I’m back Dear Reader, you probably have forgotten me and moved on, but hey, that’s cool, I get it and it’s okay. Just call me a ..

Onward and upward.  I gotta write and write I will. I’ve been through some really ununique times.  But not writing, or only writing (carefully) to the air on facebook has made me one sick puppy.  So I need to write to you.

Hopefully soon I’ll figure out spam and letting comments be available, right along with getting a camera so I can do the picture thing again as well, or at least figuring out how to get them from the phone to here.

Well, here we go.

Quick catch up… After Dirt recovered from his accident 8/16, we had a fire that ruined our house 1/18, now we are slowly rebuilding, starting with the 140 year old homesteader’s cabin that was our living room.  7/20 and we are on the final stretch with that bit if only the window guy would come and measure and I would quit farmgardening long enough to get the walls sanded and the hearth in.  Dirt of course has been dutifully doing his work on the cabin and still dealing with no students (thank you China virus) while he works at school daily and comes home to fuss over bits of haying in our very drizzly year.

We are making a huge switch in the Market Garden, from food to flowers.  We will still feed our friends vegetables and fruit but not strangers.  The regulations on producing edibles is unnatural, perhaps even ungodly, well it certainly seems very unconstitutional, but someone with far deeper pockets will need to take that one on.  Meanwhile I continue to work on being a consistent provider of colorful tasty legal eggs, while learning the new skill of flowering.

I’m signing off for today, I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day.  I’ve got a thought brewing, steeping, germinating, about some current cultural goings on.  Think weeds and plants, and how it is like our country’s lives, past, sin, love, accomplishments, future – oh, this might need to be a couple  thoughts!  See you soon, Dear Reader!

And if you want to say anything about anything, or need something from us please email:  Farm @  itsthedirt . com  —you know how to put that together right?

My mom had lots of shiny brites, but one that meant a lot to me, that I had saved for myself when she passed, was a striped one just like this. She hung some of her ornaments with thread including this particular one.  As little children, my brother and I would spend hours twisting it up tight on its thread and then letting it go for it to twirl its beautiful colors ’round and ’round. So much so that, no matter how careful we were, we had worn off much of the flocking around its middle. Even as young adults we couldn’t resist giving it a spin, or two, my mother facilitating such shenanigans by placing it on a branch near the arm of the settee.

This last November I didn’t have the oompf to fill my living room shelves with my winter scene.  On the Sunday or sometimes the Friday of Thanksgiving, on the shelves Dirt built into the living room, I spread and hang lace backdrops and carefully set out the farm, the cottage in the forest and the village, with a mile or two of tiny lights.  I always leave it up through February, taking it down when I no longer am wishing for snowy frozen days.  But this year, coming off a year of recovery from Dirt’s accident, I just didn’t have it together enough to do all that work, spending Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend with family was more important.  When I came across this ornament as I decorated the Christmas tree, I decided to hang it in the shelves that usually hold the winter village but were now, on the eve of Christmas with snow falling outside, feeling regettably empty.

The much loved ornament was hanging there on January 14th, 10 p.m., when fire and smoke ruined my dear old house and earthly belongings.

The poor thing was so sooty, hardly recognizable, still, I saved it, knowing full well that the soot could never be removed from the flocked stripes without completely taking them off, that it was indeed forever ruined.   I sat it in a box with a few other things I was hoping to save, things my heart is just not ready to let go of.

The living room has been one of the last rooms to be completely gutted.  It is taking me seemingly forever to clear out the rooms, deciding what is beyond saving, and chucking things I find dear into the gaping mouth of the hugest dumpster ever.  Blubbering over ruined one of a kind photos, blubbering over broken things or burnt things that can never be replaced.  What I had initially laid out on January 16th as a week and a half job for me to do, drug out to a job of more than a month and a half instead.  I originally intended to attack one room at a time, recording each item as I went, touch it once, as it went into a black waste sack for sailing into the dumpster or lovingly tucked into the “save, please” boxes.  Instead, for one reason or another I bounced from room to room, working strong one day, to barely getting one thing decided and spending the rest of the time sobbing into my mask and beany on another day, to avoiding the smelly nasty wreck for a couple days at a time, or waiting for others, like the abatement crew, to do their thing.

