Rachel's Tiny Farm

Seed swap perils

2011-10-31T21:54:00.001-07:00

I host and attend a variety of seed/plant swaps during the year. It's a great way to share seed, learn things and meet people. I just attended a great swap hosted by Phoenix region people from Dave's Garden (an online gardening forum). I brought tons of seeds (because as you all know by now, I'm a seed hoarder) but most of what was at the swap was plants. I don't mean a giant pile of aloe vera pups and a few spindly leftovers from experiments that didn't quite work out. These were beautiful, top-notch plants people were sharing. I came home with an amaryllis, an 18" lime basil plant, two big tomato plants (it's 90˚ here, we're good to grow tomatoes for awhile yet), rain lily bulbs, a bulb of heirloom garlic, broccoli starts, some uncommon hot pepper seeds, and a few small pots.

At the fall seed swap I hosted one of the things I brought home were some kale seeds that a woman had saved from her garden. For some reason, amongst my hundreds of varieties of seed, I never seem to have any kale. I was pretty stoked. I got everything planted and that kale shot up so fast it seemed like it was out of the ground the moment it got wet. Pretty unusual in my experience with kale. Here's a picture of the kale bed I shot today:

What's that you say observant reader? That's not kale? You are correct. That is a bed full of mustard. Which grows like a weed out here. In fact wild mustard is one of our rampant spring 'weeds'. The woman who donated the saved seed, inadvertently saved mustard-- one of two crops (turnips being the other) that have been retired from Rachel's Tiny Farm due to household-wide disdain for eating them.

Now this is obviously not a big deal, I'll just take out entire plants to eat instead of only the outside leaves and we'll get through it quickly enough and replant with kale. If the worst thing that happens to you from going to a seed swap is a bed full of unwanted mustard, what have you got to lose? Seed swaps are a great thing to have in a community... and may I recommend the book Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth for the generous seed savers amongst you. ;)

Farm to trash.

2011-10-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

This story has a moderately happy ending, but is an excellent illustrator of insane regulation being applied to the wrong people. Cut fresh vegetables are a biohazard, but the little lathed carrots soaked in chlorine, stuffed in plastic bags and shipped hundreds of miles are not a problem.
A link to the story reproduced below is HERE.

Farm-to-Fork Dinner Fiasco
By Laura Bledsoe | October 24, 2011

When an over-zealous regulator shows up at a farm dinner demanding that food be destroyed as hungry guests await, who do you call? Here's Laura's account written as a letter to her guests who had come to Quail Hollow Farm expecting a meal of foods harvested from local small family farms.

This incident shows the value of the 24/7 legal hotline for farmers like Laura who need help...even on a Friday night! A member benefit like the hotline is available thanks to the financial support of the many FTCLDF members and donors.

Dearest Guests, (You have all become dear to us!)

What an evening we had this last Friday night! It had all the makings of a really great novel: drama, suspense, anticipation, crisis, heroic efforts, villains and victors, resolution and a happy ending.

The evening was everything I had dreamed and hoped it would be. The weather was perfect, the farm was filled with friends and guests roaming around talking about organic, sustainable farming practices. Our young interns were teaching and sharing their passion for farming and their role in it. (A high hope for our future!) The pig didn’t get loose.

Our guests were excited to spend an evening together. The food was prepared exquisitely. The long dinner table, under the direction of dear friends, was absolutely stunningly beautiful. The music was superb. The stars were bright and life was really good.

And then, …

for a few moments, it felt like the rug was pulled out from underneath us and my wonderful world came crashing down. As guests were mingling, finishing tours of the farm, and while the first course of the meal was being prepared and ready to be sent out, a Southern Nevada Health District employee came for an inspection.

Because this was a gathering of people invited to our farm for dinner, I had no idea that the Health Department would become involved. I received a phone call from them two days before the event informing me that because this was a “public event” (I would like to know what is the definition of “public” and “private”) we would be required to apply for a “special use permit”.

If we did not do so immediately, we would be charged a ridiculous fine.

Stunned, we immediately complied.

We were in the middle of our harvest day for our CSA shares, a very busy time for us, but Monte immediately left to comply with the demand and filled out the required paper work and paid for the fee. (Did I mention that we live in Overton, nowhere near a Health Department office?) Paper work now in order, he was informed that we would not actually be given the permit until an inspector came to check it all out.

She came literally while our guests were arriving!

In order to overcome any trouble with the Health Department of cooking on the premises, most of the food was prepared in a certified kitchen in Las Vegas; and to further remove any doubt, we rented a certified kitchen trailer to be here on the farm for the preparation of the meals. The inspector, Mary Oaks, clearly not the one in charge of the inspection as she was constantly on the phone with her superior Susan somebody who was calling all the shots from who knows where.

Susan deemed our food unfit for consumption and demanded that we call off the event because:

1. Some of the prepared food packages did not have labels on them. (The code actually allows for this if it is to be consumed within 72 hours.)

2. Some of the meat was not USDA certified. (Did I mention that this was a farm to fork meal?)

3. Some of the food that was prepared in advance was not up to temperature at the time of inspection. (It was being prepared to be brought to proper temperature for serving when the inspection occurred.)

4. Even the vegetables prepared in advance had to be thrown out because they were cut and were then considered a “bio-hazard”.

5. We did not have receipts for our food. (Reminder! This food came from farms not from the supermarket! I have talked with several chefs who have said that in all their years cooking they have never been asked for receipts.)

At this time Monte, trying to reason with Susan to find a possible solution for the problem, suggested turning this event from a “public” event to a “private” event by allowing the guests to become part of our farm club, thus eliminating any jurisdiction or responsibility on their part. This idea infuriated Susan and threatened that if we did not comply the police would be called and personally escort our guests off the property. This is not the vision of the evening we had in mind! So regretfully, again we complied.

The only way to keep our guests on the property was to destroy the food.

I can’t tell you how sick to my stomach I was watching that first dish of Mint Lamb Meatballs hit the bottom of the unsanitized trash can.

Here we were with guests who had paid in advance and had come from long distances away anticipating a wonderful dining experience, waiting for dinner while we were behind the kitchen curtain throwing it away! I know of the hours and labor that went into the preparation of that food.

We asked the inspector if we could save the food for a private family event that we were having the next day. (A personal family choice to use our own food.) We were denied and she was insulted that we would even consider endangering our families health. I assured her that I had complete faith and trust in Giovanni our chef and the food that was prepared, (obviously, or I wouldn’t be wanting to serve it to our guests).

I then asked if we couldn’t feed the food to our “public guests” or even to our private family, then at least let us feed it to our pigs. (I think it should be a criminal action to waste any resource of the land. Being dedicated to our organic farm, we are forever looking for good inputs into our compost and soil and good food that can be fed to our animals. The animals and compost pile always get our left over garden surplus and food. We truly are trying to be as sustainable as possible.)

Again, a call to Susan and another negative response.

Okay, so let me get this right.

So the food that was raised here on our farm and selected and gathered from familiar local sources, cooked and prepared with skill and love was even unfit to feed to my pigs!?!

Who gave them the right to tell me what I feed my animals?

Not only were we denied the use of the food for any purpose, to ensure that it truly was unfit for feed of any kind we were again threatened with police action if we did not only throw the food in the trash, but then to add insult to injury, we were ordered to pour bleach on it.

Now the food is also unfit for compost as I would be negligent to allow any little critters to nibble on it while it was composting and ingest that bleach resulting in a horrible death. Literally hundreds of pounds of food was good for nothing but adding to our ever increasing land fill!

At some point in all of this turmoil Monte reminded me that I had the emergency phone number for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF) on our refrigerator. I put it there never really believing that I would ever have to use it. We became members of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund several years ago as a protection for us, but mostly to add support to other farmers battling against the oppressive legal actions taken against the small farmers trying to produce good wholesome food without government intrusion.

The local, sustainable food battle is being waged all across America! May I mention that not one battle has been brought on because of any illness to the patrons of these farms! The battles are started by government officials swooping down on farms and farmers like SWAT teams confiscating not only the wholesome food items produced but even their farm equipment! Some of them actually wearing HAZMAT suits as if they were walking into a nuclear meltdown! I have personally listened to some of their heart wrenching stories and have continued to follow them through the FTCLDF’s updates.

Well, I made the call, told my story and within a short period of time received a phone call back from the FTCLDF’s General Counsel, Gary Cox. When told the story, he simply suggested that we apply our fundamental constitutional right to be protected against “unlawful search and seizure.” I simply had to ask Mary two questions. “Do you have a search warrant?” “Do you have an arrest warrant?”

With the answers being “No”, I politely and very simply asked her to leave our property. As simple as that! She had no alternative, no higher power, no choice whatsoever but to now comply with my desire. She left in a huff making a scene shouting that she was calling the police. She left no paperwork, no Cease and Desist order, no record of any kind that implicated us for one thing, (we had complied to all their orders) only empty threats and a couple of trash cans full of defiled food. I will get back to “the inspector” and her threats shortly. Let’s get to where it really gets good.

While I am on the verge of a literal breakdown, Monte and Gio get creative. All right, we have just thrown all of this food away, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, what CAN we do? Well, we have a vegetable farm and we do have fresh vegetables. (By the way, we were denied even using our fresh vegetables until I informed our inspector that I do have a Producers Certificate from the Nevada Department of Agriculture allowing us to sell our vegetables and other farm products at the Farmers Market. Much of our produce has gone to some of the very finest restaurants in Las Vegas and St. George.)

The wind taken out of the inspector's sails, Gio and his crew got cookin’. It just so happened that we had a cooled trailer full of vegetables ready to be taken to market the following day. Monte hooked on to the trailer and backed it up right next to the kitchen. Our interns who were there to greet and serve now got to work with lamp oil and began harvesting anew. Knives were chopping, pots of pasta and rice from our food storage were steaming, our bonfire was now turned into a grill and literal miracles were happening before our eyes!

In the meantime, Monte and I had to break the news to our guests. Rather than go into the details here, you can see the video footage on Mark Bowers and Kiki Kalor’s (our friends and guests) website at: http://www.reallyvegasphoto.com/Events/CSA-Farm-Government-Inspection/19707296_v2zFML#1546717636_dJJDZjw

We explained the situation, offered anyone interested a full refund, and told them that if they chose to stay their dinner was now literally being prepared fresh, as just now being harvested. The reaction of our guests was the most sobering and inspirational experience of the evening.

In an instant we were bonded together.

They were, of course, out-raged at the lack of choice they were given in their meal.

Out-raged at the arrogance of coming to a farm dinner and being required to use only USDA (government inspected) meats.

Outraged at the heavy handedness of the Health Department into their lives.

Then there was the most tremendous outpouring of love and support.

One of our guests, Marty Keach, informed us that he was an attorney and as appalled as everyone else offered his support and counsel if need be, even if it be to the Supreme Court. He was a great comfort in a tense time.

With their approval, Giovanni and crew got cooking and the evening then truly began. The atmosphere turned from tense and angry to loving and supportive. As soon as I heard my brother Steve sit down and begin strumming his guitar, I knew something special was happening. Paid guests volunteered their services. Chef Shawn Wallace, a guest, joined Gio and his team his knife flying through the eggplant and squash. Wendy and Thierry Pressyler and so many that I am not even aware of, were helping to grill and transport dishes. Jason and Chrissy Doolen offered to run quick errands. Jeanne Frost, a server for the Wynn hotel, didn’t take a seat and began serving her fellow guests.

Before long we were seated at the beautiful table and the most incredible dishes began coming forth. It was literally “loaves and fishes” appearing before our very eyes! We broke bread together, we laughed, we talked, we shared stories, we came together in the most marvelous way.

Now this is what I had dreamed, only more marvelous than I could have ever imagined! The sky being bright with glittering stars, we had the telescopes out and invited any guests who desired to look into our starry heaven. While we were looking into the heavens, heaven was looking down upon us! I can’t tell you the number of times I have felt the hand of providence helping us in the work of this farm.

As hard and demanding as this work is, I KNOW that this is what we are meant to do.

I KNOW that it is imperative that we stand up for our food choices.

I KNOW that local, organic, sustainable food produced by ourselves or by small family, local farms is indispensible to the health and well-being of our families and our communities now and in the future! If this work were not so vitally important, the “evil forces” would not be working so hard to pull it down.

We were victorious, we will be victorious, we must be! Our grandchildren’s future is at stake!

Back to the inspector. She did call the police. You must remember that we live in a small town. We know these officers. They responded to the call dutifully but were desperately trying to figure out why they had been called. Never in all of their experience had they ever received a call like this.

Mary, the inspector, demanded that they give us a citation. The officer in charge said that she was to give us the citation, she responded that no, they were to give us the citation, which they then asked her for what violation. Even with the help of her superior on the phone she could not give them a reason. They asked her to leave which she did. The police were very kind and apologetic for the intrusion. All of this was done without fanfare and out of sight of our guests. The police officers are commended for their professionalism!

Now that we have come to the last chapter of our novel, I realize that it ends with a cliff-hanger. As happy as the ending was, it isn’t “happily ever after” yet. This will remain to be seen in the ensuing days, weeks and even years ahead.

Tom Collins, our County Commissioner, furious by the events that took place, having formerly been a board member for the Southern Nevada Health District is putting together a meeting with himself, the current board members and ourselves to make sense of all this mess.

As so many of you have related verbally and through emails your desire to help and be involved, we will keep you informed as events take place. I feel that we have been compelled to truly become active participants in the ongoing battle over our food choices. This is just one small incident that brings to our awareness how fragile our freedoms are. We are now ready to join the fight!

We would encourage all of you who can to contribute and to become a member of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. They are not only fighting for the farmers, they are fighting for the consumers to have the right to choose. You can find them at farmtoconsumer.org

As I close, I am reminded of the passage written so forcefully by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

The same battle continues. I pray the result of the battle will be the same, that we have been “endowed by our Creator with … life and liberty”.

We love you all, and thank you with all our souls for your continued love and support! We will stay in touch.

With warmest wishes for you and your families,

Monte and Laura Bledsoe
Written from Quail Hollow Farm
October 24, 2011
quailhollowfarmcsa.com
Email Laura at quailhollowfarm@mvdsl.com

Summer break is over!

2011-09-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

There just isn't much to blog about for me from June through the Equinox. All of the blogs will sound the same-- "Gee, it sure is hot here... 30 days in a row over 110˚... lots of dust, no rain, still hot.. etc" But now that the weather has cooled enough to go outside in the mornings and evenings and my annual desire to give up this crazy farming stuff has passed, I'm back. :)

A recap of recent events:
Fall planting is getting started. I've put in lots of lettuces, carrots, beets, herbs, peas, parsnips and flowers with more to get planted in mid-October. I'm really going to focus on keeping the gardens well-mulched as a step to help improve soil and plant quality for the long haul.

A few of the people that came to the seed swap

I hosted a seed swap for the Valley Permaculture Alliance (as well as my monthly "Raising Chickens" classes for them and other organizations). I love seed swaps. They are a dream for someone with a seed habit as serious as my own, but it's also great to share with brand new gardeners and watch them get excited when they find out what all they can grow.

In neighborhood news: For those of you that read the post a few months back about the people in my neighborhood, you may be interested to know that the mosquito has added to his impressive bicycle fleet and now has a very homemade bmx-ish bicycle built for two. No more hauling the wife around on the modified wheelbarrow attached to the back of his (sort-of) regular bike. Though the one time I've seen him on it he was alone. We also have a new addition whom I'll call the operatic jingleman. He scoots around the neighborhood in a motorized wheelchair on trash pick-up day and grabs things (recycleables maybe?) out of the trash cans with one of those claw-on-a-stick things, all the while belting out what seem like old commercial jingles or tv theme songs. As hard as it may be to believe, I don't think he's crazy, he seems more like he's just out having a good time and thrilled about autumn.

Sour oranges and Marmalade

2011-06-07T17:50:00.001-07:00

We have a giant sour orange tree in our yard, which most people consider a great big waste of space. However when you consider that it's very similar in many ways to a lemon (and can easily replace them in most recipes), the tree starts looking a little more valuable. When you realize you can make a margarita out of those things, they become infinitely more valuable.

My basic recipe for the Southwest Sour Orange Margarita (only a little less good than the legit lime kind):
Two shots sour orange juice
One shot of good tequila
Half shot water
Big squirt of agave nectar
A few ice cubes.

Shake. I leave the ice cubes in. Drink. You can also add a splash of grenadine which I think is extra tasty, but at some point it stops becoming a margarita and turns into some weird Red Lobster "hurricane splash" type drink.

Earlier this year I made marmalade with some of the sour oranges. I always remember that making marmalade can be a frustrating process as getting it to set without adding pectin can be a pain, however I often forget that there is a soul-crushing amount of sugar in there. This year I left all of the oranges soaking in water for a day, that seemed to help as I got a good set. Recipes abound, I won't include the one I used because I'm still not 100% happy with it, maybe next year I'll add ginger, cardamom, vanilla or something else to give the taste more depth. Any recommendations?

I think I'm the bird lady

2011-05-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Because I teach a lot of backyard fowl classes around here (and wrote a little pocket guide about raising chickens) I get a lot of emails from people asking for help with their birds. I think the birds in the neighborhood have gotten word of that over the years as well as they seem to show up here when they need a little help too. Here are some photos of a few of the birds I've helped/raised. (Please excuse the bad hair days, birds seem to show up when you look least presentable)

Our favorite wild bird of all time, Jasper. We raised him/her from about day 2. Here Jasper's trying to find any remaining seeds that might be stuck on my fingers...

This is Jasper with some newly hatched (unwild) Khaki Campbell ducklings

This was from bring your wild bird to work day. Long time readers may recognize this photo. As Jasper grew up we let him/her fly around and return when he felt like it. I thought he had left for good one morning and was quite sad, until I went to work in my backyard studio and Jasper had flown in through an open door and was there waiting for me.

A little woodpecker

The woodpecker thought my messy hair might be a good place to look for bugs!

My hands are very small, and this hummingbird makes them look like man hands

It's that time of year again, so I'm keeping an eye out for little birds. So far it's just been a few sparrows I've had to help (begrudgingly, as they are a bit of a pest around here). Mockingbirds, my favorite, should be hatching right about now!

Inspiration at the Permaculture Design Course

2011-04-26T14:22:00.001-07:00

First off, the pair of mallards came back for a visit (read: they came back for more mulberries) How exciting!

Many of you local readers know me as the chicken lady, as I'm the person who has been teaching the majority of classes on raising backyard chickens in the Phoenix area for the past several years. For those that don't know, I've been lucky enough to teach the "regular" chicken classes for the Valley Permaculture Alliance (formerly known as the Phoenix Permaculture Guild) and also the animal part of the Permaculture Design Course. It's always a blast to teach people who are so interested in becoming active participants in a positive and more complete relationship with their environment. This year I had the privilege of teaching at the VPA's newest version of the Permaculture Design Course being headed by Toby Hemenway (author of Gaia's Garden), that felt like kind of a big deal. I followed Toby and after my presentation was an amazing talk about seed saving by Bill McDorman, formerly of Seeds Trust, now the Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson. Also teaching, though not on the day I taught, was Brad Lancaster (of water harvesting fame). All of these people are accomplished and well-respected in this field, and I realized that they all live in Arizona. With all of the crazy press AZ gets over our often idiotic state government amongst other things, it's really inspiring that we have such vibrant permaculture, sustainability and service-oriented communities. I won't bore you with long lists of local groups and their accomplishments, but the list is long and the membership in these communities is in the tens of thousands. It makes me want to try even harder to learn, experiment and share more with my community. Maybe someday the headlines about Crazy AZ will take a backseat to the eco/forward-thinking powerhouse we could become? We have a little ways to go to catch up to parts of the Pacific Northwest for example... but the solar cooking's better out here. ;)

Visitors!

2011-04-18T21:00:00.001-07:00

Over the years I have made a lot of bird friends. I don't mean people who also like birds, I mean birds. Most of them are ones that I've saved but every once in awhile a bird shows up and decides to spend 15 minutes or an hour with me and these are some of my favorite memories.

