were clearly tilting into fall.

I’m late getting out the September edition of ‘Then & Now.’ When I got home from travels I dove into farm projects and getting things ready for our fall Farm Day on October 1. Actually, Farm Day got rained out by a tropical storm and postponed to October 9. It’s been a little hectic but as mid-October approaches I’m starting to feel caught up, maybe (???)…

Anyway, hope you enjoy these photos!

September 2020

September evenings often make for good lighting conditions for photos…

L to R: Baxter, Vernon, Daria, Flaura.

Young Possum and Clarice looking very cute.

Millie, always mugging for the camera.

Forrest in the foreground, junk piles in front of the trailer in the background.

Rachael got good at hatching out birds. These ducklings lived in a bin in our bathroom, and then in our shower, until they were old enough to join the adult birds in the coop.

Guinea keets.

In September 2020 we installed a wood-fired boiler to provide all our heat and hot water through the cold seasons.

It was a big purchase - fairly expensive. But wood is super-abundant on our property. It saves a lot on our electricity bill. And we can extend it in the future to heat a hot tub, greenhouse, workshop building, etc.

It’s also nice that the wood, ash, and other mess are outside, the fire danger is outside, it’s very efficient and low-emission, and we don’t have a wood stove taking up space in our small living room.

September 2021

I had just finished the pig pasture fence when a tropical storm came through and knocked over a big ol rotten walnut tree, which got hung up on other trees at a crazy angle right over the pasture corner post.

We didn’t have money to hire a professional arborist to deal with this dangerous treefall. Rachael’s suggestion (no kidding) was to throw a cable around it and yank it down with my truck.

So I undid that section of fence and did just that. Happy to report there were no casualties.

Since I had to re-do that section of fence I decided to go ahead and install a gate. Win-win.

Finally the pigs got to enjoy their playground!

Rotational grazing with the sheep and goats was in full-swing.

A few roosters took up residence with the traveling sheep and goat crew

I started work on a shelter for the upper pasture, in anticipation of winter weather. My neighbor gave me the old tin panels for the roof, which saved us a lot of money.

I would keep adding to this building and in 2022 it became a hay storage shed.

September 2022

I don’t have a lot of farm photos for September 2022 since I spent most of the month in Ecuador, working with communities in the Amazon affected by petrochemical pollution. You can read about these workshops in biochar water treatment at my other Substack site.

I was gearing up to leave home for South America late on the night of September 1 when, of course, our sow decided to have piglets.

The trip to Ecuador was a wild success. But as soon as I got home, the first thing I had to contend with was going into battle with a yellow jacket nest. Our neighbor was kind enough to loan me his bee suit.

When I went to borrow the bee suit, I noticed that he had a TON of acorns all over his shed and driveway. I said to him, “I wish this oak tree was over my pig pasture.” He replied, “I do too!” I spent the afternoon sweeping acorns off his shed and bagging them up to give to our pigs. They love them!

Early fall is a good time for doing little projects in preparation for winter. For example, one of our IBC tote water tanks cracked and leaked. (The really old one I pulled out of the woods when we first moved to the farm.) So I re-purposed the metal cage by making it into a hay rack.

And the old cracked tank got made into an impromptu pig hutch.

I built a few more pig hutches out of scrap materials.

The grazing has been good this year - the sheep and goats are fat and happy! Here’s a short time-lapse video of the paddock moving process.

This young goat, Gulab, has a special friend - the big orange rooster we named Jr. Sisk. I’ll often spot Jr. sitting on top of Gulab while he’s lounging in the paddock.

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August is one of those months where there is so much going on you don’t have a spare minute to take it all in, and before you know it the month is over. Wow! Rotational grazing is in full swing, sows are poppin’ out piglets here there and everywhere, the rain rains hard and the sun shines hard and the garden turns into a wild jungle….

August is when summer really figures out how to be summer and all cylinders are firing in concert. Just try to keep up, if you can!

August 2020

Early days and eco-infrastructure starting to take shape…

We installed a rainwater harvesting setup to capture water off the back roof of the house. The house is on (nearly) the highest point on the property. The idea is to gravity-feed rainwater to the vegetable gardens, chicken/duck house, and livestock water tanks in the pastures below.

