This post is part of a monthly series, Then & Now, that uses photos to show the development and changes taking place on the farm.
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.