Last night I was picking mulberries from the tree over our driveway (I know, not the greatest place for a tree that makes a HUGE mess for 3 weeks a year, but that's where the birds planted it.) and my husband saw these guys fly our way...

Introducing Cowboy and Kickass

They hung around in the street for a few minutes and then wandered towards us. It turns out mallards like mulberries. I fed them berry after berry, 15 minutes or more later they followed me up the driveway and into the backyard. I didn't want them to get sick from eating too many berries so I switched to sprouted bread. They wandered around our backyard for a long time and we just sat there and watched until finally it was getting pretty dark (way too dark for photos) and they both stood up as tall as they could like little antennas and flew off together. It made my week.

New Blog-- The Integrated Tiny House

2011-04-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

This is a new blog about a project I'm hoping to embark on. I know there are currently people building very sustainable "normal-sized" houses, there is a growing awareness of permaculture and a small (no pun intended) tiny house movement, I'd like to combine all three and build:

The Integrated Tiny House

I'll need to do a little fundraising to get the project off the ground, but once it gets a little momentum I believe I have all of the resources to accomplish a proof-of-concept house. This would not just be intended to be a one-shot house for one family to live in, but would also serve as a teaching institution about the different processes involved in the structure and surrounding landscape.

These are the people in my neighborhood

2011-02-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

I've been working on converting the front yard to ebdibles for a couple of years, it's a long process-- getting rid of bermuda grass, palm trees, planting fruit trees rearranging the dirt to create swales and lowered garden beds and so on. I hope to have it all finished by the end of this year, but spending a lot of time in the front yard has made me grateful to be an urban gardener (urban homesteader if you will). I see lots of people pretty regularly while I'm out there working, my close-by neighbors of course, and those are varied, kind and interesting people for sure, but today I'd like to talk about the other folks that pass by. So here are some brief profiles:

Backwards man: One of my favorites, he goes around the neighborhood several times a day in his wheelchair, backwards. We have brief conversations; when he sees me out working, he stops at my house to light his cigarette. Apparently he used to garden when he lived in San Diego. For awhile he got a motorized wheelchair and went forward, but he's recently returned to going backwards in a regular wheelchair. I asked him what happened to the electric chair (I'm sure this term isn't ideal) he replied, "It got a flat tire man, I'm totally bummed out!"

Murphy, the mayor of 14th St: I learned about the "mayor" part from a guy that lives a few streets away (on 14th St) that works at Home Depot. We figured out we were neighbors once when he was helping me with some appliance questions. Ironically, I see him nearly every time I'm at Home Depot and get caught up in neighborhood news, but have never seen him once around the neighborhood, but I digress. If there ever existed a man that would be well-served pedaling a bicycle instead of riding a converted one (powered by a lawnmower engine) it would be Murphy. However, he has lots of "business" around the neighborhood and must need to make his pick-ups and deliveries expeditiously. He's recently branched out from his uhm, herbal sales to making those irritating motorized bicycles. His sounds like a big giant bee, which sort of fits with his appearance, another one that he's made for a neighborhood guy sounds like a sputtering fart, and a third that was made for a possible business partner sounds like a mosquito, which brings me to....

The mosquito: Built like a mosquito, otherwise looks like a hippie. Almost like a cross-dressing hippie. He tends to wear a lot of tank tops and very short cut-off jean shorts. He used to ride an old ten speed around but then switched to this. He has a long-time lady friend that sometimes doubles up on the bike, but I have also seen him taking her around in a cart attached to the back of the bike that I'm pretty sure was made from an old wheelbarrow/dolly with the handles bent upwards for gripping. She looks a bit like the grandma from Beverly Hillbillies so the sight of this contraption going by will make anyone laugh and really brighten your day.

That old whore Lois: She's the neighborhood nuisance. Really the only regular pass-by that I really don't care for. I have no idea what her actual name is, but the term comes from a family member several generations back whose husband left her for, "That old whore Lois" Lois is always drunk/high and is often seen dressed bumbling around looking for business in a Jackie O-style outfit/sunglasses/scarf, with old beat up sneakers. She begs you for money with a variety of obviously untrue excuses and curses you if you don't give her any. No one gives her any. Her one positive point (that I've been able to find) is that she walks the dog that used to just stay chained up in the yard where she stays (I think it's an invalid's house who may be her grandfather). She peed on my neighbors wall a few months back.

The non-speaking dog-walker: A slight girl who looks to be in her early 20's that walks a great big hairy dog most everyday... in heels... that she can't walk in very well. I hear her clopping down the street and know who it is immediately. I usually say hi to her and she never says hi back. I don't think she's being rude, probably just shy, or maybe too focused on not falling over.

Jose: Jose unfortunately died of a stroke this past year, but he was one of my favorites and deserves recognition. His English wasn't great, my Spanish isn't great so our conversations were choppy. He always wanted to see what I was growing, we would talk about plants and cooking tips. One day he showed up in my front yard with some different agaves and instructed me to plant them, so I did. :) I showed him my two cotton plants once and he doubled over laughing saying, "You gonna beee reeeech!" I miss Jose.

I could go on, as there are a lot more, but this post is getting long. I'm so grateful to have this huge mix of folks surrounding me, maybe I'll do a part two to this post down the line.

Urban Homesteading at Rachel's Tiny Farm

2011-02-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

Most folks by now know about the Path to Shooting Yourself in the Foot AKA the Dervaes family's trademark of "Urban Homestead" and "Urban Homesteading". For those of you that have managed to miss it, the brief summary is that a prominent urban homesteading family in Pasadena got the phrases Urban Homestead and Urban Homesteading trademarked late last year. They then sent intimidating cease and desist style letters to other urban homesteaders or that dared use that decades-old term in their name or events. They had Facebook pages taken down of some folks and small businesses like Denver Urban Homesteading, a small farmer's market in Denver that also teaches and promotes self-sufficiency. There's a lot more that adds to the egregiousness of the situation, but a quick search will pull up dozens+ of stories about it, so I'll refrain from writing another one here. The long and short of it is that essentially the entire urban homesteading movement is upset. This is not a great move when your income, via donations and an internet store that sells urban homesteading-related items (with a pretty hefty markup so purchasing from them also includes an implied donation) depends primarily on other urban homesteaders.

I remember picking fruits and veggies at my grandparents house starting when I was very young, my grandmother also had shelves full of what seemed like hundreds of jars of canned foods that I liked to sit and stare at, though the only thing I wanted to eat were the cinnamon apples. She didn't teach me how to can, but she sparked the thing in my brain that made me want to do it, and has helped me along the way. It probably started in my grandparents gardens in the Ozarks when I was too small to remember and slowly snowballed into what it has become today, picking up bits of information and skills as I roll along my way.

Enough about that. In response, here are some things relating to self-sufficiency that are practiced here at the tiny farm. This is a post standing with my fellow urban homesteaders showing an overview of some of the things we do, illustrating that urban homesteading is a widespread phenomenon, deeply rooted and not something that one family can own. (No pics this time, sorry!)

Aquaponics: We're about 8 months into raising tilapia in a small (200 gallon tank, 100 gallon grow bed) home-made aquaponics system and loving it. I love the results and the concept, it's almost like having my own tiny biosphere in the backyard, without the late-night pizza deliveries... for those of you that remember that little fiasco. My goal for 2011 is to get the bigger system set-up and running. We're half way there, the pond is built and has gambusia (mosquito fish) swimming around eating any would-be baby mosquitos, I've just got to get the grow beds in and the mechanics finished. Another goal is to switch over to feeding the fish completely with homegrown feed (black soldier fly larvae, duckweed etc).

Food preservation: We do both dehydrating and canning. I prefer to dehydrate because the resulting product takes up less space and it uses only the arid AZ weather to create. (We use a solar dehydrator that I built which you can read about HERE.) This last year I found a brand-new pressure canner for cheap, so I'm able to do both water bath and pressure canning now. The pressure canner still makes me nervous and the safety monitor in me wants to wear a helmet and goggles while using it. For now I'm resisting the extra apparel and am I'm grateful to have the option to can low acid foods.

Chickens and Quail: We raise these (in separate areas!) mostly for eggs, occasionally meat. Because you can have quail roosters in the city, I'm able to breed the quail. In fact there's a batch in the incubator due to hatch the first week in March. The birds' manure can't be overlooked either, with attempting to grow as much as I do, that valuable fertilizer is necessary!

Composting: Because of composting, re-using and recycling, our household of two, including our businesses, now creates a small bag of trash every two weeks. Of course there are the other obvious benefits of composting.

Year round food gardens: Although we hit a new record low this year of 19˚ (how do you cold climate people get through winter??!!) our winters are pretty mild, generally with only a handful of freezes. Interestingly, the September through February season is often the most productive time of year in Phoenix, so 365 days a year there is something in the yard available for eating.

Solar power: The house, though on grid, creates 100% of the electricity it uses annually from photovoltaics on our roof. We also often cook with a solar oven, and dehydrate with the aforementioned solar dehydrator.

Rainwater collection: We have one 275 gallon rain collector and a few other smaller ones. Someday we hope to have a cistern, but that's likely a year or two off.

Household miscellany: I do our haircuts, we repair rather than replace when possible, use a clothesline, use a lot of homemade cleansers, make gifts or buy them from friends or other individuals that make neat things.

Seed Saving: With the exception of one Super Sweet 100 tomato I'm growing this year all of our seeds are open-pollinated. I love both the action and the idea of saving seed. As many of my friends know, I'm a seed hoarder. I'm trying to divest myself of this problem(?) but it's tricky. With all the horrible things that are going on in the mega-seed world, preserving open-pollinated varieties seems like an easy way to do some good deeds.

Helping others: Helping other folks that want to be more self-sufficient is one of the most important things an urban homesteader can do. You've got some skills or books you don't need anymore? Pass it on. Even if it's just taking the time to answer someones email questions. This year I feel lucky enough to have the ability to not only continue teaching chicken raising classes for the Valley Permaculture Alliance (formerly Phoenix Permaculture Guild) but to be recently added to their board of directors (It's unpaid, so don't get too excited about the possibility of the Tiny Farm adding acreage or anything). I was also able to host two seed swaps for Arizona Homegrown Solutions and donate about 700 packs of seeds (Remember that seed-hoarding thing?).

Our reasons for doing all of this are many-fold. Lessening our environmental impact is a big one. Another one is financial. My husband and myself are both self-employed freelancers, I'm a painter (art not houses) and he's an animator. As you can imagine, our income is sporadic and not huge. The relief of not having to worry about paying an electric bill is great. Due to saving rainwater, using many native-adapted plants and earthworks to use water most efficiently, our water bill is no higher than a house with a standard lawn. Our food tastes good, I know where it comes from and that it hasn't been genetically modified or covered in pesticides and our grocery bill is reduced. Finally, it's just a good feeling to live as self-sufficiently as possible, tens of thousands of people agree.

Aquaponics Update

2010-12-25T17:41:00.000-08:00

I'm about 6 months into the aquaponics experiment. My first system, looked great (IMHO) and worked pretty well until it sprung a leak in the grow bed. I'm pretty sure this was in the drain area. I unfortunately placed the drain near a seam in the EPDM, which wasn't in itself a problem except that one side was regular thickness and the other was double thickness where the seem was and I think that caused a tiny leak that ended up making the wood swell and cause a big problem. Lesson learned. I didn't lose any fish, but I had been wanting to try an IBC system anyway. (IBC's are the giant plastic 275 gallon containers that things like bulk pineapple juice and liquid soap are shipped around in). These are a couple of pictures of that system.

I have the fish tank section shaded to prevent too much algae growing in there so it's a bit hard to see in these photos. I cut the 275 gallon container into two sections, an approximately 175 gallon fish tank and a 100 gallon growbed which is filled with hydroton (expanded clay pellets-- very lightweight, easy on the hands). The grow bed is mounted on top of a structure I built for it made out of 4"x4"s and 2"X6"s. It's on casters like the original system. Right now, because the fish need to stay warm I keep it covered in greenhouse plastic. One interesting thing I learned was that, even though the temps in the grow bed get up above 100˚ during the day, the greens don't bolt, presumeably because of the 68˚ water flowing over the roots every half hour. I keep a 250 watt tank heater with a built in thermostat in the fish tank just in cases the water starts to drop at night.

Growing tilapia

conrete reinforcing wire being used as a structure to support the greenhouse plastic

So far I'm impressed with how aquaponics is working out. These plants have no supplements of any kind, they are strictly being fed with fish water.

P.S. Now I'm working on system #3. The 400 gallon pond is nearly complete...

Seedlings are started...

2010-12-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

75% of them so far...

I started the first round of my seedlings a couple of weeks ago. They won't go into the gardens until mid-late February but I like having a good sturdy plant to get into the ground so we can make the most of our short spring before the blazing summer when most tomatoes either die or stop producing fruit until October. For that reason I like to plant tomatoes that are mostly 75 days or shorter. I'll go as high as 80 if the variety really strikes me, but beyond that there isn't much hope of getting much, if any, fruit out of the plant. Peppers and eggplants, on the other hand, will tolerate the heat much better so I'll go as high as 90 days for them.

Below I've listed my "catalog" of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants for the 2011 season. The descriptions are mostly straight from seed catalogs. I'm growing hundreds of plants, but I'll only keep about 40-50. The rest I'll sell for $2.50 or so in the spring to help raise money for improvements to the tiny farm. :)

Eggplant:
Rosa Bianca: 70-90 days – A lovely Italian heirloom that bears medium sized, 8 inch, oval fruits. The pink/lavender colored fruits are occasionally shaded with a cream color. Always sweet and mild, with no bitterness.

Pepper:
Hungarian Yellow Wax: 70 days- Developed in Hungary, this medium-hot pepper has a beautiful golden waxy color that resembles bees’ wax. The fully mature peppers are a more orange-red color, but the fruit is traditionally picked when fruit is 3”-4” long and still yellow. A favorite for soups and stews, pickling, frying, canning, or roasting, the 5” long and 1.5” wide peppers have thin walls and don’t need to be peeled before cooking.

Italian Relleno Sweet Pepper: 65-75 days- 18-24 in. Delicious roasted, fried, and especially stuffed. Popular variety similar to the Anaheim chile, but slightly earlier maturing. High yielding and well worth growing. Transplant when soils are warm, spacing seedlings 12-18 inches apart. Enrich soil with mature compost. Needs warm conditions day and night to germinate and fruit well. Watering tips, during germination, keep entire seedbed evenly moist. Harvesting tips, pick at peak of color.

Nardello Sweet Pepper: 65-75 days- Delightful fresh or fried, the sweetest non-bell Pepper when ripe. An italian heirloom from the Nadello family. Red when ripe, these 6-8 in. peppers have shiny, wrinkled skins. Almost like candy.

Ordoño (NS/S): 90 days- An ornamental type of chile producing green, yellow, orange, purple and red fruits, which are an inch long and grow upright. Hot and edible. Collected from Batopilas Canyon, Chihuahua, Mexico. Good for container gardening.

Pasilla Bajio (chile negro): 80 days- The Pasilla Bajio offers a rich, smoky, mildly hot flavor to many dishes. It is also called 'chilaca' and 'chile negro'. The name, 'Pasilla' means 'little raisin' in Spanish, referring to the dark brown, wrinkled dried pod. It is called 'chilaca' when fresh and adds character to red chile enchilada sauce and salsas. When used as a dried pod or in powder form, it is a very flavorful ingredient in many mole sauces.

Sweet Canary Bell: 80 days- Canary Bell peppers ripen to a beautiful golden yellow that adds a gorgeous golden color to any recipe. We chose this variety of yellow Bell pepper for its exceptional flavor, thick walls, and incredible color. Canary Bell sets its fruit early and continues to produce peppers throughout the summer. You can use these peppers as a vibrant accent in salads, and they are also wonderful when sautéed or grilled. Easy to grow, you can plant them in the garden or grow them in large containers on a patio or deck.

Tabasco: ~90 days- Hot, prolific, and hardy, this is the famous ingredient in Tabasco sauce. Narrow 1" fruits are yellow or orange maturing to red. Good for container gardening.

Yellow Banana (Sweet) 72 days- An AAS Bronze Medal winner for 1941 and still extremely popular. Large, pointed fruits measure 6-7" long and 1½" across. The mild yellow peppers ultimately turn brilliant red. A favorite for pickling.

Tomato and Tomatillo:
Ace: 80 days, indeterminate- This robust tomato has wonderful fresh flavor, but is an old favorite for canning as well. It has clusters of 6-8 ounce fruits, 5”-6” in diameter, growing on bush type plants that do not require staking. Being a low-acid tomato, it may be easier on your digestion if you are sensitive. You will be impressed by the excellent yields these plants have for such a large tomato! Resistant to Verticillium wilt and Fusarium wilt (Race 1)

Black Cherry: 65 days, indeterminate — This is a new variety that is very productive with cherry shaped fruits that have the dark, purplish coloring of 'Cherokee Purple.' Flavor is wonderful, very rich and sweet.

Black From Tula: 75-85 days, indeterminate- Deep reddish-brown beefsteak tomato has a rich, sweet flavor that is delicious. Fruit is smooth in texture and weighs from 8 to 12 ozs. This outstanding variety is very productive and seems to set well even when weather turns hot. Russian heirloom.

Bradley: 76 days, semi-determinate- A disease resistant variety released in 1961 by Dr. Joe McFerran of the University of Arkansas. Our TomatoFest organic tomato seeds produce compact, bushy, semi-determinate, regular-leaf, tomato plants with heavy foliage that yield copious amounts of 7 to10-ounce. dark-pink tomatoes with a wonderfully, delicious sweetness that is well balanced with just enough acidity to give you that old-fashioned big tomato flavor you love so much. Tomatoes ripen at the same time making it a great variety for canning and freezing. Suitable for Southern regions. An excellent fresh market tomato. Fusarium wilt resistant.

Chadwick’s Cherry: 70 days, indeterminate- Heirloom cherry tomato named after the late master gardener, Alan Chadwick, originator of the biointensive method of gardening. Flavorful, 1-inch, red fruits borne in vigorous clusters of six. Add these cherry tomato seeds to your collection of cherry tomatoes and taste the difference.

Chico III: 70 days, determinate- Compact plant produces high yields of 3 oz plum shaped red tomatoes. Plants set fruit well during high temperatures. An excellent processing variety used to make sauces and puree. A variety suitable for mechanized harvesting. Great for salads and sandwiches too. Suitable for home gardens and market growers in Texas and the Southwest. Disease Resistant.

Chocolate Cherry: 70 days, indeterminate. Plant produces high yields of 1" diameter chocolate cherry tomatoes. This cherry tomatoes grow in cluster of 8 and are very flavorful. The tomatoes are crack resistant and hold very well on the plant. They can be picked several days before completely mature and allowed to ripen off the vine without sacrificing quality.

Coyote: 50 days, indeterminate — This variety was given to heirloom tomato collector Craig LeHoullier by Maye Clement during a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Harvest Fair show, as a cluster of fruit on the vine. She indicated that it grew wild in her home country of Mexico. It is a tiny cherry tomato that ripens its prolific crop to an ivory, translucent yellow color, shading to darker yellow at the shoulders. Flavor is superb.

Gardener’s Delight: 65 days, indeterminate- Also known as Sugar Lump, these red cherries range from 3/4 to 1-1/2 inch across and are loaded with sugary sweet flavor.

Hong Yuen: 75+ days, indeterminate- This Chinese tomato produces clusters of many red, mostly two-inch, sweet fruits. Hong Yuen is fine tasting for salad or sandwich; this excellent cropper can also be used for sauce or whole-pack canning.

Juane Flamme: 70+ days, Indeterminate- Extremely prolific French heirloom tomato that bears in clusters of 6, beautiful, 1 1/2-inch, round, golf-ball sized tomatoes that are persimmon-orange colored inside and out. A delicious full-bodied tomato flavor that literally bursts in your mouth. Very decorative. Makes a great flavored sauce.

