Just Saying Hello

In the barnyard, Emily says hello to Miss Calico. 

Frosty Field

Moonlight and Evening

 Barefoot, I walk out to the garden. The air is gray and cool and smells of dirt and dill. Dodging water droplets, the wet earth soft on my feet,  I move the sprinkler to another section of tangled weeds and vegetables. In the distance goat bells chime. 
I stop at the barn yard to latch the gate and offer a goodnight treat to two little goats. The moon rises round and serene over the treeline.
Before heading  back inside where pickles and green beans wait to be processed, I stop and breathe deep of moonlight and evening. With each breath of evening, perfect contentment fills my lungs and courses through my veins. 

Linked to Real Toads. 

(This is my attempt at writing Zuihitsu, which is a genre of Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author's surroundings. The name is derived from two Kanji meaning "to follow" and "brush", and thus works of the genre should be considered not as traditionally planned literary pieces but rather as casual or randomly recorded thoughts by the author. For more information about Zuithitsu, click here.)

Overcoming A Gendered Childhood

Girls don't______.

 You can fill in the blank and I probably wasn't allowed to do it. In the family I grew up in  girls weren't allowed to do much of anything. It was drilled into me that girls don't ride horses. Girls don't cut wood. Girls don't use tools. Girls don't wear pants. Girls don't play sports. Girls don't play chess. Girls don't compete with boys. Girls don't go out alone. Girls don't do heavy work. Girls don't speak in church.  The list goes on and  on with large and small things. (Besides the "boy" things we weren't allowed to do, there were plenty of traditionally "girl" things that we weren't allowed to do as well, because they were either frivolous or immodest--like wearing make up and styling our hair. Even something as simple as putting one's hair up in pony tail was frowned upon.)

Today, as I was driving home from picking up two little boy goats, I was thinking about my childhood and young adulthood and how I OUGHT to know a lot about goats, because I grew up with them--but I don't, because the boys took care of the animals. (I did learn how to milk, both cows and goats, but that is about the extent of my knowledge of either animal.)

The point of all this really was to keep women helpless and force them to rely on men and make the men in our lives feel like they were big and manly for being able to pound in a nail or put a bridle on a horse. Girls and women were to keep house, cook, and garden, and serve the boys and men. It was the way to protect marriage and family. If a woman got too independent she wouldn't need a husband and would go off and get divorced and the world would fall apart (even more so than it was already falling apart).  It was the same reason that I was taught that a woman shouldn't go to college or get a job--those things would make her too independent, she wouldn't need a man to take of her and that would lead to an unhappy marriage and, in the long run, a divorce.

I was able to ditch the mentality that women shouldn't go to college or work pretty easily. I realized quickly after I left my parents' home that it was very important to me that I be able to support myself financially and I refused to get married until I was done with nursing school and had sustainable income. Now I am very thankful that I do have a job that brings in enough income to pay the morgage and other bills. Shortly after we got married, the economy in Michigan tanked, and my husband who is a public works inspector, no longer had year round work. We will never get rich on my income, but at least I know that I can take care of myself and my family with it and the morgage will be paid.

It has been much harder for me to get rid of the mentality that "girls don't use tools, girls don't do hard labor, girls don't  do this and girls don't do that". I'm trying to conquer that mentality. This summer I am making a much more concerted effort than I have in the past. I hate feeling so helpless--especially since that helplessness is so deeply ingrained in me.

Preparing to get these goats have made me realize just how helpless I am. Our property came with a little goat barn, but it hasn't been used in several years and needed to be fixed up. It has a fence around it, but most of the posts were rotted. I realized I didn't have a clue how to do any of the things that needed to be done to fix things. Even though that helpless feeling I am so familiar with wants to paralyze me, I realize these goats are my project, not my husband's.

So with my husband's help, I am learning about things like landscape lumber (the 4x6's make great fence posts), cyclone fencing, air wrenches, lag screws, and electricians pliers. With the help of the Internet, I am learning about how to take care of goats, what they eat, when to castrate, how to prevent urinary stones, and so many more essential and interesting things. 

