Happy Easter!

It has been a busy week up at the farmette.  Friends and family have been visiting for Easter vacation.  I feel OK calling it Easter vacation here because we have been doing Easter art projects at school since St. Patrick's Day.  If you don't celebrate it; too bad.  Very different approach from the city where holidays were never spoken of in school.  Honestly though, aside from the Jesus nailed to the cross thing, which we did not do an art project about at school, what's not to like about Easter?  There's candy, a giant bunny, coloring eggs, more candy and the rebirth of the outside world after a long cold winter.

I think Easter is my favorite holiday.  As a recovering Catholic, it is the one holiday where I think the Bible story is a pretty cool allegory for what happens in spring.  Again, not so much about the crucifixion but about the rebirth part of it.  Jesus is kind of like a tulip rising from the thawing ground.

Ok, so now that I have pissed off a bunch of Christians comparing God's son to a tulip, let's move on.

Today spring finally arrived.   Despite the snow that still covers our north facing slope, it was very warm and sunny and we had to open up the window in the greenhouse to cool it off.  The seeds that I planted three months ago are finally starting to look like lettuce.  I really cannot believe they made it through the winter.  A month ago they were tiny little seedlings sticking out of the frozen earth and now they look like we might be having a salad in the not too distant future.  Thank you Eliot Coleman.

In the past we have become overly optimistic about the warming April temperatures and planted things in the garden a wee bit too early, but thanks to the greenhouse, we can hedge our bets.  Today we got to work preparing the raised beds for planting tomorrow.

Each bed was spread with two big buckets of a mixture of rabbit, horse and chicken manure.  Noelle's contribution will come later in the season when her manure has a chance to age.  We then topped each bed with two bags of some sort of soil the husband bought at a greenhouse auction. Since the floor of the greenhouse is wall to wall weed barrier and the soil is from a bag, we are hoping to avoid ever having to pull a weed, unlike the rocky weedy nightmare up the hill.  We even captured some of the lady bugs in the house and brought them in to eat the aphids.  Take that Mother Nature.  It is not a very pretty set up and I can't help but worry that Martha wouldn't approve, but it is functional.

The whole point of the greenhouse is really so the husband can have tomatoes. We have had such miserable luck growing them outdoors here and it is the only produce the husband really wants.  He is so confident that this year we will have tomatoes that he bought about a 1000 tomato seeds and we already have five seed starter trays planted.  I guess the 50 chickens he is going to butcher and defeather in his homemade chicken plucker will be cooked in tomato sauce. Hint:  he posted on Freecycle today in search of a washing machine.

Well, folks, it is time for this farmer to go to bed.  Need to be up bright and early to hide some Easter eggs and get to work in the greenhouse.  Hopefully I will be dreaming of juicy red tomatoes and not chickens spinning around in a washing machine.

Holy Cow!

There is really no reason for me to title this post, "Holy Cow!" but when you have a new cow it is pretty much a given that there will be a "Holy Cow!" joke in there at some point, so I figured I should just get it out of the way now.  I guess I could have titled it, "Oh la Vache!"  since I am going to Paris in two weeks sans enfants.  I had to sneak that in as well so you all feel really jealous.

This has been a crazy week at the farmette.  Spring is here according to the calendar but not according to the white out conditions outside my window.  Earlier in the week I did a 180 into a snow bank on my way to school.  Luckily we were going so slow that no one was hurt but James Dean decided he wanted to take the bus the next morning.

Here are some other highlights of the week:

I took a full-time job at the boys' school because A: The husband just quit his job to start his own company and while $11,000 is not going to keeps us in diamonds and furs, I can probably buy some groceries or as I discovered from the business manager, I may earn just enough to afford health insurance for the family B: I like having an inside track on what is going on with my kids education and C: I have a hard time saying no.