Nichol’s (NS/S): 75 days, indeterminate- These seeds originated from the Nichols family in Tucson. Volunteer seeds that just kept coming up, they have been maintained by the family patriarch for about 50 years. It is well adapted to the desert; it is heat-tolerant and prefers full sunlight. The tasty, “pink cherry” tomatoes are prolific producers. Halfway between a cherry and a plum tomato.

Principe Borghese: 75 days, DETERMINATE — Italian heirloom variety very popular in Italy and California for splitting in half and sun drying. They maintain color and flavor well. The plants produce heavy yields of small, red plum-shaped fruits. The plants will benefit from support such as caging.

Prize of the Trials: 75-80 days, indeterminate- Best overall cherry tomato for flavor, yield, and crack resistance. Productive vines bear orange, apricot-sized fruits that thrive in hot dry climates.

Punta Banda (NS/S): 75 days, indeterminate- Collected on the Punta Banda Peninsula in Baja California and grown out at our Albuquerque garden. The plants produced hundreds of red meaty, thick skinned fruits despite heat, water stress and poor soil. Great paste tomato.

Red Grape: 60 days, semi-determinate — This variety is modern and currently very popular in the fresh produce market. The fruits are bright red, weigh about an ounce, and are smaller than most cherry tomatoes (½ by ¾ inches). Since they are mouth-sized they are perfect for salads and garnish plates. Twelve to sixteen fruits per cluster.

Rio Grande: 80 days, DETERMINATE- Very large, blocky pear-shaped tomatoes are borne in profusion, making for large harvests to turn into tomato sauce, paste, or juice. Deep red fruit is about 4 inches long. Vigorous plants are well adapted to extremes in temperature.

Roma: 78 days, DETERMINATE- One of the most popular varieties for paste, sauces and canning. Compact vines yield large harvests of 3 inch long, bright red fruit that may be pear-shaped or plum-shaped. Thick walled and solid with few seeds; slightly later than Roma with heavier foliage.

Sugar Sweetie: 65 days, indeterminate- This organic, perfect, cherry tomato has classic sweet flavor. You may eat so many right in the garden, that it will be hard to get them into the house for salads! Large numbers of 3/4" to 1" fruit are produced in grape-like clusters on 2 foot tall plants. Even though the plants are indeterminate, the plants may be grown in containers on a sunny patio, deck, or balcony. As the plants continue to grow until fall frost, they will likely require a stake, small cage, or some sort of support.

Sungold Select II (Open Pollinated): ~75 days, indeterminate, This is a selection from the regular Sungold tomato, sent to us by Reinhard Kraft of Germany. This is one of the tastiest orange cherry tomatoes out there! This variety is not completely stable and a few plants still produced red fruit.

Super Sweet 100 (F-1 hybrid): 65 days, indeterminate- This is a home gardener favorite that has more disease resistance than Sweet 100 while keeping the same fabulous taste. Small round 1 oz. cherry tomatoes are deliciously sweet with a high Vitamin C content. Long clusters of fruit load up on tall, vigorous plants and continue to bear until frost.

Toma Verde Tomatillo: 65 days, indeterminate- YOU MUST PLANT AT LEAST TWO NEXT TO EACH OTHER FOR POLLINATION TO OCCUR. If you can grow tomatoes, you can grow Tomatillos! They can be used in a wide variety of Mexican dishes, and their unique flavor makes an indescribably tasty 'salsa verde', which some say is superior to red salsa. The 'Toma Verde' is a large-fruited variety that has been adapted to grow successfully in a wide variety of climates. Related to tomatoes, tomatillos prefer similar growing conditions, but they will handle a lot more heat and drought. The 3'-6' tall, indeterminate plants grow quickly and produce well in both southern and northern climates. Fruits grow inside a paper shell and keep producing until the first fall frost.

Violet Jasper: ~80 days, indeterminate. When these little Oriental jewels ripen, your eyes will be stunned with color. They have pretty violet-purple fruit with iridescent green streaks! Fruit weigh 1-3 ounces, are smooth and have good tasting (though some have complained it’s grainy), dark purplish-red flesh. This variety will also amaze you with its yield: it’s not only high, but incredibly high, being one of the most productive tomatoes we have grown. A great variety for marketing. Introduced to you from China.

White Currant: 70-75 days, indeterminate. Treat yourself to one of the most unique and sweetest tasting tomato varieties known. The tiny fruit are half the size of a cherry tomato and grow in nice heavy clusters. Creamy-white in color with just a tinge of yellow. Deliciously sweet, a favorite of many.

Yellow Pear: 78 days, indeterminate- These prolific miniature pear-shaped tomatoes are 1-3/4 to 2 inches long and clear yellow in color. They are delightfully sweet considered by many as 'garden candy'. Baskets of these are as pretty as can be. Tall plants bear large and continuous harvests

Yellow Plum: 70 days, indeterminate — A very old variety. The plants are large and open with small oval fruit, 1 by 1¼ inches, that taste mild and sweet. There are typically eight to ten fruits per cluster, some late fruits have slight neck. Very productive.

Zapotec Pleated: 80-85 days, indeterminate- Deeply pleated, pink to dark-red 6-8 oz. fruits originating from the Zapotecs of southern Mexico. Unique appearance with a rich and earthly flavor. Excellent stuffed, baked or sliced.

What varieties are you planting this year?

Deviled Quail Egg recipe!

2010-12-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

People are always asking what in the world they can do with quail eggs. My favorite thing to do is to devil them. When the Phoenix New Times asked me for a recipe of something I'm baking right now, it seemed like an obvious choice (even though technically it's not baked :) )

HERE'S a link to my deviled quail egg recipe.

Picking from the yard and foraging the foreclosures

2010-11-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

First off, let me say that my camera bit the dust, so I'm having to rely on a little digital point and shoot that I'm not too familar with and as such have been hesitant to use it. No pictures usually= No posts. :( However, a new camera is coming soon. :)

Our neighborhood like many of yours is full of vacant foreclosed houses. Many of these houses have fruit trees, and I'm not shy of saving that fruit from the roof rats. Here in Phoenix right now the daytime temps are around 70 and the lows are around 50. (Today was a beautiful 80 degree day!)With this kind of weather, November is one of our best times for harvesting. Today in addition to all I picked from home, I grabbed a big basket and went for a walk around the block. Our first stop is a house around the corner that has a big pecan tree in the front yard that reaches right up to the street. We always stop there and get pecans that are in the public right of way, people live here (though I doubt they harvest many of their pecans from what I've observed) so I don't get too grabby or go up into their yard. A few houses down from that is an empty house with a giant pomegranate tree out front so we hit that up with our citrus picker. Then around the next corner and halfway back to our house is a foreclosed house with no gate separating the front and back yard. The backyard has a huge lemon tree with hundreds of lemons on it. We got some. :)

There are also mulberries and a recently discovered fig tree (ripe at different times of the year) in vacant housing or in the public walkway in the neighborhood. I only know of one other neighbor that bothers to pick any...

So here is a picture of most of today's harvest, everything not mentioned above came from our front and back yard. I even canned some dilly beans (like a dill pickle, but using a green bean instead of a cucumber) from our beans.

Do you have anything to forage for in your neighborhood?

A day in the life at the tiny farm

2010-10-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

I'm jumping on the "Day in the Life" meme bandwagon. Here is Sunday 10/10/10 at the Tiny Farm.

6:30- Changed the chickens' water, checked the automatic (timer) feeder and the treadle feeder, both had food. I gave the hens some leftover cantaloupe rinds and seeds from last night's dinner and a few greens. I have one hen that sleeps on the lip of one of the nest boxes and I've never been able to break her of the habit, so I take the big spackling knife I keep hanging on a nail in the coop and clean the poop out of one nest box.

Our biggest fish are around four inches now

6:40- Feed tilapia. Check on the quail chicks. I sold 25 of them, but still have about 72 in the stock tank. Luckily I just inherited a bigger stock tank, so they fit pretty comfortably in there, and since it's two feet tall, they can't fly out of it yet. :) I change their water, give them food and clean the bedding a bit.

A few 8 day old quail

6:50- Check on duckweed/mosquitofish pond. Feed and water all of the adult quail. I also collect a few eggs that got laid after I collected them Saturday night. For whatever reason, one pen likes to lay just after dusk. I have them in 6 separate hutches right now so all of this takes awhile. I'm looking forward to their aviary being completed!

7:05- The quail hatch before the most recent one had a few wry necked birds in it. I'm pretty sure this was caused by excess humidity during the incubation. I've read that it's genetic, but I've never had another wry-necked bird from my breeders, so that doesn't really make sense to me. Either way I want to be sure that the trait doesn't get passed on, and it's been awhile since we've had quail. I pick out a tuxedo quail for butchering, and after I grab him I realize I don't have my butchering scissors outside so I take the bird with me inside to get them. The whole time he just kept looking up at me in a pitiful way that landed him back in the pen and I ended up processing a much more severely deformed jumbo brown instead. This was a better choice anyway, as the tuxedo's posture is barely off, whereas the jumbo's neck was so crooked that it definitely impacted his quality of life. Butchering always makes me sad and a little queasy.
After processing the bird, I put him in the refrigerator in a pyrex bowl with a very light brine. (1/4 tsp salt and about 2 cups of water).

7:25- Water all of the garden beds. I usually have the automatic drip system on, but we got a huge storm and we have hundreds of gallons in rain barrels, so that means doing it by hand. I fill up watering cans with the rain water and hit all of the beds, most of which have newly planted seeds in them.

One of the rainbarrels

7:40- Pick stuff! My favorite part of the morning. I bring in some passionfruits, my first fall tomato of the year, a few black-eyed peas, some cotton and a lime. There is a lot of eggplant (and mint) still out there, but I have a bunch in the kitchen already and need to use it up!

8:00- Make breakfast. I cook up some chicken and quail eggs on the stove and have them with some cantaloupe and morningstar fake bacon. My husband hasn't eaten pork in at least 10 years so thinks this stuff tastes as good as the real deal. He's waaay wrong, but since I have no desire to butcher any pigs, I don't argue (much).

I have recently become pretty firm that I will no longer work on the weekends. If I don't hold myself to this, I get really stressed out and am an unpleasant person to be around (the word "tyrant" comes up a lot and is about the only PG-13 word that gets used to describe me). It's a nice day and the high is only in the low 90's so we go to the zoo and buy an annual membership with some of my birthday money. One of my favorite part is the goats, chickens, turkeys and peacocks. I just can't get enough of those things and I'm plotting to find some room to put some turkeys at home...

3:00- Back from the zoo, I feed the tilapia again and give the quail chicks more food and water.

5:00- I collect the chicken and quail eggs and seed two beds with peas, lettuces, spinach, golden beets, early wonder beets, thyme and onions.

A few of the chickens just wanted to say hi!

6:00- Start dinner. It's melon and roasted roots with quail. I chop up all the "roots" we have, which this time around are just carrots, potatoes, onions and garlic and add rosemary, salt, pepper and olive oil and put them in a baking dish. In the center goes the quail from this morning stuffed with garlic and a little butter with a few extra pats put underneath the breast skin. Bake at 350 for a little over an hour, turning the quail every 15 or 20 minutes and basting with a small amount of butter.

7:15- Dinner! We saved all of the bones and little cartilage bits to make stock with in the solar oven tomorrow. Even a tiny quail can make a couple of cups of stock.

9:30- Final check on the baby quail, they get more food and water to last them through the night.

A great (and also sad) quail hatch!

2010-10-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

I went to bed with one quail just barely hatched and this is what I woke up to:
In the incubator!

These are from shipped eggs from a flock completely unrelated to mine so I can refresh the gene pool. The eggs these guys came from arrived on a particularly hot day and sat in the mail truck touring the neighborhood for at least 5 hours. Needless to say I was worried about their viability but was pleasantly surprised when 98 hatched out of 118 set. :)

Unfortunately one of the last quail to hatch had an umbilical hernia. About an inch of intestine was protruding from the little guys belly button. This is the first time I've ever seen this in person and sadly this situation doesn't have a good prognosis so I had to cull the bird. Now I've eaten some of my quail before, but their death served a purpose. It was much more difficult to kill a tiny bird, only to bury it in the garden. One of the hard moments in raising livestock.

On a brighter note-- here are a few of the 92 smiling faces from the hatch.

Time to refresh the coturnix quail!

2010-09-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

Well, it's that time of year again. Once a year I like to bring in some quail eggs from a new source to refresh the bloodlines. No one wants a bunch of inbreeding! I'll sell some of the adults I currently have and replace them with birds that hatch out of these:

Out of 120 eggs shipped only 2 got cracked. It always amazes me how well eggs (and even chicks) do in the mail. I probably crack 2 quail eggs a week just bringing them from the quail pens into the house.

I will be keeping a total of only about two dozen birds, the rest will be sold or eaten. I currently have about three dozen, so those plus whatever I get out of this hatch will be the birds to choose from. I decide which birds go where by a few different criteria:

1. Genetics: I want to have as many different bloodlines represented, I especially want the roosters to be from different bloodlines as the hens as much as possible.
2. Defects: Any bird that has any trait that I wouldn't want to breed (for example I have one chick right now with crossbeak) gets eaten. It's unfortunate, but it's important to not have those birds in the breeding pool, mine or anyone elses. They are given a good life until they are table size.
3. Interesting, good looking or other positive qualities: I have a few that I recently hatched out with color patterns I haven't seen before, I'll keep at least one of those. I also have a rooster that I love because he has a bizarre and warbly crow very different from the others. I also have a few birds that are especially friendly and/or lay very large eggs, they stay here as well.

Ideally, all of the other birds get sold or bartered with. I wouldn't want to sell a bird that I wouldn't use for breeding myself, I feel that even as a tiny scale hobby farmer I have a responsibility to not muck up the genetic pool for this amazing breed. (And no one wants bad quail karma!)

Aquaponics and a tiny pond

2010-08-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

I still haven't added the tilapia to the aquaponics system, but I think the tank may have nearly finished cycling this weekend. In the few weeks we've had them, the females have gotten a little bigger but the males have more than tripled in size.

Grow bed about 2 weeks after planting seeds

The plants are doing fantastic in the grow bed. I've been adding small amounts of fish emulsion both to help with the tank cycling and also to provide some nutrients for the growing plants. This picture is about 10 days worth of growth from the last post's picture.

Finally, I've made a tiny pond on the tiny farm! This roughly 45 gallon pond will serve to grow duckweed to help feed the tilapia. I'm hoping to eventually grow 100% of the food for the tilapia on the property. To build it (after my usual sticking my shovel through some irrigation lines and repairing them) I used leftover pond liner from the aquaponics set up, rocks that were already on the property, plants that came free with my tilapia, a handful of duckweed from the fish store ($1.30) and a pair of gambusia fish to eat mosquito larvae ($2.49). Total cost: about $4. I could have gotten the gambusia free from friends with ponds or the city of Phoenix, but this particular fish store (Phoenix Tropical Fish) took the time to really help me with questions a few weeks back so I thought I'd give them some business, even if it's just a couple bucks.

Pond area: BEFORE

Pond: AFTER

I'll add some plants around the outside of the pond when the weather cools down a bit. The duckweed is spreading rapidly and the water hyacinths are blooming, so it's been a pretty good payoff for a few hours of very sweaty digging and rock piling.

Aquaponics sprouting!

2010-08-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

Some free cucumber seed being put to work

I planted some cucumbers and summer squash for the fall season in Phoenix. I was a bit hesitant to just throw the seeds in the hydroton (clay balls) as I thought they would just get washed down to the bottom, but lo and behold after three days, my cucumbers have sprouted. I planted 6 seeds each from two different varieties and every single seed sprouted, so apparently they do stay put fairly well. In a couple of months we'll see if the tiny seeds like lettuce and herbs perform the same.

I am still cycling the tank, so the fish are still indoors as I'm trying my best to not kill them. In order to prevent the tiny tilapia from getting sucked into the filter once they do go in, I've devised a simple and cheap mesh cage for my pump. I bought a small roll of fiberglass mesh used on window screens and sewed it into a tube shape. Using a couple of my zipties I tightened it around both the cord and the hose fitting.

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I will remove this after the fish get big enough to not get sucked through the normal 3/8" holes in the pump cage so I can pump some solids out. These will be filtered out using aquarium spongy filter media that will be placed underneath where the water comes out of the pump into the grow bed.
The progress so far is exciting!

Aquaponics progress

2010-07-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

The new system is nearly entirely built. I have learned a lot of lessons, on how to build and plumb more efficiently (for way less money!) for next time around. So many parts that I imagined would be easy to find were not, and some didn't even exist. I've kept all my receipts and will update with the way-over-budget total when I'm done and have returned all of the incorrect parts that I bought. :) I will also add a more reasonable hindsight budget for next time!

The system is a roughly 100 gallon grow bed and roughly 100 gallon fish tank. Both are built with 3/4" plywood and reinforced in the corners (top and bottom) and lined with EPDM pond liner. I will probably also add some reinforcement going over the top of the grow bed to keep it from bowing over time. It's all on an old shelving unit my carpenter neighbor built and gave to me when he moved. Very sturdy but added more casters in the middle (you can't see them in this picture) and some extra 2 by 4 bracing just to be extra sure. The system can obviously not be moved around when full, but the idea is to empty the tank (even temporarily) between seasons so it can be in afternoon shade in summer and full sun in winter. When it's in place I have cinder blocks underneath it for extra insurance.

The most simple explanation is that a pump pumps about 40% of the water out of the fish tank to fill the grow bed, when the water reaches a certain level a siphon kicks in and floods the water back into the fish tank. I went with an Affnan siphon for those of you that are interested in those sorts of details. I'll do a more complete post about siphoning in the future.

Looking down into the growbed-- need a little more substrate to fill it up.

The rocks on a plate are a temporary weight to hold down that pipe. The pipe has lots of holes drilled in it to act as a strainer to keep the rocks from entering the siphon, which is inside that pipe. The pipe to the left of that is an overflow pipe (I need to make it shorter). It's simply a back-up in case the siphon ever fails, it will keep the grow bed from overflowing. The other pipe is hooked up to a 35 watt(!) Laguna Max Flo 600gph pump, and carries the water from the tank to the grow bed. I will put some aquarium filter underneath where it comes out to keep too many solids from entering the grow bed. It might be hard to see but the water pipe is zip tied in place in three different spots to be sure it stays in place.

Still a little more fine tuning, but as it is now, everything works how it should. I plan on beginning to cycle the tank tomorrow, it should be ready for the tilapia in about 3 weeks.

Aquaponics beginning

2010-07-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

After a year or so of wanting to do aquaponics, I've finally begun. For those of you that don't know about it, aquaponics is similar to hydroponics only instead of adding chemicals, you use a fish tank and the fish provide the plant nutrients and the grow beds provide the filtration for the fish.

I had some plans to build a 1000 gallon fish tank filled with tilapia and stick some growbeds on it and call it a day. It turns out, after some research, that there's recommended ratios and a few other things that just made it more complex than I was expecting. Not the least of which is our climate. For at least a month we have highs around 115 and lows around 90... and humidity. It's also quite expensive to do something that large, not prohibitively expensive, but enough so that I don't want to mess up. So for now I'm building a 100 gallon fish tank which will pump up about 50 gallons twice an hour to a 100 gallon grow bed filled with rocks which will siphon back down into the fish tank.

Building the outer frames for the fish tank and grow bed

I was lucky enough to get some tilapia fry (babies) off of craig's list, as it's expensive to overnight big bags of water from the hatcheries, and I only needed about 15 fish, which is well below any minimum order sizes. We did a trade for them too, which was an even bigger bonus. I gave her seed packs and quail eggs.

Those gray smudges are 1/2" long tilapia

I have a pond pump, and pond liner on the way. Both the fish tank and grow beds will be lined with pond safe EPDM. Until then....

Not so flattering pic... it 100 degrees in there

Happy solstice, the mead is done!