Unlike my parents, my husband is all for independent women, and honestly, my helplessness has been a source of frustration for him ever since we met. He has tried to teach me things in the past, but I would usually get so frustrated I would end up in tears and give up. He is positively delighted that I am suddenly taking what appears to a real interest in learning how to do something that involves tools. He was even more pleased when I stepped in front of him while he was starting to hook up the generator during the power outage last week and said, "No, you show me how to do it."

I did learn a lot of things from growing up on a homestead that I continue to use. Things like gardening, cooking from scratch, sewing, understanding soil, canning and preserving food, cheese making. The one thing that is a "boy" thing that I did learn a fair amount about was trees. I spent as much time as I could in the woods, partly to get away from a tiny house filled with too many people, and partly because I loved the woods. I spent a lot of time hunting for and collecting wild medicinal herbs and collecting vines for basket making. Somehow I managed to absorb a lot of what my father was teaching my brothers about the forest. I also absorbed a lot about growing fruit trees and pruning them by watching my father take care of his beloved apple trees.

I am  grateful for what I did learn.

 Now it is just a matter of overcoming that learned helplessness and learning the rest of things a farm girl needs to know. Thankfully, I have a husband who can do just about anything when it comes to tools, building, or big machines. He is pretty amazing, and even more so, given that he was a city boy who grew up in Detroit, and never in his wildest dreams imagined he would marry someone who would end up dragging him out to the country where tractors and chickens and goats are all part of life.

(Note--it is common in families where Christian Patriarchy is practiced for there to be definite gender roles, however, I think my parents were even more extreme than most families I am aware of who follow this belief system.)


(And little goat photos coming soon--they are10 weeks old and are half Nigerian Dwarf (dad) and part Boer and Nubian (mom). My computer died in our recent power outage and the laptop I am using while waiting for the verdict on repairs, is difficult to view photos on. I may just wait to post photos until I have my computer back. Or I may not. We will see. :)

Vegetable Garden Tour

Why is it that I never have enough room in my garden? I have the same problem each year, and I thought the problem would be solved by moving out to the country and plowing up space for a huge garden. This year's garden is the biggest garden I have ever had, I and still don't have enough room.

Though, the other question that I suppose needs to be asked is why do I feel the need to grow 22 different varieties of tomatoes? If I didn't need to grow 22 different varieties of tomatoes, I might have room for everything thing else I think I should be growing. (20 varieties are in the ground--but I have seemed to run out of room to  put the Amish Paste and Cour de Boeuf tomato plants--not to mention that I still have sweet corn, more green beans, peppers, eggplants, beets, and  more to get in the ground!.)

Whatever my problem is, I'm starting to realize that it isn't going to be solved by  simply plowing up more garden space...more garden space just means that I will need to start growing twenty different kinds of lettuce and goodness knows what else.

Enough of my problems--on to a quick garden tour!

Looking North-East...

6 different varieties of garlic...

Summer cabbage (in between apple tree seedlings and surrounded by California poppies that are just getting ready to bloom.)

Red romaine lettuce interplanted with daffodils and potatoes.

Spinach, interplanted with green beans and daffodils.

Potatoes in mulch (I wonder if I am growing way too many potatoes--we have four long rows this year--in any case there is going to be lots of picking of Colorado potato beetles.)

One of three long rows of tomatoes.

The garden looking south west. You can see raspberries, rhubarb (which is getting choked by the raspberries), strawberries (which my free range chickens have decided they love and of which they ate every single last ripe one today--I don't think they are going to be free ranging for the rest of the strawberry season!), some random beds of things like carrots, beets, kale, and and perennial flowers, then off in distance the long row of garlic.

I do also have melons, cucumbers, more cabbage, Brussel sprouts, onions, and a long row of sunflowers coming up.

Still need to plant sweet corn, pumpkins (they are getting a separate patch this year), squash, fall beets and carrots, peppers, eggplant, and probably some other vegetables that are slipping my mind right now.

So that is how my garden is growing right now. How is yours doing?

Linked to Farm Girl Friday blog hop.