Under-deck rainwater storage system.

I didn’t have a lot of height to work with so I opted for this type of water tank, ordinarily designed for use in full-sized pickup truck beds. Not the cheapest option but it (just barely) fit into the space available. Later I expanded the storage by adding two additional tanks under the porch and plumbing them together in series.

In August 2020 I also completed the install of the first iteration of the self-flushing mini-duckpond.

If we get a big enough rainstorm rain water flows into the pond and over-tops the siphon, kicking off a flushing episode.

I liked the aesthetics of this curvy pond shape, but in the end it wasn’t really rigid enough to be practical. I later swapped it out for a more boring oval but thicker-walled sturdier stock tank.

I also played around with a few different siphon designs, and settled on a simple U-siphon made from 2-inch PVC. Here’s a short youtube vid that shows the current system, more or less:

I also have to give a shout-out to early days in the chicken shed with my favorite rooster, who we named Lenny Kravitz for obvious reasons.

Lenny and the guineas, great band name up for grabs…

Another key bit of eco-infrastructure that has come in clutch and for very little cost - shade sails!

The back of our house faces nearly due-east. That means we get heavy morning-to-midday sun insolation. This is great in winter for passive heating of the house. In summer it heats the house up way too much and makes the back deck unbearable. So - shade sails, voila! - pleasant deck ambience and less heat stress on the house.

Our young critters loved the warm late summer evenings of August 2020 for posing for glamour shots.

Possum

Alabama

Clarice

and of course Miss Millie Vanilli, what a damn princess…

Last but not least, after his surgery and confinement in the sheep ICU Forrest is back with the gang in the pasture and holdin his own!

August 2021

Big adventures unfolded in August 2021 in two main categories: sheep and goats go on a rotational grazing safari, and pastured pigs have babies!

The Winnebagoat was an instant hit with the flock.

Vernon scopes out the new digs.

Flaura and the girls enjoying the shade.

Lil Miranda approves.

Alabama - maybe not the smartest goat ever - finds a shady spot underneath.

Vernon: “Hey Flaura, did you hear about some fresh grass over there?”

Finnegan: “Did Vernon say something about fresh grass?!?!?!”

Moh (always chill): “It’s over here guys.”

Finnegan: “I’m all about it!”

Emerald: “Calm down, boys.”

Even the roosters are getting in on the vanlife influencer bandwagon.

Meanwhile, down in the woods the piggos are exploring their new territory…

A new mama gets moved into her new digs and straight off heads for the hot tub.

Hungry little piggies!

and…now they’re in a milk-coma…

Nighty-night lil piggos…

August 2022

Well, August must be piglet month.

Here’s a short vid clip showing part of our typical evening routine going down to feed the pigs.

In addition to new piglets, August 2022 was an eventful month!

Our friend Matthieu taught us the traditional Nigerian method for processing goat.

Goat rack-of-ribs.

The brains are a delicacy.

On a work trip to central Mexico I also got to tour an amazing agroecology project called Via Organica. I wrote about my visit and shared some video clips here.

One of the ideas I got from Via Organica is to cultivate giant agave plants and ferment them to make a super nutrient-dense silage for sheep and goats. I am going to find cultivars of agave that will grow in North Carolina and try this out. Don’t be surprised if you visit Magpie Hollow in a few years and see these huge alien plants growing!

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July 2020

Millie (Milli Vanilli) came to live with us, ostensibly to protect the sheep and goats from predators such as coyotes.

Young Clarice and Alabama are so cute!

Calamity struck when we were shearing young Forrest. He kicked at the wrong instant and the clippers nicked his achilles tendon. Sliced right through it. Rachael sedated him and did a surgical repair on our front porch.

He spent about the next six weeks wearing a splint in the sheep ICU, AKA a dog crate on our front porch. We brought all his food to him.

He recovered well, and now walks with a barely perceptible limp.

July 2021

Millie gets some much needed hoof work.

July 2021 begins our foray into rotational grazing. I put a roof and side screens on the livestock trailer that came with our property to make a mobile shelter. Introducing The Winnebagoat!

