A Day in the Life

Posted on January 25, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Another question that came up when I asked our readers to give us their burning questions was what our daily life looked like. They wanted to know just how much work we put into running everything.

Of course our days vary greatly depending on the season, what we have going on, and even the day of the week. But I’ll do a typical weekday and weekend day schedule so you can see what we do. With all the animals we definitely stay on a specific schedule, which helps keep the amount of time needed to a minimum.

Weekday:

  • Get up at 5am
  • Feed dogs and cats
  • Shower (Rachel)
  • Eat breakfast (usually oatmeal) and drink some coffee
  • Get dressed
  • Fix lunch
  • Milk goats and weigh milk
  • Let turkeys and chickens out
  • Leave for work around 6:15am
  • Get home from work around 5pm
  • Check mail
  • Milk goats and weigh milk (when kids are weaned)
  • Check everyone’s feed and water
  • Collect eggs
  • Do some yard work (in the Summer)
  • Fix and eat dinner
  • Feed cats and dogs
  • Shower (Tom)
  • Relax (in the Winter)
  • Go to bed at 9pm

Weekend Day:

  • Sleep in as late as the dogs will allow which is usually 6am
  • Feed cats and dogs
  • Drink coffee
  • Relax until the sun comes up (Winter)
  • Milk goats and weigh milk
  • Check everyone’s feed and water
  • Go to the farmers’ market
  • Usually we either have a consultation, event to attend, friends or family to visit, or project to work on to about 4 or 5pm.
  • Nap time (for Tom if we can finish everything by 3pm)
  • Milk goats and weigh milk
  • Fix and eat dinner
  • Feed cats and dogs
  • Relax until bed time

It doesn’t really take that much time. Milking usually takes 15 minutes tops. We’re usually the most busy on the weekends, but we really enjoy doing this so it’s more of a hobby than a chore. We wouldn’t do it if it was a chore.

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Reader Questions: Goats, Gophers and Bunnies

Posted on September 22, 2011 · 2 Comments

We got some great questions to go over today!

The first is from the Metropolitan Homestead:
I’d like to ask how you got started with milking goats and how much daily work they really need.


Our girls Daisy (front) and Bella (back)

We had been thinking for quite awhile about getting goats but at first we didn’t think we had the space to keep them. We were then introduced to Kitty from Havenscourt Homestead in Oakland, who was raising 4 goats (she has 5 plus 3 kids right now) on her 4,000 sf lot. She gave us a consultation on goats and we quickly realized that they were totally feasible for us. In February of 2010 we got our first two does.

In October we felt it was time to breed them, so we “rented” a buck from one of Tom’s friends who raised the same breed. We kept him at our house for about 40 days to make sure that our girls were pregnant. Bella got pregnant 3 weeks before Daisy, which was nice because it gave us some breathing room between kiddings. Bella kidded in late March and Daisy kidded in early April. For the first two weeks after kidding we let the kids have all the milk. This is not only to get them stronger faster, but also the milk during those first two weeks still has colostrum in it which isn’t particularly appetizing. Some people take the kids away and bottle feed them but because we work full time, this wasn’t feasible.

Before we even bred them, we started working with them on the stanchion- which is a milking stand – to get them used to it and used to us touching their teats and udders. It took some time, but now they are dolls (for the most part) while getting milked.

As for daily work, it depends on how much you want to play with them. Since we still have the kids we only milk once a day, but once they are gone we’ll be milking them twice a day. Milking usually takes about 15 minutes and it needs to be done at 12 hour intervals. Feeding and watering are daily, of course, and we give them dairy pellet twice a day. It’s good to spend a little bit of time observing them each day to make sure everyone is healthy. Other than that, it’s not a huge block of time. As long as you have at least two, they are happy.

Rebekah Clarke asks:
Do you have gopher problems? I lost a lot of plants to gopher problems and I would love to hear solutions people have.
We currently don’t have gophers (knock on wood) but at our previous house they were a concern. Chicken wire with the smaller cells and hardware cloth (wire mesh) are your best defenses. For young trees you want to create a basket that’s twice as wide and deep as the rootball to plant the tree in. For vegetable beds your best bet is raised beds with the chicken wire or hardware cloth between the ground and the bed. Of course, after several years, the wire will need to be replaced because it will rust and won’t be able to protect against the determined little buggers.

Lucy with her kits

Justin Wandro asks:
How long do you keep the baby rabbits in with the mother before moving them out to their own cage. Also do you buy feed for the rabbits or grow your own?
If we’re planning on breeding again we generally start removing them at 6 weeks old. We only remove one at a time (males first starting with the largest) to help our doe dry up her milk slowly so it’s less uncomfortable for her. If we don’t plan to breed right away we’ll only remove the males at 7 weeks old and leave her daughters in with her until they get too big and they need their own space.