I had abandoned my initial work in the living room for continued work on upstairs contents because the workers were going to need to go there after the kitchen and dining room were completely stripped including their interior walls.  Well, that, along with complete sadness and being distracted by feeding an outside hotdog fire, put that room aside.

And then a head cold hit.  Not to mention, we still have a farm to take care of and a temporary home and life to secure, you know Dear Reader the likes of: dealing with cooking, eating, milking cows, feeding pigs and chickens, dirty farm clothes care, and go-to-town clothes care, oh, and sleeping.   These nearly two months have been a magnifying glass on why it seems I can never get to the final touches of a project in what I think is a timely fashion.

After the head cold slowed me down, the most recent news from our contractor further knocked me out.  Bad enough that it went in six weeks from repairable to have to strip it of its walls inside and out, but now we heard the finally word once our contractor saw what lay beneath the burned walls.  Our contractor cannot not see any possible way of saving the main structure of the house.  We must tear it completely down.  Phil, my husband, aka Dirt, figured this all along, as did a few others secretly, knowing what he knew of the old house’s ills before the fire, but Dirt stood back as others, the insurance adjuster and the contractor, thought they could save it.

All of this massive tear down, excavation,  means we have to get big fat building permits and drawings and officially official stuff and incur now-unavoidable expenses where before we only needed this-or-that permits and inspections.  With a smile on my face, and a cheerful, “okay, okay, we can do this” to our contractor and Dirt, in the privacy of my studio apartment and the chicken hoop the next day, the news sent me into paroxysms of weeping and despair.   Six weeks of fighting off my “silly” nightmares of not having much of a house after all the insurance money is exhausted, only to have it come true.  Fighting the desire to strangle the sound out of well meaning words that have come my way of late, the ones that pat me on the top of the head with “it’s hard, but hey, you get a new house!”  As if the adult thing to do is embrace all the charred mess as some huge blessing, and to do so right now!, with the ash smudges still on my face and coughing up ugly looking lumps.

So the boxes on the floor, books and a few remaining decisions on the shelves in the living room remained until yesterday.   In spite of the lingering sinus compaction, I finally felt good enough to buck up and finish so that I could begin to rip off the interior coverings of Sam Sorensson’s log cabin, proving to myself, and others, that there is a log cabin worth saving.  Our living room for years now has been in the old cabin that the original homesteader, Sam Sorensson, built in the late 1800’s.  There is a lot of history in my dear house.  Some that is about to be torn down and carted away.  In light of the new news, I am pleading that the cabin be restored, lifted and given a proper foundation.

When I went back into the living room yesterday, to get back on track, I found the box of saved items had been tipped over.  As my eyes adjusted to the dark, and I began to pick up and inspect the contents, wondering again if this or that could be repaired, I came to the slow but horrible sweeping realization that not only was it true that one of a kind photos of my children did glue to the glass when it got hot, but that my childhood treasure I placed in the box had been broken to bits.

Though I cried and hollered and cried some more, and had a hard time focusing for a while, when Dirt arrived home he was amazed at all I accomplished.

Today I’m splitting my non-farm work time between exposing more walls in the cabin and digging the grape hole and preping a site for a storage shed… Oops, nope, I have material, sewing and knitting supplies that still need to be recorded and tossed in the dumpster.  The dumpster needs to leave, eveyday that it sits here not being filled with things from my house it wastes money, though there are days I’m glad to pay a buck to not have to hurl my posessions into it, I might like to buy a spoon to stir my soup with.  Tomorrow I’ll finish those other three jobs and begin to find homes for other dear-to-the-heart but too close to destruction/construction plants to go.  But by Friday construction on a storage shed must begin.  I’m still a farmer that needs access to her incubators and some sort of a inside work area.

Keep my nose to the grind stone Dear Reader.  Unfortunately I haven’t solved the spam problem here on the blog so don’t try to comment here.  Nor have I put my old emails on the new laptop.

All kick in the seat words of exhortation, or comforting commiserations need to be delivered via our other and most accessible email:

Dickviolin@gmail.com

or a note on Facebook:

LeeAnn Vick on Facebook ,

or

Vicktory Farm & Gardens on Facebook 

It took me a few busted kiddie pools over the years to figure a better way.