It is a pretty sobering thought that a minimum wage job can only earn you just enough for health insurance.  Those asshole politicians who claim that the minimum wage doesn't need to be raised because those jobs are held by teenagers or people who are not the primary bread winners in a family should come meet the teacher's aide who works three jobs to support herself or the certified substitute teacher who sometimes does janitorial work in the evening to support her family.

I could write some pretty entertaining stories about working in Scrappy Doo's kindergarten class, but I don't think it would be ethical and would probably get me fired, so suffice to say I started out the week with a kid who had a nose bleed that made the room look like a crime scene and ended it with a kid who pooped her pants.

Noelle is doing great although her enthusiasm and affection can be a little scary at times.  I decided that I can't let her smell my fear though so I use my angry mommy voice when she starts trying to eat my sweatshirt or stops stubbornly when I take her out for a walk. So far it seems to be working and after a session of, "who's the boss?"  she usually becomes very docile and loving and we stand forehead to forehead as I pat her and talk softly to her.  Cow breath is surprisingly pleasant.

I have started reading a book called, "Keeping a Family Cow" by Joann Grohman.  It is an interesting book even if you don't own a cow although she is rather opinionated and doesn't seem to have much respect for vegans.  The book did make me realize that in order to live the sustainable life I dream of, we have to be meat eaters. At some point chickens stop laying eggs and will have to go into the soup pot.  In order to have milk and cheese Noelle will have to get pregnant pretty much every year and if it's a boy he will end up in the freezer.

I have grappled with this inevitability but I know we cannot rely solely on my garden to sustain us.  Between the rocky soil and the pests, we would have to live on arugula and blueberries.  Plus, since I am committed to doing things organically, I amend the soil with manure which means animals are involved no matter what.

So, the meat eating life is in my foreseeable future. It will be difficult to butcher steers or chickens we have raised, but I think having that connection to our food will make us appreciate these creatures who sustain us even more and  hopefully never buy factory farm meat again.  I am not a religious person, but I am sure I will be giving thanks the first time I eat a hamburger from my own beef.

OK. I am done being Debbie Downer and can move on to the husband who is a treasure trove of funny anecdotes.

The husband decided to go visit his brother from another mother, Amish Eldin last weekend.  Eldin has become quite the Amish mogul.  His construction business is booming and he just purchased a sawmill which made the husband VERY jealous.  The husband went over to supposedly buy some locust  fence posts but I think he just wanted to visit Eldin. Locust wood is the strongest wood there is according to Eldin and the posts should last many years. The husband came back several hours later with the posts, a bunch of canning jars, a new Amish straw hat and supplies for the chicks he decided we should get from the Feed and Seed near Eldin.

I have been waiting for the weather to warm up a bit to get a few new chicks.  Two chickens do not provide enough eggs for a family of five so I thought if we got four or five more, we should have plenty of eggs for ourselves, even during the winter when egg production slows down.  The husband handed me the list of different breeds the Feed and Seed would be getting in and told me to decide which I wanted.  He had decided we should also get some meat birds and then he disappeared upstairs to go design some new chicken tractor for them.

I started doing some research and decided on The Golden Comet, Araucana, Australorp and Maran. Golden Comets and Australorp are the best layers. Araucanas lay the bluish greenish eggs and Marans lay dark brown eggs that look like chocolate.

Faverolles and Sussex were my choice for the meat birds because they are supposed to be the tastiest. I originally wanted the Cornish Rock meat birds even though I have heard their meat is not the best, because they are rather unattractive and are rumored to be lazy layabouts without much personality.  I thought that would make it easier to butcher them.  It is surprising how attached you can become to chickens.  They are very amusing and have quirky personalities.  I agreed to the Faverolles if the boys could give presidential pardons to three of their favorites.  They are really beautiful and friendly according to Backyard Chicken magazine.

