"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

I can feel Spring in the air!  Maybe only until it snows again, but whatever.  It's a start.  Andrew and I are in full-steam-ahead planning mode.  We have our garden beds mapped out, seeds are started or neatly in line, waiting to be started.  Andrew even dug out the half-built chicken coop to get it finished as soon as possible.  We have our chick order figured out.  Chicks come home next month.  Things are looking up!

So let's talk poultry.  Nothing says springtime like a brand new baby chick.  Here's the plan.  We're going to order fifteen chicks.  We will have a mix of three or four breeds: Buff Orpington, Rhode Island Red, Black Australorp, and possibly Araucana.  I really only prefer the latter for aesthetic reasons.  Our family eats a ridiculous number of eggs.  I'm honestly not sure where they all go, but we go through a ton of them.  The hens will start laying in about six months.  The smaller breeds, such as the Araucanas may begin laying sooner, while larger breeds, like the Orpingtons will take a bit longer to mature and start producing eggs.

Buff Orpington

The Orpingtons are a good dual purpose breed.  They are decent meat birds with good egg production capabilities.  I'm pretty excited to have a few potential meat birds in our flock.

They're also known to have docile, gentle personalities unless they get broody.  While a hen of any breed may become broody, Orpingtons can become especially broody.  "Broody" is chicken speak for being a good Mama.  They become very protective of their eggs in an attempt to hatch them.  This can be a great asset if you want to introduce more chicks without having to purchase them or brood them artificially (which requires a large amount of energy, which we don't have.)  It can also be a great pain in the ass when you're trying to pry a broody hen out of the nesting box to retrieve her egg, or when she starts laying them in hiding places so you don't find them.

Rhode Island Red

These guys are my go-to chicken breed.  They're fairly gentle, but they have plenty of personality.  I just love them.  I tend to name them all after members of the Weasley family.  I had originally intended to have a flock consisting of entirely Rhode Island Reds.  However, there are so many great breeds out there, why not branch out a bit?

These prolific producers lay large brown eggs.  They are tolerant of both cold and heat, which makes them perfect for a Maine homestead.

Black Australorp

I think the Australorps are gorgeous. In build and purpose, they are similar to the Orpington.  They don't grow as large, so they aren't as suited for meat production, but they're good, hearty layers.  They lay eggs that are on the larger side.

Plus, look how pretty.  Let's not kid ourselves; looks are a completely valid consideration when selecting a chicken breed.

                                                                                         

Araucana

I love Araucanas.  They're so delightfully strange.  They can come in a variety of colors or patterns and they lay beautiful, moderately sized blue-green eggs.

They may not be the best producers, but they are so sweet tempered and great foragers.  Want to save on feed?  Add breeds to your flock with a predisposition for foraging!

My favorite hen that I ever had was an Araucana named Squirt.  She was friendly, sweet, and just plain adorable.  She died her first season, which was tragic.

(photos from www.backyardchickens.com)

So these are the ladies that we intend to add to the family.  I think we'll also have a rooster.  They are great leaders and protectors.   And next season we plan to add ducks!  I am so excited about ducks.  They eat slugs!  The slugs decimate my garden every year and I am so looking forward to giving some ducks free range of my garden.  What can I say?  I have a passion for poultry.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."

I read a lot of Robert Frost in the winter.  Much of what Frost writes reminds us of the natural beauty in New England and I need that reminder more than ever right now.  I absolutely love winter, but I'm done with it this year.  I don't want to whine about it anymore, but I just thought you should know that winter is kicking our rears this year.  If you live around here, you already know that, anyway.

We finally became completely fed up with our Honda Civic and traded it in for an AWD Subaru.  The morning after we drove the new (to us) car home, we got another four inches of snow.  Thank goodness we bought that car!  I wouldn't have made it to work otherwise!  And now we don't have to walk a mile to get between our house and our car every day.  We can drive right to our house.  I bet you take that luxury for granted.  As beautiful as the walk is, it is less fun when one is laden with groceries and an 11-month old boy.

Plowing has been a challenge for my dear husband.  He's a stay-at-home Dad so he often has to wait until I am home from work to go out on snow removal duty.  He is holding up admirably, though.  He is a rock.  Even on his most stressful, painful days, he gets up and does what needs to be done.  Andrew is my hero.