As you can tell by comparing photos of Alabama in July 2020 with those a year later, she put on some weight! I built this special ramp just for her since I was worried she might be too fat to jump into the trailer.

In May 2021 we had our first batch of surprise piglets. Another batch showed up at the end of July!

July 2022

Makin’ bacon!

Dry rub with salt, black pepper, and brown sugar.

A week in the fridge then throw ‘em on the smoker!

We starting to build up our gardening repertoire. A few baby water melons starting to grow on the trellis…

I got an excellent haul of potatoes - about two five gallon buckets full from one strip of potato plants less than 20 ft long. Next year for sure gonna plant loads more potatoes. Feels good to have some points on the board in the gardening game.

Alabama and her boys Gulab (right) and Jamun (center) are doin’ great!

This little eweling is usually too shy to let me get close to photograph her. But one evening she was calm and curious enough and I got this shot.

Two years after his leg surgery Forrest has grown up into an excellent bellwether.

Our lil ram Moh is doing great as well!

One project this month was to retrofit a shelter in our pasture for storing hay for the winter. There was kind of a saga extirpating a hornets’ nest before I could start work on the shelter. I will spare you that chicanery.

In July 2022 we got confirmation that Rachael is having a boy! The other vets at the clinic ultrasounded her back in May and called it, but her 20-week appointment with the human doctor confirmed it officially.

Tried to take some nice pregnancy photos on our trip to the beach.

We are so blessed. I cannot believe it.

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Phew we have been busy! Our spring farm day got rescheduled for mid-June, having been cancelled in mid-May since I had the bat flu. It was a big success and we had a great day of hanging out with friends and selling pork shares!

I harvested turnips from my garden, boiled them, smashed them into fritters, fried them in olive oil and bacon fat, seasoned with salt, pepper, and chives, and melted some fresh shredded parmesan cheese on top. Was a real hit with farm day guests!

As you’ll see from the photo series below, June can be a wet or dry month for us here. This June was very dry, and it shows in the grass! Really goes to show there are no hard and fast rules for rotational grazing, other than to keep an eye on the pastures and move as-needed. We’re learning as we go.

Hope you enjoy this short photo-essay. Feel free to share Magpie Hollow Farm News with your friends and loved ones!

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June 2020

In June of 2020 construction began on the chicken house in our back yard.

Note the giant pile of rotting logs with poison ivy growing on them in the last photo. Those were left presumably when they built the house. We spent the summer and fall cutting up that pile, and burned what we could for heat the first winter.

This shot, taken June 18, 2020, shows the beauty of the place along with the dilapidation and overgrowth.

We spent the first couple of months piling up junk that was strewn around. Then, the junk piles quickly became overgrown when the warm weather and rains of late spring early summer came.

The handful of goats and sheep we had in our “flock starter kit” of cast-offs from another farm were so small and cute.

Little Clarice is tiny in this photo!

Alabama and Clarice, w/Baxter and Daria in the background.

Lil Possum!

Exploring the refurbished shed we used for a barn all that year.

This shot shows the hunter’s shack (brown building in background) that we partially disassembled to recover the useable lumber, and partially converted into a barn over the winter of 2021-2022.

The tool shed was just getting cleaned out and a coat of paint.

Deck shot, late June 2020.

June 2021

Under-the-deck shot June 2021 - additional rooftop harvested rainwater storage capacity installed, check!

We processed (or, had processed by our local family-run abattoir) our first hog - a boar that had gotten too big for his britches.

Quite a haul!

An excellent blueberry crop last year…

Lot’s of cute hatchlings too, if I remember correctly...

And a major highlight-of-the-month for me: while I was away doing fieldwork in Mexico, the repairs were finally completed on my beloved ‘89 ‘yota, Lola and Rachael brought her home. Here’s Lola (the white one) next to her younger sister Tulsi (‘95).

June 2022

Beautiful blooms this June…

Rotational grazing in full swing…

The guineas run pasture cleanup, scavenging bugs (especially ticks!) and parasites, etc.

Major effort stockpiling firewood for this winter. In a huge windfall, we got just over 4 cords for nearly free. We spent hours stacking it!

