Mud Season

2009-03-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

(photo: A few of the hens enjoying the spring sunshine on the woodpile) In some parts of the world it’s Spring. Here, in northern Vermont, it’s Mud Season, or, as a casual glance at the matted and mangy lawn slowly emerging from the waning snowbanks confirms, it’s Dog-shit Season, or more accurately, given the disproportionate productivity of 2 toy poodles vs. 7 geese and 14 ducks, goose-shit season. Glacial moraines of soggy wood ash on the driveway and walkways, forgotten detritus emerging like bad dreams and hidden crimes, and everywhere, the downside of free-range poultry. Only someone who’s gone through a Vermont winter could take delight in such a prospect. Mud and manure and water running in the ditches and dripping off the eaves, true harbingers of Spring. There’s still at least four cords in the woodshed (put up about ten-and-a-half) so we should be a couple of cords ahead of the game for next fall. Better than money in the bank. After various fits and false starts, two of the geese are getting seriously broody. Flattop (nom de non-plumé, so to speak – ganders glom onto goose’s head and neck feathers when they mate, (the technical term for this behavior is “treading”) and apparently she was one desirable goose) built herself a nest under the eaves of the covered walkway connecting the garage to the house and one of her (anonymous) sisters set up housekeeping in a corner behind the feed barrels. Jane had been collecting the eggs she found randomly deposited and abandoned around the area. (they’ll stay viable for up to two weeks – time to collect a batch for an incubator or, in our case, to slip into the nest when the goose starts setting for real. Flattop’s choice of nest area was less than ideal, given that it was centered exactly under the spot where rain would run off the roof as soon as it became warm enough to rain, rather than snow. So I screwed a protective cap of plywood to the walkway rail and Jane draped an old blanket over it to provide some privacy and protection from the wind. She’s settled into the hay and if all goes well, within about four weeks we may have some goslings to sell. These would be Buff geese, nice big gray and white birds with a reputation for being less aggressive than Toulouse or some other breeds. I keep telling that to #9, the head honcho of the flock who hisses loudly and nips at my heels and pantlegs whenever I walk by.
(left photo: Flattop sitting on her eggs;
right photo: Flattop’s makeshift nesting box under the walkway eaves)

The full moon in the middle of March is called the “Sugar Moon”. Our son-in-law Dan, who is the crew foreman for a fairly large local sugarmaking operation, also keeps a small herd of beef cattle. On the morning after the Sugar Moon, his cow gave birth to a healthy little black heifer calf. Our granddaughter, Olive, was bouncing on the trampoline in the yard between our houses (we keep it shoveled off during the winter) when she noticed a black something moving next to the fence around the cattle’s winter corral. We ran up to investigate and there she was, wobbling on her spindly legs while her mother licked her dry. Citing the date of her birth, Olive named her Maple. Last fall we commuted the sentences of nine of the fifty Peking ducks that we raised for market. The idea was to use them as breeding stock. (Day-old hatchery ducklings are kind of pricey and we thought that maybe this would be a more economical way to build a flock.) So we wintered the ducks with the geese and guinea fowl in a bay of the garage which we converted to a cozy temporary barn. . Unlike ground-dwelling chickens, geese and (even more so) ducks, being water fowl, have fragile legs, not really all that well-adapted to bipedal activity on dry land (hence the waddle in the walk). Our icy sloping driveway was dangerous enough for us to maneuver. For ducks and geese it was much worse. Hence the wood-stove ashes spread liberally about. But, whether due to an interspecies scuffle, or a run-in with a passing vehicle, (Although we live one house down from the dead-end of our dirt road, we’ve had an abnormal amount of vehicular traffic this winter since they have been logging our neighbor’s land and not all of the loggers seemed amenable to slowing or stopping for birds in the roadway.) Whatever the cause, not too long after our national lame duck had finally flown off to the ranch, we had an actual lame duck on our hands. Given the harsh rule of the pecking order, a duck with an apparently broken leg, unable to run or walk, was fair game for all the other ducks, as well as the geese, and guineas. Sir Francis, as we named him, had to be placed in protective custody if he was to have any chance of recovery. To relieve him of the stress of coping with frigid nights, we made him a nest inside the sunspace attached to our dining room. Since he couldn’t ambulate in much more than a circle, he couldn’t wander into the house proper. A couple of weeks later, he had another convalescing duck to keep him company. This duck needed a safe place to re-grow the feathers that had been plucked from his head, neck, and back by the other ducks who for some duckish reason, singled him out for general abuse. Hence, his sobriquet, Rocky, as in the Stallone movie.
(photo: The duck crew having a drink)
Once the days and nights warmed, we moved our sickbay into a protected corner of the woodshed during daylight hours and into a storage room between the garage and walkway for nights. Rocky recovered his plumage and was successfully reunited with his cohort. But Sir Francis wasn’t really progressing. While he could hobble about marginally better, he seemed to be growing increasingly lethargic and unthrifty. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to get better. So I carried him out to next year’s woodpile and tied a string around his neck gently stretching it out across a bolt of firewood and made a quick clean cut with my hand ax. I skinned out the breast meat and then I autopsied the damaged leg. I saw extensive blood clots and fluid and what might have been some dead tissue and found that the drumstick bone (femur) was definitely broken. It looked a lot more like an argument with a pickup truck than with a gaggle of geese. Poor Sir Francis was finally out of his misery. I left his remains at the far edge of our field as a donation to the coyotes. Jane says she really doesn’t like duck, but that probably wasn’t why she gave the meat to Molly. Seared in the skillet and served rare with a honey-mustard sauce, Dan and the kids all agreed it tasted great. You try your best, do what you must, and salvage what you can. A life and a death on the farm.

