Very Grown Up Geese

This is neither here, nor there, but the voracious groundhog that lives beneath our back porch is exhibiting a startling tail that I thought you might want to see. This picture was taken from our dining room table, so it doesn't have quite the same impact that seeing the tail outstretched behind the fleshy beast, just feet away from you, would. At any rate, the tail looks like a rigid, shaven pole that bursts into a pom pom of fur at the very tip. I guess the rats have been grooming him while he sleeps.  

The real reason for me writing is that our geese had their first grown up day today. We let them out of of the hoop house to graze on their own. They kept so close to each other that it was as though they were one animal. They are totally adorable. When I first went out to check on them after about four hours I couldn't find them anywhere. That was worrying. A few more anxious minutes passed before I saw them clustered in the shade. They graze the way cows wish they could. They take a few steps and then land on their bellies, nipping the ends of everything they can reach easily before getting up to waddle a few steps farther. 

Although they are predominantly sweet and submissive now, their goosely powers have already become evident. Garth said that this morning he watched them intimidate a chicken that had come by to examine them. They stuck their heads out and extended their necks like upturned cannons ready to fire. The chicken, though twice the size of one of them, was scared away quickly. 


Will they always move like one animal? Will they rule over the chickens on day? If they do, will they stop there? I don't want to be subservient to another goose. It's happened before and it's unpleasant. At least for now, they are just adorable. 


-Alanna

Chicks and Goslings

Our goslings came this week. They were meant to ship two weeks ago, but the hatchery had an under-hatch and couldn't send them until now. 


This is our first time raising geese. They are so different than chickens. First of all, they are not frantically afraid all the time. They are goofy and clumsy on their feet. I often see them trying to do something and 'oops!' roll over themselves.  This is true despite their being very rugged and hardy. They are ecstatic about eating grass. When I reach my arm down to do something in their brooder they waddle over to my hand, unlike the Black Australorp chicks next door that fly into a panic and huddle together in the corner, leap frogging over each other to get as far away from me as they can. The unfortunate confession I have to make is that I cut one of the gosling's beaks by accident yesterday. I was cutting up some grass into small pieces, and one of them was so eager that it went in for the blade I was cutting right then, putting its beak between the shears. It was so sad. It bled, but that seemed to be the worst of it. 


We read that if you become bonded with geese when they are young they may see you as a threat to their authority in older age and be more aggressive towards you in time. It's similar to raising bulls. The ones that stay under their mothers and are not cared for exclusively by humans are less likely to challenge humans later when they are vying for dominance. This challenges all that I've heard about the mutual affection between people and geese. Whatever the case, if what we read is so, it seems like it's going to be very hard not to become fast friends with them. 

-Alanna

The Ethics of Eating Meat

The New York Times recently ran an essay contest on "the ethics of eating meat", and the six winning entries were just published. They can be read here.  Both Garth and I entered the contest, though neither of our essays were published by the Times, but since I have a platform here I thought I'd share it with all you dear readers.


Small disclaimer - there was a 600 word limit, and that is the primary reason for such a string of statements without further explanation about the reasons I hold the beliefs I do.  Anyway, here it is.

My belief that eating meat is ethical is informed by several concepts I hold about the world, namely, that humans are a part of the world and dependent upon it, that human choices affect the natural world for better or for worse, and that partnering with animals under a rubric of wholisitic management is the best way to achieve maximum health for livestock, humans, and the environment we share.  

By no means are all steaks morally equivalent, and certain parameters must be met for eating flesh to be acceptable. The animal that makes up my meal must have lead a life free of inescapable manure, pain or noise, and had little exposure to fear inducing structures or machines.  Stated in a more positive manner, I eat animals whose living situations enabled expression of the full range of instincts and desires they were subject to in life.  Most slaughter houses do not yet live up to this standard, but some do, and there is a nascent movement that is pressing for industry wide reform.