2010-06-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

First off a happy summer solstice to all of you. As always, it feels like we're at least a month into summer here by the time the solstice rolls around. I've instituted a new family tradition that we'll celebrate the solstices (and maybe the equinoxes too) with some homemade hooch. Today I think it will be more of our hefeweizen as it's already at its peak and delicious. The hefeweizen was actually our second attempt at liquor making, the first one was the honey mead we started several months ago but just bottled this weekend. The mead was a bit of a learning curve for us as we learned some important lessons in sanitation, and how as it turns out, you should check all of your seals BEFORE you put the mead in the primary fermenter, otherwise you may have to put your hand in the brew to tighten things up. Despite the odds the mead turned out drinkable and not poisonous. We opted for a dry mead rather than a sweet one and this one is definitely dry. I think we left it in the fermenter a little long as it tastes more like a chardonnay that was left on the counter overnight... a hint of vinegar. Hey, I said it was drinkable, not wonderful. We're hoping that some aging will help it get a little better.
22 bottles of La Mano Venenosa Mead

The rest of the tiny farm is being productive as well. The 11 chickens are pitching in laying plenty of eggs in the 105 degree heat. Here's a week's worth:

Not bad considering that a few of these birds are pushing four years old and I'm still getting about 9 eggs a day!

The first blackberry!

2010-06-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

This morning I got to pick the first blackberry I had ever grown. I didn't even know you could grow blackberries in Phoenix until I was about 20. Ever since then I had wanted to and when I bought my house I tried (and killed) several blackberry plants and pretty much gave up on it.

Fast forward to about a year ago. My husband and I were riding bikes around the neighborhood on our way to visit the house that had heritage breed turkeys for awhile. No, not legally, but no one complained. You could see the pen from the street and I think a lot of people like made a point to go by that house just to watch the turkeys. Anyway, we stopped at a yard sale a couple doors down. I bought a little birdcage to use as a hospital cage for small birds for $5 and I noticed he had a huge hedge of blackberries. Long story short: we rode our bikes home with a birdcage and a gallon bag of blackberries. He invited us to come back later with a shovel and dig up a few. We did. I planted them. Two out of five survived and I now have blackberries. I recently found out that they grow 'wild' in the irrigation ditch a street over and an awesome neighbor whom I've recently befriended happens to live next to that ditch and brought us 8 or 9 plants of which a few are starting to leaf out. These are not the thornless 25 gallons of berries per plant you see advertised in the catalogs and magazines, they are good old-fashioned very thorny blackberries. It makes them a little rough on the hands, but it also means they're a little rough on predators. I've planted them against the fence to the chicken pen and against where I plan to build a big quail aviary in the fall, so now they can serve two purposes.

A big day indeed.

Solar update, more baby quail, PICS

2010-05-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

For those of you that are curious, the electric bill last month was $9.47. Way to go, solar! About $8 of that is administrative fees and taxes, the remainder is from the couple of days before they installed the new meter that credits us with surplus power. After all the math, it seems like it will pay for itself in about 5 years. However my husband and myself are both essentially freelance so the investment in the piece of mind that we have (basically) one less bill to pay every month is worth even more to us.

We had an 80% hatch rate for this last batch of quail. This seems a little low for eggs that didn't have to travel but still very much acceptable. There comes a hard time in nearly every hatch when a quail or two has started pipping out of the shell and for whatever reason gets stuck and doesn't progress. The general rule is to not help the quail, that hatching is a test of fitness and for the sake of future generations you only want to breed the best and healthiest birds. Often birds you help out will be weak or have other problems and die anyway. Every once in awhile though you get a bird that is so close, really seems determined and peeps away at you from half inside the shell as if to beg you for just a tiny bit of help. Honestly from time to time I help one of these birds, I tell myself I really shouldn't, but I can't just let it suffer. An important part of responsible animal husbandry is to not be such a softy, that you really aren't doing the breed as a whole any favors by helping out individuals in this situation. My solution for this is that if there is one that I've helped, to band it and make sure it doesn't get used for breeding.

It takes about 4 to weigh as much as a cherry tomato. :) On to the pics!

Breed responsibly!

Solar is finally completed!

2010-04-18T18:17:00.001-07:00

As the title states, after a long wait, lots of red tape and a few dollars, the solar panels are finally hooked up and running. All 5.04 Kw. We had a great time watching the meter run backwards the first couple of days, but then the utility came and replaced it with a digital meter. Like digital slot machines this took away some of the fun and excitement, but the end result is still the same. It's been up and running for about 12 days and here are the statistics courtesy of the inverter box:
30 Kwh of electricity produced today
398 Kwh produced so far
676 lbs of CO2 saved

What would you do to celebrate? We brewed our first beer. With some help from my friend Chloe who is an experienced brewer and a fantastic local brew store (Brewer's Connection in Tempe) we now have 5 gallons of hefeweizen in the primary fermenter. Between that and the 5 gallons of honey mead bubbling in the closet, we should be in good spirits for awhile. :)

The ever-popular banana ice cream

2010-02-07T13:45:00.001-08:00

I feel I should repost the banana "Ice cream" recipe for those of you that have either not seen it or for some reason have not gotten around to trying it because maybe you're skeptical that a one-ingredient recipe could be so awesome. Let me assuage your anxiety. It is that awesome. It's vegan to boot so you can serve it to your friends that are always insisting that tofu-based pies are as good as the real thing.

Directions:
Freeze some bananas. If you froze them in the peels let them thaw out just enough that you can easily slice the peels off. (15-20 minutes) Cut into slices. Put in the food processor until it gets to be the consistency of fancy ice-cream. Eat.
For a way more complex version: add a teaspoon of peanut butter in the food processor with the banana slices and then when it's done add chocolate sauce. As my new favorite feedback booth guy at the end of a recent Antiques Roadshow says.... "Champion!"

I realize a picture should be here, but I ate it before I thought to take a picture. Besides, you all know what ice-cream looks like.

More Solar

2010-01-18T08:24:00.000-08:00

Looks like Phoenix is scheduled for rain for the entire week. This could have some say in whether or not our solar gets installed. This also means no global sun oven meals, I really can't say enough good things about that product. It heats to 325-350 in basically the same amount of time our indoor oven does. If I really pay attention to moving it with the sun every 30-60 minutes, it will get up to at least 375. I'm not sure how much of a difference ambient temperature makes, but in the summer it will be 60 degrees hotter outside than it is now. While it's not cheap (around $225) it's nice to know that it's made in America with non-sweatshop labor and that a portion of the proceeds go towards providing solar ovens to people that need them in parts of the world with less money.

Mikey- Our utility (APS) is paying $15,120 towards our 5.2 KwH system. If I remember correctly, it's not just a straight $3,000 per kwh, it increases as your system size increases. (I think it was $12,500 for a 4.8 kwh system) Arizona has a crappy buy back policy. They will buy any unused electricity from you at the end of the month at wholesale costs, should you need more than you produce in a given month you buy it from them retail. Alternatively, you can let your unused production roll over to the next month (and every year in April the slate gets wiped clean, so it's a bit of a use it or lose it). The latter is the route we've signed up for.

The solar countdown...

2010-01-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

Well, for those of you wondering about the significant lack of posts, I've been extra busy. :) I have 30 kinds of tomatoes started, 10 pepper varieties and two eggplants. Way more than I'll have room for, but it's hard to stop myself. The bigger news is that we're getting solar panels. When I first looked into it I thought it would be I pay for them, they come out and install them and it was all done. I wish. There are many layers of approvals that need to be gotten (the solar company does most of this, but there's still a lot of waiting between each stage of the process) We had to get two 35 foot palm trees removed, which were going to make it too shady (probably two more will have to be pulled out before it's all done) there will have to be significant trenching in the backyard because of how our house is set-up, then more people have to sign off on things.

It seems like a lot of steps just to get solar power, but when it's all done, it should be 110% of our total power usage and because of all the rebates, credits and incentives, it will be about 85% off the sticker price, so we just couldn't refuse. There are nine days until they start installing the actual panels, which is stage one of the home stretch. I'm crossing my fingers that everything goes well.

Pictures to come!

Fall planting

2009-11-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of weeks I had been working on getting the fall crops in. Our average first frost in Phoenix is usually the first or second week in December so after the ridiculous summer heat, there's a brief season kind of like spring, as well as the root vegetable crops that overwinter with the frosts.

Spinach, Beets and Lettuce Sprouting

As usual I have more things I want to plant than space to plant them. This year we're growing three kinds of peas including a native type, six kinds of beets (my favorite!), several kinds of disgusting radishes (my husband's favorite), lots of different kinds of lettuces, some onions, lots of herbs, broccoli, carrots and a few experimental cold-tolerant tomatoes as well as some huge cherry tomatoes that over-summered. New this year are cabbages (for kraut), leeks, parsnips, turnips and kohlrabi. I've never had turnips or kohlrabi (to my knowledge) and I know the rule is not to plant things you don't like, but I'm afraid I wouldn't ordinarily like them, but I seem to like eating anything I grow, so maybe it's a better way to get me to like something that might otherwise be revolting.

This sounds like a lot more than it is, some of these varieties only get allocated a square foot or two. Our total vegetable gardening space is only about 250-300 square feet, not including the fruit trees.

Here's one of the garden beds about 10 days ago and again yesterday:

I know it's a bit crowded in there. I know when I'm planting that those tiny seeds a probably a little close but I just can't stop myself. Those plants will just have to get a new sense of personal space. I also decided that flowers aren't a total waste of garden space and put in a few. Here's a better shot of a great little snapdragon.

I hope you all are enjoying your fall gardens (if you live in a place that can grow them) or some time off getting ready for the seed catalogs to arrive!

Happy Halloween and birthday. New babies are here!

2009-10-31T16:19:00.000-07:00

The weather started to warm up from that harsh cold front just in time to have the doors and windows open on Halloween. This begins the time of year when I am thankful for where I live. The highs are in the mid to upper 80's for the next 7 days and it's perfect out. No panting or shivering animals anywhere. Although we do have 20 new babies that just hatched last night and this morning and would prefer it was closer to 100 degrees. Here they are, Happy Birthday and Halloween to our most recent batch of Coturnix quail babies. Most of these little guys will be sold to help pay for feed and other things I need around the tiny farm. This brings the total of birds hatched here in 2009 to 158.

We celebrated with a batch of pumpkin pancakes, made from a native pumpkin (Mayo Blusher Squash) I picked back in July and just now got around to cooking. MMmm pumpkin eating season has begun!

Grinding corn and mesquite flour

2009-10-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago I got out the dried ears of flour corn and the dried honey mesquite bean pods to make flour. You can grind corn with just about anything (grain mill, coffee grinder etc) but mesquite is much trickier. You'll mess up most appliances and mills if you try to grind the pods in them. Once a year a hammer mill is brought from Tucson to Phoenix and you can grind your mesquite and carob pods for a nominal fee but I decided to do it the old fashioned way.
When I was a kid my parents had this metate as yard decoration. When I grew up and got a house, I brought it here for practical use. Here's me grinding some corn:

I had a miserable flour corn crop and my two small mesquite trees were only planted last fall, I still got a cup or so of each kind of flour. I'm really looking forward to next year or maybe 5 years from now when I get lots. There are plenty of mesquite trees to harvest from in the area, but most of those are not the right kind of mesquite and the flour tastes a tiny bit skunky after the initial sweet flavor. The flour made from honey mesquite basically tastes like you ground up some sugary mesquite bbq flavored chips and mixed them with your flour. MMMMMMM!

Tomorrow, a generous member of the rare fruit growers club has offered to give me some dragonfruit cuttings.....

Chicken Book is Published!

2009-09-24T11:16:00.001-07:00

So many of you know that I had been working with Greg Peterson (of the Urban Farm) on a small pocket guide to keeping chickens called Fowl Play. There are several chicken books out there already, including one with a similar title that came out around the same time, but this is a small what-you-really-need-to-know guide. Easy to refer to with clear information. Here's the Amazon link: Fowl Play: Your Guide to Keeping Chickens in the City
It's neat to have an ISBN number.

Still Here! Fall Planting

2009-09-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of blog people, I've been on a bit of a summer recess. Both because it's been 115 all summer and not much has been going on and because I've been really busy in my job as a painter getting ready for shows.

Here is a brief summary of what's happened at the Tiny farm this summer: We had a new batch of Coturnix quail, I sold most of them as babies and had about 17 left, of those 11 were males and I kept 1 male and the 6 females. I'm not sure why we had such a high rate of males this batch. It was probably close to 75%. The muscovy ducks, Daphne and Delilah, got more and more territorial and started attacking everything around. It was very stressful for the chickens and eventually for me when they began running to attack me any time they heard me coming. They're strong birds and broke skin a few times. I think they were mad about my constant nest raiding. They went to a nearby home where there are 9 other Muscovies and no chickens. I think they'll be very happy there and since there are males around, they might get to have ducklings some day. We lost one of our old chickens so now we are down to 6. I try not to buy chicks more frequently than once every 2 years to prevent myself from getting overrun with less productive chickens in the future. It's a strange feeling to have so few birds in the pen.

Now on to the more exciting stuff! Today is significant for two reasons-- one, it is my last day in my 20's... two, because it is the first day of fall planting! Today I'll be planting beets, which I've been waiting for all summer. I bought some new heirlooms so amongst the usual Early Wonder, Detroit Dark Red etc. I'll be planting an albino beet, which is a very sweet white sugar beet from Holland and a beet called Crapaudine (They should have had a naming contest if that was the best they could come up with) which is supposedly a variety that's over 1000 years old. It looks more bark-like but I hear it has amazing flavor.

This week I'll also be planting Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Danvers Carrots, Nantes Carrots and St. Valery carrots, Gold Princess Onions, Texas Early Grano Onions and several varieties of radish. Peas, Garlic, Lettuce and Parsnips will go in during the beginning of October once the highs get down below 100 consistently. Fall can't get here soon enough!

Ugh....HEAT

2009-08-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

This heat is ridiculous. Hottest July on record. I can't remember the last day that the high was below 112, with most days being 115+. It's going to be 120+ for the next few days. The weather report always seems to be 5 degrees cooler than it is at my house, I put a second thermometer up because I thought maybe the first one was wrong. I went out and did a little tree pruning the other day because it was "only" 110, a beautiful day for yardwork.
It wouldn't be that big of a deal if I could just stay inside in my nearly pleasant 85 degree home, but if the chickens and quail are going to survive (the muscovies have a much higher tolerance for heat) I have to bring them ice for their water baths every few hours. I know those of you in the NW are dealing with 105 temps that must seem out of this world to you with little or no air conditioning, me and my birds sympathize.

Sorry for all the complaining. On a brighter note, the baby quail are doing well and I'm looking forward to replacing some of my crazy/aggressive birds with them in about a month.

Quail hatch #2!

2009-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

This past weekend we had our second round of quail eggs hatch. These were all from eggs that my quail or my friend's quail laid. They hatched pretty early, days 14 and 15, and a couple on day 16 instead of the usual 17. I think this may have something to do with the fact that the eggs were laid in 100-110 degree weather, that may have given the ones that hatched a jumpstart on the incubation.

We had 39 birds hatch out of 92 eggs set, which is a meager 42% hatch rate, but a lot of the set eggs were old and were stored in far less than ideal conditions, at 85 degrees instead of the recommended 55-65 degrees. Three birds died, two of those were very sickly runts from the beginning and one I think was smothered or trampled the first night. Overall I'm pleased with the results and I'm going to do another hatch or two in the fall.

I am thinking about selling sexed quads (one male, three females) for $17.50 or you can add another female and make it an even $20. The birds would all be 3-4 weeks old. This is much cheaper than you can get them at any feed store around here. This seems like a good deal for the buyer and compensates me for my time, feed and hatching costs. I wonder how many takers I'd find around town.

Produce from June

2009-07-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a shot of some of what's been growing at the tiny farm this summer. This shot was taken in late June, but I'm just now getting to it. The big thing that looks like a melon is actually a squash, the little green things in the lower right are a native passionfruit that is a volunteer in my yard. The jar has sun-dried tomatoes in it dried in the solar dehydrator, I plan on saving 24 cups of sun dried tomatoes for the winter as well as trying to grow some winter tomatoes. I have recently planted: Sub-Arctic Plenty, Stupice, and Siberian tomatoes. Hopefully I'll get closer to my year round tomato goal!

Been awhile! Birds in the heat.

2009-07-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry for my lack of posts. Here's a synopsis of what has been happening at the oven usually known as the Tiny Farm.

It's been ridiculously hot here. This whole week the high is around 115 and the lows are in the low 90's. This means that the birds never get a break. The muscovies were being real troopers until today when they finally started panting and just hanging out next to the water dish in the shade all day and completely giving up on chasing me around, which seems to be their favorite thing to do. I don't know why they don't just get in the water.
The chickens are far less heat tolerant than the ducks and are really miserable. Every morning around 5:30 am (when it's a brisk 94 degrees) I give the birds some cool vegetables (lettuce, melon, cucumbers etc) to get them hydrated and cooled off. The sprinklers come on around 6:30 and get the area under their favorite bushes nice and wet. Around 9:30-10:30 when the temps get to around 105, I put frozen water bottles with no lids, in shallow pans under their bushes so they can drink the cool water or stand in it if they want to. I replace the frozen water bottles around 3 or 3:30 when the temps are about 115 and hose off the bushes they hang out under to make sure it stays damp under there for them. Once they go up to roost at night I hose their feet/roosting bar off, which they don't particularly enjoy, but I think it helps them.

The quail get their water from one regular water bottle and one that was frozen the night before so as it melts it makes nice cool water (until of course it heats up into unpleasant warm water). Instead of filling their dust bathing dish with sand, I fill it with ice a couple of times a day. Like the chickens, they stand in it and drink the cool water. I also put a few ice cubes on some heavy cotton fabric in the cages so it keeps the fabric cool as the ice melts.

As you can see keeping birds in the desert, especially the chickens and non-native quail can be a big pain, luckily it's only this much work when the temps are consistently over 110 for several days in a row. Which is hopefully less than three weeks a year. Even with the extra steps each chicken is laying an average of only one egg a week. (Interestingly, the quail are still laying around 5 each a week.) I know lots of people that don't take quite as many extra measures, but I feel like it's my resposibility to do what I can to make them comfortable since I'm responsible for bringing them to Phoenix.

I also have about 100 coturnix eggs in the incubator due to hatch around July 27th! This will be my first batch of quail eggs to hatch from my own birds, I'm interested to see what kind of hatch rate I get.

Coturnix Quail update

2009-06-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember that I hatched some quail about two months ago. About a week ago they began laying and I'm getting several quail eggs every day. I originally hatched 85, sold all but 17, but then sold even more as I figured out which ones were roosters. A cat killed one and caused another to himself pretty badly, which I ended up putting down and eating--- this was before the chicken butchering, it was much much easier and actually gave me the confidence to get the meat chickens. I had a few hens in one pen that were fine on their own but very aggressive when I put a rooster with them and they nearly killed him. Since I plan on breeding these birds that wasn't going to work, so I sold them too.

I ended up with too few birds so a friend that I had sold about 50 to was kind enough to allow me to buy 3 hens back. So now I'm at 8 quail, with a rooster to hen ratio of one male to 3 females. I plan on keeping one male for every five females and upping my total number of quail to 18. This will give me a dozen+ eggs a day since Coturnix are pretty reliable daily layers. A dozen quail eggs are equal to between 2-3 chicken eggs in volume.

I'm surprised at some of the difficulties I've encountered with raising the quail. Like chickens, they don't always take to being mixed with new birds. With quail though at least you can usually add a hen to a group with no trouble but mixing bigger groups can be tricky and they can be very brutal. Quail can and will kill each other if they don't get along. For these reasons, in addition to the fact that they can be a little more difficult as chicks (because of their tiny size they are prone to drowning in even a small jar lid full of water, sidenote: they also require unmedicated gamebird starter feed-- they need the higher protein) I would say they are leaning between a beginner and intermediate poultry pet.