And the garden is starting to get real exciting…

But of course, Rachael steals the show with the glow of a mama-to-be at about 18 weeks pregnant and just starting to show a baby bump!

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I’m late posting our monthly segment of Then & Now for May. This is partially because we have been so, so busy. There has been so much stuff going on at the farm, every day feels like a race just to keep up, and not really keeping up.

We had also planned our spring Farm Day for mid-May. This is where friends and family come from around the region to see what’s been going on at the farm and to buy shares of pork, eggs, chicken, whatever we have on hand. But a couple days before Farm Day I started feeling sick. I have had so many tick bites this year (and every year) I was afraid it was Lyme disease. I went to the doctor to get tested for Lyme, which came back negative. But I tested positive for Covid. I was actually glad to have Covid - that’s way better than Lyme. But we had to cancel Farm Day so I could quarantine at home. I had about three days of flu-like symptoms, then fully recovered within five days or a week. It threw a wrench in our gears but we’ve re-scheduled Farm Day for June and it should be a good time.

We have some good news to share as of May 2022. You can read about it below. But one of the reasons I have kind of put off writing this update is that we had some sad occurrences during the month and I’m feeling more than a little heartbroken.

For practical reasons we sent our donkeys off to live on another farm. They’re well cared for but I miss them. Our little beagle went to another home as well where she has a new sister-from-another-mister and playmate. I miss her loud “ROOOOO!!!!!” sounds around the house and her crazy-but-cuddly beagle energy.

And this month we lost our beloved three-legged Anatolian mongrel mutt MacGyver. No stories to tell for now, I’m just sad, sad, sad. Tears come to my eyes whenever I think of him. RIP, buddy.

My heart hurts and so I’ve procrastinated writing this update. But here it is, better late than never.

What can we learn about the month of May in our area? The weather heats up and you’ll get some hot days - hot enough that the pigs will want to climb into their water tub for a soak. In wet years the grass grows like crazy - rotational grazing ops have to be in full-swing by May 1. Any pastures grazed from early in the season will shown signs of over-grazing in May, especially if it’s a drier year.

May is a beautiful month - time to get outside and get to work!

May 2020

By May 2020 we’d fought back some of the overgrowth, fixed the fences and shed in the main pasture, and brought home our starter flock of sheep and goats.

Note the junk piles in front of the trailer and along the drive to the left. We spent so much time the first year clearing junk, pulling stuff out of the ground, etc. Many trips to the dump and some pretty epic trash fires.

We uncovered an old flower garden with a giant chunk of petrified wood set right in the middle of it. I planted a dogwood tree and we designated this the memorial garden for my mom.

May 2021

On the first of May 2021 we got a big surprise - piglets! We did not know at the time, but all of our sows were pregnant. We’d only had the pigs for about ten days. They were in a small temporary pasture because the main pig area was still in preparation.

We were about to go into town for errands and I went down to check the pigs water as it was getting to be a hot day. I saw a little piglet poke its head up above the straw - and then another, and another!

We grabbed the electric netting and made an emergency farrowing pen around the mama and babies.

One little boar was white with black spots. We gave him to Rachael’s boss. Two other boys died within the first few days, sadly. We were left with three girls.

They’re cute little buggers!

Our boar had started to get a little aggressive, so we decided it was time for him to go. First, Rachael castrated him to avoid boar taint in the meat (although as we later learned this may not be an issue for kune kunes). We kept him on the trailer for two weeks after that and spoiled him, before taking him to our local family meat processing facility.

We had some beautiful, pleasant evenings during May 2021 so I took lots of animal photos. Going back through them, I see that this was the time our pastures began to be over-grazed, obvious in the photo below.

Millie and Theo of course wanted to be photographed a bunch.

Hey! Our baby fruit trees were starting to produce apples and peaches!

Mom’s memorial garden starting to look pretty nice with irises etc…

May 2022

May 1st 2022 was a sad day. We’d made the executive decision to re-home our donkeys. We had to sedate them to make transport less stressful. Here’s Rachael darting Theo with a sedative:

We got the donkeys to provide protection from predators for the sheep and goats. It’s uncertain if our donkeys would have been effective against, say, a pack of coyotes. Thankfully, they were never tested.

