Quick update from busy Seven Trees

Mark the evil parrot, AKA the worst pet in the world. He likes to march back & forth across his cage top, muttering and yiping. Today one of us dared to touch the potato chip bag, which set off an extremely loud shouting spree, until his treat dish was properly filled.
Magnus, showing off his master sleeping skills. No box goes un-filled on his watch.

It's been a very busy week here. One of us had a minor surgery which involved a trip to Seattle, having a critter-sitter, lots of house cleaning and shopping, etc. That went well, so spring should have us back in the mad project mode.
We finally retired the 10 year old Dell and got a spiffy new one. Of course that means I am struggling with Vista, plus trying to figure out how to reload all the stuff from the old computer. Craigslist provided us with a nice oak table to put all the electronics on, and it actually matches some of our furniture!
Also, we decided to take a bit of a loss on Ryder and swap him for a Dexter steer. He's going to the breeder who we rented bulls from, and his bloodline will carry on. We were going to steer him for ourselves, but it just didn't seem right to waste all that potential. So Sunday we'll say goodbye to Ryder and hello to a nice red Dexter steer.

The garden still has lettuce, chard, beets, carrots and broccoli, but not for long. Even though I can't seem to find a free moment, it's time to get the beets pickled, chard blanched & frozen, and so on. The lettuce was planted in September and is under a plastic sheet. It sure is nice to go out and pick a salad in November. We also have some chard starts in the greenhouse.

We're hoping to have our 2nd annual Apple-Tree Wassail on December 20th. More info as the time draws near....

September Harvest

We are still picking and trying to process our September harvest. It was 41 degrees this morning, so it's time to think about getting the last veggies in for the season. Here's a basket of beans and a few ears of corn fresh from the garden.

The kitchen transformed for canning. Our pressure canner is older, but serviceable for now. Eventually we'll be upgrading next season to something like an All American Pressure Canner because J has become quite proficient at canning these days. We like eating food we've grown since we know exactly where it came from and what is in it.

Here's the final product waiting to be placed on the pantry shelves.

And of course who can resist eating what's available while it is still fresh. Below is last night's dinner, roast potatoes, cob corn and Korean kalbi style beef ribs (I based what I did to these on the linked recipe) from the last of our Hemlock Highland beef, all grilled in some form or another on our Weber charcoal grill. The beans were blanched, then tossed with butter, salt and pepper. We served this with a side of what we call "summer salad" or whatever is available in the garden, cukes, carrots, zucchini, onion, cabbage, broccoli; tossed and marinated in this instance with rice wine vinegar, hot sesame oil, soy sauce, salt, black pepper, sugar and red pepper flakes. Delish and completely local!

Other harvests included all of our hops. Here's some fresh picked Cenntenial hops. After harvest we quickly dehydrate them, pack them in ziplock baggies, and freeze them for optimum freshness. We also harvested Cascade, Willamette, and Fuggles hops. Hops are harder to come by for home brewing and more expensive than ever, so we are considering adding more plants in order to have enough to sell at the farm gate eventually. They take a few years to get established.

On the far right rear, please note the enormous size of the egg! Our laying flock is the best we have ever had, and most hens lay an egg every day, but this? Above and beyond the call, I'd say. No hens appeared harmed in any way by the passing of this monster, at least as far as we could tell.

Another fall chore is worming the cattle. Here's Lady Stella herself, first time in the new stanchion for a once over and some pour on Ivomec wormer. She was none too happy, but cheered considerably when the pan of grain was delivered. Turns out Stella didn't take when Nash the bull visited, so she isn't pregnant yet. We've talked to the owner of R Double D's Rambling Bob, the bull who we had out last year, and she can spare him this fall. Bob will be out late October through November to see if we can get Stella to give us another calf as handsome as Douglas next year. The boys, Douglas (left) and Ryder the bull (right) also received their worm treatment. Here they are after the fact, getting to know each other better. Ryder has gotten much better on a lead these days, but we intend to keep on his training all winter. And after a hard day of harvesting and critter wrangling, Crichton demonstrates how to unwind.

"By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer’s best of weather

And autumn’s best of cheer."

