The Helpful Gnome Farm

musical sit

2010-10-18T21:11:00.002-04:00

So Jax starts obedience school this week. He's pretty good at 'sit'... we won 3rd place in musical sit at a fundraiser for the animal shelter! The Jax/Chels team even beat the veteran Dia/Rog team.

Brewing

2010-09-26T20:46:00.010-04:00

Roger just finished bottling his first batch of home brewed beer. I don't know alot about it, and Roger has spent many hours reading about it, so here is a very abbreviated, what Chelz understands of the process.

Boil some stuff in a pot. Add some stuff. Boil more.

Pour stuff in bucket. Stick bucket in basement for three days.

Pour stuff from bucket in another bucket. (Bonus points if a dog helps you.)

Pour stuff from second bucket into bottles.

Put caps on bottles.

Store in basement for another week.

Tada! One bucket = five gallons, or 48 bottles.

chicken killer

2010-09-14T14:19:00.005-04:00

We caught the chicken killer. Neighbor Bill has been patrolling our barn, and caught a dog coming out of the barn, next to a newly killed chicken. The dog was harassing other chickens. Bill shot it with a BB gun and it ran off. We waited for it that night, and sure enough, he came back. We called it up to the house and it very a very sweet, gentle, well trained dog. He knew 'sit' and 'shake'! He had a collar, but no tags. He was starved and covered in burrs.

He hung out in our backyard that night, and the next morning animal control came and picked him up. We hope he gets a good home. He will be adopted for sure. Very sweet.

On that note, you can check out my fundraising page for the animal shelter and it's annual walk.
http://www.firstgiving.com/chelsearoodemmick

We also caught a raccoon in a trap in the barn. Bill shot it for us with relish. We really hate raccoons. One of our farming friends told us he could give us instructions on how to butcher a raccoon, but I couldn't bring myself to each such a despicable, mean creature.

PS... We were totally right with our CSI-ing of the crime scene!! Dog it was.

Chickens, dog pool, and hops

2010-09-05T20:28:00.006-04:00

Okay, good news first. We took the dogs to the 'Drool in the Pool', which is when they open the swimming pool up to dogs the day before they drain the pool. Dia actually got in pretty deep! She hates swimming, but we took her thinking Jax may be into it. Well, Jax had a great time but never got wet. Dia was actually coaxed into jumping into the 3 foot end. She can't resist when her mom is in calling her a 'good girl'. She'd run through flames if I was on the other side calling her a 'good girl'.

Yesterday I was woken up by my neighbor calling my phone every 10 minutes. Finally I got up and answered. Turns out, he had a dead chicken in his front yard. There were spots of feathers everywhere, like a path leading from the barn, around the barn, and ending in his front yard. We examined the body. Then we embarked on solving the mystery:

Something had a chicken dinner.

Okay, so the fact that the body was in the front yard makes us wonder if it could have been coyotes. Coyotes do roam our fields, but would they go that close to the road? We're thinking it couldn't have been a raccoon because the head was still attached, and the body was really eaten up. Raccoon's 'signature' is a missing head. The spots of feathers in the yard were about two feet apiece and a few yards apart. Like something caught it, shook it, and it ran a few yards and then caught again. There were no feathers in the barn or in the chicken yard, which means it was caught outside... sometimes (okay, often) the chickens get out of the fenced in area and do whatever they want. After counting them all, we realized we were missing three... the one body, and two others were missing. The rooster, and a fat feather footed chicken.

I took Dia into the field and had her run around in there... she usually finds dead things in the field. She did not find any chicken bodies. This means if the rooster didn't run off, he was carried off. And he's a big rooster.

We're going with 'wild dog'. Although coyote is still possible. Either way, there must have been at least two of them for them to carry off two huge birds.

We've started locking the birds in the barn. They're mighty mad about it, but they'll get over it, and it'll get too cold to free range soon anyway. We're going to install an electric netting fence.

In other news, Roger harvested his hops. They're growing along the trellis in the back yard. He's hoping he got enough to try to make a batch of beer. He's never brewed before, so this will be an experiment.

Also, the dogs love each other. Love. Here's a video of them making out. This never stops.