I clean the kiddy pool out daily and refill it with fresh water.  Sometimes it is nearly half full, but so very mucked up, I can’t bear to wait.  Sometimes there isn’t much left in the pool but even then, if you lift the side of the pool to drain the water, it crinkles in half or worse.  A good 6 months of that and eventually the pool cracks.

So I got smart.  Just call me Maxwell.

I found a discarded piece of plywood slightly bigger than the pool.  And put it under the empty pool, and filled the pool with water.

And now when the pool needs to be emptied. I lift the board it sits on and the pool stays flat against it, I can easily spray the pool out, lay it all back down again, and start over.   Sorry I can’t do the process and take pictures but….

I know, crazy huh?  And I’m thinking you could do this with a kiddie pool that is used for actual kiddies of all things!

Whether you are plagued with flies, or not, if you have poultry you should have fly buckets.  Harvey Ussery explained them in his book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.

Basically flies are attracted to food for their offspring. They fly around, find moist foody type stuff, lay eggs, the eggs hatch, the larva gorge, grow, get ready to pupate.  When fly larva pupate they prefer to do so in the ground, so when they are ready the travel downward (geotropism). When they do that in your bucket with lots of holes in the bottom, they fall to the ground and your ever watchful chickens snap them up.

Free protein.

And that fly that laid those zillion eggs in your bucket, did not lay eggs some where else away from your chickens, only to have those pupating children of theirs grow up, fly into your house and bug the snot out of your city mother visiting for the day.

I use offal from when we butcher our livestock or poultry, I tend not to use animals that die suddenly potentially from communicable disease.  You can use kitchen scraps, especially the stuff your chickens won’t eat.

When do you need to recharge?  You can keep an eye on the ground beneath the bucket.  Fresh stirred dirt implies an active bucket.

This picture shows an active fly bucket over head. Notice the well scratched dirt.

This bucket is just about out of larva and needs fresh stuff. You can see the activity is infrequent.

Ingredients:

5 gallon bucket, lid optional.

3/8″ drill bit  (and the drill)

Baling twine (this might just be me, but every project must have baling twine)

Food waste, the best of the best is meat or offal from butchery.

Shavings for those with sensitive noses. I don’t always use shavings, it is rather a spontaneous judgement call.

DIRECTIONS:

Drill holes all over the bucket, on the sides and lids so flies go in, and the bottom is important so that the larva can fall out.

Put a fine layer of shaving on the bottom especially if you have squishy large intestines that can cover up the holes.

Put in your fly-delicious fly food.

Put more shavings around and over the glop.

Put on the lid, if you have one.

Hang above your chickens social area.  Placement is important, you don’t want the chickens pecking at the bucket but not so high that you forget it is there and walk into it with the top of your head.  Plus, when I recharge it, I like not having to take it down, just toss more in. There does come a time that I have to take the bucket down and empty it out onto the compost pile and start over.

Happy fly-bucket making, happy chicken free feeding, happy fly-free living!  (Nearly)

That could be the title of my life and I typically do it to myself.

Company’s last day, and up late working so again late waking and movin’ out on the day.  But as usual, chick house, rinsed water buckets and fed. And other basics.

Took about an hour total to broadcast prilled calcium on the three leek beds and two empty ready to go beds next to them.  One 50# bag per two 4×90′ beds. Set the sprinkler for just the leek beds while I used my Johnny’s seeded to seed swiss chard and flamingo spinach.

Spread the last half bag on the pole beans,  when Anna showed up to say they were leaving.  I may indeed have left the bag out open, thankfully it won’t rain tonight.

When I returned to the garden with my lunch, a can of PBR, I took up with getting the water on all five beds, did by hand watering for quite a while. Sometimes a job done like that is worth the lost minutes.  It gives me time to think, look about me, contemplate my next big leap.

It came in the form of Dirt arriving home early. We were scheduled today to unload the load we loaded last night.  So I hopped on the tractor to see what our day was going to be.

As we waited to hear from the hay boss we scoped out the back yard grazing area, talked with Bet where the cow could go and where she wouldn’t go.  Pick up an old mess on the back patio and kinda just shot the breeze with Lucas and Bet.  And Henry of course.

