Two types of dogs

When previously looking up skunk spray removal remedies, I came across a saying. With regard to skunks, "there are two types of dogs: those that learn the first time, and those that never learn." Unfortunately for us, dear Sammy is a never-learner. The other night (on his evening walk with Matt) was his 3rd (or 4th?) encounter - a direct hit - leading to a hurried peroxide/dish soap/baking soda bath at 10 pm, a night sleeping in the garage (Sammy - not Matt), and then a full bath the next day. What's not to learn?

Our sunny weather had departed before that - and we are very glad for the rain. What we are not glad for is a constantly damp, mildly skunk-smelling dog wanting to roll on the carpet!

I've planted cover crops in the empty rows, and am planning on prepping more (especially since the seeds have finally started germinating. The flocks of migrating birds we see every morning are a joy, except when you suspect they are stealing all the seeds!) But the weather is not cooperating... and to be honest, I'm not complaining. I'll post some outside pictures when the weather clears a bit.

Hope everyone is all prepared for Christmas!

What season is it?

Today was an unexpectedly beautiful and almost warm day - especially appreciated after last week's several nights of frosts and hard freezes, and yesterday's rain! So, it probably comes as no surprise that we spent most of the daylight hours outside. I worked in the garden, digging and amending planting holes for some blueberry plants we have ordered (we're going to try out 3 varieties - 2 plants each - to see what does best here). Matt was busy out in Santa's workshop... but no pictures of that! We wouldn't want to spoil any surprises. :)

The animals were happy to frolic in their little pasture, probably thinking it's spring. Oh - and, a single chicken has begun laying. We had actually assumed none would start laying until spring, but we've had small pullet eggs for 4 days, and we've seen one of the black hens in a nest box.

Hardly Strictly Baby Festival

On Saturday, we had the pleasure of going to a celebration for Neely and Jason's baby-on-the-way. They were quite clear that it was not a baby shower. On the calendar, I wrote "Hart baby fest." I'm sure Jason would not object to Baby-palooza. :) Whatever you call it, we had a great time. Luckily, Matt took lots of great pictures.

The serious business of the day was tie-dying "onesies" for the tyke. Fortunately, the largest size was for a 12-month old, preventing potential scenes in the future ("I don't care that you're in 8th grade - your aunt Julie made that shirt for you and you are wearing it to the dance!") But we won't be surprised if the child grows up with an unexplainable affinity for the 1960s...






When we weren't splashing around in the dye, we were free to chat, eat, drink and be merry.

And admire the cutest cake ever...
(The writing on the front reads, "May the forest be with you.")

In three words or less

Hopefully everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We did.
It's been a long time since our last post. In the interest of time (yours and ours!) today's captions will be short.

What has been going on?

Mischief

More mischief

Firewood

Greenhouse construction: start

Migration: American robin

Migration: Killdeer


Sugar snap peas

Garlic

More to come...

The woodstove is in!

Among the many chores completed today (cleaning chimneys, clipping chicken wings, trimming goat hooves, getting road base delivered, stacking firewood, digging the greenhouse foundation, hitting the hardware store, marking out new planting beds) only one is the least bit exciting or photo-worthy: the final installation of the refurbished wood stove into the shop. Now to move all the flammable junk - er, I mean valuable objects - out of harm's way.

Planting garlic

After clearing the beds a few weeks ago, I bought a yard of compost and turned it in. Today, I finally started planting the garlic. Wow, 5 pounds is a lot of seed garlic! I planted 237 cloves... and that's probably only about 2/3 of the amount we have. I'll need to turn in the compost on the old potato beds (in the top picture, the ones still covered with straw and compost) to have more room for the rest. Then on to starting a bunch more rows for next year's spring/summer crops...

If we don't start selling produce in the spring - everyone can look forward to getting garlic wreaths and braids for Christmas next year!

Woodstove for the shop

Matt is refurbishing a salvaged woodstove to put in the shop, so we can keep working on stuff all winter long...

The trouble with old farmhouses

A couple of weeks ago, Matt discovered that the faucet had started leaking cold water underneath. Late last week, he replaced the fixture.
That evening, a friend visiting asked, "is it normal for the toilet to flush so slowly?" Uh oh.
To skip the details, we had the septic tank pumped, a porta-potty delivered (for the party and for us), and we have been learning more than we ever wanted to know about the county's permitting process, competition between local septic-related companies, and the like. Luckily, Matt knows enough about the subject to save us lots of money in terms of troubleshooting... but we've agreed to leave the dirtiest work to the experts!

Halloween at Driftwood Farm

All I can really do is add a bunch of photos! Neely's account of the Halloween festivities pretty much says it all... read it and see her pictures here. We were so happy to have friends from out of town make it to the party! (Ok, well, maybe that's why we had the party...)




Laura and her vampire girl-o-lantern bare their grins for the camera.
Pumpkin carving is serious business for Don!



Creating the pumpkin-head-man:



Unfortunately, most of the pictures taken indoors ended up blurry... including those of the happy baker, Neely, creating something like 70 delicious, spookily decorated gingerbread cookies.

Oh, and Don came to the rescue with a few more pictures...

Andrew looking very scary...

Matt in full pirate regalia standing out in the drizzle.

And the gang admiring the newly-carved jack-o-lanterns.