Helen Hunt Jackson, September

August = chores!

Yet another load of hay stashed in the garage. Some really nice fescue/orchardgrass that the critters approve of heartily. We have a pretty good menu of various cuttings and grass varieties to accommodate the needs of all our herbivores. I wouldn't mind having a round bale dumped in the barnyard to give them something to snack on between meals. With just one of us taking care of the place for the next 6 weeks, every shortcut helps.
Here's Princess Stella having a pedicure. Too bad we didn't get the lifting process on video. The metal stall part starts out upright. She walks into it and gets lifted and turned with heavy duty slings.
The giant "bolt cutters" take off the bulk of overgrown hoof, then she gets her nails filed with a hand-held grinder. She wasn't too thrilled with the process, but she looks great now. There aren't too many people willing to come work on just one cow, so finding such a skilled and friendly trimmer was a huge relief. Email us at the info link or post a comment if you want his contact info for cow trimming in Whatcom County.

Beets! These are Early Wonder Tall Top, a new variety for us this year. The greens are just ok for eating, but the beets themselves are really tasty, and even better pickled. I still blanched & froze the greens anyway, since come winter we'll be happy for any "free" veggies we can get. We've been harvesting chard, kohlrabi, the last of the lettuce, carrots, cukes (8 quarts of dill pickles so far), a few Stupice tomatoes, Anaheim & Islander peppers, and of course lots of potatoes. The Reddales are about ready to dig up completely, and the Island Sunshine & Ozette fingerlings are not far behind. The garlic is harvested and drying, green beans are getting a late start but starting to shape up, and the corn looks very happy so far.
Got the trim on the back corners of the run-in installed. Now Gemini & Ryder have a lpace to get out of rain & wind and still have lots of fresh air. We'll keep fancying it up later this year though.
Stella and Doug, posing for the camera. The vet didn't think she's pregnant, but we think she is. With Dexters, sometimes the fetus is too small to feel so early, so there is a margin for error on his diagnosis. We could do a blood test to be sure, but we'll just wait & see. She's weaning Doug right now, and will all we have going on this summer, I decided to stop milking. There just isn't time to do twice a day milking, and I also don't want to deal with the bellowing that will commence once they are separated. We got 5 good months of milking, and later I'll post a grand total of how many gallons we got over how many days. I'm still pondering how I want to milk next time. I'd like to milk longer, but the convenience of letting the calf do most of the work is very tempting. We are back to buying milk. It's raw, local Jersey milk from Jackie's Jerseys. Tasty, but nowhere near as rich as Stella's.

Here's Ryder, modelling the new stanchion. He got dehorned Friday, and his shots. He's settling in ok, and we've been walking him and working with him, and enjoying the learning process of training a bull calf.

No worries at Seven Trees

With Magnus on the scene, we humans never have to relax for a moment. We just let him handle that thankless task, saving the frantic, incessant labor for us. What a trooper!

Look at that technique! Maggie is a true master of his art form. He really sleeps like this, among other equally boneless positions.
As for the two-leggeds, we've replanted the garden casualites, done prodigious weeding, harvested plenty of lettuce, mowed, hilled, mucked, raked (but no muck-raking!) and as always, milked. Stella is still giving a steady 3 quarts each morning, saving plenty of cream for Doug. Sooner or later, I'll wean him so we cane get enough cream to make plenty of butter. But not just yet, because with once-a-day share-milking, I can actually take a couple days off each week and sleep in.

Also in the cattle news, Nash will be going home on the 28th. He's been really easy to deal with, and it seems like he's done his job, based on the lack of "sparks" between he & Stella. We'll be building our bull pen right after that. It will be an 8 'x 16' addition to our little barn, giving us 2 stalls on the south side that open onto a small pen and the pen opens onto 2 different grazing paddocks. It will give us lots of options for cattle-wrangling, and free up a stall for milking only.

Coldest June in 30 years!

We've been setting records for lowest high temperature in Cascadia this month. We had a burst of freak heat a while back, and nothing but cold, wet & grey since. Most crops & gardens are way behind, and now we have to start thinking about beating the first frost date!