We expect the sheep and goats to be out of the main paddocks on rotational grazing using portable electric netting for about nine months out of the year. Since the donkeys weren’t with the sheep and goats during this period, they weren’t providing any predator protection. We would have to feed them hay year round since we don’t have enough fenced-in pasture to provide them an all-fresh-grass diet. A considerable expense, and they weren’t doing anything for us other than looking cool and making crazy donkey sounds at random times.

So off they went to a big cattle farm nearby with plenty of grass to munch on. But I miss them.

Bacon!

In May 2022 I began my adventure with bacon curing. With the help of a local buddy, we cured pork bellies from one of our pigs using a wet cure method and a dry cure method, for later comparison.

Wet cure brine.

Dry cure with salt, brown sugar, and black pepper.

After a week of dry cure and ten days of wet cure, we smoked the bellies.

Then we froze, sliced, and vacuum packed the bacon!

We have some friends in Virginia who have a beagle about Ruby’s age named Daisy. Daisy was lonely, so we decided that Ruby should go and live with them so Daisy will have a playmate. They are both so happy now!

Ruby (left) and Daisy.

I’m happy for them but sad for me - I miss the crazy Roo-Bot! Can’t wait to visit her and Daisy.

As I mentioned above, this month we lost our beloved MacGyver. I’m really tore up over it and don’t want to write any more. So heartbreaking.

Let’s end on some happy news, how about? Well, for one, my potatoes are doing great.

We’ve had some hot days and the pigs beat the heat by taking turns soaking in their water tub, which is adorable.

And we found out this month that we are most likely having a boy. We still have to confirm with blood tests, but one of the other vets at the clinic ultrasounded Rachael and seemed pretty confident that it’s a boy. And human. A human baby boy. How about that?

And even though during May she transitioned from first to second trimester, Rachael’s still out killing it on the yard work on her days off from the clinic.

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April is a tremendous month at our location. Spring is really only just beginning to stir as late March tips into early April. By the end of April, Spring has exploded into long warm sunny days with the trees fully leafed out, with the hummingbirds returning and the bats making their first appearances snatching bugs out of the evening air.

Spring comes galloping in during April and you can see remarkable changes on just about a daily basis. The dogwood blooms come and go in a flush of heartrending beauty. The hesitant grass gets its legs under it and charges skyward. The surrounding mountains, visible all winter through the dormant leafless trees, disappear behind an embracing wall of green.

April will see a few nights, at least, with temperatures dipping below freezing and we give thanks to the wood stove. And it will see days with the doors and windows flung wide to admit the breeze and sun rays you can actually feel in contrast to the winter rays that illuminate but seem to transmit little warmth.

During an April evening you’ll have the peculiar startling experience of walking out onto the porch after sundown and hearing what seems like a deafening din of insects! The nights of winter and early spring had been silent for so long you hadn’t noticed.

April is one of my favorite months here.

April 2020

The work begins in earnest.

The shed that was nearly a lost cause got rehabbed, a fresh coat of paint, new doors, and the first of many lean-tos constructed on the property.

The poor riding mower we got from craigslist was no match for the roots, rocks, rugged terrain, and the various bits of junk sticking out of the dirt. It sort-of lasted a season but I spent more time fixing it than mowing with it.

This photo taken April 1, 2020 depicts the potential of this place. The lay of the land, the trees just starting to bud and leaf out, the texture of the clouds at sunset.

What can’t be seen in the photo is the overgrowth, the fences in disrepair, the dilapidated buildings, the junk and trash strewn around.

April 2021

This little buckling, a Nigerian dwarf we named Finnegan, was my birthday present from Rachael. A cold snap the night before called for an adorable goat jacket. In April 2021 we took our first steps into the world of rotational grazing using electric netting, as shown here.

Rachael started to get good at hatching birds…

Guinea keets.

One of the ducklings we hatched and raised with several others who lived in our shower for a while.

My first big fencing job. To look at the corner posts and fence runs now you can probably tell it was my first effort at a big fence project. It gets the job done but will need updating in a year or two.

One of my favorite photos of Ginny. It shows her energy and joy.

