Even though we have been absent from the blog, we have been busy with the farm.  Actually, busy with the farm is one of the reasons why we have been absent from the blog. That and my camera broke. The blog isn’t nearly as interesting with no pictures. So, as I finally have a working camera, I will attempt to catch you up to date without too much talking.

As we are now farmers, and weather controls our lives, I will begin there.  Yes, we expressed our displeasure every chance we got at the lack of rain, for the second summer in a row.  Then the forecast said little rain with very cold temperatures for the winter.  Great!  So pasture growth had been slow but with sun in the Fall and a little rain, we thought we could manage if we reduced the number of grazing animals.  So our first wonderful rainfall, lasted three days and dumped 100mm!  We had water running everywhere.  The main roads were flooded and some bridges on the highway submerged.  The rain came down so hard and for so long, the ground could not absorb it.

The front pasture was a lake.  We had just moved the sheep to another pasture, but not the horses.  The horses did have higher dry ground to go to, but at this moment, they were fine being in a lake.

Since that introduction to Fall, it has rained often enough that our campo has yet to dry out.  We have good soil.  The water just stays.  We have had a few sunny days, but lots of cold days.  The temperature lingered around 12 C during the day and dropped to 2 C at night with intermittent rain.  Fall forgot to come and Winter came early and has stayed.  We started the wood stove in the house in April to get the chill off the house.  Very early.

At least we had firewood to burn.  Most people we talked with had yet to stock pile their winter wood.

With the water comes mud, which leads to wet muddy dogs who enjoy playing in the water.

The dogs also enjoy being toweled off which helps to keep the floor cleaner and prevents raw spots from developing on the dogs.  But with wet weather comes more laundry, oh joy.  Wet weather and cold no sun weather means that hanging laundry on the line doesn’t work.  So our little clothes dryer has been getting a work out.

I guess we will manage to blame the weather for any inconvenience  no matter what season. I’ll play catch up on our farm activities over the next few days and then, with a bit of luck, topics can turn to what we’re up to now.

P.S. The blog left off with the Olive harvest. It happened. It was semi-successful (the rain cam DURING the harvest) but we sold the olives, and we’ll talk more about all of it later.

We met a young lady who had been working in a restaurant nearby.  The restaurant was buying some specialty vegetables from us.  Evidently this gal had worked for a farm in the states who took vegetables to Sunday market.  She came to us at the end of her restaurant contract and offered to work for room and board for a few weeks.  We can always use another pair of hands and took her up on her offer.

Her are a few of the tasks she worked:

Tying up tomato vines and picking the ripe tomatoes for the house and the over ripe tomatoes for the chickens.

Weeding and mulching the asparagus.

Making labels and wool sample cards for processed wool bags.

She helped with the evening feeding of the chickens and collecting eggs.

Cleaned rabbit cages, and

fell in love with a few rabbits.

It was nice having an extra pair of hands for awhile and now she is off on her next adventure.  We wish her the best.

With the hot weather, searing winds, and endless sun the garden is a bit stressed – and so the weekly vegetable boxes have been put on hold for the season. But not delivering vegetables means that those few plants surviving the weather make odd surpluses for our kitchen. Such as Zucchini. Never a great favorite when merely sautéed, we grew a bit weary of it and did not maintain the strict harvest schedule needed to keep Zucchini plants under control. As you can see,  a few got away from us.  The pigs and chickens have been enjoying the excess bounty immensely!

Let there be Sauerkraut!

We have peas to shell in our quiet time. Megan is stripping the last of the peas from the garden. Pea plants are cool weather plants – with the heat they dry up quickly. So we sit and shell the peas when we have a moment – then bag and freeze so that we may have peas all through the summer.  Freezers are wonderful if you can’t can things.

