If I happened to be looking for monthly tiny farming themes, this particular January is clearly all about chickens and tools (and thinking about stuff!). It’s not the usual January routine around here. Normally, I’d be hanging the lights back on the light racks, checking out my seed starting gear—plug sheets, trays and the like get hit by a certain amount of damage and destruction each year—and generally cleaning up and rearranging the Milkhouse for seedling production. This year, with the move to the new farm, there’s nothing much to do on this end, until the new seedling room is built. So, it’s been back and forth—this weekend was there. The tools in the photo, a fairly small part of my ever-expanding collection of essential farm maintenance gear, aren’t what’s mostly being used, it’s mainly the chop saw, sawzall, cordless drill, and a lot of measuring and marking as we frame and insulate the lower barn space. But I’ve been lugging this chest each way, just in case I need tools at either end… As for the chickens, well, it’s water, feed and eggs every day!
Winter light
Mid-January, 5pm and still light out. This is the view to the west, with the big barn just out of frame to the left, looking past the loafing barn yard to the second, 11-acre pasture—the 9-acre field where the market garden lives is directly to the right—and then the trees. At the end of the rail fence in the foreground is the gate where the cows come home at night. It’s bitterly cold, my fingers are going numb after only a couple of minutes on the camera, but I’m enjoying the sunset, out here in the deep freeze, thinking about all the work ahead for the new-farm market garden season. It’s crazy. Cool!
Your veg is in the mail
In comparison with just about everything else, tiny farming is so…basic. A friend sent me a link to Graze with the only comment: “Remember our chat about healthy food + convenience?” So I clicked it. I don’t know what to say. After reading through the site, I was kinda, literally, almost speechless—the service is summed up in the home page snapshot above: Graze mails healthy snacks to you at work. The UK business is based on the British National Health Service’s 5-a-day campaign that says you should eat five servings of fruit and veggies daily. Graze aims to help.
This is seamlessly intense green marketing. Every base is covered. Probably my favorite piece on the whole site is their description of how precisely-sized servings are shipped to you:
Our box is thin, strong & uses the least material possible. What’s more, it’s from a sustainable forest, biodegradable & 100% recyclable. We source our food locally wherever possible, and prepare everything in our own kitchen, keeping food miles to a minimum. We hate waste so we buy all our fresh produce on the day we send it, and any leftovers go to our local farm. And best of all, the postman delivers it, so we don’t need any vans or energy guzzling shops. We are always seeking ways to be even greener.
Fascinating! Puts direct-to-market tiny farming well in perspective! :)
More cold-weather construction
A fairly productive Saturday of building out the new seedling room in the freezing cold (-15°C/5°F), with Michael and Bob (he dropped by to help for the day). By sundown, we had about half of the framing done, slow going with the cold, and the joists in the ceiling to work around. The propane space heater I used to use for emergency greenhouse heat barely made a difference with all of the drafts around the old barn doors and windows. This winter work is nowhere near as fun as rough carpentry in warm weather, but it felt good to get stuff done. And we’re still on schedule—seedlings soon have to start!
Checking on the beef
Sammy the Steer, born at 4am in the freezing cold barn last January, is healthy and hefty at around 800lbs (360kg), and approaching the end of his arc as a provider of tasty, mainly grass-fed beef. He and his three pals will likely go off to auction in March. They’re heavier than they’d normally be on a mostly grass diet (supplemented with some grain), because Bob didn’t wean them from their mothers for an extra couple of months. Mother’s milk is good. I’ll miss cows on the new farm. Although I’ve never been involved in their day-to-day, they’ve been close neighbors. My real connection with them is through MANURE, tons and tons of 6- to 12-month-old, air-dried, partially-composted, nutrient-rich goodness in a constant, convenient heap, there for the taking. I don’t see cattle in my near farming future. I hope to get to them eventually, meanwhile, putting some animals in the new tiny farm food chain sooner than later is on my mind. Perhaps goats?
Chickens standing around
I’ve been keeping the eight guys indoors most days lately, opening up their door only when the sun is out. They still seem little worse for the wear after weeks of roaming around in the sub-zero cold. They’ve suffered a little frostbite to the tips of their combs, likely from the severest cold nights in the coop, and there’s no sure way around that short of insulating and heating the chickenhouse (Bob said that happened even with 300 layers sharing body heat). Some days, they seem to like just standing around in the snow, even when there’s feed, warm water once or twice a day, and comfy dry litter at home. They often stand on one leg at a time, keeping the other one warm…
Barn work continues
Momentum is slowly building at the new farm. The trusty Kubota compact tractor is on site, there to help out wherever it can. Today, we just about finished the demolition in the barn, which included a small room on the upper level (pounded together with a million 3″ nails), and a stall area in the lower level that looked good maybe for goats. Below, Michael uses a sawzall (reciprocating saw) to cut things up. The sawzall is my favorite power tool of the moment. With a heavy duty demo blade, it sails through wood and nails no problem (you can see the stall poles sawed just above where they’re set in concrete). Sometimes, you have to tear down in order to build—with the right tools, that can be fun. We’re moving along—the new seedling room is on its way!