We both buy and feed them what we’ve grown. If you want to feed them forage just make sure they get the proper nutrition so they grow up healthy and strong.

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California Herdshare – Illegal?

Posted on August 25, 2011 · 1 Comment

Thank you to Pamina for alerting me to this situation. It’s not so much a reader question but rather an important discussion topic.

Evergreen Acres is the last farm left in San Jose. They are petting farm and goat farm.

Recently the California Department of Food and Agriculture sent a letter to Evergreen Acres stating that they were violating the law by boarding, caring for and milking goats that were boarded at their farm and then giving the milk to the owners of those goats. According to the CDFA, this constituted “unlicensed manufacturing or processing for resale” of raw milk. The strangest part, however, according to the CDFA, it’s perfectly legal for Evergreen Acres to board the goat and to milk it for the owners. It becomes illegal when the owners take the milk home for their personal use. The owners are free to consume it as long as the milk stays on site. If they continue to take the milk home from their privately owned goat Evergreen Acres can face up to $10,000 in fines and up to a year in jail. 


Testing of the milk from the goat in question by a standard plate count test of bacteria scored below 50. California Law allows retail raw milk to score 15,000. 


According to Mike Hulme, who owns Evergreen Acres with his wife Jane Hulme, “There is no injury here; no one has become sick from milk produced at the farm. There have been no complaints from either the goat owners or officials in the City of San Jose. The only conclusion I can draw is that this is a politically motivated action by the district attorney and CDFA to effectively put a small family farm out of business.”  

This could cause a huge problem for a lot of us urban farmers as well as small family farms. People that share private ownership of goats or keep them even on their neighbor’s property face legal ramifications. It practically bars people from taking their own dairy products off of their property for any occasion, whether it’s food for a road trip or to have a picnic.

Fortunately that’s where the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund comes in. On behalf Evergreen Acres and the goat owners, they have filed a lawsuit against Santa Clara County and the CDFA.

The suit, filed July 22 in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, asks for a declaration by the court that Gerbode, Skiwski and Sullivan have the inalienable right to purchase, own, possess and use a goat, that they have the inalienable right to consume the raw milk produced by their goat and a declaration that they have the inalienable right to contract with the Hulmes to board, care for and milk their goats. The suit asks for a permanent injunction against the State of California and Santa Clara County preventing Defendants from commencing or continuing any enforcement action against Plaintiffs “or against anyone else in California who wishes to engage in the conduct engaged in by Plaintiffs.” 


You can read more about this here.

This obviously isn’t about keeping the public safe. It’s about denying citizens the right to choose where their food comes from and from being able to produce their own food.

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Reader Questions – Baking Soda and Vinegar vs. Greywater

Posted on June 23, 2011 · 2 Comments

Once a month I’ll be answering your questions! Ask them in an email (if you want to be anonymous just say so) or just leave a comment – I’ll find them and answer them the best I can.

So here is one I found in our comments that I haven’t had a chance to answer…until now.

From Pamina:
…we are trying to do the bathtub to garden water thing, so have been leary of the baking soda & vinegar shampoo. It seems like that wouldn’t be good for the garden, no? Right now we use the oasis bio compatible soaps, but would love to switch to something more simple. 

I would think baking soda and vinegar would be fine in the garden. Did you ever do that experiment in elementary school with the volcano? You mixed vinegar and baking soda together and it bubbled out like lava. This reaction between vinegar and baking soda  creates CO2 (the bubbles), pure water, and a very dilute solution of sodium acetate. Since you’re already using a diluted amount of both baking soda and vinegar in relation to the amount of water you’re using in the shower the amount of sodium acetate would be negligible.

I did find this information regarding an alternative deicer that utilizes Sodium acetate:

The environmental impacts of Ice Shear™, an alternative highway deicer, have been evaluated using standard laboratory tests; biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) tests, chemical oxygen demand (COD) tests, acute rainbow trout bioassays, and phytotoxicity tests were used. Ice Shear consists of equimolar sodium acetate and sodium formate. The organic matter of the deicer can be readily degraded microbiologically in the natural environment with a slow rate of degradation at lower temperatures but an increased rate at higher temperatures. At elevated temperatures, highway runoffs of the deicer may reduce the level of dissolved oxygen in the receiving waters to cause an adverse impact. However, the apparent activation energy calculated for the BOD rate of Ice Shear is low (8.78 kcal mole−1), indicating that the temperature variation may not significantly influence the biodegradation of the deicer compound. Ice Shear appears relatively harmless to aquatic animals, showing a high 96-h LC50 value (16.1 g/L) derived for rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). Ice Shear causes minimal toxicity to representative roadside vegetation; herbaceous (e.g., sunflowers, beans, and lettuce) and woody (e.g., pine seedlings) plants. Rather, the deicer at low concentrations (less than 2 g/kg soil) seems to work as a fertilizer, promoting the yield of biomass. The test results indicate that Ice Shear poses minimal environmental disturbance in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

So, in my opinion, the baking soda and vinegar should be a-ok for using.

