Solstice

And so we make it past the longest night of the year...and the Winter begins.

Every year the Rowland family celebrates the Solstice. We let the day be one of reflection and rest.  Then, we have a dinner and celebrate our Pagan roots that worshipped the earth, the animals, the plants and the one thing we all have in common for life, the sun.  We celebrate it's shortest day and also the return of it's light.

It has become a day I take off every year to reflect on the passing of those I love and also to rest.  It is both symbolic and real to me, as Tom, my step-dad, died 3 years ago on the day before.  He was a man of few words and many boasts.  He loved the Solstice.  It meant something to him being a man of the earth, he knew what the toil of a farmer was, and knew the importance of taking a break.  I fondly remember him, floating on an air mattress in a pool in Hawaii.  He had a huge smile and soaked in the sun.

Happy Solstice Tommy!

The fog that settled in the valleys here gave a surreal beginning to the Winter.

The farm is tucked in, well sort of...My year has been a bit of a whirlwind and the farm had to become my hobby and Sharon's full time job.  We know we can make it as farmers, but it certainly is nice to be able to replace my jeans.  I started working for a friend and have helped build his company and it has been a challenge, but also worth it.  My on again off again life as a camera man and TV guy was too hard on the boys and I hung that hat up temporarily so I can be home every night for the family, and help run the farm when I have a moment.

We have 2 goats and 2 sheep now.  They are all beautiful and hilarious.  Qui Qui and Cowboy are our goats.  Qui Qui is a milk goat and Sterling and SHaron milked her twice a day while she was in milk. Cowboy is a fixed male and he is hilarious.  He is everyones friend and hopefully we will get him trained on cart this next season.  Qui Qui is pregnant so we are hoping for another girl and expand the Milking operation a little.  The sheep Raghnild and Gro are pregnant also we think, we have had a little ram named Little Bear in with them for the last couple months and he is a character also, bouncing around and playing games with Cowboy.  We will be expanding our flock the next 2 seasons and are hoping for females.  We will sell the males as lamb late in the year next year.

Our goal is to have a small flock and enough goats to have fiber and milk products for sale in a few years in addition to the pigs, eggs, and meat chickens we raise and whatever veggies and fruits we have.  We strive to create a farm stand at some point along the way and maybe become a small country store if we look really far down the road!  It's good to have a goal to strive toward!

  I hope you all stay safe and warm this wintery season!

Love from the farm!!

Petunia

The pigs died today.
They lived on the farm from baby to adult.

We had a pig we called chops because you never name your food...

She was Petunia, her last week with us.


She liked ear scratches and fodder grass and was truly an interesting creature.  She was here for a reason and she knew it and she seemed ok with it.  You could see in her eyes a soul ready to pass thru and feel it in your heart, you do when you live with animals and take care of them.

I shed tears for the beauty and wonder of each and every animal we have here.

So I raise my growler to Petunia and thank her for her life.

I went down to the barn after work and they were gone. I realized my dream of the last 2 years was no longer a dream, I saw that we can do whatever we want here on this planet in this precious time we have here. My mother never lied to me when she said that to me.

I walked into the barn leaned against the wall and sobbed for a moment.  Perhaps it was the feelings a powerful day like today arouse.  You prepare for this day 6 months before and then the day comes and its no easier. I wish it were as easy as feeding them and ignoring them and telling yourself not to feel sad.

It is hard not to be sad about life lost.  Just like it is easy to be happy about life renewed...

I love this farm.

After my moment in the barn, I closed in the rest of the animals.  I petted each and everyone of the laying hens.  I saw spongebob(Lairds chicken) so gentle and peaceful with her weird mohawk top knot fashioned from generations of genetic muttdom.  They cooed as I petted them on their perch.

The last 2 survivors of the winters unsuccessful broiler run somehow made it in with the layers also.  It is all so random and mysterious, this life/death thing...

Why did 2 broiler hens survive but the pigs went out today?  Maybe because it was too cold to butcher them at the time, maybe it was because they were too sickly to possibly live this long...maybe the universe stayed my hand for a reason...all questions with no answer, their life circle just hasn't closed the loop yet.