Seven Trees is no exception. The only happy plants are the assorted greens and the potatoes. The corn, squash, peppers & onions seem to be in suspended animation, waiting for the sun to return. The beans have somehow miraculously begun to sprout, even though it's about 15 degrees colder than it should be. The tomatoes are pouting, and I've slowly been replacing the worst-looking ones with store-bought starts. Potato bugs nipped the heads off the melon starts in the greenhouse, but the replacements are coming up fine. Our real tragedy came to light today, when I noticed the previously happy-looking cukes wilting to nothing. Upon closer inspection it seems they have given up on summer and are starting to rot in the ground. So I started new ones in the greenhouse today, in hopes the weather will turn in time to get a crop in before frost.

Here are 2 ideas we're trying to mitigate some of our challenges. The potatoes are hilled with straw instead of dirt. This should give the tubers a place to form that the wireworms can't inhabit. I'll give them another pile of straw next week, and then we wait for buried treasure. The plastic doohickeys are rain ponchos for the tomatoes. Blight tends to spread and grow when water splashes spores from the ground onto the leaves. Now that we have soaker hoses for watering, we can cover them from most of the rain. Right now I have them down really low to act as mini-greenhouses. Hopefully they will catch & hold a little heat to help the plants hang on til the sun comes back. When that happens, we'll loosen and move the rain hats as needed to keep the tomatoes from getting too hot while staying dry.

Here's a batch of nettle tea (the garden kind) almost ready to use. I'll dilute it half with water, and scoop out the nettles to put on the compost pile. The plants really seem to love it when they're in the growth stages.
Stella, Doug & Nash, scrounging around the barnyard. I just locked them out of the grazing paddock for the night, so they have to eat hay (the roughage is good for them) and clean up some of the grass they've been ignoring. Still not sure about Stella's hoped-for pregnancy. Good thing Nash is here for another couple of weeks. And latest news is that we'll have Ryder here in August, so lots to get ready before we pick him up.
And this is what happens when you leave stuffed gators unsupervised overnight....looks like the dog toy version of an upset tummy. Or maybe Stewart was trying to make an artistic statement! In any case, another expensive toy bites the dust.

Is she or isn't she?

They certainly look rather bored with each other, don't they? This weekend, if I got my days counted right, would be when Stella shows sign of coming into heat if she's not pregnant. She pretty much did boring cow things like eating, sleeping, grooming Doug and Nash. No sparks, no mooning about like a lovesick teenager. And her milk production has gone back up to a steady 3 quarts at morning milking, after her brief experiment with holding back milk from me. Doug still gets most of the cream, but we'll manage until weaning time.

Here's Doug, in his favorite napping spot, a bed of leftover hay, next to a stump. It's usually shady when it's hot, and dry when it rains. It's also conveniently out of the way of grown up hooves.

One of us at Seven Trees is going to have major surgery in August with about a 2 month recovery time. That means we'll be hammering on a few projects to make sure we're ready to cope with the drastic labor-force reduction. Now that the garden is mostly in (and we just laid soaker hoses in all beds to speed watering) and the perimeter fence is done, we're concentrating on running electric fencing to delineate all the grazing paddocks. We should be able to rotate them through all 5 with plenty of time to let the grass regrow and disrupt the parasite cycles. We sold our main laying flock in preparation for the younger batch to start laying anytime. They get to free range where ever the cattle go, and that helps keep the bugs down too.

The next project will be building an 8 x 16 lean-to type shelter on the south side of the barn. This will give us 2 stalls that can open into grazing paddocks, separate from each other and/or the barn & barnyard. This is where our new bull will live, and also be a holding pen for anyone who might need to be kept apart. We're designing it with our upcoming hurricane season in mind. Since it's on the side where the worst storms come from, it needs to withstand extreme wind and rain. We're also hoping to run a buried powerline along the driveway, with outlets at the chicken coop, outlet & light in the barn, and a light at the end of the drive for safety (and security).

If the stars all align properly, one last project this summer will be painting the house. It's been on the list forever, and really needs it, but painting weather and free time don't always end up in the same universe.