Mail box accident

2010-08-16T21:08:00.008-04:00

At 7:30am Sunday morning someone woke us up knocking incessantly at the door. Over and over. The dogs were going nuts. We go to the door, Rog in boxers and me in red cat pajama bottoms. There were two deputies at our door to tell us that someone had fallen asleep while driving and hit our mailbox. Really hard. The mailbox and the mail were all over the road. The 4x4 post it was on snapped in half. The woman then corrected to the right, directly in a huge bean field. She drove pretty far into the field too. She was kind enough to call the cops instead of just driving off. She has insurance, so we should hopefully get reimbursed for the new mailbox we had to get.

Then Roger left the mailbox inside while I was shopping and Roger was outside. Jax then ate part of the brand new mailbox and the screwdriver.

In farm news, we harvested the black beans. They're just like regular beans, but you leave them in the pod until they dry. They turn black when they dry. Then you split the pods and pick out the beans.

We also got a pumpkin! It's a bit early, but the vine rotted, so I had to pull it. Not sure what to do with a pumpkin. I've tried making pumpkin bread with real pumpkin before, but it was all stringy.

Jax, the new dog

2010-07-28T18:42:00.001-04:00

He may seem excited about something... but it's just how he is. All the time.

We're back!

2010-07-13T20:53:00.003-04:00

We're back from vacation and our garden has exploded! Notice in the pics below that the tomato plant is taller than Roger.

The yellow squash in the picture is actually yellow zucchini. We are drowning in zucchini. The people who watched our chickens while we were gone took five, and we still have lots when we came back. I tried a new recipe for zucchini, that is basically fried zucchini cakes. It was really good. Here's the recipe:

1 large grated zucchini
1 cup bread crumbs
half cup Parmesan cheese
1 egg
chopped garlic
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp pepper
form into patties and fry in olive oil

We had lots of very large turnips. Unfortunately, we didn't know that turnips like cold weather. The turnips are very very bitter. Any advice for super bitter turnips is welcome.

Blue eggs and strawberries

2010-06-28T20:40:00.004-04:00

Blue egg! We're getting about 4 eggs a day now. This is our first blue egg! Hopefully more will come quickly!

Our strawberry plants are putting out huge amounts of runners! I dug up a bunch and potted them. I had no idea how wild these would go. The runners are these long tentacles that produce other baby plants. Some of the runners made babies that made runners and other babies. One of the pics below is a double runner... a baby making a baby. The other pic is my giant bowl of runners. We'll try to keep the plants alive until the spring and replant them in another bed.

And lastly, just for fun, a couple of pics of Roger and I at the 'Taste of Bloomington' is which a food festival here in town. All the restaurants in town set up booths and sell $2 dishes. So you can go to like, 5 booths over the course of the evening and taste a bunch of food. We ate a lot.

New poll to the right ---->

2010-06-25T10:54:00.002-04:00

The risk of pressure canning... Please comment below. Have you ever used one? Weights or gauge? Have you ever had something blow up? Have any great recipes to share? Pros and cons of canning vs. freezing?

storms

2010-06-18T16:45:00.001-04:00

Huge storms blew through last weekend. We had a couple tornadoes in the area. I went outside to watch it blow in, and saw the rotating cloud and ran back inside to get the camera.

strawberries

2010-06-13T21:12:00.004-04:00

We planted a large strawberry patch early spring and it has begin to give us strawberries! They are so so good. The plants are sending out tons of 'runners', which are thin vines that make new plants. We're going to pot the new baby plants after their roots get established so we can double our patch. If we had thought this through, we would have just started with a much large patch and spaced the plants really far apart. But we didn't, so there's a bit more work involved. Also: greens, spinach, and romaine lettuce.

Foster Dog Dash has gone back to the shelter. He was way too much of a puppy for us. I took him to the dog park every day after work and he ran and swam and tired out every other dog at the park and still managed to come back to the house and go wild. Dia was so fed up. They did manage to cuddle for about two seconds, so I snapped a picture. I hope Dash gets a home with a jogger or something.

Foster Dog Dash

2010-05-29T22:37:00.004-04:00

New foster dog... a few days ago I got an email from the shelter that said they had taken in 25 cats in 2.5 hours last Monday and the rest of the week wasn't much better... they were saying if they couldn't get animals moved out they were going to have to start euthanizing just for space reasons. So of course I go in and get a dog... Foster Dog Dash.

Dash is 5 months old and a cattle dog / russel terrier mix. He's a wild ball of energy. He's been at the shelter for 2 of his 5 months, and they were worried he was missing his critical socialization window.

He's not completely house trained. He bothers the cats. He has WICKED gas. It's okay, we like him. Hopefully he'll get a home soon. With someone who jogs or something, because he will not stop running through the house.

odds and ends

2010-05-19T21:08:00.007-04:00

Apologies for not posting recently. I'll try to catch you up to speed.