So as the winter closes, so do the circles of life.

I welcome spring and wonder, fixing fences and laughing boys, lettuce and smiles and sunshine on my face.

I thank the universe for all things.

Love, The Farm.

Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, Regeneration...

Walking in my boxers and cowboy boots, across the field to the coops tonight, I find myself reflecting, as I do on things, on the last few months.   I find myself in deep thought...What are we doing?  Feeling the earth, with bare finger tips.  Smelling the dirt, hearing the calls of the rooster to come to bed(yes they do that too).  Fresh smells of farm, wind thru the dried corn stalks, the crunch of the grass under my feet. A boy laying out in the field with his dog after his chores, eyes wide and staring up at the popcorn clouds drifting into twilight.

So many sounds and moments of birth and watching animals and plants grow, so many moments of life and death, cycles rotating thru everyday on the farm...

I get thoughtful the day before a animal processing day.  Tomorrow we will slaughter and butcher another group of birds.  These are our summer broilers.  They lived a good life.  Fed well everyday, shelter over their heads, moved onto fresh grass daily.  They could hunt and peck if they wanted to but mostly they just liked to eat and lay around.  I suppose after 8 weeks of me doing that Sharon would probably process me too.

It's not hard to process a bird. I say that because so many people ask, "how the murder went" or "how was the massacre" and it sort of bothers me, I don't enjoy or not enjoy the process.  I just do it, I believe strongly enough in knowing that my meat came from my yard, and not slaughtered in the USA then shipped to China to be processed and then shipped back...yes that happens. We give a deep reverence to their life and the knowing where they come from, what we fed them, and how they are treated.

We treat them as life, for that is what they are... Our life, our children's lives, our friends lives.  I thank each of them knowing their life gives us life.  Their life never really ends, it just continues infinitely, as does mine and yours. Birth, Life, Death, Decomposition, Regeneration.

Summer flew by for us, our jobs went into full swing limiting farm pursuits. Now I'm off work for awhile again and trying to play catch up in a game that never ends.

Some things to update:

The wheat patch grew in and we got about one bushel of wheat.   Of course then we have to thresh and separate it still.  Of the three experiments only one grew to full harvestable size.  The pasture is a tough beast to tame.  It constantly eats up any ground I clear.  I pastured the meat birds over it after I cut it with the old ancestral scythe from Sharon's side of the family.  It is very eye opening to see how much work goes into hand harvesting a grain.

The corn grew in really nice, and we had what looked like was going to be a great patch of cauliflower and then not a single head came...it was weird!  Then the cabbage got eaten up and all nasty and rotten by something.

We had great success with tomatoes as usual, collard greens, kale, some beets, carrots.  These would have been even better if we had time to thin the rows and weed, but work was too many hours and the commutes a motivation sucker.




In June we went to the Mother Earth News conference and it was stellar!  I learned about Mushrooms and pasturing birds and all kinds of great things that have motivated us to get going on more seriously.  Our most recent endeavor has been plugging a bunch of oak with mushrooms spawn.  Next fall we will have mushrooms to add to the mix!  YAY! I love Shitakes, maitakes, oysters, and Lions mane! Decomposition to make life is cool.

The October addition to the farm will be pigs, and I think we already have all of the pigs sold that we haven't even bought yet!  Woohoo!

Life on the farm is good.  We enjoy being stewards to the land and all our critters, we enjoy providing friends and family with quality food.  Thank you for supporting us!

  

The dirt doesn't wash away anymore...

Moving into the new place this winter was such a blessing, I can't thank the universe enough for what it has provided for us over these past two years.  Touching the earth and smelling the spring has gotten my spirits and dreams up...and my back tired!

This bear of a property has been a lot of time and effort, but it is really rewarding and fun to attempt a bunch of different farming techniques and experiment with new earth and new crops and new ideas! Here's to NEW, and the Spring rebirth!