Like I said, enough whining.  We aren't the only one's suffering.  For example, rats are really struggling this time of year.  They are forced to find shelter wherever they can... like my bedroom, for example.  YEAH, you heard me... A rat!  In my bedroom!  I heard a noise in the corner of the bedroom at 4:00 the other morning.  I mumbled, "damn cat" and made a move to try to shoo him away from whatever it was he was playing with in the corner of the bedroom.  I rolled over in bed to look, and I saw the cat, alright.  He was walking over to the source of the noise to investigate it.  If the cat isn't causing the disturbance, then...

I woke Andrew up saying something like, "The noise isn't coming from the cat!  There's a thing!"  Sure enough, it was a big ol' woods rat.  My first thought was of the .22 upstairs.  Is there a way to shoot a rat without also shooting a hole in the floor?  I guess not.  And then I felt bad for wanting to shoot it.  Anyway, we were unsuccessful in our attempts to catch the poor little (huge) thing, so it's up to Merle to deal with the ginormous rodent, or we'll have to trap it.  Ugh.  There's something to look forward to.

I guess I didn't stop whining.  I'm a liar.  Oh well.  We have Spring to look forward to soon.  We are starting our onion and leek seeds this weekend.  There is light at the end of the tunnel!  And it's weird to think that I have a garden bed full of garlic somewhere under the five or six foot snow drifts in the yard.  But soon the days will be longer, warmer, and filled with black flies.  No, we mustn't think that way!  No complaining about the bugs after a winter like this.  It's gotta be better than snow, right?

It's That Time of Year...

It's that time of year when our road turns to crap.  Ugh.  It's not easy experiencing three of the four seasons in a single week.  First it snows, then it thaws, then it rains, then it all thaws, and then it's 10 degrees and snowing again.  Holy cow!  Our poor road has taken a hell of a beating and it's only getting worse with all of this rain!  I love where we live.  I truly do.  It's beautiful all the year round.  It is quiet, my son has so much room to explore, we have room to grow, to build, to live.  It's heaven on Earth.  BUT...there are drawbacks to living out in the middle of nowhere.  And one of them is that dang road!

When we were thinking about buying the house, we had long talks about how we would maintain the road.  We had recently purchased a Honda Civic, which we knew would spend a lot of time parked a half mile from the house.  We would not have been interested in that car if we'd known what kind of road we would be living on, but such is life.  We walk or drive the truck in and out.  We bought a plow truck to take care of the road for the winter.  We put money aside for fill for the spring.  We had the best of intentions.  However, it is all easier said than done.  The road continues to deteriorate and there really isn't a lot we can do about it.

In the long run, it seems a small price to pay for the love we have for our home and our lives in the middle of nowhere.  Hopefully we will have an AWD vehicle in the near future instead of the Civic.  Yet, there is no shortage of work for us, and the road is only one part of it.  And it does make for some great stories!

We had a home birth with Charlie.  In April.  Down that God-forsaken road.  My midwives are brave souls, to say the least.  When I started having contractions, Andrew and I walked up and down the road with shovels, digging trenches for runoff.  (Okay, Andrew did most of the work; I leaned on my shovel and groaned a lot.)  We had a backup plan: we would birth at my mother's house if the road became impassable.  Andrew did hourly road checks for the two days that I was having early labor contractions and, when the time FINALLY came, he determined that we could have Charlie at home.

Boy, was that a close call.  But we did it!  After another day of contractions, yells, groans, laughs, tears, frustration, and elation, Charles was a part of the world.

One week later, we drove the truck on the road and hit a sinkhole.  We sank the truck up the frame.  Charlie and Mommy got out and stood in the rain while Daddy ripped and rutted the truck out.  And the whole time I stood on the side of the road with my sleeping son, I was thinking, "Holy crap.  That would have sucked a week ago.  We are so lucky."

Dear readers, how many of you have had babies?  Moms, do you remember that fun healing process after birthing your bundle of joy?  I won't remind you in writing.  I assume it was fun enough without reliving it while reading this blog.  I like to keep this a traumatic flashback-free zone.  So you can imagine that having to walk in and out with a baby while I was healing was no cake walk.  That hurt.  It hurt a lot, man.  What's funny is that, at the time, I gave it no thought.  It just was what it was, and there must have been no sense in whining about it.  Also, I had this beautiful little gift named Charlie, so he consumed most of my thoughts, anyway.

I need to channel that feeling.  I need to let go of these frustrations more easily.  I was so good at it then.  What happened?  We are surrounded by so much beauty.  Why is that so easy to forget?  Maybe that will be a New Years resolution.  I've been feeling so frustrated lately and it's so hard to see through it to the other side.  Sometimes I doubt that there even is something positive on the other side.