First, all the plants are out. Here are small tomato plants and a garlic plant. The garlic is planted in the fall and roots through the winter and continues to grow through mid summer. So these guys have a few months left to go. But it is nice to start the season with something already in the ground! As far as tomatoes go, we have several varieties... two yellow cherries, a roma, a 'big pink', something striped, and a purple I think. I actually can't really remember, when I bought them I didn't label them, so we'll just be surprised!

Also, in case you were interested, this is how we started seeds inside. Roger has a huge setup of florescent bulbs (industrial plant growing kind) that we lower over the plants and slowly raise as the plants grow. If the bulbs are too far from the seeds when they start they will bolt and get really thin and fall over.

Also, an update on our favorite neighbor, Neighbor Bill. Neighbor Bill is so awesome. He watches our place like a hawk and tells us everything that happened while we were gone. 'A chicken hawk was eyeing your chickens', 'I saw a woodchuck in your field', 'someone turned around in your driveway'... He invited us to go camping with him and his buddy... they go fishing a lot, and I guess they go to this place that's an hour away and fish all day and then 'camp'. And when he says 'camp', it turns out it means make dinner over a fire, then sleep in the car. We think it will be fun and we're going to try to go with them. We will be using a tent. Here is Neighbor Bill and his buddy grilling pork chops:

Also, I cut my hair. I donated it to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program
Beautiful Lengths I have a sister who is a cancer survivor, and it was important to me that my hair go to a place that makes wigs for adult women. Here is a kind-of picture of my new hair, plus me harvesting rhubarb. Yes, that is a rhubarb plant. The huge kind. In this picture it looks kind of boyish, but I think it works for me.

And lastly, here is a picture of my dear friend and coworker Sarah, holding a chicken for the first time.

Max catches a mole

2010-05-02T19:28:00.003-04:00

Foster Dog Max really likes to dig and smell things. He likes to smell things and then 'point' at the source of the smell. Today he would not leave this one spot he was pointing at, and then suddenly shoved his face into the ground AND CAME OUT WITH A MOLE.

In other less interesting news, our rhubarb plants are finished growing. We have a variety of rhubarb that is mostly green. This is normal, it doesn't get totally red when it's ripe. I made a pie, and it was amazing. Pie recipe:

1 and 1/3 cup sugar
6 tablespoons flour
4 cubs chopped rhubarb

mix sugar and flour, put a heap on the bottom of a 9 in pie crust, then heap rhubarb, then cover with the rest of the sugar mix. Put a pie crust over the top. Bake at 450 for 10 minutes, then 350 at 45 minutes. We put a pizza pan on the bottom rack to catches spilling juices.

foster dog

2010-04-24T18:16:00.003-04:00

We have a foster dog! His name is Max. They think he's two years old and some kind of hound mix. To us, he doesn't really look like a hound but a Beagle mix, but he will howl, so we're deferring that he probably has some hound. He was very scared when I met him at the shelter, and I had to lift and shove him into the car to get him home. But he jumped out of the car, saw Dia, and ran for her. They've been Best Friends ever since.

Max is leaving us May 4th to catch a bus to New England to go to a shelter up there. Apparently, they have shortages in shelters in New England, and there is a program that takes bus fulls of dogs from Indiana up there. The woman who runs the foster program says that the shelters up there hand pick the dogs they want from the Indiana shelters and they are often adopted before they even get there.

Spring has Sprung

2010-04-20T20:46:00.004-04:00

We had our first day at the market! We sold luffa sponges, purple jalapeno starts, dried herbs, and chili pepper strings.

Chickens:

We planted two types of peas, spinach, lettuce, greens, and strawberries. We also planted two very small pawpaw trees. For those of you not from the midwest, Pawpaw trees are about 10 feet tall when grown, skinny, and produce fruit that looks like a small mango and tastes like a mango/banana. They are very good. This plant is only a year old, so they're small. It'll be a few years before we get some pawpaws.

A strawberry plant:

Killing things

2010-04-15T09:59:00.003-04:00

A few days ago neighbor Bill killed a woodchuck for me over my lunch hour that we had trapped. I was telling this story to a coworker, who was judging me for killing such a big, furry creature. Coupled with the 'inability-to-kill-baby-mole' story, this brings up the question; at what point do we kill something on the farm?

