November 2011

 

The only problem with trying to collect leaves for compost or garden in the fall is…goats will always find them, no matter where you put them.  Goats love leaves!

We picked a few bushels of Red Delicious apples in exchange for fresh cider at Art and Hillary’s early in the fall, then a few more bushels of Red and Golden Delicious at our friend Barbe’s in exchange for a some winter squash from the garden, then five 50 lb sacks of wonderful Rome apples in exchange for a some fresh Chevre goat cheese at Mary and Bobby’s orchard.  The Romes keep well in the root cellar, but the Red and Golden Delicious needed to be canned, frozen or dried before they went bad (well, or eaten, which we tried to do).  This required the construction of a second dehydrator rack to put up on the roof of the goat barn (where the goats couldn’t jump on it for fun).  We make these racks from window screen with hardware cloth backing attached to a big wooden frame, with a salvaged sliding glass door window over the top.  Greens and herbs dry best in the dark inside our solar dehydrator (see our High Mountain Homestead blog for construction of that), but fruit, tomatoes and squash dry best in direct sunlight.

 

Having grown all that food this past summer, we decided to get ambitious, and more than doubled the size of our garden this November.  The first two sections in the foreground are the old garden, and stretching out to the horizon are another 18 beds, each 3’ wide by about 38’ long. 

In a hurry as usual, we made the expansion using our typical sheet mulching methods, but this time decided to forego spreading newspaper or cardboard on the ground first.  Instead, we used our truck and trailer to haul several loads of horse manure in, before putting up the new fence.  We shoveled the manure from the truck and trailer directly onto the field, then just covered it with straw, moldy hay, leaves, whatever we could scavenge for mulch, and left it for the worms to work on over the winter.  Sometime this winter, we’ll also scatter the contents of a 55 gallon drum full of mixed greensand, rock phosphate, and glacial rock powders onto the beds to let it soak in with the melting snow in the spring. 

We omitted the cardboard this year because we’ve found that our most persistent weed, field bindweed comes right up through cardboard, so why go through all the effort?  Most organic growers around here that we’ve spoken to seem to pretty much concluded that you can’t really fight bindweed, unless you have a really small garden and a lot of time to pull it up every day for several years.  Besides, people reason, it’s bringing up lots of minerals from way down in the soil, which makes it a great bio-accumulator.  So, we live with it.

We ended up taking down all of our old garden fencing, and put up a new fence around the 155’ long by 55’ wide garden.  The new fence consists of 36” high field fence on t-posts with a top wire at 48”, corner “H” braces made of t-posts with special clips (quicker and cheaper than using cedar posts and a post hole auger on rented tractor).  Every few posts is 8’ high instead of 4’ high to allow for three strands of salvaged electric ribbon tape (but not hooked up to electricity) spaced every foot or so, as a visual barrier to keep elk and deer from leaping in.  At the bottom, we plan on installing chicken wire, skirted out onto the ground and up along the bottom foot or so of field fence, to keep the rabbits and prairie dogs out.  A frugal version of a “real” garden fence, but it seems to be working so far.

Here’s our goat herd this year.  From left to right we have Buddy (wethered companion to Gandalf), Gandalf the breeding buck, Eggplant’s two girls Sox and No Sox, and Phoebe.  Phoebe’s two girls, Flicker and Wren have moved down the hill to our neighbor’s Pete and Siobhan, where they spend their days running with two Arabian horses, two German Shepherds, and several chickens.  Gandalf goes down on scheduled dates, so there should be some new goat kids down there this spring too.

Now, how we are supposed to kill and eat these cute little ones, we haven’t quite figured out yet.  Sox and No Sox discovered the hay stash in our portable garage the other day.  They sure are cute, mischievous, friendly goats.

Our goat barn rainwater catchment system.  Hard to see unless you click on the image to blow up the photo, but the pipe leading from roof gutter to large tank at left has a tee with a valved pipe leading to the stock tank at middle right.  That way, we can choose which to fill, stock tank or the big cube (which has a hose to fill the stock tank from).