“Ummmm, this snack pan is empty. Photos can wait.”

April is the month for dogwood blooms in our area. I went bananas last year and this year taking photos.

Expanding our rainwater storage under the back deck.

My mom’s memorial garden starting to look pretty good. Note the massive chunk of petrified wood!

Fencing project done and animals let onto the new pasture.

It looks nice here, but I messed up. Grazed it too hard, with too many animals, too early in the season. It is just now, a year+ later, starting to recover, after I spread straw and grass seed.

Now that my eye for grass is a lot better I can easily tell from this photo that this early season flush was way too young and tender to graze. Oops. Lesson learned.

That said - it was pretty cool recruiting the ciritters to clear more land in the woods to expand the pasture!

We did our first shearing in late April last year. The weather had already started to get hot. Based on this experience we decided to do spring shearing in March, and probably another one in July/August just to help keep the sheep cool.

And then…we got pigs!

The idea was just to get a couple of feeder pigs to raise on pasture. But Rachael found a screamin deal on marketplace where a guy wanted to get rid of four nearly full-grown kune kunes (a boar and three sows).

The pig area was not ready, so we put them in the small lower pasture behind the goat shed.

Hoo boy were we in for an adventure with the pigs! Tune in next month to see what happened…

April 2022

April is definitely the month for dogwoods.

Tales to come of the pig adventured I alluded to above. For now, let’s skip ahead to the test run of the pig loading setup I built over the past couple of months…

My foray into veggie gardening has begun. Wish me luck developing that green thumb…

Planted potatoes, turnips, and spinach first.

Grape vine.

Raspberry.

Goji berry.

Also planted a blackberry bush, another peach tree, and a plum tree.

The pears, peaches, apples, pecan, and fig trees I planted last year survived the winter (and the deer nibbling at them) and are leafing out/blooming this month. Some day we’ll have a proper orchard!

Emerald and her twin girls are healthy and happy.

“You got treats!?!?!?!?!” Theo says.

“Can’t you tell we’re starving to death?”

Possum and his boy Jalebi. Possum got to go out and eat fresh grass while Jalebi stayed in juvenile detention, being weaned off his momma Clarice.

Here’s a little montage from rounding everybody up to go out on rotational grazing. If last year is any indication they’ll be out on rotation until Christmas.

The mowing/brush clearing crew go to work on a locust thicket…

…and they do excellent work!

Jalebi finally got let out of juvvy and rejoined his momma.

The pigs got let onto fresh pasture as well.

Young Moh (center) is now our ram, as we select for Shetland traits. Rachael castrated Onion (right) a few weeks ago during spring shearing.

We end April 2022 with a sad story that could have been worse. During morning rounds I noticed a young ewe staying away from the group and acting like she was uncomfortable, and with something hanging out of her backside. I thought maybe she had eaten a piece of twine or string and was having trouble pooping it out. I decided to let her try to work it out for a couple of hours and check on her later.

When I checked on her around mid-day, nothing had changed. She still seemed uncomfortable and hadn’t passed the “string.” So I caught her, put her in a dog kennel in the back of my truck, and took her down to the clinic in town.

Rachael figured out right away that the “string” was a piece of the placenta, and that she was trying to lamb but couldn’t for some reason.

As I held her in the grass behind the vet clinic, Rachael reached in and found a stillborn lamb. It wasn’t positioned correctly for birth, and was too big for this young, small ewe anyway. Rachael managed to pull the dead lamb out, and saved the ewe’s life.

We put the ewe in a pen in the barn and fed her alfalfa and treats for a couple of days while she recovered. She’s back with the flock now and doing fine!

It’s sad to lose this baby but if we wouldn’t have seen and acted the ewe would have died as well. A beneficial by-product of management intensive grazing is that one or both of us see the animals on a daily bases, usually twice daily. Thus we can spot many problems as they arise and respond quickly. This makes a big difference for herd health and minimize sickness and suffering of the critters.

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March 2021

With winter starting to abate I was ready to get outside and WORK! What’s the best way to shed cabin fever all at once? Go out and demolish the Bejeezus out of something!