Human history is inextricably linked with the consumption of other animals.  Building and fueling large brains required the concentrated source of calories that meat and offal provide.  Thousands of generations of meat eating shaped our guts and metabolisms to be optimally healthy with flesh as a component of our diet, and all the vegetarian beliefs I used to propound cannot change this simple fact.

Bad range management is one of the greatest of humanity's failings.  But improper application of grazers and wholesale disruption of ecosystems by poor grazing management in the past is not a reason to foreswear the many ecological benefits that can be gained from good pasture management. I take it as an unalloyed good that streams run clear and cool, the air smell clean, grass grow lustily and green, wild animals have space to meet their needs, that carbon is sequestered and soil made more fertile, and that we all - humans, domestic animals and wildlife, enjoy access to these environmental services.  All of these goods can be affected for the better by grazers, increasing overall carrying capacity and thereby enabling more life, of many different forms, to live.  Partnering with herd animals is the only way to achieve the high level of ecosystem vitality I currently see in a few small areas and easily envision on a much wider scale.  To fully create this type of world requires that some of the herd be culled each year, and cycling their bodies into the larger whole makes more sense to me than composting them or feeding them exclusively to obligate carnivores like dogs or cats. 

I eat meat because I see it as an integral piece of the larger puzzle we need so desperately to solve.  Our healthcare crisis could be dramatically attenuated or even reversed by eating as our ancestors did.  The potential reduction of morbidity and suffering is truly mind-boggling.  Many of our ecological problems could be solved with the help of large herds of ruminants.  The members of such herds can lead truly full lives where they find space and time to act on all their various drives.  Cutting short the lives of some animals that the others in the herd, the range itself, and we humans can all achieve greater health is a difficult choice, but it is one that life demands.  

- Edmund

First Calf of the Year

The first calf to drop this season is here! Garth and I were returning from a trip yesterday. We pulled up the road to the farm and from a distance we could see a small black spot moving in and around the feet of our cows. It must have happened within the hour of our arrival because she (I say this lightly because we haven't made entirely sure it's a girl yet) was still wet when we walked up the hill. Garth says this the farthest ranging calf we've had. She bounds all over the pasture, worrying her mother who is confined within the portable fence. Datura groans with anxiety while her calf frolics and hides in the grass. It's nice that human children can't do this to their mothers.

I feel very happy about how easily Kerry cows calve. This is the 6th born on our farm and we haven't had one issue to speak of. It is one of the great benefits of raising a lower yielding heritage breed. I'll take it.

- Alanna

End In Store

This is the end of the road. I unearthed our last storage carrots from their dank waiting place in the basement. The beets are crying out to be released from this earthly shell. Many of the hundreds of storage onions we still have are pointing green fingers at the sky.

Garth has been attacking every perennial winter weed in the garden with a tool he recently found in the hops barn. It's like a one and a half inch wide knife crossed with a trowel that has one serrated edge on the left. It's entirely useful. I've been digging beds. The wind licks at my waist, scurrying up and under the bottom of my jacket.

It's too cold to plant anything now. Garth planted a variety of things during a week of fair weather that have all been killed or stopped dead in their tracks. We wait, and watch and make progress where we can.

-Alanna

Garden and Greenhouse

While our garden was quite productive last year, it got off to a rather difficult start. I started our leeks, tomatoes and celery in a soil block mix I'd made months earlier, and it must have developed a robust population of some undesirable fungus, because after a fine start, all of the celery and tomato seedlings drooped and then fell over as their roots rotted away beneath them. We only managed to salvage some of the leeks by transplanting them into clean soil, and I still wonder if it would not have been more effective to simply restart them from seed. Many of them had a single, anemic thread of root, and those that survived took forever to get over the transplant shock.

Fortunately, we had planned on direct seeding as much of the garden as possible. So by April, not long after I'd realized everything I'd started was in the process of dying, I took the first warm days of the year to go plant greens, onions, cabbages and cauliflowers. Unfortunately, last year was cold, wet and overcast.

Most of that first sowing of greens failed, and the few kale plants that made it through were barely bigger than those started a month later. Despite a heavy seeding, the onions came up so irregularly that, rather than the expected thinning, Alanna spent hours consolidating them into some semblance of order. The more refined coles failed to make an appearance from the first planting, and the second planting - emerging into an only marginally better environment - was promptly devoured by flea beetles.

So in order to have a decent harvest we had to buy celery, celery root, cabbage, and onions from a local greenhouse. This was fine, though the cabbages matured too early for real storage, and the onions were a bit leggy and had some transplant shock. It was also less than ideal in that, since we did not have control over the source of the seed or the conditions in which the seedling was raised, we have less applicable knowledge for this year.

Regardless of their origins, it was clear that, in our relatively short growing season, transplants are required to be sure of a decent yield, at least for a few critical crops. And while going to the nursery again might not be perfect, it would save us the frustration of trying to raise seedlings until we had somewhere well suited to it.

We want a greenhouse, preferably a nice, big, used glass one that we can set up right beside our garden. But as other farm and house projects grow, or as we recognize their scope, the day when we will have the time and resources to pursue this appears further and further away.

Separate from all this garden stuff, we had decided to raise geese for meat this year, as an experimental alternative to broiler chickens. Chickens eat a bunch of grain, which makes them expensive and likely less healthy for human consumption. But they grow fast and are relatively easy to process. Geese eat far less grain and far more grass, making them theoretically less expensive, despite the higher up front cost of goslings. But they are harder to process, and we don't know what managing them will be like. The geese will doubtless get a few posts of their own. They relate to the current discussion in that we needed somewhere for them to live, and our old chicken tractor wasn't going to do it.

I'd been reading about portable hoophouses as a shelter for laying hens, and I realized that one could be used not only for brooding and housing geese, but also for starting seeds and for season extension in the fall.

These factors, plus the prospect of a good prototype for future farm enterprises, convinced me to make it a winter project.

I began by making two skids out of pressure treated 2 x 8's. I notched the interior of each skid to give the hoops something to rest on, and I used 2 x 4's and 2 x 6's as cross braces to create a 12' x 16' base.

For hoops I used 20' lengths of 1 3/8" chain link top rail, which I ran through a hoop bender purchased from Johnny's.

Cross connectors and a few more lengths of pipe finished the basic frame.

Constructing the end walls took a lot of fiddling, and they are the part of the house that could use the most improvement, though they will suffice.

The end result is a completely functional greenhouse, which can theoretically be pulled around the pasture by our tractor, though I have yet to attempt this. Last week we started onions, leeks, a few savoy cabbages, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, rosemary, marigolds, beets and turnips, and already we are seeing good germination.

I could not resist planting some greens in the garden, along with some early carrots and a couple rows of peas. It was in the 70's every day, and we had nothing but warm weather and clear skies in the forecast. I would feel too foolish if this weather continued with no plants taking advantage of it. I expect to see kale, miner's lettuce and several other types of greens germinating any day. Of course, a week ago Monday night was meant to be in the 30's, while now the forecast is for 19. So maybe spring isn't here quite yet.

-Garth

To the Garden, Prematurely

We've had a spell of warm days, with more of the same predicted in the coming week. I've been drawn out to the garden. Pruning raspberries, black raspberries and blackberries was the most obvious place to start. It is alarming how little life is evident at ground level this time of year. A number of honeybees were coaxed outside to explore as I was. They found me more interesting than much of what surrounded us.

Today I stepped out with a shovel in hand. I aimed to turn a few beds we had planted to field peas. We hadn't touched them since they were sown and the winter had flattened what debris there was left. A scattering of hardened thistles and dandelion roots, and a patch or two of various grasses, were all that stood to offend. The soil was heavy and slick. The sun hasn't had time to draw the moisture out. The tip of my shovel made contact with ice encrusted blocks of soil a few inches below the surface. The air is warm, but winter's fingers are clenched, gripping dark places unseen. I guess I've come prematurely to the garden.

- Alanna