The move here was timely and after Back Breaking 101 last year, I worried about destroying my back trying to get things ready.  The great thing about farm college was, it was an education.  Don't do too much too quickly were my syllabus notes from last year. So I got into things, but a little more slowly this season.  It seems amazing in retrospect that in the last 2 years we have moved from a 50x100 foot city lot with 9 chickens to 100 acres with over 150 animals, and now back to 5 acres and around 60 animals and the goal of living as sustainably as we can.

The goal has never changed, just the methods, the experience of being farmers for a year and knowing that our end game is to live happily and healthily under the heavens with our own two hands(well, 8...).  To know that from the stewarding and loving of the land comes the food to survive and the satisfaction of learning and teaching our sons, remembering our ancestral core and how bonded we are to mother earth...

A truly humbling moment is when you look at your hands and see the stains of your labor and love of the land, dirt and sweat embedded in the cracks of age...the dirt doesn't wash away anymore.

We finally moved all the chickens and ducks out to new pastures and put in fencing and patched up all the horse shelters to be different coops.  That was most of my spare time in February.  The livestock are set and we made a new huge tractor for the cornish crosses we are getting for our meat birds this year.  I am looking forward to growing these fatty's and having some pasture raised meat!  Yum Yum!







In early March I started the long process of turning the pasture into farmable land.  It hasn't ever been a farm as far as I know, so years and years of pasture and horse dung has made a super thick sod layer and it has been a beast to get thru.  But in theory it will be a great growing base!  The rototiller beat me up pretty thoroughly and waiting in between rains for it to dry out enough without packing the soil was testing my patience.  BUT it got done.  Note:  Buy tractor.

I tilled three to four passes over each of the 4 plots.  We made a 20x30 kitchen garden up by the house and are trying to "lasagna Garden" in this area.  The Lynsky's came for a visit and I put them to work! We laid down all of our broken down boxes from the move and then brought in a soil mix and raised the beds.  This will be our root veggies, peas, salad greens, spinach, salsa garden, and all that business.  So far we have planted in the cabbage, beets, lettuce, kohlrabi, beans, peas and a few other things, we will stagger 2 weeks and plant another set of those things and then move into the warmer season plantings.

In the upper pasture I tilled a 20x60 patch and another 25x80 plot and then two 4x30.  They will have wheat, corn and dahlias respectively.

The wheat should prove an interesting experiment.  It's what farmsteaders call a pancake patch, since there isn't really enough being grown to do more than a few batches of pancakes once it is said and done.  But that should be an interesting endeavor nonetheless.  It was planted in three different ways(by mistake) to see how the wheat comes up.  First I planted 3 rows that were about a foot apart, but then after Laird and I planted I looked up the date, the almanac said it was possibly the worst day of the year to plant!  The next section I did a more thorough job of raking out sod clumps and packing the soil and the third section I didn't rake, so it was the least molested of the turned pasture.

When the Lynsky's were up and the moon cycle was more favorable, they helped me hand broadcast the wheat and then rake it in.  It should be interesting to see the different productivities of the sections.  I think the hard part will be the hand harvest, threshing and winnowing, but should be more fun than the tilling!  Cant wait to use the old scythe from Sharon's great grandparents farm!

The spring has gotten us all silly with hatching! We incubated about 18 eggs and had a really bad hatch.  7 total jersey giants from the batch and one silkie.  We lost power twice for at least 3 hours toward the end of the incubation period, but we are unsure because it happened when we were away one day, so we can't be sure how many times it went out.  When we came back it was on for a little while then we lost it again, so I hooked the inverter up to the riding lawnmower and kept the heat up until power came back. So now we have a generator!

The poor little guys in the hatch that did survive, hatched out in our super tiny incubator and could barely move around, so we built a Coolerbator.  It is an old wine cooler rigged with a wafer thermostat and 2 lightbulbs.


















The wafer is filled with gas and as the lightbulbs heat up, the gas in the wafer expands. It eventually trips the switch killing the lights, then as the wafer cools and contracts the switch trips the light back on.  You regulate temp by doing minute adjustments with a thumbscrew to the distance of the wafer to the switch until you have the temp you want.  It was a pretty cool build and Sterling really enjoyed learning about the electricity and mechanical aspects of the thing.  So now we wait for the next 48 eggs...YES 48... and see what will happen with them.  We have silkies, jerseys and viking chickens in right now.

Our next breeding experiment is with Sterlings show silkie cock, Blue Eared Buff, in a breeding pen with our naked neck hen, Hi Helen.  We are hoping to get what are called Show Girls.  They look like Naked Neck's with Huge pom pom poofs like silkies....should be hilarious.

It's been a busy busy couple of months, but soon we hope to be in maintenance mode instead of build mode for the rest of the season.  I almost forgot, we have planted 10 blueberries, 4 fruit trees, 10 cedars, and 10 raspberries.  I feel like thats a pretty good start to our fruits and berries!

Make sure to enjoy the spring, smell the air look at the buds and flowers watch the birds and connect to the earth.  As you run your life, and the hustle and bustle get you caught up, try to take a moment to look at what you do and remember, in the end, your actions to the planet affect you.

Look at your hands, look what they have built for you and thank them, for today these hands have brought you here.

Love from the farm.
The Rowlands

Settling in.

What a start to a new year!  We made the move to Battle Ground, mostly at least...

It was a pretty crazy move.  First of all, while moving TO a farm is exciting, moving FROM one is a nightmare.  Moving fences and taking down coops and figuring out how to move animals, and all that farmy business was insane.

I put over 100 hours in going up and down from the Olympic peninsula to Battle Ground and Portland.  We had our stuff spread out between 4 homes and 2 states for most of December and January.  I can't thank our families and friends enough who helped make it all happen again.  Patrick Kligel is an amazing friend and let me have his car trailer full of my stuff for 2 months...Matthew helping me load up in Sequim and Mom, Tim, Kyle, Jesse, Shamus, Chuck and Lori for helping us move in, My Dad and Shamus for helping me tear out blackberries and fix up the barn for moving in our flock...the Moberly's for taking on housing Laird and Sharon between Christmas and the move day...so many others who helped out in so many ways, THANK YOU ALL!

Some of the challenges we faced were daunting and frustrating, but in the end we are here.  A raccoon found our ducks 2 weeks before we left and got 3 of our ducks and of course 2 were females, which is so frustrating because of our hopes to be breeding them down here.  Radar and I had him cornered and I shot him with a crossbow bolt, but holding a spotlight and shooting turned out more difficult than one may expect.  I shot at him five times over 3 different encounters, and i think I got him with one shot but never found him.  So now poor brownie has 4 males after her all the time.  I am looking for some replacement full grown females now and we have ten or so eggs in the hatcher, and it looks like we have some babies growing when we candle them!  So that part is exciting!

Right before we left Sequim, the Avian Bird Flu started hitting Washington. Luckily, I had the ducks and breeding chickens(my show jerseys, and show silkies) in an enclosed space because of the bastard raccoon.  So they were away from the crick and funny enough the wild male Mallard who liked to hang with them had left for awhile(Mallards were the main carriers).  I realized I had better keep everyone away from him and kept Radar chasing him away when he started to come back looking for his buddies.  I guess it all happened for a reason.






Sterling and I worked on cutting away the blackberries from an old stall that had become overrun. Then Shamus and I made a big pile that is almost ready to burn. It seems like I have been revamping old farm structures for 2 years...oh wait, I have been!







The new barn is awesome.  It has 5 stalls and a tack room, and in desperate need of some TLC.  It is next on the list, a little paint and some siding and gutter repair is in order, but it doesn't leak and the electricity and water works, so thats huge!

The house sits on the top of a hill overlooking the 5 acres of pasture and barn, so when we get the birds in their new digs and the lower 3 acre pasture rented out to some horse people, we will have quite a nice little view from our back porch!