Maybe when I feel that way I should go for a nice long walk on my road.  Hey, driving on it may be awful, but I can't imagine a more beautiful walk.  There's that silver lining I was looking for.

"The best laid schemes of mice and men..."

Well, they say if you want to make God laugh, make plans.  But that seems to be what my family is best at!  We have endless plans for our little farm-to-be.  In fact, we often have to check ourselves to make sure that our goals are at all realistic.  I'd like to share some plans with you, fair readers.  If you have any input or advice, we would love to hear it!

CSA

We would eventually like to implement a small CSA program.  I have decided that I need a season or two to "practice."  I'd like to grow for just a couple other families in the first year.  I'd love it if they could be friends of ours so that they understand if things hit the fan.  Maybe then we can add a couple   more families the next year and then really get into the swing of things.

The real problem with this plan is that we need a greenhouse.  I'm still exploring ideas and designs for one.  At first, I determined that the greenhouse needed to be portable so that we can use it to start seedlings and brood chicks in the Spring, but then also move it over beds to extend our season.  But now I'm thinking that the structure can be more or less permanently placed and we can use low tunnels over crops as need be.

Goat Dairy

As you know if you have been following this blog, we would like to keep dairy goats in the future.  I would like to incorporate milk, cheese, and yogurt into the CSA shares.  This is going to be a huge undertaking.  The initial investment is more impressive than I had originally assumed.  It will probably not happen within the next year, but I hope that we can make it happen during the following one.  I'd love to have goats!

Layers & Broilers

Again, if you have been reading this blog, you know that we have recently made headway on building a chicken coop.  We would like to finish the coop building by the Spring so that we can begin with laying hens.  I have experience with chickens; my parents have kept chickens for several years.  Part of the reason we are so anxious to get our chickens is that my parents no longer have any and we want eggs!  We eat a LOT of eggs.  In a couple of years, however, we would like to expand our chicken horizons.  I would love to have meat birds.  That would require more space, more time, more feed, etc.  It will happen when we are willing to take all of that on.

In the meantime, we keep on livin'!  Andrew set up his tree stand over the weekend.  Hopefully we have some fresh venison in our near future. Rural Maine living allows us to harvest our own meat seasonally.  It's definitely not a bad way to eat!  Charlie and I went to "supervise" while Andrew set the stand up.  Charlie was fascinated by the leaves crunching under our feet.  When I helped him stand in the leaves, all he wanted to do was reach down and play with them!  Nothing makes us happier than watching our little guy discover nature's little wonders.  The world is such a fascinating place for a baby!  I wish we could all live with that kind of awe of our surroundings.

This is without doubt my favorite time of year for a walk in the woods.  In fact, it is my favorite time of year altogether.  We just celebrated Andrew's birthday and our fourth wedding anniversary.  Here's to many more years!

Here's a picture of our beautiful autumn wedding in Greenville four years ago, and a picture from our walk over the weekend!  Man, time sure does fly.

"The language of friendship is not words, but meanings."

Well, we have fantastic friends and family.  We recently had them over for a coop raising!  We tore down an old out building and used some of the salvaged lumber (plus materials from various other places) to begin building a chicken coop!  We had a wonderful time.  There was chili, cornbread, and beer for all.  We would be rather lost without all of you guys!  We managed to get about half of all construction done in a single day.  We'll chip away at the rest as we can.

We plan on chicks in the Spring.  We would also like to invest in a couple of goats but we have been having trouble finding the right ones at the right price.  We would like to buy them as kids and raise them for a season before getting into the business of milking.

Our son is growing beautifully alongside our farm-to-be.  We've been having a ball going to consignment shops and to the Belfast baby fair to find used clothes and toys for Charlie.  It's amazing how little we've had to spend on keeping him diapered, clothed, and fed thus far.  It's that time of year to stock up on warm winter clothes but there are ways to do it on the cheap!



Here are some photos from the day!

"Asking is the Beginning of Receiving."

Well, it has been a while. This is mostly because I DID have a whole entry written and then lost it just before publishing. Ugh!

Things have been busy. I've gone back to work and I've struggled to balance the roles of working woman, wife, and Mom. I'm getting better at it each passing day. It helps that Andrew is an amazing stay-at-home Daddy! But with all of the time that is eaten up by a job, we have realized that we sometimes need to ask for help to complete the jobs that need to get done before winter. I can't speak for Andrew, but asking for help has always been difficult for me. I think it is a struggle for two reasons: I have weirdly misplaced pride and I am a control freak.