I gave the husband my list and went outside to play with Noelle.  When I came back in he told me he placed the order and we would be getting 100 chickens.  No, I did not accidentally type an extra 0.  He ordered 100 chickens.  So much for the small self sustaining farm.  We were now chicken farmers. Since some of my choices for layers were hard to find he had to special order them and they only came in  groups of 10 so he decided instead of just choosing 1 breed he would order 10 of each breed I wanted. He then decided we should have 50 meat birds.  Now, I like a nice roast chicken but I am not sure I can butcher and pluck 50 chickens.

The next day at school I told two women in the lunchroom about our order and their jaws dropped.  Both ladies have chickens and have offed their own roasters but they were dumbfounded by the idea of trying to butcher 50 chickens.  I was informed that it is a very tedious process and can take an hour or more per chicken from start to finish.  Hmmm.  50 hours butchering chickens.  Sounds like a really good time.

I called the husband immediately when I got home and pleaded with him to greatly reduce his order.  He reluctantly agreed that we should probably start with far fewer birds since our only experience with butchering a chicken was a Youtube video featuring this crazy chicken lady who sings to her chickens and prays with them before she breaks their necks.

So that was my week.  Please come visit us at the farmette soon.  First 25 visitors get to take home a baby chick or maybe a kitten.  Itty Bitty Kitty is pregers.  Stay tuned for more on that.

I guess I'm not done with the baby bottle yet.

OK, so that was a cheap way to get you to read this post.  I am not having another baby, but we do HAVE a new baby.

Her name is Noelle.  It was Noel because she was born on Christmas, but my Swiss friend told me it needs to be Noelle since she is a girl and it should have an umlaut, but I don't know how to type an umlaut, so just imagine it there.

A calf?  WTF? you may be asking yourself.  I thought the crazy farm lady wanted sheep to make sheep cheese?  This is true, but sometimes when fate steps in and offers you a two month old heifer, you have to go with it.

This all began when another friend sent me a link for a free bunny.  I consider myself a little like Noah and already have my two bunny quota thank you very much, so I passed, but not before I asked if she had seen any listings for sheep. This led to another email with photos of the Beekman Boys new baby goats.  Super cute.

For those of you who do not know the Beekman Boys, they are exactly like me and the husband if we were gay men who bought a fabulous mansion in Central New York, complete with goat herd and goat herder, had a successful reality show, online store, and won The Amazing Race last season.  As you can see the similarities to our lives are uncanny.

They do live near us though and before their big win on the Amazing Race, one of them did work in  advertising in NYC during the week, while the other stayed and worked on the farm, just like the husband and I do, which means we really do have a lot in common and probably should be having drinks with them at their fabulous mansion tonight.

But I digress.  When I saw the photos of the baby goats I was tempted but remembered that goats kind of freak me out with their crazy eyes and I am not super fond of goat cheese. The little kids did make me realize that Spring is almost here and if I am serious about making cheese, I should probably start looking for my pregnant ewes.  I started perusing Craig's List.  I didn't find any sheep, but I did find Noelle.

She is 3/4 Jersey cow and 1/4 Holstein.  Jersey cows are hard to find because they are much prized for their creamy milk. They don't produce as much milk as Holstein's, but because their milk is super creamy it is great for cheese.  They are also smaller than the Holsteins which means she will probably only be as big as the Prius and not as big as the Mini Van.

Being from the city where a great deal on Craig's List is quickly scooped up by someone else, I immediately emailed the owner to see if she was still available.  Yes, she was.  The owner then emailed all of her sire information which made her sound more like a cyborg than an actual animal.  Thank god for the internet and knowledgeable friends.

I discovered that most people don't really want to own a bull.  Can't imagine why?  Most heifers are artificially inseminated with bull semen for $75 a pop.  The companies who sell the semen have statistics on the bull's daughters that track things like health, milk output and fat content which is all very complicated when you are just a yahoo who saw a photo of a cute calf and don't know anything about cows.

How would you like the job of collecting bull semen?  I don't want to picture it in my mind, but can't help wondering how they do it.  Do they show him pictures of pretty heifers?  Cow porn?  LALALALA. OK, I need a new image in my head.