Every last bit

I love being able to use up the entirety of something - from "disposable" products, to electronics (my ancient cell phone just will not die!) to things we've grown. Since I'm down to working part-time for the fall and winter, I've been making myself useful around home when I'm here.

Yesterday I chose two 5.5 lb pumpkins as my trial run. I cleaned and baked them, mashing and freezing most of the pulp for later use (without having to start from scratch). We ate a couple of chunks with dinner, and the rest was incorporated into a loaf of pumpkin-banana bread (hey, that overripe banana came from South America somewhere and I wasn't about to toss it in the compost!) The seeds, of course, I cleaned and roasted with a little olive oil, salt, cayenne, and paprika.

The chickens absolutely LOVED the fibrous stuff from inside the pumpkins, and surprisingly, the skins as well (which had been cooked). Much to my glee, not one scrap of those pumpkins even made it to the compost pile.

Pumpkin harvest

The official count is in: 28! The three largest pumpkins came from one Howden vine; the remainder are Sugar Pie, from 6 plants.

Matt can hardly wait to get started carving some of them, but the rest will be for eating (and storing, for later eating!) I'm envisioning pastas, tarts, pancakes, pies, and the best recipes the internet has to offer.

Out of this world

Matt and I saw the most bizarre thing this morning, on our way to work. It was a little before 7:00 am. Heading south outside of Fort Bragg on Hwy 1, to the east we saw what we can only describe as an extremely bright, blue and orange shooting star. It was so low that our first thought was a plane on fire - but it was moving far too fast, and gone in a flash. My pretty extensive internet search leaves me no choice but to believe it was a meteoroid. It's nerve-wracking just how low it was. We were glad we were both saw it, or it would have been too unbelievable.

Of course the photo above is not one we took, but it's just like what we saw! Except that it was nearly light outside.

Funny stuff

The culprit:

Looks innocent enough. We picked this thing up at the feed store a couple of months ago for grooming the goats. They were happy to be brushed, but if they caught a whiff of the brush, they would bolt. We figure it's probably made of boar bristles or something. I left it outside, then in the barn, to try to air it out.

Last Sunday, I took it up again to find that of the goats, only Redwood isn't mortally afraid of the brush, although he will run from it when the others do. I left it on the ground, figuring that if they got used to it, it wouldn't be a big deal. It only took moments to find that the chickens are also afraid of it, and not for love, money, or cracked corn would they pass by where it lay. There was a chicken traffic jam.


A little disgusted, I took the thing out of the pen. But as the animals now clamored after me, rushing the gate like raptors on Jurassic Park, I had an idea:


Voila!

It was working like a charm, although Matt said he saw Redwood brushing himself on it yesterday...

Changing seasons - the bad news first

Last month's warm, late-summer rainstorm and subsequent muggy conditions appareared to cause the tomato - AND the previously-flourishing potato crop - to collapse and die. What actually killed them looks to my novice eyes to be late blight. Aargh. So many tomatoes wasted, just as they were ripening! And that was the last chance this year for a potato crop for us; risking planting them now would be folly since frost, too much rain, or residual blight could make all the necessary work of preparing more rows a collossal waste of time. (So we bought a big "harvest special" sack of taters from our CSA!) And luckily, most of the pumpkins were near mature before powdery mildew felled the mass of vines. We've left them there for now, to absorb what little nutrients the plants can still give before bringing the 25+ pumpkins in for storage.

The greenhouse is also undergoing its seasonal change. The bell peppers are done; the cherry tomato vines are looking tired (although still alive and producing a little, so they get to stay a bit longer). I took many of the randomly propagated perennial flower plants out of the greenhouse, and planted them in place of the fading annuals in the flower garden. I've divided some jasmine to make more for the yard, and started sugar snap pea, lavender, kale, celery, and cilantro seeds. I'm experimenting with planting a few other things "out of season," just to see what happens (e.g., some borage seeds I collected from this year's plants; cuttings from the carnations). I also rooted a dozen strawberry runners, even though I'm not sure if I'll be able to chill them properly to allow them to produce next year. But at least they are making a good hideaway for a fall-camouflaged frog!

The New Farm Name!

We knew from the start that Furlough Farm wouldn't be the permanent name. Before starting the blog, we spent a lot of time trying to come up with something. We looked all over for inspiration, but still hadn't settled on a name that we liked, that didn't sound pretentious, presumptuous, or cheesy. It had to be relevant, but not too bland (named after the town, for instance). And though some of the names sounded good in a tree-hugging sort of way, I knew that if I was embarrased saying the name out loud to Matt, it wouldn't stick.

A couple of weeks ago - after having spent time off-and-on using word-association websites, brainstorming all kinds of things, even the help of a business-name generation guide - I blurted out an ultimatum to Matt: We have to name the farm in the next week. He said, "Oh, OK." Opened the curtain. Looked outside. After 30 seconds, said, "Driftwood Farm."

All my agonizing hours of minute dissection of the meanings of words (e.g., "'green' is good, but so hackneyed now"), the long lists of associations and ideas... Matt just looks out the window at his massive collection artistically displayed around the yard, and bam! Farm name.

The plan for now is to keep this blog; if at some point I get the market business going (it's in the works!), we'll create a new page.

Taking pictures of the driftwood amongst the fence posts and tall grass wasn't as lovely as we hoped; so the photos here are from a little day-trip we took to the south part of the county (Point Arena and surrounding area).

So, everybody... how do you like our new name?