I pried up the boards off the trailer front porch and cut through nearly all the nails holding the thing together with a sawzall. Then I threw a cable around it and yanked it down with my truck. Salvaged as much wood as possible and threw the rest on the burn pile. I did similar to the deck in back of the trailer. Now we have got some free project lumber!

I also dealt with multiple overgrown trash piles, consolidated down to the one shown here in front of the tool shed.

With the warmer evenings and nice light, I had a lot of fun photographing the animals.

Forrest.

Possum.

Clarice.

Vernon, and Flaura (named after my Granny) with the guineas in-tow.

Theo and Millie. Millie really likes to be photographed.

Doggos doggos doggos…

Ursa, about 6 months old here.

Roxanne. Aka, Roxy, Roxomoxoa, Squirrel.

MacGyver. He was a stray and got hit by a car. Rachael did surgery to try and save his leg, but had to amputate it. He had such good energy despite going through all that. So we adopted him.

Ember, aka Emmy, aka Creeping Em, aka Emmy Batwing (because of her ears), aka Emmy BedBug.

Ginny (Virginia). Ginny-Loo, Ginny-Loo-Hoo, Ginny-Hoo-Tee-Hoo, Ginny Spinny (she loves to do donuts and race around).

Ginny had also been run over and had a busted pelvis. She was abandoned by her former owner at the clinic, most likely because he couldn’t pay the bill for surgery. She was a bag of bones who had been laying in a puddle of her own pee. But she recovered strong and is 100% living her best life on the farm. The most joyful dog.

Ruby Jean was another adoptee. She likely came from a beagle puppy mill. Her mom had died of worms. Clinic staff adopted her two surviving siblings. We bottle fed her and raised her up into the Holy Terror she is today.

In March 2021 we had our first non-bird critter born on the farm. Daria gave birth to this little ram that Rachael named Onion.

This old freezer was abandoned in the hunter’s shack. I hauled it up to the house, cleaned it up, and plugged it in. Nothin. I thought maybe the compressor was bad.

Turns out, it was just the temperature control wiring was all boogered up with corrosion. I directed wired that puppy and it kicked on! Ordered a thermocouple/temperature controller online, set this bad boy up in the crawl space under the house, and voila! Meat freezer for next to no expenditure.

Work also began clearing pasture land and building this shelter for the pigs. My neighbor gave us some old tin roofing panels, and we had a few lengths of the sturdy wire mesh panels (actually they are cattle panels) laying around. I got half rounds for free from a local sawyer, and used wood reclaimed from the trailer porch and deck to build this. All I had to buy were fasteners and four 4”x4”x10’ posts, and later a couple of gates.

We had some beautiful blooms on our young fruit trees, but a frost later nailed them pretty bad and the fruit yield this year was small.

Definitely can get some epic sunsets this time of year…

Porchpic early March 2021:

March 2022

Porchpic early March 2022:

The more things change, the more they stay the same….

This year it was the pear trees’ turn to bloom too early…

…and then get nailed by a hard frost. Ho-hum.

Don’t want to jinx, but maybe the peach trees wised up this year and bloomed a little later, trying to miss the frost…

Three more baby sheepies dropped this month!

One of the best feelings is to come into the barn at night or early AM to check on the girls and a new lil hitter is already nursing away!

This little eweling we named Shallot. Her half-brother is Onion and her half-sister is Vidalia.

Emerald was the last to go, giving birth to twin ewelings. We haven’t named them yet. First we’re gonna have to figure out how to tell them apart, other than one being slightly smaller than the other. Here’s the littler one of the two…name suggestions?

Our hay was cut on our neighbor’s farm. He let’s me borrow his 1970 Massey Ferguson tractor to bring bales down to our pastures. Besides needed a jump-start and sometimes tire inflation, this ol’ hoss turns over and WORKS! It’s barely big enough to pick up these giant round bales though. Have to go up steep hills backwards if I don’t want to pop a wheelie.

We’re almost out of last year’s hay. Hopefully we can make our stockpile stretch until the sheep and goats can be put out onto rotational grazing. The cool season grasses are coming up well. But I want to hold back as long as possible to get a good strong stand of forage going before grazing. One of the lessons-learned from last year is to not graze forage too early - it takes too long to recover and is very easy to overgraze. Grass growing now is using its energy stores saved from last season - the soil is still not that warm and the days are too short for enough photosynthesis to drive strong forage growth. But the new green sure looks pretty after the dry winter! Here’s Ginny lounging in the fresh new grass.