The husband and I went over to see her a few days later and fell in love.  She looked like a little deer and was very sweet.  The fact that we wouldn't see a drop of milk for about two years didn't seem to be a deal breaker. We would raise her with the boys.  Maybe a 4H project for Prince? We decided right then to take her.

The girl who was selling Noelle is a lovely girl.  My guess is Christian home schooled and about 17. She started raising cows a couple of years ago and I could tell by the look on her face she was more than a little apprehensive about our impulsivity.  She told us she would keep her for a week or two until we were set up and ready.

Fearing she might get cold feet and decide to keep our little girl, I went into overbearing mother mode.  Anyone who has ever tried to get their kid into a desirable school in NYC will know what I am talking about.  I wrote her a flattering email about how impressed I was with her dedication to her cows and how I wanted to have a small self-sustaining farm and raise the heifer with the boys so they learn to appreciate where their food comes from.  I laid it on thick.  I was getting that little cow no matter what.

That weekend we went to work.  The husband got the stall in the barn set up and started putting up the fencing.  I read everything I could find on raising a family cow and sourced hay and milk for her. We even spent a day at a dairy farm up the street from us.  It is run by a great couple who should have a reality show of their own.  They were so friendly and gracious and while we won't be milking 45 cows twice a day, we learned a lot and are having them over for dinner next week.  Sorry Beekmans.  We won't be available for drinks next Saturday.

I emailed my earnest young Christian girl and told her what we had been up to.  She was impressed and confessed that when she got her first cow she didn't even have a barn.  We could come get Noelle the following Friday.  I ran over to the Feed and Seed and purchased the largest baby bottle I have ever seen.  The bottle holds a half gallon of milk and she gets a bottle twice a day.

Friday came and we lined the back of the mini van with a drop cloth, straw and newspaper and headed out to pick up our little girl.  She wasn't too keen about getting into the back of the van, but the husband really is an animal whisperer and managed to lift her in and climbed in next to her.

It was a long slow ride home but we finally arrived and managed to get Noelle out of the van and into the barn.  She was a little suspicious of us and not quite as affectionate as she had been the day we met her.  We stayed with her for a bit and then closed her in with the two chains the husband set up as a gate.  Noelle promptly stepped over the bottom chain, ducked under the top chain and sprinted to the front yard.  The husband and I tried to herd her into a corner so we could grab her harness, but each time she managed to give us the slip.  I felt like a real cowboy.

We finally got her back in the barn and I held her while the husband added some more wood planks around the stall to keep our little escape artist in. I then went in to prepare her big ass baby bottle making sure the temperature was just right.  I presented her with bottle thinking she would immediately grab on like the babies at the dairy farm did. She wasn't impressed. I had to pry her mouth open while the husband tried to shove the nipple in her mouth.  We fought with her and each other for another five minutes before I agreed with the husband that perhaps the nipple needed to be cut open more.  That seemed to do the trick and she latched on with an enthusiasm that nearly ripped my arms out.  It was an upper body workout like I have never had in a gym.  She pulled and thrust trying to get every last drop of milk out, which she managed to do in about three minutes.

Once she was full of milk, she warmed up to us, nuzzled my coat and welcomed pats and kisses from the whole family. The boys were almost as smitten as the husband and I.  I think Scrappy Doo was a little scared of her feeding enthusiasm and we encouraged his caution to a point where we may have dissuaded him from ever setting foot in her stall.  While she is a beautiful baby, she is still a large animal who could cause some serious damage to his tiny body.

I went in and got her an old cardigan sweater that I tied around her to help keep her warm. She looked like some crazy bovine Mr. Rogers.  It was hard to leave her in the barn that cold night, but the husband was out there at 4:30 the next morning to give her a bottle and shower her with affection.  I think Itty Bitty Kitty has been replaced in his heart.