Well, what we do is weigh how much damage the creature is doing and multiply that by what the creature is damaging (venue), subtracting a few points for cuteness.

For venues the creature is damaging, in ascending order of importance is:

yard < garden < barn < chickens

So if a mole is ripping the hell out of the yard, we have big damage, less important venue. If a possum bites a chicken but doesn't kill it, we have small damage but most important venue. In conclusion, we would attempt to drive the moles out of the yard through humane solutions, and shoot the possum.

When we first started trapping the woodchucks, we attempted to relocate them. However, the barn is freakin' GROWING woodchucks like it's a petri dish. We trapped seven woodchucks last year and we're having massive tunneling already in April. So we will continue to relocate them when it's convenient, but lets be honest, I'm not going to drive every woodchuck in Monroe County out to a farm. The huge tunneling is a problem because it compromises the foundation of the barn and also creates huge entries into the barn for raccoons and other chicken eating predators. So we have big venue damage to both barn and chickens. Even with the points they get for being cute, it's just impossible to treat them like pets when there's an ARMY of them.

So ends the explanation of how we determine what gets dumped in the back field for coyotes and what gets to live another day to annoy the crap out of us.

Moles

2010-04-11T21:29:00.004-04:00

We have mole problems. They tear up our yard, and nothing we do will get rid of them.

Today, while moving some straw bales by the house, we discovered a nest of baby moles.

We didn't have the heart to kill them. We put the bale back over the nest.

We've been doing some hiking at a state forest nearby.

Mexico

2010-03-28T20:29:00.003-04:00

A thousand apologies for not updating in so long... I've been in Mexico with a group of students from the college I work at. We took 12 students to a small town called Calnali, 7 hours by bus from Mexico City. It's up in the mountains. The students pour concrete floors and put up walls in a shanty town, and then they go to an indigenous village and give out shoes.

They shanty town is an acre of land that was donated by the government for a group of 10 homeless families to live on. The shacks are one room boxes with dirt floors and plastic wrapped around the sides to make walls. The students mixed the concrete by taking sand, gravel, a giant bag of concrete mix, and buckets of water from the river. They mix each batch by hand by turning the ingredients with shovels. The few walls they built were either cement block (if they were lucky) or cardboard painted with tar.

Before we left we did a shoe drive around town here in Bloomington, and collected about 400 pairs of shoes, mostly childrens. We were only able to take about 300, due to space. Each student checked a huge bag with nothing but shoes. At the village we gave away every pair of shoes in 2 hours. Many of the children didn't have shoes, and many of them that had shoes were wearing something that was in horrendous shape and not near the right size.

That's the synopsis. Later I'll post my report to the college.

chickens out to barn

2010-03-07T21:04:00.001-05:00

The chickens got moved to a stall in the barn:

2010-03-02T20:22:00.001-05:00

New Poll! -------->

The bathroom is finished!

2010-02-27T18:30:00.004-05:00

Remember this mess?

It is finished and it looks great! We have new paint, new lights, new towel racks, new light covers, new towels and mats...

New camera!

2010-02-21T22:30:00.003-05:00

We have a new camera! The old one broke... it was about 5 years old, so I guess it was time. The new one is very much like the old one, but it has some newer, cool features. Our old camera was 5 mega pixels, which was good for it's time, but this one has 12 and is about standard for the times now. It also has some anti-blurring stuff and other fun things to play with. Good price too... $100. The last one was $250. Reminds me of the time I bought Roger a 1 gig flash drive for $70 at a black Friday sale and now they're $10.

Check out the video at the end... I think it's clearer than the old ones.

Ugly chicks

2010-02-20T15:59:00.002-05:00

Had to borrow a camera because ours appears to not be working... and this camera doesn't have sound, so here's a video sans sound. I'm trying to convey the awkward ugly phase of chick fuzz to adult feathers.

Weekend #2 of bathroom renovating...

2010-02-14T17:20:00.005-05:00

We painted the bathroom red. The giant patch you see me putting on the wall was the hole from the toilet paper role. We got new fixtures, and the new toilet paper role holders are much smaller than the giant inwall ones of the 70s.

We got a new light fixture over the sink:

We got new towel racks:

And lastly, we're working on getting a new fan/light combo. As I type this, Roger is up in the attic trying to rip out the fan unit that's been in there since the house was built. I really don't think this is going to be worth it, but Roger hates the old light with a fiery passion, so he's willing to invest in getting it done. It is amusing when Dia runs around barking at the ceiling.