Missing Willow Farm

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Wow, what a difference a few months makes!  We grow the majority of our heirloom tomatoes in pots on our deck, which runs the length of our house.   Now that we’ve had a hard frost, the plants are done for.  We spent a few hours this weekend moving the pots down to the greenhouse where they’ll spend the winter.  It’s weird getting all that deck space back.  What’s even weirder is in about 7 weeks we start all over again with planting tomato seeds!

One of our chicken tractors is currently a Thanksgiving turkey tractor.  It’s pretty hefty as it was designed to withstand goats and sheep playing on the roof but it’s on wheels, so is easily moved.  There are large eye bolts on both the front and the back where we attach a removeable strap.   Just lean back and pull and it rolls to a fresh patch of grass for the turkey, and exposes a lot of turkey poop which give the dogs something  new to explore.   Everyone is happy on tractor moving day!

We have both a 10 by 10 foot hutch and a huge barn out in our pasture where our livestock guardian dogs could spend the night cozy and warm.  But they don’t.  They stay out with our animals to keep them safe.  We had a hard frost last night, Milos and FiFi were still wearing it on their coats when we went to feed them this morning.  Good dogs!

We’ve got them growing on logs.  If we were more successful at it, I’d post a tutorial but it’s surprisingly mysterious.  Here’s what I can tell you.  We bought some plug spawn in the Spring of 2009.  They look like pencil erasers and consist of mushroom spores suspended in a binder.  My husband prepared our logs by drilling holes and inserting the plug spawn.  The log selection is probably the most particular part of the process.  Certain trees work best with certain types of mushrooms.  These are shiitakes.  You then paint cheese wax over the spawn plugs and leave them in the shade for, well, forever it seems.  We had one log fruit by surprise last Fall from our first batch.  When the spores make their way through the log you can see white dots on the end of the log.  That’s our signal to soak the log in our pond over night, slam it on the ground to simulate a branch falling off a tree, and setting it in the shade to wait for mushrooms to appear.  Only it doesn’t always work.  However… we’ve had enough success not to get discouraged after 18 months and have added pearl and phoenix oyster mushroom logs to our stand.  They live in a hammock under a bradford pear tree to keep them shaded and off the ground.  Shiitake risotto… yum!

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True Blood is an HBO show in it’s third year that’s won a slew of awards & accolades.  It’s based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series of books.  As I’ve posted before, I’ve won a total of three different True Blood contests this year.   The most recent (and most fabulous) prize was a weekend in Orlando at the second annual EyeCon True Blood convention.   Four members of the cast spent the weekend at Q&A sessions, signing autographs, posing for photos and hanging out with us.  We learned that Joe Manganiello, who plays Alcide on the show, is in talks to be the next big screen Superman.  Kristen Bauer is prettier in person than she is on screen as Pam.  Sam Trammel started out in the Groudlings and his dream is to host Saturday Night Live.  Allan Hyde had just turned 19 when he got the role of 2000 year old vampire Godric.  He looks really different without the gladiator haircut and ancient tattoos!

Our herdsire’s name is Rudy, aka Stinky Boy.  He keeps peeing on his head to make himself extra attractive to the girls.  Isn’t that disgusting?  I can’t stand to be near him this time of year.  That’s him in the top photo.  He was born on our farm.  We were so happy when he was born because it meant we could get rid of his daddy, Jerry Lee.  That’s him in the bottom photo, he’s a purebred Alpine.   The folks we bought him from were calling him Elvis because of the magnificent shock of curly hair he has on his forehead, but we thought he looked more like Jerry Lee Lewis.  He was the devil.   He was underfoot all the time and had to be the center of attention.  He stole the keys out of our Mule.  Twice.  He figured out how to open the pasture gate with his lips so we had to rig a special lock for it.   Most of our visitors can’t even figure out how to open the pasture gate and they have opposable thumbs.  We took him to the stockyard auction and like to think he’s on someone else’s farm bothering the crap out of them.

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You may be wondering what is this chicken tractor I’ve mentioned in a few of my posts.  It isn’t some contraption that is powered by chickens, although that would be quite a sight!  It’s a portable coop used to raise chickens on pasture grass.  We have two of them that my husband designed and built.  We keep our meat birds in them when we have them.  The egg layers have their own little barn and barnyard.  When it’s chilly out, we cover it with a tarp to keep the wind off of them.  There’s a  feeder and commercial waterer hanging inside.  That’s the red thing.  It’s fed from the white plastic bucket which we keep filled with water.  They’re in the pasture with our very large dogs, so predators aren’t an issue.  It’s on wheels so gets moved every day.  We just attach a strap to it and drag it over to a new patch of grass.  One person can handle the move.  The birds love it when they get a new patch of grass to scratch around and eat bugs out of.  The goats think it’s a toy.  The occasional sheep does, too.  They get up there and knock each other off while the birds are chirping ‘get off of my roof’ inside.  Raising poultry on pasture makes for some really healthy birds.

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It’s kind of like television… for farm animals.  When we got our new turkey home, we put it right into a chicken tractor in the pasture.  In case you’re curious how to get a large bird home in an automobile, we brought a large cardboard box and it rode home in our back seat.  Everyone had to run over and say hello except the sheep who were off doing sheepy things.

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  We went to a turkey farm over the weekend to pick out our Thanksgiving bird.   So many to choose from!  We raised our own last year, and gave an extra to a friend who needed one in return for him raising our bird for this year.  I think we got an extra big one when we invited them for Thanksgiving dinner!  We left Jenna in the truck because these birds are being guarded by some very excellent guardian dogs… no need to invite trouble. We left her in the back seat but she was in the driver’s seat when we came up from the barn, eager to get on the road.

What the heck is this?  It’s Jenna’s collar.  A nice lady named Beth made Jenna two Halloween charms; a glow in the dark dog bone and a green zombie heart.  What dog doesn’t need a scary necklace today?   Happy Halloween!