Solved! The Mystery of the Dying Flowers

Last week I finally figured out why nothing has grown well in this garden since we moved here. I would plant flowers and they would turn yellow and die. All I could do was wonder why.

Turns out the little flower garden has been getting a weekly dose of concentrated bleach water. Well, that explains a lot!  (The chlorinated water is a by product of our water system that has to be serviced weekly. Unbeknown to me, each week the bleach water was being tossed out the door on to the flower beds.)

So now that I know what the problem it (and have established strict rules for where the bleach water may be put in the future--hello, gravel driveway!), we are starting over with the flower garden:

I tore out a lot of dead and ailing plants and dug out a good deal of the soil and replaced it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. 



Fresh perennials went in as wells as some annuals.

 I filled some pots with violas to add color and height to the back of the garden--and so that I would have something to put on the two old milk cans we dug out of our woods the first summer we moved in.

I am hoping in a month or two that I will be able to post photos of a lush green garden filled with color (instead of the mostly dead or yellow plants I have had in the past couple of years!) And I am very happy that the mystery of the dying flowers has been solved.

A Flower Garden Makeover

The little flower garden enclosed by a white picket fence in front of our house has been sorely neglected since we moved in 3 years ago. This spring I decided it needs a makeover. It has so much potential to be a sweet little cottage garden. You can follow along with its progress on Dandelion Haven's facebook page.

(The fence "before" any work was done.)

(Rocks and weeds cleared away and getting ready to strip, prime, and paint.)

Dream Woods

Digging myself out from under a massive pile of garlic mustard to post some photos of a neighboring woods....the kind of woods I hope to have myself sometime in the future. A woods filled with Trillium grandiflorum as far as eye can see with not a single garlic mustard plant to found:

Now, excuse me as I head back out to my woods to pull more garlic mustard, so that my dreams of having a woods that is carpeted with trillium's (with a few jack in the pulpit thrown in for good measure) from edge to shining edge can come true.

(And this a great article if you ever wanted to know what it takes to encourage trillium in your woods.)

Trillium

It seems that the trillium in our woods have doubled since we moved out here three years ago. I'm not sure if that is possible--I didn't think trilliums are a wildflower that spreads quickly. Perhaps the little plants were there, but needed us to pull the garlic mustard which has been choking the life out of the woods, so that they could breath and grow.

In any case one section of our woods has hundreds of blooming trillium and many more young plants that will start blooming in the next few years. And ever better, we are starting to see trillium popping up here and there in other parts of the woods that didn't have any in the past two springs.

Slowly, surely we will restore the health and beauty of our woods.

Spring Work on 13 Acres

Our little flock of chickens gathers to watch and follow behind us as we dig out invasive weeds from our woods--garlic mustard, box alders, mulitflora roses, and autumn olives. The fight to create a beautiful, healthy woods seems to never end. The chickens don't mind, though. To them the sound of digging means only one thing--easy to find bugs and worms!

I decided to expand the garden this spring (as if I need more work to do)! Actually we decided to plow up an additional patch of ground specifically as a pumpkin patch. I don't feel obligated to keep the pumpkin patch weeded once the plants start vining. A separate patch will free up already prepared ground for more vegetables and flowers (and hopefully keep the main garden looking less weedy).

(Breaking ground for the pumpkin patch.)

The work on our little farmstead never ends. I am just grateful for two days off in the middle of this week, and the cooler weather we have right now that has slowed down the growth of weeds and invasive plants.

October Day

I got up this morning with a long to do list. Laundry to do, the chicken coop to clean, canning apple sauce, picking and freezing the last of the green beans, mulching some of the garden rows, vacuuming, 

 I started the day with a quick walk to watch the sun rise through the mist over a field of Michigan soybeans.

The back to the house to start on my list. Except somehow with the warm sun shining outside, the list completely lost its appeal. Blue skies and butterflies gently beckoned through our glass front door.  The hammock between two pine trees in the side yard was calling my name. It had been woefully neglected since my husband put it up for me this summer.

The hammock and a  couple of books won out over the pile of laundry and gardening chores.