The call finally came at 5ish.  We were up at the feed store just before closing and emptied the trailer in thirty minutes.

Where the best hay is, Webster Road Feed.

On our way home I realized physically I could not move another inch if it took being on my crazy feet. I took a bath and went to bed.

Tomorrow is another day.

Here it is a quarter midnight Sunday and I’m finally in bed writing up my day.

Got a bit of a slow start, houseguests and Sunday.  Giggling with grandbabies over coffee and breakfast making.  Forgot to eat breakfast

Went about my regular morning routine, just a lot later. Quail, incubator/hatcher, chick house, cats, Margaret Garden poultry…

Dirt delivered bags of poultry feed to me in the garden and then we went out to the west pond together to measure the fire hose.  Dirt noticed the special valve and weed basket missing so off came the boots and socks, up went my work pants and into the mirey crag I went.  Trolling, in the true sense  for the missing piece.

It wasn’t to be found. Measurements were taken, evaluating glance was thrown at the crops and back to the garden proper I went.

Settled on the project du jour but headed back to the farm house when I realized I was empty stomached, thirsty and without anything to care for either plight.

Filled my gut, slaked my thirst, and kissed my haying husband good bye with a promise to somehow join him when needed.

Transplanted leeks for the next five and one half hours.  Two hours per ninty-foot-plus bed.  The last batch of leeks didn’t quite make it all the way to the end.  In the three four foot wide beds at the far end of East Market, rows of leeks were place eighteen inches apart, with a inch or so between depending on the size, or lack there of, of the seedling.

I’ll need to go back tomorrow and spread calcium – prilled lime – and turn the sprinkler back on to the beds.  Leeks are shallow feeders so I tend to not like to put the amendments on the bed before planting, but instead side dress. After the calcium and water, I will put compost in between the rows, one reason for the extra space between rows.  More towards fall I’ll go back and seed spinach and the like in between the rows of leeks.

At about 5:30 – 6 I headed back to the farm house, to tidy the kitchen, and make dinner for those who needed it.

‘Round about 7 p.m. I finally headed towards the town hay fields with a stop at the hay boss’ house while they finished up dinner and cooed over the babies.

We hit the hay field right at about 9 p.m. and left at 10 p.m. with a full load.  We were missing one of our stacker girls, and Dirt was driving instead of bucking, so out typical driver was on the trailer stacking.  Dirt not only drove but he also babysat Henry.

We followed the hay truck until it turned into its very own driveway, headed home with little chit chat.  I hopped out at the gate and entrance to the Margaret Garden to collect eggs.  In the way back to the house I swung into the chick shed area and put all to bed.

Then me, after collecting dishes, tossing away garbage and takin’ a quick dip in the tub.

One more day under the belt.

My son, the one married to my second born daughter, brought me some geese today.  As he backed into the Margaret Garden to unload them, he looked around and then asked, “How much time to you put into this.”

He caught me off guard so of course my reply was silly.

“Not enough.”  Pause.  “I sit around way too much”

Truth is, I don’t have a clue.  And I should.

Today for instance, here it is 6 o’clock in the evening and all I can remember….

I washed eggs first thing for a half hour at 5:30 a.m.. sent 4? dozen with Dirt.

Ate breakfast, entertained Henry for a bit, by 8 I had done the chick chores including washing wate buckets and adding corrid for their final coccidiosis treatment, and was out moving water on the beds I intend to seed.

Then I began to prepare to bring geese home while, putting some wash in the laundry, moving baby quail out of the house, setting flea foggers upstairs.

Arranged to borrow a truck, headed to get it but found I didn’t need to, so instead visited with my friend who is convalesing from back surgery two days ago.

1 p.m. Came home, dealt with the gate opener that wouldn’t open the dang gate.  Started making pens for the geese.

3 ish.  Geese delivered and distributed to pens, waterer set up, shade set up.

4:00 ish evening chicken chores. Collect eggs. Kick 3 broodies off nest,  devise a plan while I walk back to farmyard to do the chick house afternoon chores. Strip upstairs bed, notice the smell of the foggers, perfume. Move laundry for weekend guests. Get a beer from well house fridge, clean up accumulated milk jugs from orphan lamb project.