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Filed Under: Gardening, Green Tips, Growing Tips, Pests & Diseases, Reader Questions

Reader Questions – New Feature!

Posted on April 14, 2011 · Leave a Comment

I’m going to start doing reader questions as a formal topic now. Type your question in the Formspring box on the right. Just remember that it has limited characters so you’ll have to keep it somewhat short. So hit me with those questions!

Our first question in our new series:

Do you guys work outside the home at all? I am a new reader so don’t know your background, sorry. Thanks, dixiebelle

Hi Dixiebelle! It’s funny you should ask this because we’ve been getting this question a lot. A LOT. Almost once a week right now. Yes, my husband and I both have full time jobs. Tom works in electrical wholesale – basically sells equipment and parts to electricians. I work in landscape architecture as a project manager. Fortunately we both work in the same corporate park and have the same schedules so we carpool.

Our typical day runs like this:

Get up at 5am (weekends too)

Get ready for work

Go milk the goats

Go to work

Leave work and get home about 4:30pm

Feed, water, and tend the outside critters. Play with the friendly critters.

Do a bit of yardwork – generally not much to do during the week since we do most of what is needed on the weekends.

Harvest something for dinner.

Prepare dinner.

By about 7:30pm we’re relaxing. That is if we don’t have a meeting or event to go to.

Go to bed around 9pm to start it all over again.

And this is how it goes pretty much every day except the weekends. The mornings start out the same but then we have the farmers’ market to get food at and take my stepson to his martial arts class. When we get back it’s usually the big farm chores like planting and building.

Thanks for asking!

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Reader’s Questions – Round 2

Posted on September 13, 2010 · 3 Comments

Got a burning question to ask us? Want to know what to do with all that extra produce or all of those eggs? Want to know more about goats, chickens or rabbits? How about how to get rid of pests in your garden? Are you overwhelmed by the varieties of vegetables and fruits and want our advice on what to choose?

We’d love to hear from you! If you’re shy, just make your question anonymous. No question is ever dumb and I’m sure there are others out there wondering the same thing. If we don’t know the answer we will do the research and find out that answer for you!

So go ahead! Ask away….

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Dogs & Cats – A Question for our Readers

Posted on September 11, 2010 · 6 Comments
Yes, that’s our cat laying on our dog’s head

Just a short post today but it would really help me out.

I’m curious to find out how many urban farmers, new rural farmers and homesteaders, and those thinking about joining the ranks have dogs and/or cats and if you had them before you moved onto other livestock.

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What to do with Chicken Manure

Posted on August 20, 2010 · 8 Comments

I recently got a fantastic question from a friend about chicken manure and what is the best way to use it as fertilizer without causing pollution. A very thoughtful question and since I discussed chickens last week and touched on this issue a little bit I thought I’d expand on it some more and share more options for manure management.

—————————————–
Chickens are manure machines

The balance between manure and fertilizer depends on how many chickens you have and how much garden. You want to make sure manure composts before applying it to plants. Adding chicken waste to a compost bin is an excellent way to get it really hot, but it will take awhile for it to completely compost.

We actually put most of our garden waste (sans toxic plants like rhubarb leaves and tomato plants) and all of our kitchen scraps in our chicken yard. What they don’t eat they compost for us by turning it through scratching. Every couple of weeks we rake everything (plus additional manure from goats and chickens) back into a pile so they can continue to dig around in it. Of course they also add a lot of extra manure as well.

We add what is in that compost pile (manure and everything else) to our vegetable beds when we finish our harvest in the fall and remove old plants. This gives it ample time to continue to compost before planting in the Spring. We will also take the more broken down stuff and put it around our fruit trees in the Winter when most are dormant.

As for the barn area, we use the deep litter method, meaning we have about 6-8″ of hay down. Droppings go into it and just get mixed in and covered by more hay over time. It will slowly compost itself. We only need to clean out the barn once a year. What we remove will go into the pile in the chicken yard to be used the following year. An additional benefit of deep litter is that it provides warmth for the animals in the winter caused by the microbial activity in it.

Another option is to build a chicken tractor which you move around your yard. This helps keep manure from being concentrated in just one spot and allows the chickens to free range without destroying your plants. Their manure is in small amounts and doesn’t need to be composted and is already deposited where you need it. We used to have a tractor, but we have too many chickens now to use it and it can be difficult to herd them into it when it gets large and unwieldy.

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Filed Under: Chickens, Gardening, Growing Tips, Livestock, Reader Questions Tagged With: