Check out the Mother Earth News “Food Gardening” iPhone/iPad app.

It is a resource on how to grow various crops … Its free so check it out! I will be test driving it myself.

Learn more here

Visit the apple store page

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I am using my iPhone to compose this post so I apologize for any odd formatting.

This years kidding season has been a bit Trumatic here on the homestead. Our reliable milker Torte lost her babies in a miscarriage early on this winter. Spelty had been crushed in the goat shed collapse in October 2011 snowstorm. If she had been pregnant she lost it or was never able to get pregnant. That’s okay because her hips may not have been able to handle a pregnancy after healing from her crush injuries.

Luna and Ama kidded out twins each and they look awesome. Unfortunately Luna is rejecting her babies and her milk doesn’t seem to be very robust this year. Ama is having to milk or rather nurse all four babies. Ama has a ton of milk so that’s okay for now.

The really terrible news is that we lost Millet and her two babies to some sort of odd failure of her large intestines. She died on the first day of spring.

What all this means is that this year we only have one goat in milk so I’m going to put away the portable milker and we will milk her by hand and have hardly any milk. Hopefully next year we’ll have better success.

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This is an extremely powerful video and Andrew Faust absolutely speaks for me

OCCUPY THE ECONOMY : Andrew Faust – Permaculture – OWS from TerraVisus on Vimeo.

Andrew Faust Permaculture Designer: HomeBiome.com
Costa Boutsikaris Filmmaker: TerraVisus.com

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This October surprise snow storm dump 2 feet of wet clingy snow on the northeast and particularly on us. The
Night of the storm our goat shed collapsed and crushed/trapped one of our goats.

We found her weakly crying and slipping away. We pulled her out from under tons of shed and snow – was pushed down into muck. We rolled her onto a bed sheet and slid/pulled/lifted through 2 feet deep snow many yards and then into our dining room onto blankets. We covered her in blankets as well and fed her molasses water until she rehydrated enough to drink on her own. She began to eat grain and hay. She menaces passing cats who she doesnt like. She can not stand on her own – her back leg is not working, might be dislocated.

We now have to take her to the vet and i hope its a simple matter of joint reduction. Will share photos of that when it happens.

Am also sharing some photos below of a tiny bit of the vast amount of storm damage here. We have no power, no internet so i am having to post by iPhone.

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This is the first post I am writing from my iPhone and I hope that it’s going to be helpful to give more recent snapshots of what’s going on at our homestead.

The kids carved pumpkins today and our chickens helped with the mess.

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I cant tell you how much we enjoyed growing these black spanish radishes! We bought them from the new-old Comstock Ferre, you can see their page here LINK

They were hardy, really tolerant of our fantastically variable weather this year (cold, wet, endless), only a few went to seed.

Here is a youngish one in the soil.

And then we has some really silly fun picking these godzilla radishes. We figure none of these photos of kids-with-gigantic-veggies will ever make the cut to be in a garden seed catalog!

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Can you ID what this is? mostly impacting our oaks (severely) – adjacent non-oak trees much less affected.

I have many theories but none of the oak diseases fit well into our symptoms.

Here are some more photos.

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As you may remember – we milk dairy goats. At the moment we have 9 lamancha dairy goats, 8 in milk. Goat milk is naturally homogenized so it requires an expensive cream separator to get cream. With no cream you can not make butter!

Additionally, the amount of grain and hay and labor that goes into milking these 8 goats (which includes all the work to get them pregnant, help them deliver, etc etc) fails in comparison to the amount of milk we would get from one cow with much much less labor and cost.

Its for this reason that we have been mulling getting a cow for more than 2 years now. Today we finally decided to just do it and buy a cow, who you see below.

She is 15 months old, a full blooded jersey and not very large – which is very good for a family cow. She will be bred next week (by AI) and will do a few beauty pageants with her current owners.

In September we will have her come live with us!

She should deliver her baby sometime in April or May 2012 and then we will be in milk!

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(one of our neighbors down the street)

We had a VERY close call here at Humble Garden.

(NASA satellite image of the track of this tornado through our area)

We were missed being hit by the Massachusetts EF-4 1/2 mile wide tornado by only a 1/2 a mile – living near a climate induced disaster zone REALLLLY brings home climate change in a way thats almost down to the cells of the body.

Before, in some ways, climate change was academic – charts, presentations, news about far away Pakistan or Moscow, Joplin, MO.

But now the battle has been engaged. We chose this area to build a homestead because its NOT the south or tornado ally or midwest etc and that its supposed to be “cooler” and wetter than the intense droughts in the works for much of the US – well – with this tornado – what i knew – that nothing is safe or sure – is something i know for certain. one can dig an earth home – create a sustainable self sufficient eden in their backyard but mother earth can easily simply wipe it clean.

The real work is inside our heads – and the goal is resilience and hope in the face of chaos.

Here are photos from the apocalyptic devastation just down our street.

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