Even with those downsides Coturnix quail have so many things going in their favor I'd be very quick to recommend them! They are quick maturers and reliable layers. Quail roosters have a very pretty call, that most people would think was a neighborhood songbird-- sounds like "look at meeeeee", so for people wanting to breed birds in the city, quail can be a way to do that (they won't usually sit on their own eggs, you will need to incubate them). The call, while pretty can start up very early in the morning, so you might not want to have a large number of roosters or people will soon be onto you! They require only about one square foot of cage space per bird so apartment dwellers, especially those with a small balcony could have them and get their own fresh eggs. (Apartments are such close living arrangements I would probably skip the rooster here, but that won't diminish your egg supply!) People plagued by HOA regulations could have them too, as it's a small caged bird I believe it falls under "regular pets". They are easier to process than chickens if you are choosing to have some for the meat (the jumbo varieties can reach up to a pound of live weight). There are all different color variations, so if you are interested in genetics, you can do some fun experimenting with different crosses to see what color combinations you get.

My quail pens, bought brand new off of Craigslist for $50 each

It is recommended that you keep them on wire (in cages), this keeps the eggs nice and clean and the birds parasite free. They are great flyers and vulnerable prey so there is no chance of free-ranging them, but I may experiment with tractoring a batch down the road just to see how it goes. The backyard chicken movement really has momentum right now, but I know very few people that keep Coturnix quail, I'm hoping that more people discover them because they're great producers of eggs and meat and such a fun versatile bird.

Processing meat chickens

2009-05-30T11:42:00.001-07:00

I was thinking about ordering a dozen or so meat birds this fall, my husband who likes meat far more than I, was pretty much on board. I wanted to do this a part of being more self-sufficient and also feeling like if I was going to eat meat I should have the responsibility of processing my own animals at least once in awhile and really respect how they get to the table. Lucky me was perusing Craig's list and saw that a feed store in town had 8 week old meat birds on sale, 5 for $20. They were not organic, but you couldn't even raise a meat bird conventionally for $4, so we brought them home yesterday morning and this morning we got up at dawn to dress them.

I won't give you details, but it didn't go as smoothly as you would hope. We used a killing cone made out of a very large plastic apple cider vinegar bottle and a very big knife. We opted to go for decapitation instead of bleeding them out or any of the other methods because we thought the chickens would suffer the least this way. Plucking the chickens took us forever (about an hour each), soooo many little pinfeathers. It was so frustrating that we skinned the last three. I was in charge of gutting, which was more nauseating than I was prepared for. (This is coming from someone who loved to draw and paint from cadavers when I used to have the opportunity.)

I thought I would feel proud of myself, or at least like now I earned my right to eat meat, but mostly I just feel sick. I have no desire to eat chicken for a verrry long time. These birds will be vacuum-sealed and frozen and will not go to waste, but it will be awhile. I know most people have better outcomes and feel a great sense of accomplishment, but both of us are leaning more towards being mostly vegetarians and will never butcher chickens again.

Delilah the duck has a surprise!

2009-05-05T09:31:00.001-07:00

Well this morning I went out to feed everyone and one of the new ducklings we got was running around, she apparently had dug her way out of the pen and couldn't get back in. After trying to catch her for about 15 minutes (and the other animals "helping") I had to go wake up my husband to help me wrangle her. As soon as we got her back in with her mom I took care of the rest of the birds and thought I heard some cheep cheeps... well there's about 15 nests around our house with baby birds in them... but none of those are in the chicken coop. Here's what I saw:

Roxie gets a little curious

These are from the first round of fertile chicken eggs I got from the friend that has Dazzler, the rooster we had to rehome. We had 6 eggs, one broke, one was clear (infertile) and she got the other four to hatch. Today was only day 20 and these chicks were already nice and fluffy early this morning, so I think they hatched late on day 19. They're really chubby, I think because of the extra humidity that ducks provide. I have read several things about not letting the muscovies brood the baby chicks, one reason being that they sometimes step on and crush the chicks that aren't prepared for giant heavy duck feet, and also because ducks try to introduce their babies to water, which for a chicken chick, doesn't work out so well. So it made me a little sad, and Delilah very angry, but I put the chicks in a brooder.

She still seems to be sitting on the nest, she had a few chicken eggs that are a week old under her (I had no room in the incubator), so she may be trying to hatch those out. I also grabbed a few of the duck eggs from the incubator and gave those to her as well, partly as an I'm-sorry-for-stealing-your-chicks gift. I'll keep a close eye on her and hopefully she'll hatch out a second round that are due in a little less than three weeks (all of the remaining chicken and duck eggs are scheduled to hatch at the same time). If she manages to sit for that whole time it would be a total of just over 6 weeks. That seems like a really long time, but since Muscovy eggs take about 5-5.5 weeks to hatch, it's certainly possible she'll do it.

I counted this morning and I think we have 45 birds here at the tiny farm. Wow.

Four Easter Egger chicks warm in the brooder

Muscovy Ducklings!

2009-05-03T14:01:00.001-07:00

It's the time of year for things to start hatching. The woman whom we got our Muscovies from is moving and can't take her ducks, and the duck had hatched 11 eggs last week. Today they arrived at the tiny farm! We will be finding new homes for most, if not all, of the new ducks. The mama looks so rough because she was outnumbered by males 4 to 1 and they all thought she was pretty. Her feathers have started coming back in, and we'll keep her for at least as long as it takes to get her back into good shape. Look at her blue eyes!

I hope a couple of her babies get her eye color. It's so neat to see all the different color patterns. These ducklings are full brothers and sisters to ours, the father, who died just before the duck started sitting was solid black. He was a great duck who loved to be pet and was very very friendly. His personality seemed to come through a little in our ducks, which let you pet them. I hope this batch gets that as well.

There are few things as cute as ducklings.

Quail pictures at one week

2009-05-03T13:53:00.001-07:00

The chicks are a little over 2 weeks now, so I'm behind in the picture posting, I'll do another update in a few days to get you up to speed on their progress.
Out of the 85 that I hatched, I kept 17. One of those was a runt that I helped out of the shell (I know, never do that...it just looked so sad stuck in there), another has a funny bend in the back, nothing serious, I just don't want to breed it, and there's another one of the Jumbos that has weak legs. I have it and the runt in a separate brooder with some additional vitamins (really aimed at the weak leg one, the runt will likely never catch up in size, though it has as much pep as any of the others). These three "non-breeders" will stay separated, if they all turn out to be females, I'll just use them for eggs meant for the table rather than the incubator.

As you can see from the photos, the chicks went from the size of a quarter to the size of chicken chicks in one week!

Quail chicks are hatched!

2009-04-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

The eggs in the incubator

They started hatching right on time at the beginning of day 17 and continued through the end of day 18. I can't stress enough how much I enjoy the short incubation of quail chicks. We started with 118 eggs and ended up with 110 going into the final period of incubation. Out of those we hatched 85 baby quail. Because of the large number I couldn't candle all of them, so after the hatch was over and I checked the remaining eggs I realized around 20 infertile/never developed eggs were included in that 110 eggs.

That's rubber drawer-liner on the bottom of the incubator, the quail chicks are so small that their feet could slip through the standard mesh.

I keep the incubator in the pantry as it's the most out of the way place in our very small house. I get so excited (Notice my refraining from using the punny "egg-cited"? You're welcome.) about hatch day that for two nights I slept on the tile floor in the doorway of the kitchen and pantry so I could listen to them hatch and get up every 2 hours and see what was going on. People who incubate will commonly tell you to wait before the entire hatch is over before removing chicks, so you don't mess up the humidity level which can cause birds to not be able to hatch. With quail, at least in this volume, I learned that you can't really do that. They are very aggressive, curious and hungry and after they get mobility figured out, they just run all over the place and peck at the toes of the newly hatching quail (which, to them, look like tiny worms sticking out of the eggs I imagine). So about once every few hours I'd quickly grab all the dried off chicks and move them to the brooder. I felt I could safely do this because my humidity was hovering in the 80% range due to all the wet chicks, so even when I opened the lid it never dipped below 60% (the recommended humidity levels for hatching quail is somewhere around 60-65%). Quail babies also like the temperature a little warmer than baby chickens and ducklings, they seem to prefer the brooder closer to 100 degrees rather than the usual 95. Enough with the statistics, here's more pictures!

Speedy quail chicks in the incubator

It's hard to get over just how small they are. Here's one in my hand, and that's a power-ade bottle cap in the upper left that they're eating out of.

This video illustrates why you want to be the first one to hatch. Actually this chick is relatively lucky the others are just ignoring it instead of pecking at the new shiny thing in the incubator.

I just can't get over how tiny they are. These chicks will be laying eggs themselves in 6-7 weeks!

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that I got eggs mixed from several different color patterns, that's why there are different looking chicks.

Mulberry cobbler

2009-04-12T10:43:00.001-07:00

Our neighborhood has about one mulberry tree per house, maybe more. We have 7, two males and 5 females. Four females and a male are still pretty small and not really producing much yet. This time of year is one of my favorites, the weather is still nice and every afternoon I go out on my bike riding around the neighborhood picking mulberries off the trees that are close enough to pick from the street. Most people consider them a nuisance because they make such a mess, and don't even bother to eat any. I figure I'm doing the neighborhood a service by keeping a few hundred (thousand?) berries from falling onto the ground. I always freeze some, but I try and use them up as much as possible, but it gets tricky finding new ways to go through a pound a day. (Next year, maybe mulberry wine). For Easter breakfast I modified a berry cobbler recipe I found on Chiots Run

I thought I had taken a picture of the cobbler, but all I can find is one of the mulberries. So here's an image of the berries I used. A mixture of purple and white mulberries (ripe when white).

Mulberry Cobbler
1 cup of all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons regular sugar
2 Tablespoon of course sugar (I use the sugar in the raw/turbinado stuff)
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 cup cold butter
1 egg (I use a duck egg mmmm!)
1/4 cup of milk

6 cups fresh mulberries from your neighborhood trees
1/8 cup lemon juice
1 Tablespoon of sugar
1 Tablespoon of cornstarch

For filling: in a saucepan combine the berries, lemon juice, sugar (or honey) and cornstarch and 1/4 cup of water. Let stand for 10 minutes. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly, keep warm.

For topping: in a medium bowl stir together flour, regular sugar, baking powder and cinnamon. Cut in butter till mixture resembles coarse crumbs, set aside.

In a small bowl stir together egg and milk. Add to flour mixture, stirring just to moisten. Transfer filling to a 2 quart baking dish, or large cast iron skillet. Using spoon, drop topping onto small mounds atop filling. Sprinkle course sugar on top.

Bake cobbler in a 400 degree oven for 20-25 minutes or till a wooden toothpick inserted into topping comes out clean. Serve warm.

Next time, I would switch out 1/3 of the mulberries for blackberries or raspberries, because the mulberries are very sweet, but I think it would be more flavorful with some other berries mixed in.

Here is the estimated cost breakdown:
Mulberries, duck eggs, lemon juice: $0 (of course not including the cost of duck food)
Organic flour: $ .20
Organic sugar: $ .05
Organic milk: $ .07
cornstarch: $ .02
Organic Butter: $ .80
Cinnamon: $.02
Baking powder: $ .02

Total ingredients cost: $ 1.18
The tiny farm is sticking it to the man once again. :)

P.S. I am sitting on my hands waiting for these quail. If everything goes right, we should start seeing signs of hatching in 24-36 hours!

Coturnix Quail Hatch, day 12

2009-04-12T09:17:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter! My favorite holiday second to my birthday. We started the day with an easter egg hunt (my husband is kind enough to hide eggs for me every year) and I made a mulberry cobbler, which I will post about later.

Several weeks ago I had made the decision to go ahead with raising a few Coturnix quail, for egg and probably meat production. These quail will become fully mature at 6-7 weeks, and begin laying or be ready to process (Live weight will be between 11-15 ounces). The females will lay about 6 eggs a week and though the eggs are much smaller, their feed to egg weight ratio is better than chickens or ducks. I went ahead and ordered 100+ eggs from the internet. While I was MIA from my blog, a package of quail eggs arrived! I had a little postal delay that was frustrating... the eggs made it from Pennsylvania to Phoenix in one day, but it took 4 more days for them to get from the main Phoenix postal depot to my house. Five days in the postal system is not great for eggs and will probably decrease my hatch rate some, but hopefully the extra eggs she sent will make up for those losses.

Opening the box

The best egg packaging ever

Ordering eggs (and chicks) in Phoenix can be very tricky since usually by the time it's warm enough in the places the eggs and chicks come from, it's too hot here to receive them and then in October when it finally cools down below 100, it's already freezing in the places the eggs come from. There are a few hatcheries in warmer climates, but it seems like those places hardly ever carry the breeds I'm interested in. So it was nice that there was agreeable weather on both ends of the shipment. After I got them all unpacked, there was only one broken: 119 out of 120... not bad.

All 120 eggs

One really great thing about hatching this breed of quail is that the incubation period is only 17 days, that's only half the time of the Muscovy ducks! Here are the eggs going into the preheated incubator.

Quail eggs are notoriously difficult to candle (when you shine a bright light into the egg to see what's going on in there) because of their size and their really dark shells. I got a 135 lumen headlamp from Target on clearance for $10 and that seems to be the only light that I own that's bright enough to see anything through a quail egg. Because there are so many eggs to check and you don't want to lose the heat/humidity in your incubator you need to take the entire egg turner out and leave the incubator lid closed while you're candling, and even this way you don't want the eggs to cool down much so 10 minutes is the maximum amount of time I have them out. You won't be able to see much before about day 7 or 8, and you also want to leave the eggs alone during the most critical development stages: the first few and the last few says so I checked about 80 of them on day 8 most of them seemed to be progressing normally, some were clear (infertile) and I pulled 3 cracked eggs and a rotten one. (The rotten one stank, so I needed to be sure and get it out of there before it exploded all over my good eggs). I think the few eggs that cracked got cracked in the egg turner because they were too big and hit the turner trays next to them. I marked the clear eggs and put them back in because some of them are just too difficult to judge and I'd hate to throw out a developing egg because of my own candling incompetence. I'll re-check the marked eggs when I'm taking them out of the turner for the hatch, by that point it will be obvious if anything developed because the whole egg (except for the air cell) will be dark if there's a chick in it or clear if there's nothing.

Now we are at day 12 with 5 days to go. I will take the eggs all out of the automatic turner and lay them on the incubator floor 3 days before hatch. This gives them a chance to get situated and get ready to hatch, but it's also important because hatch times can vary anywhere from 14-19 days and you don't want them to try and hatch while they're still turning. Time to sit on my hands and wait. :)

Where have I been??

2009-03-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

Right now since I'm feeling sick I figured I'd take advantage of my down time to post an update. I've been busy working on paintings for a show I have coming up and that has consumed most of my awake time and will continue to do so for the next couple weeks so posts may be sporadic for a little while longer. Hopefully you're all so busy planting that you don't even notice. :)

The duck eggs are still in the incubator, but this past week we had a serious temperature spike in the incubator that I am pretty sure killed all of the developing ducklings. I'm pretty upset about it, and I'm going to go ahead an leave them in there until their scheduled hatch date (Wednesday the 25th) but I haven't seen any movement in the eggs in several days and they don't appear to be developing. I can't really figure out what would have caused that to happen, but I'm going to be making some adjustments and doing some tests before I put the quail eggs in there next weekend.

Speaking of temperature spikes... the weather has been hovering around 90 for the past few days causing the remaining lettuces and herbs to bolt. I'm not really ready for warm weather yet, luckily it's supposed to dip back into the low 80's next week.

Out of the 50 or so tomatoes I planted, about half of them are doing well. About 5 have already been pulled, and several others seem to just be stunted after I transplanted them, but I'm giving them time to catch up. This is what I expected to happen which was why I planted so many in the first place. We have a few tiny green tomatoes developing, I'm hoping to get my first ripe one before May.

We also have some good news on the duck front, one of our muscovy ducks started laying this week! Not only that, they've begun eating flies. We were starting to think that the whole muscovy fly-eating thing was a trick to sell ducks, but now I've witnessed it several times and it's great entertainment. The ducks run around with their necks fully extended and their heads almost touching the ground snapping their bills like mad. Like chickens, the ducks seem to become more friendly once they begin laying. Now the one that's laying lets me pet her every once in awhile.

I'm off to rest!

Around the tiny farm: The animal pen

2009-03-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Here are just a few photos illustrating what's going on this time of year in the animal pen.

Delilah taking a bath. That water was clean not too long before I took the picture. Ducks have a way of getting water very dirty quickly. This shot is in between splashing like mad, they get everything within a several foot radius very wet, which is why I thought it would be smart to plant the sugar cane on the other side of the fence there. After the ducks take a bath, they hop out and run around the pen full speed with their wings flapping, it's hilarious to me, but I think the chickens would prefer to not have giant ducks zooming at them.

All of the older birds are now laying, the last one to start was Cosmo, the white-crested blue polish last week (at around 24 weeks). We're averaging 6-7 eggs a day between 9 birds that are currently laying. It's gotten noticeably louder, mostly with the "Get out, I want to be in that nestbox" noise, which is not my favorite thing to hear. Here's Pizazz (named after the Gem and the Holograms character), our australorp in one of the boxes. I leave the plastic 'training eggs' in the boxes in the nests even after the chickens begin laying just for fun, also, it can't hurt to remind the chickens...

The compost was in bad need of turning, and I was feeling lazy about doing it, so I opened the little gate to the compost bin and for the past few days the chickens have been doing the work for me. They love it and do a far superior job. Now I'll sift the finished compost into a separate container and shovel the rest back into the bin.

Finally, I decided to build a potato bed in the chicken pen. There isn't any grass in there, so I don't have to worry about sprouts of bermuda popping through the potato patch. The chicken wire has so far kept the chickens away from the sprouting potatoes and the newspaper lining has done a good job of keeping the soil in. For seed potatoes, I just went to the farmers market and got some organic red potatoes, yukon golds and fingerlings. This also gives me a good place to dump dirty water when I'm cleaning the waterers instead of having to haul it around the yard or wasting it.

New hen!

2009-03-05T17:08:00.001-08:00

Rachel's tiny farm got a new hen! Well, in a round-about way I got an old hen back. Remember when the hatchery accidentally shipped my order to me again two weeks after I got the first 26 chicks? Well I was visiting the urban farm the other day, where 10 of those chicks ended up and I commented on how beautiful one of his hens was, and it turns out it was one of the ones he got from me and he gave her to me. I offered to trade him my noisy hen, and what a surprise, he turned her down. For now she's in a pen inside the chicken yard to get accustomed to her new home. She should begin laying any day.

Here is Miss Moneypenny, the new Easter Egger.

I am pleased to get another easter egger, I love those green eggs. I had planned on having three of them originally but you may recall, Dazzler, turned out to be a rooster and got a new home.

I'm trying to get some foliage up around the chicken pen to act as a little bit of a sound buffer, and also to obscure any view of my chickens from the street. So I was pretty excited when tonight a neighbor gave me a stalk of her sugar cane. I cut it into a few pieces and buried it sideways along the chicken fence. It's right next to where the ducks take baths and splash water all over the place. I'm hoping that nitrogen-rich duck water will really boost the sugar cane. I'll let you know how it goes.

Candling the Muscovy eggs

2009-03-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

Well, we are now on day 14 of 35 with the Muscovy eggs. After candling them, I determined that 2 of the original 15 were infertile and 2 had died early on, so now we're down to 11. Tonight I candled one and could see a little embryo moving around, but unfortunately could not get a picture to turn out. Maybe next time I candle I'll test out the video function on my camera. I did get a picture on day 10 of a viable egg, this vaguely shows the spiderweb of blood vessels that form early on in development (The faint red lines near the top of the egg).

Day 10

It's interesting that different poultry take different amounts of time to hatch. You would think that ducks are ducks and it would all be the same, but all other ducks only take 28 days to hatch and Muscovy ducks take 25% longer at 35 days. Compared with a quail's 16 days, that's an eternity (also seems like eternity for those of us that watch the incubators.)