I spent most of the day reading and sleeping and watching the chickadees that flew in and out of the pine branches, often landing on the hammock and looking at me, trying to decide, it appeared,  if I really was a human or not.

I don't take a lot of days off and just decide to do nothing. Most days when I do nothing it because I'm not feeling well, and I always feel guilty about it. Today, I just decided to do nothing and not feel guilty about it. The nature of a woman is to nurture and care of others and in doing so we often forget to nurture ourselves. Nurses are especially notorious for this and it is one of the reasons there is a high burn out rate in nursing. We are always caring and doing and don't take a lot of time just for ourselves to just be.

I read two books today. That is something I don't often do these days, take the time to read a book from cover to cover, without interruption. The Chicken Chronicles by Alice Walker is the gentle story of healing and restoration that came to the author through watching and learning from her small backyard flock of hens. As a chicken lover myself a lot of her story resonated with me.

When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull up a Chair by Geneen Roth is a gentle and humorous book that encourages women of all shapes and sizes and brokenness to discover their true beauty and nurture themselves. A good reminder for this often busy and stressed out nurse.

All in all it was a good day. I didn't accomplish anything tangible, but did something much better--fully lived--mostly outside, on a perfect October day.

I ended the day with another walk--this time to watch the almost full moon rise over Michigan farm country.

And I will end with a quote that rings so true with me:

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering. - Saint Augustine (354-430)

Linking to Straight out of the Camera (unedited photos) and Imperfect Prose.

Rooster Dilemma

Sometimes I wish I had paid more attention to our flock of chickens when I was growing up. They were just part of life--I remember chasing them out the garden, collecting eggs, lots of chicken droppings in inconvenient places, and eating them when they got old. I don't remember much about dynamics in the chicken coop.

(The rooster with his hens.)

As a result, I'm completely at loss when the sweet black australorp rooster that I hand picked to keep out of seven roosters, suddenly decided to grow up and  misbehave. I'm sure he is just being a rooster, but my gosh, he couldn't be more obnoxious! (Yes, seven of these 12 chicks turned out to be roosters--I was hoping for six hens, but ended up with five.)

 In addition to the five little hens that were part of the dozen chicks I bought this spring, I have three older hens, who I raised from chicks 3 years ago. This rooster has no interest what so ever in the young hens. Given the opportunity, he spends all day chasing and mating with the older hens. The older hens hate this and act like they are deathly afraid of him, and it it is also tearing out their back feathers and bloodying their combs. With winter approaching, it is important that the hens be in the best health possible so they can overwinter well.

(My california whites--these were my illegal back yard hens when I still lived in the city.)

I leave the laying hens in the coop until after they have laid their eggs for the day. When the hens are cooped up, the rooster literally spends hours pacing back and forth in front of the coop, trying to get in. He is clearly upset by not being able to get at the older hens.

(Waiting for the older hens to be let out of the coop.)

The last few days I have been grabbing the rooster when I let the young hens out of the coop in the morning and locking him up in solitary confinement. I hate locking a chicken up. It is so against the nature of a chicken to be in a cage. They are made to hunt for bugs, take dust bathes, and to run around in the sunshine and fresh air. It seems positively cruel to keep one locked up most of the day. The older hens do go to  bed about an hour earlier than that the young hens, so I am able to let him out for a little while at the end of the day.

Interestingly, the younger hens all hang around the cage with rooster when they are out. This is actually a good thing. The australorps are diggers unlike the California whites and can quickly do a lot of damage in the garden...so confining the rooster seems to limit how far his flock of hens goes.

(Locked up in solitary confinement for multiple counts of rape.)

I'm linking this post to the Barn Hop over at Homestead Revival. For those of you who have a flock of hens with a rooster, what is your experience? I have read that you really need six hens to one rooster.  I have 9 hens all together. Once the 5 young ones are mature (they should start laying in October) will this rooster be less obnoxious  toward the older hens?  Other than this one problem, he seems to be a pretty decent rooster. I don't want to give him away if I don't have too, but at the same time, I want to make sure my flock of hens stay strong and healthy.