Another project this month was to build a pig loading chute. I got a stack of grain bin panels for free leftover from a millwright job site a few months ago and used two of them to construct a curved chute.

We need to load and unload the animal trailer at this angle given space constraints in this part of the farm. It was tricky trying to make the chute come out relatively square and plumb when the terrain, pig shelter, etc. are not flat, square, or plum at all!

The end of the chute is angled so that we can tilt the trailer down to make it easier for the pigs to step on and off. Will be testing this soon as we have plans to process two more pigs this spring!

The goats are seen here enjoying another big milestone project completed recently - a new ~1/2 acre paddock. We’ve been working since the fall to clear overgrowth, prep the barn, and fence in a spring pasture for mamas and babies during kidding/lambing season.

This means more forage for the animals and less area for me to mow - win-win!

Another project this month - shearing.

Forrest has the best fleece of the bunch!

Last year we didn’t get to shearing until May and it had already gotten pretty hot by then. This year we’re trying be ahead of the season a bit, and hope to do another shearing in July/August to help the sheep feel cooler while still getting a good growth of fleece through the winter for next year’s wool.

Persela’s first shearing. She did really well.

Our shetland ram, Moh, before his first haircut.

Moh all sleeked-up and ready to woo the ladies come breeding season.

In addition to shearing, Rachael docked tails of new lambs (necessary for hygiene) and castrated two boy goats and a sheep that we’ll raise for meat. As with all things we try to keep animal discomfort to a minimum. The live a really good life here. (They are certainly well fed!) Our motto is “all good days, and one bad day.” But I suppose in the case of castration it could be “two bad days.” Still I get attached to the animals and when it comes time for processing I’m really sad.

Goat-snuggling’ is on the regular here at Magpie Hollow!

Another project this month was to make ready for a decent-sized vegetable garden.

I tilled up the backyard and fenced in an area that will come out to about 1,000 square feet of growing space. Our soil is pretty bad, so I tilled in a generous amount of compost made from straw and animal poo scraped out of the barn. I wrote a bit about the garden and in general why we’re undertaking these kinds of homesteading projects in a recent post.

Rounded out March projects with a first attempt at rendering lard kept back from the two pigs we processed last year.

I cut up about 10 lbs of pork leaf fat and boiled it at 200-250 F for 2.5-3 hours.

I poured the liquid fat through a strainer. It had the slight yellowish tinge you can see here. It cooled overnight to a fairly white solid.

Hopefully this lard will be of good enough quality for pastries and pie crusts in addition to pan frying. The yield was 8 pints.

When Roo-Bot’s not out raisin’ the Devil she likes to sleep in my office windowsill.

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February 2020

February is when the daffodils are likely to spring up.

A lot of what was to become Magpie Hollow was a real trash heap. Though as highlighted in the previous Then & Now, there were some treasures to be had among the junk, like this ladder.

I met the home inspector about a week before closing to go over the main house, which was in pretty good shape (it was immaculate compared with this single-wide we nicknamed the “meth trailer”).

After the inspector left I set out to walk the property boundaries, which are about 80% in the woods. The back line of our property cuts a straight transect over the topography. I plunged through the woods, climbing over rocks and downed trees and avoiding thorns, and down into a ravine where I discovered this…we have a spring! How awesome is that!!?!?

Until the well was drilled for the main house, this spring was the farm’s water source. Clearly the spring box, pump, and piping had fallen into disrepair. But I was super excited about this discovery. Someday we’d get it all fixed up and flowing again, perhaps for providing water to the animals.

February 2021

Guinea tractor. There was a huge pile of old logs in our backyard where they had cleared trees to build the main house. We cut and split the wood and used it for heating over winter 2020/2021. I put the dog kennel on the spot where the log pile was and put the guineas in there to till and fertilize the ground. This is where our kitchen garden will go.

The livestock guardian donkeys were fully fuzzed out in their winter coats.