Warm days ahead

2009-02-27T19:41:00.000-08:00

This happens to be my 100th post, I wish it would have coincided with something earth-shattering, like me inventing some easy and safe way to rid your yard of bermuda grass forever... oh well. Our weather has been unseasonably warm and next week we're looking at a couple of days where the temps will be approaching 90. Luckily, I've gotten everything in the ground already with the exception of a couple of tomato plants and one butternut squash. When all is said and done, I will have planted 50 tomato/tomatillo plants! For most people that would mean 500-2500 pounds of tomatoes, I'm shooting for 100 pounds, 250 would be fantastic. Many of these are planted in pots, some are more cool weather varieties and there's several other reasons why I'm fully expecting some casualties early on. There are somewhere around 25 varieties mostly heirlooms, and this was the real reason there are so many. I just couldn't say no to the seed catalog. Thankfully the tiny farm is paying for itself through selling eggs, seedlings, sometimes baby poultry and teaching classes. It's somewhere between a hobby and a job, but since it has it's own bank account (by bank account I mean small envelope with about $30 in it at any given time) no one bothers me about going overboard with seed buying.

Our mild winter means the eggplants and peppers from last season are still doing just fine, they're starting to put on new growth and are just starting to flower.
An eggplant flowering... in February
These should hold me over until my new varieties of pepper and eggplants begin fruiting. I can't wait!

Ollas and the neighborhood community

2009-02-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

I tried candling the duck eggs last night and they're still just a little early along for me to see anything definite. I'll give it another go this weekend, and show you pictures.
So what else have I been doing? Well, this morning I had my very first root canal. I was sick with terror about it. My doctor prescribed me some sort of anti anxiety pill to take before I went in, that helped a little, then the happy gas came,which helped more and after the shots it was really nothing at all. I couldn't believe it, after all this talk about root canals. It really didn't even hurt. YAY! So Since I was so good, I decided to get myself a special prize. I was still loopy from all the drugs, but I had my neighbor drive me over to Southwest Gardener and I picked up these babies!

My new Ollas

Southwest gardener has a 25% off coupon if you get their mailers, after the discount these four set me back $73.10 total. I had received two as a thank you gift for chick-sitting awhile back and I have loved them and am so happy to be getting more. They will go in my front yard native bed which has no drip system. A way better reward than a trip to the pizza place.

On a somewhat unrelated topic, I feel so grateful to live in the neighborhood I do. Today I came home from the dentist to a hand-written note from a guy down the street, that I had only met once in passing, wanting to learn about chickens. Still loopy from the drugs, I ran (crookedly) to his house and we talked about chickens, I told him I would help him get set-up for them and gave him some squash seeds and a tomato plant for his garden. He is a bike mechanic and volunteered to fix up an old bike we got at a garage sale to return the favor. Awesome. Over the past few weeks there's been a lot of bartering/sharing talk in the neighborhood. I'm sure some of it's because of the economy, but some of it is just people wanting to deal with individuals and business on a smaller and friendlier scale. Off the top of my head I can think of some trading around that's been going on here: food for seedlings, seeds for seeds, tool sharing for fixing tools, fixing things for seeds. This isn't officially bartered, it's more like I fixed a neighbor's sewing machine and a giant bag of oranges magically appeared at our house. It's just a bunch of folks helping out some other folks.

It's a little funny in a central phoenix neighborhood to have 5 people with chickens all on the same street and at least that many with some sort of garden plan and a bunch of us are also experimenting with home-made solar and in all other regards, we couldn't be more different. It's encouraging.

Home-made olive taste test

2009-02-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

For those of you that have been reading the blog for awhile, you may remember that I decided to brine my own olives. I picked olives from a neighbor's tree and followed directions I found on the internet. Here's the original post if you care to read it, the olive part along with a promising photo are near the middle/bottom.

How did it go??

Terrible. Yuck. Awful.

I ended up making 5 jars total. 3 of the 5 had mold on the tops, so they were out straight away. I tried one from one of the non-moldy jars and it tasted like salty poison. Poison-y taste aside (perhaps they needed more curing) the salt is so overwhelming that you can't even begin to taste anything remotely olive-like. I think I'm going to find some local folks who have had success making olives before and find out what went wrong. As a side note, my neighbor that tried this experiment at the same time had similar results.

It's disappointing, but at least I didn't NEED these olives. It's always best to practice when you can afford to fail.

Today is day 8 on the Muscovy eggs in the incubator. Tonight I will be candling them to check for fertility. I will do my best to get pictures of anything I see and post them soon.

Free Tomato Seeds, YAY!

2009-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Susy at Chiot's Run for linking the Free Tomato Seeds offer from WinterSown and enabling me to acquire more tomato seeds, and feed my addiction. They are a non-profit seed-sharing group, to whom I will be donating seed to at the end of this season. If you didn't see it at Susy's blog, here's a link to it. Basically you send an SASE and a list of 6 choices, plus 4 alternates. The varieties are listed as all OP varieties, though I saw one or two that I'm pretty sure are hybrids.
They sent my 6 tomato requests, plus most of my alternates as well as a bonus pack of Field Pumpkin seeds. Basically, it feels like my birthday.

Here's what I got:
Egg Yolk
Cherokee Purple
Heatwave
Sub-Arctic Plenty
Russian Persimmon
Marglobe
Green Pineapple
Absinthe
Stupice
Field Pumpkin

The Sub-Arctic Plenty and the Stupice are both 50-60 day varieties, and will be added to my year round tomato experiment.

I don't have a picture of my free seeds, so I will leave you with a gratuitous picture of Sparkle, my silver-laced wyandotte, as well as a reminder that I'll be teaching the "Raising Chickens in Your Backyard" class for the Phoenix Permaculture Guild at the farmer's market this weekend for any Phoenicians that might be interested.

Chickens, ducks and someone else's lambs

2009-02-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a bit of house/animal sitting about 2 hours away from home for a week. Even though both my husband and I work from home, he couldn't come up, because someone had to stay home and take care of our animals and seedlings. He's not thrilled about being on animal and plant duty, but he's a very nice and patient person, so he's doing it without complaining (the tiny farm is called "Rachel's Tiny Farm" not "Rachel and Wes' Tiny farm", for a reason).

Of course the day after I leave we get the first egg from this round of hens, They are 23 weeks old tomorrow, so it's about time. I'm hoping the others follow the Australorp's shining example. I don't think I'll be getting anymore chicks in the fall. Since I don't artificially light my birds, I think they're taking a little longer to start laying because of the short day lengths, but also, they will probably all molt this next winter and I'll get fewer eggs out of them. It seems like when you get your chicks in the spring and they start laying in summer/fall they often skip that first molt and you get a lot more eggs in the winter. That's my observation anyway.

The ducks should also lay soon. During our recent storms the ducks discovered the chicken coop and decided that they prefer sleeping in there instead of the middle of the yard, which I'm happy about. I'm hoping they'll lay in the coop where I can easily find the eggs rather than go off hiding them somewhere. There's more good duck news-- the people whom I got the ducks from are moving and don't want to deal with a new round of ducklings so I am picking up a clutch of Muscovy eggs on my way back into Phoenix next week to incubate. If everything goes well I should have muscovy ducklings available in mid-late March, let me know if you're in the Phoenix area and are interested.
Daphne heading into the coop

The people next to where I'm house-sitting have sheep and it's lambing season, the first day I was here I saw two black lambs that are a couple weeks old and this morning there were some tiny lambs that were about 36 hours old. They are a pretty tame bunch of sheep and they let me get pretty close, unfortunately I didn't bring a camera, so I just got a picture off google to illustrate. ;)

Imagine this times two, and then two more little black lambs

Now I'm scheming as to how I could get myself some sheep... there are a lot of empty houses because of the markets, maybe they could provide grazing rotation.... okay, so sheep are probably out for now. Do any of you have sheep?

Seedling progress, tomato list

2009-02-11T18:45:00.001-08:00

There hasn't been a lot to post about around here, I've been mostly busy painting getting ready for a show I have in May. We've been getting the same weather roller coaster as most of the rest of the country, it was in the 80's last week, lots of trees started blooming and now we're getting tons of rain and frosts. It's times like this that I'm glad that I don't have to depend on my plants as my only source of food.

My seedlings are growing like crazy, I had started them anticipating being able to put them in the ground in late February, but the weather has been so nuts I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Here's a photo of their progress so far. Sorry about it being a horrible blown-out image. It was so bright I couldn't see the display on my camera to know I needed to take a better picture. ;)

There are 150+ seedlings there, mostly tomatoes... here's a full list of the tomatoes I have planted this year:

Tomatillo (not really a tomato... I know)
Besser Tomato
Bicolor cherry tomato
Bloody Butcher tomato
Brown Cherry tomato
Golden Nugget tomato
Green Grape cherry tomato
Green Zebra tomato (this was from saved seed, don't know if it will grow true)
Ivory Egg tomato
Paul Robeson Tomato
Roma Rio Grande tomato
Russian Black Tomato
Siberian tomato
Sugar Lump, AKA Gardener's Delight
Sundrop cherry tomato
Sungold cherry tomato (Hybrid)
Super Sioux tomato
Super Snow White Cherry tomato
Super Sweet 100 (Hybrid)
Sweet Gold Cherry tomato (Hybrid)
Tumbler tomato
White Queen tomato
Yellow Pear tomato

Yikes, that's about 20 more varieties than I planned on planting. :)
I'm still working on the list of varieties I want to try next year, or even this fall for the fast-maturing varieties. I'll post it soon and maybe we can swap!

Bird Netting Tower, Seedling Set-Up

2009-01-27T17:36:00.001-08:00

First let me say thanks to the birds for the pecans. Normally the wild birds in our yard are takers. They take my plants, fruit and chicken feed. Today in a rare turn of events a couple of birds gave me pecans. I will explain. Our neighbor has a giant pecan tree in his backyard, which the birds mainly use as a place to rest and poop on his boat while waiting to steal from me. This time of year, they are also picking the pecans, hiding them and occasionally eating them. I don't know if they drop them on purpose as a means to break them open, or if they are just clumsy sometimes, but either way, some birds seem to have taken to grabbing pecans from the neighbor's tree and then eating them (or at least dropping them) from a palm tree in my front yard and the ground around the palm tree is littered with unpecked and unopened pecans. Thank you. This post is for the other birds that just steal.

Here is the tower I built around the newest 4'X 4' garden bed. We have some very sneaky birds around here, and I'm tired of the peas/tomatoes etc getting tangled in the bird netting. I built an 8' tall support around the bed which has bird netting draped over it. (The power lines are really not very close, it just looks that way in the picture.) This should give vines plenty of room to grow without growing through the netting. It looks a little ridiculous now that it's empty but I'm hoping to fill it up soon! It was partially inspired by Paul's trellis support system over at a posse ad esse, which is worth looking at.
The ridiculous tower of birdnetting will hopefully look less ridiculous when it's filled with unpecked produce.

Also, here's a quick picture of the seedling set up. First, the seeds are planted and sprouted in small containers of potting soil on a seedling heat mat on top of the dryer (I set up a fluorescent light fixture up there, just for that purpose). Once they sprout they are transplanted to their own 4" pot and moved to the garage/studio building in the backyard that has more lights set up. This picture is from one of the two and soon to be three light set ups out there. The plastic bags you see are lining those square mesh trays that hold flats of seedlings, they are always leftover at nurseries. It's an easy way to make a very cheap, perfectly-sized, waterproof container so I can water from the bottom rather than splash water all over my delicate new seedlings.

Some new tomatoes and peppers

And finally a random picture of the new ducks, Daphne and Delilah taking a bath.

Now I'm off to design quail cages! ;)

Quick random updates

2009-01-27T17:04:00.001-08:00

The new ducks got mixed in with the chickens today, it's interesting how differently it went than when we had the khaki campbells. The muscovies were a little hesitant to come out at first, but after they did they showed the 7 younger chickens who was boss, but were still bested by the older 3 hens. By mid-afternoon, the ducks were in charge. It's a little funny to watch those older hens that were giving the younger ones a hard time for the past few weeks be on the short end of the stick. Ahh payback.

After we integrated the chickens a few weeks ago, one of our older layers stopped laying, this isn't unusual, if you stir up the world of a chicken it will often keep them from laying for about 2 weeks. Now I'm afraid that I'm going to delay her even longer. We have some new egg customers now and we need all the eggs we can get! I'm very seriously considering getting some quail. I know of someone who will be selling some baby Pharoah quail for $1 each in a couple weeks, can anyone think of a reason NOT to get them? My plan was to tractor them and eat the eggs. Possibly for meat too, but we'll have to wait and see on that.

I have done a little trading and have now planted over 20 varieties of tomatoes, 3 kinds of peppers, 2 kinds of melons and 2 kinds of cucumbers. These are all under fluorescent lights and I'm pretty sure it looks like we're growing drugs. There are currently around 100 seedlings, which means I should have 50 or so extras to sell at the farmer's market in about a month. Tomorrow I will begin planting the 4 varieties of squash and 2 kinds of okra.

Stay tuned, tomorrow I'll post about the new 'tower of bird netting' I built today as well as post some pictures.

Tomato planting and more tomato planting

2009-01-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

Well, since I think I've finally accepted the fact that the tiny farm is just too tiny to have room for goats, I've moved on to the next best thing. Tomatoes. I will have pet tomatoes. I don't think it's out of spite (my husband, who was the most adamant about pointing out our lack of room for goat-housing, does not like tomatoes). I think it's because there are SO many varieties-- tiny, huge, citrus-y, tangy, sweet, juicy, gloppy, tomato-y etc. Not to mention that they come in so many different colors.
If you need more convincing go read through Hanna's (extensive) tomato reviews at thisgardenisillegal. (Even if you already love tomatoes, she reviews them with more attention than Consumer Reports).

Here is a list of the tomato seeds that I've started so far (all heirloom):
1. Besser- I got this one 2 years ago because the name was close to my last name, it turned out to be a prolific producer of cherry tomatoes, so I keep growing it.
2. Bloody Butcher- Early heirloom variety I'm replacing hybrids like Early Girl with.
3. Roma Rio Grande- Supposed to be like a Roma, but more heat tolerant.
4. Ivory Egg- "White" tomato shaped like an egg... mostly for novelty.
5. White Queen- Another white tomato, more pale and more taste than Ivory Egg
6. Yellow Pear- Prolific producer
7. Brown Berry- Supposed to be a very good tasting cherry with a complex flavor
8. Golden Nugget- Very early tasty yellow cherry tomato
9. Siberian- 48 days to maturity, I'm experimenting with super short season varieties with exceptional heat/cold tolerance to try and get ripe tomatoes year round. I've read this one will set fruit in temps as low as the upper 30's (!)
10. Sugar Lump- Sugar sweet tomatoes
11. Super Sioux- Another heat tolerant tomato, not a sweet variety.
12. Tumbler- For container gardening, which is great because my garden is full
13. Tomatillo- Ok, not a tomato, but close enough.

The first sprouting tomato seeds of 2009

I've found that old standards like Brandywine just don't do too well at my house, I think because the weather is so hot and dry and they take too long to mature (or maybe I'm just not good at it). I'd love to hear your favorite varieties of tomatoes since I'm already starting my list of varieties I want to try next year. :)

DUCKS! Muscovy ducks for the tiny farm.

2009-01-15T17:34:00.000-08:00

I've been missing my khaki campbells ever since I had to rehome them. The noise was just too much; all the neighbors could hear them. With 10 hens this year I'm anticipating a couple of flies in the chicken area, so it was obvious that I had to have some muscovy ducks. (They can eat hundreds of flies a day and don't quack.) Money is really really tight around here so I didn't think it was going to happen, but then through the magic of craig's list and two five dollar bills, I got these two!

They were sold to me as females that are about 4 or 5 months old. The ducks don't have names yet but I bet they will by the end of the weekend. Maybe Daphne and Delilah? We'll see.

They were bred from a white female and a very nice black drake who likes to be pet. Hopefully the friendliness got passed to these two. When I was a (very young) kid I thought that people with lots of freckles were the child of one black parent and one white one so they came out spotted, apparently in ducks that really is how it works!

I am so happy to have ducks again, I think a dozen is a great number of birds to have so we'll stop here for now....

My seeds are here!!!

2009-01-07T19:53:00.001-08:00

Well, most of them. I got the ones from Baker Creek, which was the one I was looking forward to the most, both because it was the largest order and because I couldn't wait to see what the surprise seeds were. Drumroll...... Evening Primrose. What?? Not to be ungrateful, but I had just assumed since I was ordering food seeds, the surprise would be a food seed too, or at least a flower seed from my climate. Al Gore's internet tells me that the evening primrose is found east of the Rockies. Last I checked Phoenix was noticeably WEST of the Rockies. However, upon further investigation it seems that it will grow in my area (and the rest of the United States), maybe that Rockies thing was a red herring. It seems that it's edible and has some medicinal properties as well, okay Baker Creek, you're redeemed. I'm going to give it a shot.

You guessed it, the evening primrose

Now it's not as exciting as my white tomatoes or Tigger Melons, but I do like that it reseeds itself. Maybe it will be like all of the California Poppies that show up in my front yard in the spring... that could be exciting. Three cheers for the evening primrose!

The rest of the ax... forcefully self-sufficient

2009-01-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

Well, today we got the news that I was afraid would be coming, my husband is officially laid off. I, being self-employed as a painter (art not houses) am also having a very slow income time because the people that usually would buy art are either broke, or hoarding all their money so they don't become broke too. So what better opportunity to put my self-sufficiency skills to work. Mind you they won't pay the hospital bill, the mortgage, our car payment etc, but they might 'pay' the food bill, the clothing bill and lower some other bills like electricity.

Of course we are both going to be looking for some paycheck work and hopefully our small savings will tide us over this rough patch. We realize that the economy sucks and we're likely going to be taking jobs our college educations will go unused at, but maybe being forced to be very productive in our gardening etc. will be rewarding enough to make up for that.

Luckily, I have all those great heirloom seeds coming in the mail. That gives me something to look forward to, and I don't feel guilty about having bought them since they'll be put to very good use. For those of you that are in the Phoenix area and don't feel like starting your own seeds indoors in January, I expect to have a few extra seedlings of interesting and productive varieties of tomato, peppers and eggplants mostly. You can contact me here and/or also I'll bring them down to the Saturday downtown farmers market at the Permaculture booth in a few weeks when it's transplant time. They will be cheap, and if you happen to represent my bank, they will be available for mortgage bartering.

I don't mean for this to be a downer post. My mom is encouraging me to view this as a great opportunity. I think opportunity would be a word more suited for an occasion where you are given 2 weeks and a hundred dollars to make a fantastic present for a friend. This is more of fear-based initiative, where the car's going to blow up so I better figure out how to utilize my gum, ball point pen and paperclip to avoid catastrophe. Although, I suppose that's a sort of opportunity too...

Hello 2009, more seeds!

2009-01-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

My husband and I spent New Years day up in snowy Flagstaff, AZ. Living in Phoenix, snow is a very novel thing so we pulled over by the side of the highway as soon as we could, made a sled out of a stiff sunshade for the car and had a great time. It was a clear 55 degree day though my husband was wearing enough gear to get him through a Yukon winter. After sledding and snowball fights we went into town and I stumbled on a used copy of Rodale's encyclopedia of organic gardening for $8 (which I bought with store credit), I found two dimes, then we ate pizza, and bought some carmel on the way back, so it was an all around awesome day.

I am still waiting to receive my seed order from Baker Creek, It seems like it's been forever, though it's only been 4 mail days since I ordered it. I just can't wait to find out what free seed packet they send and get started planting everything. I'll be using my seedling heat mat that I got off ebay for $20 (including shipping) so I can really get an early edge on those tomatoes. All right Christmas money!

Every year gets a general heirloom seed order and a native heirloom order. When I read the rest-of-the-country catalogs where it says that a certain something produces well in the heat, I always have to stop myself from getting excited and realize that they probably mean 88 degrees, not 115+. Sometimes I try anyway. I wish they had a separate zone system for the upper limits of what solar beatdowns plants can take, the closest I get to this is my native heirloom order. We're fortunate to have a place like Native Seed Search in the state that caters to our 'specialized' climate. Nothing as exciting as white tomatoes, tigger melons and ground cherries, but I did order some nice varieties of beans, squash, okra, pollinator-attracting flowers and a few other experimental things. I would show pictures, but I think you all know what black beans look like.