It has been a week since we brought our girl home and every morning when I go out there I still wonder how the hell did I end up with a cow?  I climb between the slats and she gazes at me with her big brown eyes and blurts out a loud, "MOOO" I lean my head down so she can nuzzle me.  We spend the next several minutes in silence as she leans in for hugs and scratches under her chin.  I have never thought of a cow as majestic, but she is.  The fact that she will be able to feed us simply by eating our grass is pretty awe inspiring.  Not to be all new agey, but to be this connected to your food is a really beautiful experience.  I have a respect for my chickens and now my little girl that is truly humbling. I am grateful for these creatures and looking forward to our adventures as the farmette continues to grow.

Spring! (well, not really)

I don't know why, but even though it has been miserably cold and snowy, I have spring fever.  Perhaps it is the longer days or the tiny sprouts I have growing in the greenhouse, or the knowledge that Easter is coming up, but I think it has mostly to do with the ladybugs.

In the city, the arrival of young, and sometimes not so young, women wearing very short skirts and flip flops is a sure sign that spring is right around the corner.  It doesn't have to be very warm mind you, but the scantily clad lasses come out in droves as soon as the buds start to appear on the trees, much to the delight of many leering males.

Up here on the farmette, Itty Bitty Kitty doesn't wear skirts and I pretty much live in the yoga pants  I have never actually practiced yoga in.  I needed a new signal that spring is coming.  This is where the ladybugs come in.

Everybody loves ladybugs and butterflies.  They are so "cute" that retailers have decided that even girls can like them.  They adorn little dresses and rain gear.  There are hundreds of precious little lady bugs and butterflies roaming the streets on Halloween.  The folks over at Bic must have assumed that every ladybug umbrella carrying girl will grow up to be a Lady Pen carrying woman. They are both colorful and feminine, unlike the masculine bumble bee or manly regular pen.

I am not a real sissy when it comes to bugs.  I will admit the first time I picked up an earthworm without  work gloves on was only a couple of years ago, but that is a texture issue and not repulsion issue.  I also have to admit that while I probably wouldn't be letting a stink bug sit on my hand, I don't hesitate to let a ladybug crawl up my arm.  I am sure it is partly because the ladybug has a great PR person who actually named it "ladybug" instead of "piss beetle" or "death bug."  I am pretty sure I would think twice about a piss beetle crawling on me.  It's all in the name.  Kind of like when the Republicans started calling the "Estate Tax," a term most people were ambivalent about, the "Death Tax."  Now that is a tax that can raise some ire!

 Every fall, the ladybugs descend upon our house seeking a warm place to lay their eggs I assume.  My first autumn  at the farmette, I thought it was cute that there were a few ladybugs on the doors and windows in late September, but as we moved into early October,  it was more like a Hitchcock film.  Swarms of ladybugs attached themselves to the porch door waiting for their opportunity to fly into the house; sometimes grabbing onto your hair or clothes on the way in.  It was pretty creepy and disturbing the first time it happened.   Ladybugs kind of lost their appeal.  They soon disappeared into the rafters however and we forgot about them...until spring.

Round about the middle of February we start to see an occasional ladybug walking on the table or across a cold window.  Scrappy Doo always wants to hold it and talk softly to it before he "releases" it outside where I am sure it meets a cold demise.  Slowly the numbers increase until they are dropping from the ceiling onto the dining room table or into you shirt.  Again, a little creepy and disconcerting to have bugs dropping into you food, even the colorful "feminine" kind.

Today I counted twenty-five crawling all over the French Doors that open onto the deck and it made me happy.  I sketched out my garden map, rotating crops just as John Seymour instructed me to.  I am convinced that this is the year I will have plenty of pumpkins, bushels of brussel sprouts and an abundance of asparagus, not to mention the tons of tomatoes that will be growing in the greenhouse.  Was it Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Whether insanity or optimism I can't wait to start my seeds and release the ladybugs.