6pm took a bath to get green goddess goose doo off my face. Move laundry, strip sheets on my bed. Wrote down what I did… Not much.

There are a few more hours. Dirt is baling hay in town, Bet and Lucas are shearing all day and home late so no need to do dinner.  Just tidy up the slum, so guests don’t feel creepy.

Addition:  so I left off at about 7:10 after spending some time talking to a dear friend who is struggling.  I talked about something I know better than gardening, depression and suicide, or at least extreme suicidal thoughts.

I picked up thises and thats, did a load of dishes (we do not have a automatic dishwasher, it is all done by hand). Moved laundry, moved quail back to the living room.  Did more dishes.  But then realised I did not have a scrap bucket.  Off to Margaret Garden. I took some egg baskets back down with me.

Moved water one last time,  in the morning I’ll move it again and then 5 – 90′ beds will ne good and soaked ready for seeding.

I checked on all the birds and yup, the broodies were back on the nests. Grabbed up two more eggs, 28 total.

Back to the farm yard to get a nest box top big enough to hold broodies. Stopped off at the chick house to tuck everyone in for the night. Some little ones had escaped, thank you scratching hens, put a board in to block hole. Set up a light for some I moved over to an empty pen earlier.

Headed back to the Margaret Garden with nest top, made a nest bottom from a market garden basket missing a side rail.  I’ll set the girls up completely tomorrow,  with eggs.

Turned around and our two lone African ganders that had never left the farm had come to see their friends, I hustled them into a vacant pen, got them set up with water. And now for heading back to the house, move laundry, make my bed, rewash my feet, make a phone call to see where Dirt is, make dinner for myself… a cheese sandwich

9:30 done.

Spring is a hard season for me here in constant rainy land.  But the bright spots come in the form of eggs.  The feel and colors thrill my heart and pick up my soul.

I collect eggs all during the day, in a nearly vain attempt at having a clean egg to deal with.   The eggs meant for sale for kitchen use I gentle wash in plain warm water and reseal them with coconut oil or a mix of beeswax and olive oil, for extended shelf life and ease of use for our egg customers.

Often, the eggs I keep for our house are unwashed until used, but I know that can be a difficult hurdle for non farm folks, sometimes even for us, but I am happy to sell pretty clean unwashed eggs as well, upon request.

Then, if eggs are not enough to make my heart sing,  there are the chicks and poults!  A perfect day brightener!

I love hatching out lots and lots of chicks, poults and ducklings. We aim to carry at least 150 hens each year, so given that half of a hatch are males and a few of the pullets just aren’t up to snuff, I hatch out lots for a reason.  I do end up with extras but I do not like selling chicks or poults, just too much stress to please customers.   I may be selling the extra juvenile turkeys, that are past the somewhat fragile poult stage.  Check back with me later on that.

I will sell turkey hatching eggs on those occasions when I feel I have plenty of little poults filling my brooders. Like right about now, $24/Dozen eggs, kinda cheap on accounta their being mutts and all. I just can’t bring myself to eating turkey eggs, they seem so expensive of a thing to eat.  The eggs for hatching are collected through out the day and marked on the bottom of the egg the day they are collected. Set on a cool dark shelf and tilted daily.  The top of the egg is marked on the date they go into our incubator.

I specialize in mutts, some folks call them “heritage turkeys”, I refuse marketing ploys, okay, blatant trendy marketing ploys.   The original stock of our VF&G mutts were Narragansett, Blue Slates, Bourbon Reds, and Midget Whites.

Our Midget Whites, the one turkey breed I do have isolated out, seem a bit large for their standards, but really, why eat a turkey the size of an overgrown chicken.

We do have a Bourbon Red tom, he is resting from breeding for a bit to recoup from a fighting injury.

He seems to enjoy being the one free ranging, cattle hanging out turkey.

More about all the chicken girls and our housing in another post.  I gotta go stare at the brooder pens!

Sorry the comments to the blog are closed.  Too much spam, too little time to figure out a solution.  If you are interested in eggs, and are local, look up on our contact page as to how to get in touch with us.