I'm looking forward to 2009 on the tiny farm. We will soon have all 10 chickens laying, over 50 heirloom varieties of fruits/vegetables along with about 30 fruit and nut trees. Most everyone will be pinching pennies this year, but at least urban farming is a fun way to do it.

Uh-oh a rooster.

2008-12-30T07:07:00.000-08:00

This is actually old news at the tiny farm, but I never got around to posting about it. It turns out that the cute little Easter Egger Chick above turned into Dazzler, the handsome young rooster you see below (named after the less-than-popular Marvel character whose superpower was to turn sound into light). Unfortunately for urban farmers, roosters are not allowed, so he had to go.

Most pets have a certain knack for inconvenience and Dazzler was no exception. As we were loading up the car at dawn on Thanksgiving morning to go out of town and visit my family for a few days I hear an unmistakable "Cock-a-doo" (he hadn't mastered the "doodle" yet). I had been having suspicions for awhile, since Dazzler was a bit bigger than the other birds and had longer tail feathers, but since Easter Eggers are mutt breeds, I thought maybe s/he was part large breed. My neighbor happened to be outside as well and I explained that the rooster was an accident, that we would be leaving town for a few days, I was sorry and I would take care of it when I got back. Lucky for me, a friend who has more land and less strict animal laws was able to take him a week later. He still may end up in the pot (a shame for such a handsome and friendly rooster) but at least this bought him a few more weeks. So now we're down to 10 hens, which is about 10 more than my husband wanted, but it's about 20 less than I wanted, so by my calculations I can still get 5 more and have it be a fair compromise! I'm trying to hold off another year and a half so we always have birds that are in their prime laying seasons but this is going to be tough...
Also, I want a turkey.

New Seeds are on the way!!

2008-12-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

After crying and grumbling about my $3,000 hospital bill I realized there was only one (realistic) way of cheering myself up: the 2009 heirloom seed order. Up until now, I've preferred heirlooms but would occasionally buy an early girl tomato on a whim when walking through the garden center. I think those days are over, there are just too many benefits to growing heirloom seed. I usually order from heirloomseeds.com, but I saw that they have about a month turnaround time right now because they're so flooded with orders. That's fine for people in cooler climates, but I wanted to get my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants started indoors in mid-January, so this year I ordered from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I spent several hours looking over my choices and here's what I finally decided on:

Ivory Egg Tomato
70-75 days. Sent to the United States by a seed saver in Sweden, this rare and attractive ivory-cream colored tomato is the shape and size of a chicken egg. The creamy flesh is both sweet and rich; great for making a lovely sauce, or in salads. Plants are very productive.

White Queen Tomato
70-75 days The favorite white variety of many tomato collectors, this heirloom is said to have been introduced in 1882 by A.W. Livingston, though many people question the exact date of introduction. 4-8 oz. fruit have one of the best flavors of all tomatoes, being fragrant, fruity and intensely sweet. It's creamy white in color and very attractive. A productive variety that has become very rare.

Bloody Butcher Tomato (My response to Early Girl... take that patented varieties!)
60 days. A small 3-4 oz ‘cluster’ tomato. Fruit are deep red in color and have a nice tomato flavor. Production is really good, but where this open-pollinated tomato really shines is its earliness. It ripens in only about 60 days, making it ripen about the same time as Early Girl, but this tomato is much tastier.

Roma Rio Grande Tomato
Vigorous plants produce many 4"-long, pear-shaped fruit with dry flesh, perfect for fresh use and sauces. Productive during hot, dry summers.

Yellow Pear Tomato
78 days. Very sweet, 1 1/2" yellow, pear-shaped fruit have a mild flavor, and are great for fresh eating or for making tomato preserves. Very productive plants are easy to grow.

Applegreen Eggplant
70 days. An early light green eggplant, good yield, very tender and delicious, smooth oval-round fruit growing on small plants. Highly recommended. Developed by the late Prof. Elwyn Meader, UNH 1964.

Casper Eggplant
75 days. Medium size, very attractive, smooth ivory-white fruit, that have a very mild mushroom-like flavor. Prolific plant. Fruit ripens early. An excellent variety for specialty growers and gardeners.

Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli
An English heirloom variety, bred for overwintering. Produces lots of purple broccoli sprouts in the spring. Grows slowly through the winter; very frost hardy. A great variety that is very hard to find in this country; delicious!

Boston Pickling Cucumber
50 days. An old heirloom dating back to 1880. Vigorous vines give large yields of smooth green fruit. It is excellent for pickles, very crisp and good quality. A very popular variety at the turn of the century.

West India Burr Gherkins
65 days. (Cucumis anguria) Not a true cucumber, but used much like it. Will not cross with C. sativus-Very beautiful long vines and hundreds of small tasty fruit. Yields better than any cucumber. These are becoming rare. They do great in hot humid [yeah, I know Phoenix is a far cry from humid, but we do have the hot! I thought this was worth a try anyway] weather. Introduced to the USA in 1793 from Jamaica, and used pickled or boiled by the Colonies in Jamaica.

Ground Cherry (Strawberry Husk Tomato)
Huge yield of tart-sweet berries. This is the common type, used by the Pilgrims; excellent for pies, jams, and preserves of all kinds, also delicious fresh. The fruit grows inside a paper like husk, (the same as Tomatillos.) Grow it the same as you would tomatoes.

Lemon Balm
Deliciously lemon-flavored; great in tea. A vigorous, hardy plant.

German Chamomile
(Matricaria recutita) Beautiful, small flowers; makes a relaxing tea with a sweet, fruity fragrance; medicinal. Attractive plants.

Tigger Melon
The most amazing melon we have grown. The fruit are vibrant yellow with brilliant fire-red, zigzag stripes, (a few fruit may be solid yellow), simply beautiful! They are also the most fragrant melons we have tried, with a rich, sweet intoxicating aroma that will fill a room. The white flesh gets sweeter in dry climates. Small in size the fruits weigh up to 1 lb. - perfect for a single serving. The vigorous plants yield heavily, even in dry conditions. This heirloom came from an Armenian market located in a mountain valley. It was the most popular melon at our Garden Show last August and makes a unique specialty market variety.

Orange Bell Pepper
Super sweet, brilliant orange fruit are blocky, and good-sized thick flesh is flavorful and among the best tasting of all peppers. Plants produce large yields of this most magnificent pepper.

Red Cheese Pepper
80 days. Candy-sweet, round, flat, 3", pimento-type peppers that have thick, red flesh, great for stuffing or fresh eating. So good, they are almost addictive. Very productive plants. Once used to color cheese.

Red Malabar Spinach
70 days. This beautiful plant is not a true spinach but a different species (basella rubra). This heat-loving Asian vine has lovely red stems and delicious, succulent leaves that are great in salads and stir-frys. A delicious green that can be grown as an annual in many areas or as a perennial in sub-tropical areas. [I've seen this at the farmer's market and have known people who grow it locally and it seems to do well here, it has a flavor that's a bit too lemony-tart for my taste, but it produces greens in the summer in Phoenix, so you take what you can get :)]

PLUS a surprise seed pack! I can't wait to see what kind they'll send me. I am so excited to get these growing!!

Hospital and updates. Anyone have desert toads?

2008-12-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

I ended up going to the emergency room about two weeks ago for something that I think was related to the original illness. I had *extreme* stomach pain, they thought it was appendicitis, a CT scan said it wasn't and they never really figured out what was wrong. The best part of the hospital (the least bad part maybe?) was that I happened to be wearing some brand new underwear, so I wasn't embarrassed about the open-back gown. :) I am sure my insurance company will screw me over on this, as they do any other time something expensive happens, so my husband and I got an odd job that lasted for 10 days helping to build a large scale electrical spectacle artwork for another artist. I'm crossing my fingers that it will be enough money to cover the hospital bill. My mother-in-law is also very generously putting some money into our bank account to help out.

We have had lots of rain (well a lot for Phoenix, the rain gauges here got up to six-tenths of an inch) and unseasonably cold weather, no freezing yet, but I think that will come around new years. The early cold and short daylight hours have made everything in the fall garden slow down. I'm getting some lettuce and radishes, but those just aren't as exciting as the fall crops. The coldness has cut off my black-eyed pea production and I'm losing hope of having vine-ripened tomatoes this fall. There are still a few eggplants and lots of peppers, but they seem to have stopped growing. I'm hoping that I can keep them warm enough so that they'll last through the winter and I'll have a head-start on spring. The chickens all molted and stopped laying for the winter except my Rhode Island Red who is giving me about 5 eggs a week. I'm spending a lot of time looking over heirloom seeds and rare-breed chicken varieties, there's so many I want! There's a slim possibility of raising some Muscovy ducks this spring, but a more realistic animal addition to the tiny farm is toads. I've read that they love squash bugs and it seems like a fantastic pest control method. I just have to find some that do well here. I remember growing up there was a giant toad that lived by our pool filter where it was damp. I have no idea how it got there, but it stayed for some time. Anyone in the Phoenix area know where I can get some toads for the garden?

Sick and crappy randomness

2008-12-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

That headline pretty much sums up my last few days. I had what I thought was food poisoning Sunday night from some expired but "still probably okay to drink despite it's slightly unpleasant taste" milk. In the name of not wasting money I drank something I probably shouldn't have. To skip the ensuing details, I will abbreviate and just say, I lost a lot of weight the following 12 hours. I felt pretty bad the next day too, which led others who are more knowledgeable about illnesses to believe it wasn't food poisoning but something more flu-like, and now two days after that, I still feel not so great in the stomach, less like the flu, more like ulcers. Who knows. I wonder if this is what would happen to a longtime vegan force-fed surf and turf.

In unrelated matters, I had some fantastic bread at Thanksgiving that my parents' neighbors/friends made, and it turns out it was the New York Times bread that everyone has been raving about. (Here's the recipe link in case you haven't gotten to it either) When I first saw it popping up all over the blogosphere I looked at it and thought, that looks a little messy, takes a long time, and what the hell does the New York Times know about making bread?? Apparently they (or rather the guy that originally wrote the recipe that they printed) know a lot. I will be making it as soon as I can stand up straight again.

There isn't a whole lot of tiny farm news to post this time of year. The seeds have all been planted and I'm just starting to get to the harvesting point for the swiss chard and mixed greens. I'm still getting bell peppers, eggplants and even a little okra and I'm hoping the tomatoes ripen before our first frost hits (usually around December 15th though I think it will be later this year). It seems like they almost never do though, I always have to go out and pick a bunch of green tomatoes and let them ripen inside.

I guess this was a pretty random post, I'm distracted by my stomach and my unrelenting desire for nachos, which apparently "aren't appropriate food for sick people".

Slick, the polish chicken, gets a haircut!

2008-11-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

Slick is our silver-laced polish chicken. She started off with a cute little extra tuft of hair, that grew into quite a mop. As her 'hair' grew longer she got more and more blind and wouldn't leave the coop when I let all the chickens out and got picked on so badly that she got a pretty big bald scab on her back. (I figured out that it was mostly the work of one particularly aggressive salmon faverolle which now lives in a coop across the street.) She couldn't see to fly up, so when the other chickens would roost up on bar, she was on the ground all alone and I had to put her up there myself. I felt so bad for her that as cool as her hairdo was, it had to be adjusted.
This is Slick at 2 weeks old

At 10 weeks, her hair had already grown into this blinding afro

In case you were wondering, this is what a blind chicken has to do to see what's behind her

I went in the coop and caught her from behind (which is very easy as her field of vision is next to nothing) wrapped her in a towel and held her between my knees. After she was secure in the towel, she didn't fuss at all, surprisingly. I used our second best haircutting scissors and went to town. When she was in my lap it looked like I'd given her a mohawk, but when I put her down it was more of a "modified Hillary Clinton"
Slick, still in my lap

When I set her back in the coop, she immediately went outside to join her friends and it seems to have made a world of difference in her quality of life. Maybe I could open up a chicken grooming center. ;)

Where have all the postings gone?? and making olives.

2008-11-18T17:12:00.000-08:00

I sort of fell off the face of the blogging earth. I've been busy scheming up ways to make extra money and tying up lots of loose ends. I know that most of us are all on the conserve-every-penny boat, which sucks, but I guess the bright side is that there's lots of empathy and moral support to go around.

I've been thinking about things to do to save money. (which I always do, even in more flush times-- I consider myself "delightfully frugal", my husband would use different terms when I'm explaining to him why I didn't buy magic shell for his ice cream.) I've noticed there's been a huge resurgence of canning recently, which is wonderful, however, it seems like a lot of people are going to the store, buying things in bulk and saving $1.20, and then canning them in jars that cost $10/dozen. If it's a matter of having food set aside in case there's a food shortage, then that's one thing, but if you're doing it for financial reasons, then it doesn't really make sense unless it's your own surplus crop or you're getting a really unbelievable deal on those apples. Just a thought.

So, I played crazy neighbor lady and picked 4 pounds of olives off the vacant (in foreclosure) house across the street. Three or four of my neighbor friends came over mostly to hang out and laugh at me while I picked, one neighbor decided it might be a fun idea and filled all the pockets on his cargo pants. I watched several youtube videos about brining olives, and it seems easy enough, so I'm giving it a go. You can watch them yourself, but they all say basically the same things. Here is the info pared down for you:

1. Pick olives, preferably between rosy and dark purple in color. Don't get them off the ground, they are probably covered in various animal pees.
2. Make a brine. Add kosher salt/pickling salt to water and stir so it dissolves. Keep adding more salt until the brine is concentrated enough to make a fresh egg float.
3. Put olives in a jar and weight them down with something so they won't float in the brine. (I used cut up pieces of those plastic basket things strawberries come in.)
4. Add brine to the jar and make sure all of your olives are covered.
5. Change out your brine about once every month or two, the more often you change it out the faster your olives will become edible. Some suggest every two weeks, some say every three months, depending, your olives will be ready in 2-6 months. (Months??!! I know, but they're free! :) )

Brining olives gets rid of the bad bitterness and makes them safe to eat. Don't eat them raw, that would be bad news.

The brine has already started to take out some of the color, resulting in some splotchy olives

P.S. If you're in the Phoenix area and want to learn about keeping chickens, I'm teaching a class for the Phoenix Permaculture Guild at the downtown farmer's market from 8-9:30 AM this upcoming Saturday (11/22).

Hawk! Protecting the chickens.

2008-10-31T06:58:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I was outside chatting with neighbors and SWOOP there goes a red-tailed hawk being chased by a bunch of grackles. Uh-oh. I have seen red-tailed hawks in downtown Phoenix before, but we've only had little kestrels in my neighborhood (that I've seen) until now. I thought about what I should do and that I'd better keep an eye out. Well, two days ago I hear a crazy commotion outside like someone just threatened 1000 bird nests and sure enough, I go outside and the sky is crazy with birds going every direction and right above them is my hawk. I move into the chicken pen figuring that would protect the chickens (who were all hiding beneath bougainvillea), when the hawk dives down and lands on a wall about 15 feet away from me. I move towards it and after a few steps it flies off onto the neighbors fence and I eventually get it to fly away. I had no idea they were so brazen.

The babies (now 7 and 5 weeks old) are still in a smaller fully enclosed coop, but the adult chickens are free-rangers inside the pen. I didn't want to confine them to their pen permanently, though I did for the rest of that day, so what should I do? I looked online for large netting, but that area would be very difficult to secure with a net because of several trees and bushes that are quite tall. I then read online about someone who spider-webbed his pen leaving smaller than 6 foot openings and that seemed to deter the hawks, so I grabbed a huge roll of macrame rope someone gave me and started webbing. I hope it works. It looks perfect for halloween back there, but I'm afraid after the holiday, my animal area is more starting to resemble a miniature shanty town. My neighbors undoubtedly think I'm crazy, I'm not sure it will even work, and it looks like crap. I think when our finances get a little more stable, I'm going to start saving up for the materials to build a 20'X 15' fully enclosed chicken aviary.

For several reasons, I hope that comes soon.

Class on keeping chickens at the Tiny Farm and the ducks get a new home :(

2008-10-19T19:10:00.001-07:00

Today was an eventful day at the tiny farm.

As you know from previous posts, the ducks were just too loud. We tried a few things, they helped, but not enough to make us good neighbors again, so the ducks had to find a new home. They left tonight for their move to live near chickens in the garden at Mesa Community College. They will be protected and well-cared for, but I was (am) still *very* sad to see them go.
My friend from the farmer's market just got 4 muscovy ducks this last week, and I'm hoping that maybe in the spring we can get some eggs from him and hatch a few. Muscovies aren't cute like the khaki campbells, and they don't lay as many eggs, but they don't quack. It's a trade off.

In better news, through the Phoenix Permaculture Guild, I taught a class on keeping chickens at your house... here at my house. A lot of people turned up and I thought it went well, and I always love talking to people that are also interested in chickens.

In the background of these photos (to my right) you can see the in-progress solar oven, it's just about done, I'll make a detailed post when it's completed and I have temperature statistics. I sat through a very nice man's presentation about water softening to get a $25 home depot gift certificate which, when it comes, will let me get the rest of the parts I need to finish the oven.

In other 'being resourceful' news, the downtown arts district had a harvest festival last night and there were straw bales and pumpkins that were going to be thrown away at the end of the night. We brought home 2 straw bales, which also worked as great seating for my class today, and 9 big pumpkins, which we will eat. Thankfully, the rest of the straw found a home at a community garden instead of the dumpster, so nothing was wasted. :)

Our backyard khaki campbells

2008-10-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

Marigold, Pinto and Petunia, the cute ducks
The cute ducks 2 seconds later-- quacking
As some of you know, I hatched three khaki campbell ducks in July (I got lucky and hatched a boy and two girls). They were rescue eggs, whose mother had abandoned them. I have to say that watching them hatch was one of the coolest things I'd seen in my life and they were (and are) unbelievably cute.

I kept them in a playpool lined with towels that ended up needing changing twice a day because little ducks like to empty water dishes and poop. That went on for about a month and then they went into the outside cage and eventually graduated to free-reign chicken pen privileges. They ended up getting along with the chickens okay, but the chickens love the ducks' food and the ducks love to make all water into mud. This combined with their loud pre-dawn wake up calls made me think that it just wasn't going to work out. The neighbors didn't complain, I asked if they were bothered, and they said they weren't, but I know they have to just be being nice when they say that. I had posted a request to rehome them on the local permaculture forum and got a few replies, but when it came down to it, I just couldn't let them leave, so at the last minute I had to call the person who was set to come get them and tell him that we'd decided to give it another go. That was embarrassing, and I felt like a jerk. That morning my husband and I moved the duck pool and penned off about 175 square feet of the chicken pen for them to muddy up as they please.

So now I have the mud and food thievery problem solved, but they still have a round of loud quacking at 6am that carries on for about 5 minutes. I really really want to keep these ducks, but I can't imagine what time the quacking will begin in the summer when the sun comes up before 5. The other thing I'm hoping for is that maybe they'll settle in a little as they get older and start laying. Does anyone out there in internet land have any experience with this?

General updates and chick pics, also a new solar oven build in the works??

2008-10-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, my husband and I have been a little busy with figuring out where the dollars will come from. He doesn't seem very worried, but I'm the one that does all of our accounting and bill paying, so that's not as reassuring as it sounds. ;)
We finally got all my birthday trees and the free banana tree I got last week into the ground. I've also been busy transpanting some seed starts I had growing on the porch and about 140 onion starts. I'm plagued with those cabbage looper caterpillars so I spend a few minutes every morning picking those little plant eaters off and giving them to the chickens.
I'm still picking okra and eggplant and today I got my first black-eyed peas, which was super-exciting as I'd never grown them before this year, and after my experience earlier this year with the birds eating my bean plants down to the ground, I didn't have high hopes, but they seem to be thriving.

Here are some pictures of the chicks at 3 weeks, they are doing well and still very cute. In these photos they are still segregated from the younger chicks by the screen that's in the pictures. I was a little nervous about just dropping the new ones in with the older ones so I decided to give them some time to get to know one another while the babies got used to being alive. After a week of being separated by the screen, I combined them and everything was just fine. (It probably would have been fine anyway, I just didn't want to risk it) The bigger chicks would be going outside next week, except now that they are mixed in with our surprise chicks which are 2 weeks younger and not ready for outside yet. (It's still in the low 90's most days out here, but at night it goes down to the upper 60's).