(photo: Salad greens under growlights in the greenhouse. The cord is to the soil heating cable. (We buried 30 ft of looped roof-edge ice melting cable about 4 in. deep. It works great.)
On a more cheerful note: Jane started a crop of greens in the sunspace/greenhouse.(By way of explanation: a sunspace is a solar-heated living area attached to a house, usually separated by sliding glass doors. During the day, the solar heat helps warm the house and at night or on cloudy days, the doors are closed and the sunspace allowed to cool down to conserve heat in the house proper. An attached greenhouse is a solar heated space dedicated to growing plants and so cannot be allowed to freeze. Both types of spaces benefit from insulated window shades. Because growing plants transpire, greenhouses left open to the house can increase interior moisture to unhealthy levels. This doesn’t mean you can’t keep houseplants in the sunspace. But the two uses aren’t generally compatible, that is, most experts say you can have one but not the other. Our setup doesn’t create excessive moisture during the winter because our wood-heated house is too dry anyway and we only overwinter cactus and a few houseplants during the coldest months. We have a 2x 20 planting bed along one wall of the room where we can grow winter and spring greens and herbs or transplant a cherry tomato or pepper plant from the garden in the fall which will yield fruit until the first of the year. It’s a nice place to sit on a sunny frigid morning in February. Basically the sunroom is an antidote to cabin fever. And the rest of it is convenient for starting garden transplants. This winter I finally got around to rigging up a system of grow lights on pulleys for the seedbeds. (I built the room in 1986 and never quite managed to cross that T and dot that I. ) The growlights have to be close to the seedlings, otherwise they grow up too weak and leggy to survive transplantation. ( PS. If anyone is interested, I could write about the passive heat storage system built into the floor of the greenhouse that has enough thermal mass to keep the house from freezing for at least three days without heat.) We should be eating fresh salad greens is a few weeks and starting our tomato, pepper, and melon plants in mid-April (about 6 weeks before the last expected frost date around these parts).

(photo: A bank of growlights on pulleys suspended over the wood racks that will support our trays of started transplants come mid-April.)
(photo: Growlights over the growing bed with sprouted greens. Inside temp is 70° F, outside is 20. Our sunspace greenhouse wraps around the main house from SE to S to SW. The view thru the window shows the covered walkway between the house mudroom and garage/barn/workshop/root cellar.)
(photo: Dining room looks south into greenhouse. Our poodles like to hang out here on top of the couch.)
(photo: Looking from the dining room into the sunspace area. My breakfast chairs and table will soon make way for another table full of seedlings.)
(photo: A welcome splash of color in the winter. Geraniums that live outside during the summer and some of our cactus collection. – Low-maintenance houseplants.)

Meantime, I’m cordoning off the front yard and flower gardens with a portable poultry fence to keep out the bird posse. As soon as mud season ends and the last of the snow banks are gone and the ground has dried out, we’ll be out there raking away the fossilized dog turds and the road gravel scattered by the snowplow and evening out the distribution of our goose-juice fertilizer. We’re ordering our chickens and turkeys and ducks for this season’s production. The first batch is slated to arrive on April 22. We’ll be raising 100 turkeys this year. The bulk will be standard Broad-breasted Giant Whites, but we’re also trying out some heirloom breeds too such as Narragansett, Standard Bronze, and even some Wild Eastern. We’ve ordered 100 Peking ducks, and 850 or so Cornish X Rock meat chickens. We’re also recruiting more egg layers. We’ve got 50 Red sex-link pullets arriving May 17th and a 100 or so day-old chicks, mostly production Reds, but also some heritage colored egg breeds like Marans and Americanas and Leghorns. We like to keep a few heritage type birds just to help keep the old breeds alive and add a little visual interest to the barnyard. We’re in the market for a good hand-milkable Jersey or Guernsey cow or bred heifer, preferably one that has been de-horned. Eventually we’d like to have two cows. Milk-fed and apple-finished pork is about the tastiest meat you’ll ever eat. Speaking of meat, we decided to weigh Winky and Dinky. To be more precise, to estimate their weights as we certainly don’t have a scale that could handle that job. There’s a formula for estimating the weight of pigs which goes like this: Heart Girth x Heart Girth x Length / 400. The “heart girth is the circumference of the pig measured just behind its front legs, the length is from between the ears to the base of the tail. You adjust the formula by deducting 10 lbs for every 25 lbs over 400 lbs or adding 7 lbs if the dividend is under 150 lbs. When we bought him at the end of January, we were told he weighed about 450 lbs. We reckoned Winky weighed somewhere around 350lbs. Dinky was 74 inches long by 65 around and Winky 64 by 62. The formula predicts he would weigh in at about 630 lbs and she would tip the scale at a svelte 540. That’s a lot of pork sausage and bacon in the making. (photo: Dinky smiles for the camera. Winky isn’t interested in showing off.)

Suicide by Homesteading

Mud Season