It is now winter.  An unusually dry, exceptionally warm, almost a third over kind of winter. But still, winter. We heat the house with wood – as we only actually heat the house about three months out of the year the wood stove is really quite efficient. Heating with wood means chopping wood.  Jon has had to do all the log splitting. Last year we purchased cut and dried eucalyptus, acacia, and a few other types of wood. It comes cut to size – but not split. Being smart, we’ve used all the wood that fit in the stove first – it’s just the last of the wood pile which needs to be spit as the logs are too big to fit the stove.  Megan and I are not very good at splitting logs  and Jon worries we will loose a limb. Not an irrational fear, sadly.  So one day he came home with a new toy for us!  It is an electric log splitter.  He even remembered to purchase the generator to go along with it.  He chose the style carefully, we do not have to use gas to operate it, not is it so powerful that we might hurt ourselves.

The splitter doesn’t quite finish the job.  It is difficult to pull the log apart the last little bit, so Jon takes the hatchet to it.  Well, it will work for the women in a pinch, otherwise it will remain Jon’s job. Or Alejandro and Oscar’s. As they were both quite insulted that we thought a mechanical tool could do a better job than they could. Please note that they weren’t interested in splitting wood before we bought the log splitter. Now that we have it they’ll split the logs before they let Megan or I use the log splitter.

8mm of Rain!!!!  We need a lot more, but every drop counts.

Our flock of guineas have grown from 15 or so to nearly 30. We have two age groups – they are about four months apart.  Our older group are the traditional color, our newer group are lavender.  Both groups are very talkative and I have a hard time competing with them.  The two groups do not tend to flock together, but will hang out with each other.  They have an internal GPS for where home is, and home is the chicken yard for all of them.  We want them to eat the bugs that may find their way into the garden.  They are just old enough to fly out but not all have figured out how to get back in.

Guineas are not the same as chickens. At all. They are noisy, flighty, stubborn, scared, and can always find their way home. (In theory the chickens should know where home is. We have yet to truly have that theory prove out.) They are also notoriously bad mothers. As we’d like to eventually (i.e. this coming summer season) have flocks of guineas in the olives to help manages the ants, catipillers, etc., we have to have a brood flock. Megan refuses to spend her days hunting for guinea nests in the olives. So we have a flock in the front garden to produce eggs for the incubators. If the whole plan works, next year we hope to get a flock “homed” to the olives.

It is hard to keep writing when the farm progress is not very noticeable and yet it keeps us busy.    This picture is us, from our neighborhood road.  The front portion with dirt is where we just finished digging out the cannel and spreading out the excess dirt.  We have now broken up the clay soil, fertilized, and seeded it.  This is where the geese and ducks spend their days.

We have sent many chickens, roosters, and rabbits to freezer camp.  And since we still had room in the freezer,  several sheep who did not respect the electric fence also went to freezer camp.  Then because we were interested in selling a group of our heifers, and have yet to eat any of our own beef, we sent a steer to camp.  The beef has nice flavor but not as tender as we had hoped.  Jon thinks it is because we did not let it “hang” for a few days.  The lamb was fantastic, since prior to this lot, we had only been eating older sheep.  When I went into the butcher’s to purchase some liver for the cats, he made comment that he hasn’t seen us in awhile.  This was our goal, to grow our own food.

I have been cleaning rabbit cages and worm bins, chicken waters and brooder pens.  Slowly things are getting back to normal before everything stopped for harvest.

We have had several garden beds ready to plant, but without any rain we have been waiting.  We took three beds and just broke up the soil, fertilized, and spread seed.  We are hoping for feed for the animals.  The green houses are HOT and are watered daily if not twice.  We are getting tomatoes and salad green and the kale is still very hardy.  We have peppers of all types flourishing.  Eggplant seedlings are growing.  We have yet to plant any seed boxes because of the heat, but we have the extra bales of alfalfa and the garden tools taking up space in the working green house.

When it gets too hot to be in the sun, the guys have been cleaning the bosque.  They have been trimming the eucalyptus branches and cutting off any sprouts at the bottom from the main trunk.  It is looking better, but I have a had time seeing progress when the branches and wood piles are scattered within the grove and not pulled out.

The rest of the huerta looks good.  Between the tractor to help trim the pasture and no rain to help things grow, we actually look “neat and tidy.” I know we are a working farm in progress, and someday everything will have it’s place.