I'm wondering if a banty rooster would be the way to go...(thinking ahead for next spring.)?

A Day Among the Butterflies

Today was perfect--sunny, 72 degrees, breezy, and to top it off, I didn't have to work. I stayed home and spent the day barefoot among the flowers and butterflies. We have more butterflies on our property than I have seen anywhere--and the odd thing is, I don't have that many flowers planted yet.

One of my goals for this summer is to photograph and identify as many butterflies as I can.  Thanks to friends who have identified photos I've been  posting on facebook, I have more than doubled my butterfly knowledge in the past week or so. However this yellow butterfly has eluded identification so I am hoping one of my blog readers will be able to identify it for us:

It is sitting on the tip of my thumb and is about an inch and half or so across. I haven't seen very many of these, but the ones that I did see all have similar markings. They seem to like the tansy flowers.

(Edited to add--Laura at Forest Walk Art indentified the yellow "butterfly". It is acutally a moth--a False Crocus Geometer (Xanthotype urticaria). Thanks Laura!)

The next butterfly is a Variegated Fritillary--this is a bit smaller than a monarch. I haven't seen many of these around.

Pearl Crescent--this is a smaller butterfly, about an inch across. We have dozens of these little butterflies.

Side view of a Pearl Crescent. This one is actually dead and is being eaten by a very strange looking bug.

Milbert's Tortoiseshell--there were dozens of these on my butterfly bush today.

Side view of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell.

Cabbage butterfly--one of the few butterflies I already knew. The little green caterpillars that you see on cabbage and broccoli turn into this lovely white butterfly. The caterpillars do some damage to crops, but I pick them off the food crops and plant extra kale in the flower beds so that I have plenty of the butterflies to enjoy. This is our most abundant butterfly and often I can count 40-50 in the yard at one time.

I also got to see more buckeyes and red spotted purple butterflies, as well as monarchs, and swallowtails (both black and tiger) and several other butterflies I don't yet know the names of.

A Garden of Mystery Roses

 This spring my husband bought me a whole bunch of rose bushes at a discount store. The bushes were surprisingly healthy and sturdy looking for being on the clearance rack of the a store that doesn't normally sell plants. I was very excited when he brought the dozen or so rose bushes home. One of my dreams is to have a rose garden. I actually ended up planting them in a long row in my vegetable garden for this year. As I get time I will transplant them to their permanent  locations this fall and next spring.

We thought we were getting  a nice mix of florabundas, climbers, tea roses, and heirlooms. Well. we did get a very nice mix of colors and rose types--but guess what? Only one of the roses looks anything like what the label on the package said. So now I have to figure out on my own what kind of roses they are and where each one would be best placed in a rose garden.

So many different shades of pink--

Two classic looking pink roses. These remind me of the Bonica roses that my father grew. I don't know if that is what they are, but I would be very happy if they do turn out to be that variety. It is very obvious it isn't a red tea rose, which is what the label claims it is.

This is a pretty little single rose. I really like the different shades of pink on the petals.

This rose is the only one that looks like it may have been labeled correctly. It is called Joseph's Coat, and looks just like the photo of the rose on its tag. If it is truly Joseph's Coat, it will be a climbing rose. I took this photo back in June--the little grasshopper thought it was the perfect place to spend the day and sat on the rose all day long.

A simple white rose--

I have three of these yellow roses. They appear to be ever bloomers, as the first one bloomed early this spring, and they are still going strong.  These where supposed to be heirloom pink roses. Obviously they are not pink. They do have the sweetest scent of all the roses that have bloomed so far.

This one is quite small--about an inch across, but it sure packs a punch with its vibrate colors.

This last rose is a little thornless wild rose that grows in the woods. I don't know it's name, either. I love the very delicate pink of its petals.

There are so many different kinds of roses! I am going to have to take a note book and write down observations about my roses through the summer and fall and then try to figure out what variety, or at least what type of rose each one is.  

Do you have a favorite rose or favorite type of rose that you grow?

This post is part of Farm Girl Friday over at Dandelion House.