Well, trying to become farmers out here is going to require assistance and I will have to get over my aversion to asking for it. And, if one is going to request a helping hand, why start small? We decided to host a good old fashioned barn raising. We've extended an invitation to many friends and family members to come spend a day with us, helping us renovate our wood shed into a barn (for goats in the spring) and helping to build a chicken coop (also for springtime use). With the promise of future shares of eggs, milk, and cheese, who could resist? Truthfully, I'm sure many could resist. But we're lucky that our friends and family are AWESOME and many of them have committed to being here to help. What's more, some friends and neighbors have also pitched in building materials. It still gives me a bit of an icky feeling to ask for help, but people seem to genuinely want to see our homesteading endeavours pay off and they also seem to want to be a part of that. Thank you, everyone!

In other Cayer family news, we had our first chicken slaughter experience. My mother's laying hens had stopped producing, so she asked us to slaughter them in exchange for the meat. An added bonus was obviously that it was a learning experience before we get our own chickens.

Boy... what a day that was. Thankfully, I had a conversation with an acquaintance that gave excellent advice on the process. (Thank you, J, if you see this.) That, combined with our own Googling and reading, made us feel more or less prepared for the task at hand. Of course, things are bound to go wrong. But it all worked out in the end. Andrew and my mother ended up doing the bulk of the labor because Charlie needed his Mommy a lot that day (teething is fun!), but we were glad to have the experience and to know that we are capable of repeating the process before we invest in chickens of our own. Andrew described it as "humbling." It was not easy to kill another living thing but I don't really think it should be.

It's still feeling like high summer here right now but I'm looking forward to some crisp autumn air. It's coming on time for harvesting, canning, baking, and the Common Ground Fair. But before summer departs, I promise I will share some summertime snapshots of us and our summer goings-on in the next post. I'm having trouble loading them now.

As always, thanks for caring enough to stay updated!

"Imagination is the Beginning of Creation"

I guess when Andrew and I started bandying the word "homesteading" around, we had this picturesque small farm in mind.  We saw some livestock, a bountiful garden, our future children playing out of doors all day and coming home to a home prepared meal every night... Ahh, the good life.  What we didn't foresee were all of the little adjustments and projects that we would take on in an effort to keep our dreams afloat.  But we've adjusted surprisingly well, I think.  Especially when you throw in a Spring-born baby and the fact that one of us still works full-time.

The past few weeks have brought us a few unexpected sources of income, too.  It's been weird.  And perhaps we haven't made much from these new efforts, but it's a little something to help us work from home in the future.

So, Charles uses a pacifier.  For a while, it spent about as much time on the floor as it did anywhere else.  I couldn't find a pacifier clip anywhere so I ordered one online.  I was seriously disappointed.  The ink on the ribbon started to rub off.  Any of you have one of those kids that shoves EVERYTHING in his mouth? 'Cause I do.  Obviously, we had to toss the clip.  Before I did, though, I snipped off the end with the clip.  On a whim, I knitted a strip of fabric, stitched the clip on one end and stitched a loop onto the other end. Voila!  Well, people have shown some interest in buying them!  So that's cool.

We also made some money by selling lumber to the local lumber mill.  Admittedly, harvesting those logs was slightly more labor intensive than my knitting project.  We have a neighbor that did a lion's share of the work on our property.  He's had some equipment failure and the project has caused him a fair amount of stress.  Andrew has done his share as well, but we have determined that we will refocus our wood harvesting energy on firewood alone.  But it was an excellent learning experience.

Also, my mom has a dozen chickens that have stopped producing eggs.  She has asked us to slaughter them for her in exchange for the meat.  Fair enough!

These things are as much a part of homesteading as the garden or the livestock daydreams.  So far, it's been about working hard with what you've got.  I guess we have to learn to work with what we already have before we begin adding more to our home.

Although, the one thing we DON'T have is time.  Charlie is obviously our number one priority and he has become very needy lately.  He's begun teething and has stopped sleeping very well.  It takes a very long time to get him down for a nap and won't nap alone.  I can knit or read while he sleeps, but I can't leave the bed.  I suppose many parents go through this.  It certainly has forced us to become creative with what time we have. I'm typing this with one hand while he sleeps in my other arm.

Andrew is still working full-time until I go back to work.  I have to get things done as soon as he gets home and can hand off the baby.  For example, I jumped in the kitchen and made pickles last night before putting Charlie to bed.  Tonight I'll have to run out into the garden to complete a few chores and blanch and freeze the last of the pac choi.  It's the most productive time of the year for the garden, so I'll probably be focusing more on food storage than actual meal preparation in  the weeks to come.  Oh well.  It's all in a day's work!