The list goes on and on, but priority is to get the birds in their new spaces so I can open up a couple stalls and the lower 3 acre pasture to rent to horse folks.  The ducks will have a pond soon and the chickens will have a pasture that will be divided up for rotating them on.  We will turn part of the upper pasture into food and part into flowers.  I just bought 4 trees for a mini orchard, I imagine there will be more soon...As for additional Livestock, I will put the goat fencing up that we had for the llamas...remember them...for either a couple of Kune Kune pigs or a goat or 2, realistically that's probably not until next season, or late this one.  We will focus more on turkeys meat chickens and meat quails this season.  We had sucess last year with them so we will build off that in the new season!

In the meantime, I am the stay at home Daddy, Sharon's the worker bee, Laird's my "helper" and Sterling is in school.  Sterling's transition went well and he seems to like school although I can tell he isn't very challenged by any of it.  We will be looking to get him in some after school activities as we settle in a bit more. We are definitely looking forward to Spring, the rain has made things a bit muddy by the barn and slopping in duck and chicken poo/mud is fairly low on my "things I enjoy doing" scale.









The farm will come along, as it does. The flowers, fruits and children will grow, the Daddy will get tired, the Mommy will sparkle with joy and life will be good.   Come on up, bring some beers.  The Rowland family farm is rolling along.

Much love,
The Rowland's

How do you eat an elephant...

So long since my last post in  August.  So many things changed.  Let me start with what hasn't. What hasn't changed is what we want to do for our family,  What we believe is important and the ability to go forward no matter the consequences, that the universe provides...none of that has changed, so we are sitting pretty.

A year on the farm.  Farm college if you will.  What an amazing experience.  I cant even begin to explain any of what I have learned.  Trial and error, and error and error...

We came here to make a better life for the boys, to be fearless in our faith that, things will be ok and TRY.  And we have.  We have learned that the strength of our family lies in the earth and the stars and that seasons come and go and life erupts from the earth and then is consumed by it. We live.





Sharon and I have been tested, and although the darkest days of my heart and the most crushing failures and depression tried to bury me, and that being away from support and safety is scary, it will not stamp out our fire.  We are too strong.  If I am Sharon's Oak tree, then she is my tap root. My personal family motto "The Rowland's never say I can't" has never been such a strong and binding of a scroll as it is now.


We have found love...in the earth and the fields and the silly little tumbleweed who follows us around the yard.  The ducks who I yell at "go to bed!"  And they do...and Radar, if he isn't helping me get them in, he is scattering them about like a goofy puppy will...It still is a little bit of Heaven every day.



It was tough to realize the "where" of the equation wasn't quite right.  The "what" ,"who's", "why's" and the "how's" were easy.  But we have solved the where...  We are moving to Battle Ground and are taking over a small ranch from a cousin!  WOOHOO!!

The fences I broke my back on are now down, the miles of irrigation hose are coiled, the coops deconstructed and the farmhouse is slowly going to sleep again.

What a sturdy old ship she was. Born in the 1800's first as a farm then as a roadhouse then a farm again and then she slept for 60 years in the shadow of industry, gathering dust and hearing the gravel pit go to work.  She shook awake every morning by 6am with cement trucks warming their engines.   Then we arrived, and the life we breathed, the boys rambunctious, roosters crowing, ducks quacking, dogs playing bite face in the kitchen ...happiness.   She felt her purpose and opened her arms and kept us warm and dry and gave us a place to sleep and dream.

I am glad we found this peace, this time to dream.  I am glad I took the time to just BE with my family.  I found the path I need to be on and it's just a matter of staying on target now.

We decided to move for a variety of reasons, but health of our family, and jobs that are close, tend to rank pretty high on that list.

So we are moving again, one year and a lifetime later.  But we will keep farming and perhaps even more so, now that we can really take hold and plant some roots that we know will be permanent, at least as permanent as we can be, slightly more permanent then a band of gypsies i guess.

But as the saying goes, you eat an elephant one bite at a time....so here's to strong molars!

Much love to you all and I hope to update the blog more frequently once we settle!