Finally, I've got a new solar oven in the works. It will be made of glass and wood-- but plank wood rather than plywood, so there aren't any glues, formaldehyde or other nasty stuff. I've got the body of it completed and it gets up to 200 degrees without any reflectors. I'm hoping to get those built and attached this week. I've been taking step by step photos, so I'll post it all at once when it's all done. It seems crazy and un-smart to build an oven out of wood, but I'm pretty sure it will work out without any spontaneous combustion. Pretty sure.

Rare fruit classes and update

2008-10-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the fall plant sale accompanied by a great selection of FREE classes at our cooperative extension office. A person on the Phoenix Permaculture site posted about this and it couldn't have come at a better time. I didn't feel we had the money to buy any plants, like I'd originally intended, but I knew we had plenty of funds to cover free classes. ;) The ones I took were presented by master gardeners and members of the Arizona Rare Fruit Growers and included: tropical food plants in Phoenix, Grafting, Pomegranates, and Bananas and I ended up with a free tiny avocado tree from the grafting demo and a banana tree from the banana demo. I also got some free seed from the red okra they're growing in the demonstration gardens, which was a variety I planned on buying next year. I hope to pass on some of the information I learned in the coming days.

I came home and my husband and I planted the 6 citrus trees I had bought a week ago with birthday money. We now have 27 or 28 different varieties of fruit trees for a total of around 32 trees on our 1/5 acre lot. That sounds ridiculous, like we must be living in a forest of peach trees, but they really don't take up too much room.

I was so scatterbrained last week, I didn't post many chick updates, so here's a picture I took of Cosmo, our white-crested blue polish, almost a week ago. Tomorrow the groups of chicks will be 3 weeks old and 1 week old and I'll take some new pictures.

Thanks for all the comments and emails about our recent income slash. We're definitely going to try and make lemonade out of the situation. :)

another batch of new chicks.... what??!?

2008-09-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

Here's how they show up in the mail!
You can imagine my surprise when I get a phone call from the post office this morning at 7:45 telling me that my baby chicks are here. I got my chicks two weeks ago, what chicks are these? I went down there and sure enough, there was a box of baby chicks waiting for me. I guess the hatchery accidentally sent my order twice! I don't think I'll have to pay for these, but you never can tell... So I had 23 extra chicks and no idea what to do with them. I'm happy because that means two extra cuckoo marans and a chocolate-colored easter egger, and it looks like I've found homes for the rest of them, so it's not that big of a deal, but man, what a surprise. I also took pics of the two-week old chicks, I'll post those soon so you can see how they've grown!

On a totally different note, our income got cut in half today thanks to the tanking economy. Well, we aren't the first on the block, and likely not the last. The bail-out is a total scam, and looks like some new version of it will pass this week. I wish they would just have all those rich, greedy folks that caused it do the bailing. Our pennies were pinched before, so this pretty much just sucks. I'm glad I already have some seeds started for fall/winter. Also, yesterday I added two more trees to the tiny farm: a meiwa kumquat and a low-chill hood pear. Let's hope these trees perform soon! (Note to self: do not tell husband when he's leaving for work that you wish he didn't have to go in--- this wasn't what I meant! ;) )

Quick plant update!

2008-09-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

I had some birthday money this year that I wanted to spend on new fruit trees, but I was thinking I would wait until January and get bare root trees...

Well, on Thursday I was at the Home Despot using some generous gift cards picking up some unrelated things and of course went through the garden center "just to look" I saw they had a Dorsett Golden Apple, which is the same variety we lost in that bad storm a few weeks back so I picked that up, they also had a great looking Kadota Fig (a white fig) that it seemed like we needed because two fig trees just aren't enough, a washington navel orange, which was a variety I had planned on planting anyway and a strawberry guava tree which after a long discussion with employees, references to garden books and calls to my husband to check the internet about whether it would do okay here or needed a pollinator etc. I decided to get that too.

On Saturday after the farmer's market I went to my friend Jennifer's house, and it just blew me away. Okra as tall as me and hundreds of eggplant, lots of melons and a whole bunch of other great stuff everywhere. If folks are reading this from the Phoenix Permaculture Guild and are on the fence about going to the tour at her house, GO! It's amazing. She told me that my favorite nursery (Baker's) had onion sets already, so on my way home I stopped by to get some of those. Long story short, I went home with 200 tiny onions, a 6-pack of broccoli and a sweet orange tree variety that I'd never heard of before called a pineapple orange.

Today I couldn't stop thinking about some of the other citrus that was at the nursery that I didn't have so I went back and got a meyer lemon, a bearss lime and a moro blood orange. I really want to go back for a kumquat...

So those 8 new trees bring the tiny farm fruit tree total up to 27. :) The baby chicks turn two weeks old tomorrow, expect pictures!

Gross. Don't read before dinner.

2008-09-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, I didn't take photos. Sometimes this urban farming stuff can really suck. This week I made an unplanned and unwelcome foray into maggot farming. To understand how upsetting this is for me, you need to know that there are really only two things that gross me out: leeches and maggots. When I was 19 I tried to get over my fear of the former, by ordering leeches from a biological supply company and keeping them as pets. (Imagine the looks of the fedex employees and other customers when I opened my box to make sure everything was okay.) I can tolerate seeing leeches now in a contained aquarium, but you can be sure I don't go for soaks in stagnant water. To this day I haven't been able to assuage my extreme disgust of maggots.

Here is a long story short: Lots of lettuce/green scraps go into an insufficiently aerated or balanced compost pile. A few days later I open and find thousands of maggots squirming and pulsating and not just the little tiny kinds, there were a bunch over an inch long that seem to come from some giant fly beetle thing I've never seen until this week. I had rotting avocados beating like hearts from maggot excitement. I'll stop with the descriptions. I shoveled a bunch out into a bucket to give to the chickens who obviously have a completely different viewpoint on this subject. Yuck. That's enough about this.

Chickens heart maggots, I do not.

The new chicks are here!!!

2008-09-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

All 26 right out of the box
What's better than new phonebook day? New chick day! After waiting 4 months, they're finally here and they all made it safely. I put in an order that included some for a couple other people too, so all 26 of these aren't mine, just 8, but I think the addition of these 8 officially bumps me up from Rachel's minuscule farm to a respectably tiny farm.

A salmon faverolle using a lavender/blue easter egger for a pillow

A goofy silver-laced polish peeking out to show off her new hair

I was surprised at how brown silver-laced wyandotte chicks are (which is what this is ;) )

Australorp sisters

Salmon faverolle

...and here are her 5-toed fuzzy feet

she's top model material!

So here is the list of the new additions: an australorp, an easter egger, a cuckoo maran, a white crested blue polish, a silver laced polish, a silver laced wyandotte and two salmon faverolles. These will eventually mix in with my current easter egger, rhode island red and blue andalusian for a total of 11 hens plus the 3 khaki campbells. What a birthday present!

Gulf Fritillary Caterpillars on my Passionflower

2008-09-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of many tiny caterpillars
A double flower, if you look closely you can see a couple caterpillars in the background
Just like Parsec commented on an earlier post, the Gulf Fritillary Butterfly is attracted to passionflower plants. I had seen a couple of them flying around the plant and a few days ago I saw the plant was covered in orange and black spiky caterpillars. :) Now there are about 10 big juicy ones. They eat up the leaves a little, but it doesn't look like it's enough to harm the plant. I'm pretty excited about watching them turn into butterflies, I hope the birds spare a few.
Also, happy birthday to me! The baby chicks should get here tomorrow!!!

Bees Bees Bees

2008-09-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

I was removing the dirt from a failed strawberry pot and out came all these little flower-tubes. At first because of the bright colors I thought they were old fake flowers that found their way into the potting mix somehow, but then I looked closer and saw they were little bee nests made of bougainvillea. Out here in Phoenix, our native bees are solitary bees that build little tubes out of cut up leaves and flower petals and put them into small cracks or holes. For whatever reason a bunch of them thought my strawberry pot was a good location. I'm making a bee house (a chunk of wood with holes drilled into it) and I'm going to transfer these and hopefully attract more.

You can see from the pictures that they make a perfectly shaped tube with the bottom sealed off and then it's sealed off above where the eggs are as well. It's hard to believe that a little bee made this. I'm impressed.

The baby chicks should be here in less than a week!

Painting, "The Traveling Strawberry Grower"

2008-09-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

"The Traveling Strawberry Grower"

I don't usually post my artwork on this blog, but I was updating my painting website earlier today rachelbess.com, and thought this painting might be appropriate. It's 8" by 6", oil on panel. The woman has a bee in a little bee cage for an earring (which is hard to see in the lo-res computer image).

Hopefully we make begin making better choices for the environment so we don't all have to grow dinner in test tubes on our head. A good beginning would be to think long and hard whether or not it's smart to go busting up Alaska (or anywhere else) to get resources we wouldn't need if we had better energy policy (solar/wind etc) and conserved the energy we already have... I didn't mean for this to be a political rant but the ignorant "drill baby drill" B.S. makes me angry every time I think about it. It's hard to believe that people could be such disgustingly poor stewards of the earth. These people are so greedy and selfish (look to the national debt partly because of corporate bailouts for other proof) that they will sell their grand-childrens' futures just to make their own life a little less of a hassle.

Well... I better sign off before I get too far into those feelings, this is supposed to be about my tiny farm! :)

Storm update and new rainbow seeds!!!

2008-08-31T20:02:00.000-07:00

The storm is still not cleaned up in most places, there are still palm trees snapped in half on the side of the road, my neighbors still have a tree crushing their house and my other neighbors' cars are still smashed underneath another tree. There is so much damage that I guess the tree removing people are very backlogged. It's sad because we've gotten rain everyday since then and it's just raining right into my neighbors' house and there's nothing that can be done about it while the tree is still there.

On a brighter note, I went to the nursery and 'accidentally' bought these:

As I've said several times before, I LOVE planting seeds that give you surprise colors and shapes of fruit. For this season I've chosen a gourmet blend of jewel tone beets, mixed colors of tall trailing vine nasturtiums, the 'brightest brilliant rainbow' variety of Quinoa ("keen-wa") and 'carnival blend' carrots. This will be in addition to the easter egg radish seeds I already have. 5 varieties of surprises!!

I am hoping that I can use netting or something to be able to see all the different colors of quinoa and keep the thieving sparrows away. I've never grown it before
and I don't know anyone who has, so if you have, let me know how it went!

Terrible Monsoon at the tiny farm!!!

2008-08-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

Usually here in the land of no rain we welcome the monsoons, without them we wouldn't get to our annual average 7" of rain. They occasionally break some tree limbs and some flooding, but last night we had a storm that put all the other ones to shame. We had 100+ mph winds, penny sized hail and floods. The chickens were fine, the ducks ended up being fine, but they got a little roughed up. Lots of my neighbors have no power today and it's supposed to be 103 and very humid. Here are just a couple of pictures of the damage, all of these are within a block radius of my house and there were a lot more but you get the idea from these.

Completely uprooted
There are two cars crushed under this giant tree
This took out the roof and part of the front of the house
no more porch

My wildlife rehabbing neighbor rescued this hurt swallow from floodwater

This photo only shows 2 of the 5 trees that were uprooted in front of this complex

Needless to say, most of today will probably be spent cleaning up and doing minor repairs to the tiny farm. We're thankful that all our animals seem to be okay.

Ducks and the plumbed duck 'pond'!

2008-08-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

The ducks are 5.5 weeks old now and nearly full-grown. They spend most of the day hiding out in the damp shade except when they hear the back door open which means it's time to start making noise and coming out from under the bushes to see if I have food.

I got very sick of taking out the dirty duck water every morning by hand with buckets, so I found a sturdy kiddie sandbox/pool in a bulk trash pile and added this faucet to it for draining. (The stick in the picture has nothing to do with it) With a couple rubber washers, some silicon sealer (which was probably unnecessary), and a brass fitting for the top side (also from the aisle with the hose spigot parts) I now just turn the knob and drain the water using a 6' hose. The pool is elevated on cinder blocks to help get enough gravity for it to drain and I may add one more row of 4" block to improve drainage pressure. I don't think this would work with those blue molded plastic flimsy pools, it needs to be a sturdier plastic, but this will be well worth your time if you have ducks.

The pond
Inside of the pond: the drain
Edit: I'm finding that it takes about an hour to drain with a 6 foot hose, this is a little slower than I would like and not quite the distance I would prefer. I may adjust this drain to fit a large pool hose so it will drain out faster and farther. Either way, it still beats using buckets.
Underside of the duck pond

New chicken coop pics!

2008-08-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

As promised, here are a couple pictures of the $25 coop rebuild. It's approximately 4'X 8'. I had part of the basic frame from the previous version of this coop but changed the shape a little and added more structural support. It will get painted very soon, we've been having so much rain it hasn't stayed dry long enough to get that done yet. Also, I need to reattach the door. I estimate the materials cost (if I had to buy it all new rather than use mostly recycled [clean] materials I found in the neighborhood bulk trash piles) to be in the $150 range or more, so I'm proud of my recycling savings.
P.S. I did this entirely 100% by myself.

Roxy on the nest
These 5 nest boxes are enough for 20 hens, but I'd rather have too many than not enough and this makes it less to worry about when I get more hens (the next round of chicks should be here in 3 weeks!)

Here's a photo of a Rhode Island Red looking less than excited to have her picture taken. She's my loud somewhat annoying hen. She's such a good layer though I haven't been able to bring myself to get rid of her.

Wild passionflower

2008-08-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a passionflower that just showed up in my garden. I noticed it several months ago and it's finally blooming! I have seen this plant for sale at the desert botanical garden's plant sale so I think it is somewhat local to here though I never see them. It sure is a nice change of pace to have a passionflower volunteer instead of that stinky lantana that shows up everywhere and is impossible to get rid of.

The ducks and the chickens are together in the animal pen, at first the chickens were afraid of them, but have since realized they are twice as big. It makes feeding difficult as they currently need separate feeds and the chickens would be happy to eat all the layer pellets and then have the duck food for dessert. Roxy the chicken watched the ducks swim around in a little tub I had out for them and decided it looked like a good idea and has now taken to wading in the ducks' water.

One of the reasons I haven't been posting as much recently is because I've been so busy rebuilding the chicken coop. I've got new chicks on the way soon and want to have a space that will be comfortable for 11 hens. I did it now while it's still hot because it is bulk trash time, so there is all kinds of stuff to look through along the street. I was able to find enough lumber and materials to recycle from the bulk trash that my entire coop rebuild cost $25. I also found a heavy-walled small kids pool/sandbox which I grabbed for the ducks. I plumbed it so now it can drain through a hose coming out the bottom and I don't have to empty dirty duck water with buckets at dawn everyday. I'll post pics of all this soon.

Update & how to remove juice from prickly pear fruit

2008-08-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

I know I have been way behind on posts recently. I've been busy working in the yard, helping my Mother-in-law and watching the olympics. The yard is coming along, we've gotten half the black plastic up, maybe a little more. There were so many layers of it and it's been there for more than 15 years, so the soil is the crappiest it could be. I've been digging holes in the ground and dumping in my compostables in hopes of improving soil quality, maybe bribing a worm or two to take up residence. We've had a string of fantastic monsoons that have knocked down trees, which is usually bad, but the upside is that one storm knocked several pads off a neighbors good-fruiting prickly pear. They said I could have them, so that will be about 6 or more free prickly pears for the native front yard.

On the subject of prickly pears, I read about a great way to get the juice out without getting poked to death with all those tiny tiny spikes. (You may as well take a bath in fiberglass with a few bees mixed in for good measure) Someone on the Phoenix Permaculture site gave me the idea to first freeze the fruits, the freezing causes expansion and the juicy cells bust open, and then thaw them in a strainer. I put a paper towel inside a sieve to act like a filter and rested the sieve on a bowl. After a couple of hours there was juice in the bowl, then I mashed open the fruits with a fork and the rest of the juice came out. All juice no tiny spikes. I'm sorry I didn't think to take pictures.

The ducklings are just shy of a month old and are in the mobile coop which has been placed in the chicken pen. They're doing well, they're very cute and love pieces of grape. The new chicks get here in a month, so I'm working to get everything ready for that too!

Ducks first swim!

2008-08-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of the ducks first swim, which was actually about a week ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting the photos. I wasn't planning on getting in with them, but it was a lot of fun.
People told me that ducklings would be smelly and messy. It turns out they were telling the truth! The ducks have now moved outside because they are so stinky. I have never seen another animal make such a mess. They are tiny poop catapults. However, since they are so much cuter than most other animals, I don't really mind it, but they definitely needed to be moved to the outdoor aviary. Luckily it has cooled off a little from last weeks 115 degree temps.

We've been getting a lot of okra, which I love, but I understand that most people may not like it. I learned that in a lot of cultures, people grow the okra and dehydrate it, then crush it into a powder that serves as a thickener for other recipes. That as well as it's pretty hibiscus flower are great reasons for people that hate okra to grow it. :)
okra!

Ducks first trip outside

2008-07-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

Sorry I'm a little behind with the posting! This is a 1 minute or so video taken of the ducks first trip outside, they are a little less than a week old in this. Since this video, I have been taking them out once or twice a day and they're starting to catch on to the "going back inside" part of the deal and will frequently follow me to the door and then either just sit down, or mill around just outside the door and I have to catch each one of them-- which is getting harder and harder to do, it's pretty funny for now, I'm betting the humor will wear off quick though and I'll have to find a new solution. I'd like to just move them outside permanently, but we're having some 108 degree weather all this week...

Also, Jasper has finally flown away. We see him on the wires around the house from time to time, but he's not interested in coming down. It makes me kind of sad that he's not going to ride around on my shoulder anymore, but hopefully this newfound instinct will keep him safe from predators.

A trio of ducklings!!

2008-07-23T16:49:00.001-07:00

Today has been an exciting bird-filled day. This is what I woke up to this morning:
Duckling #3!

My husband and I have been trying to encourage Jasper to fly away and make friends with other doves (well, really my husband more than myself). So we leave his cage door open pretty often, and usually he just stays in there and does his little Jasper things. Today however I noticed when I was doing some morning chores that he wasn't in his cage. I looked around the yard for him and I didn't see him so I went inside and got ready to go out to my studio and paint (it's a converted detached garage in the backyard). I go in to start working and look who showed up early for work!
Jasper gets a day job
I had left the studio door open and he had just flown on in there and was waiting for me. I keep the ducklings in there, so they can be in a climate-controlled area where there are no cats to harrass them. Here's Jasper watching over his new friends. (The baby duckling is being separated with the wire mesh while she learns to walk a little better so she doesn't get steamrolled by the other two)

And here's a picture of all three after the smallest one was a little better at walking, as you can see, they don't hold still very well.
Zooming ducklings!

and then there were two!

2008-07-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday our second duckling was born. This one took its sweet time coming out of the shell, no more busting through the egg like the first one. The two are now great buddies and are having a good time making a mess together. I tried to take some pictures, but they're all blurry because they're always running around.

There is still one egg of the original four in the incubator (one egg had a duckling in it that died in the shell). I am not sure if the last one will hatch or not. I will wait patiently which is very hard to do.

I don't know what to name them yet because I don't know if they're boys or girls.

Jasper has been pretty curious about the ducklings, he likes to sit on the edge of their brooder box and watch the craziness.

I'll get some pictures soon!

A duckling has hatched!!

2008-07-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

The first hatch from the incubator as well as my first duck was born this morning around 11am! It stayed just "pipped" for about 18 hours and then within a relatively short amount of time it busted out like Mr. Kool-Aid. Here are the pictures!
The Pip!

The pip gets a little bigger

Breaking the shell

Beginning to hatch

Hatching

Hatched!

Wet duckling in the incubator

Starting to dry a little

Into the Brooder

One cute 6 hour old duckling!

This duckling was business from the word go, he/she busted out of the egg didn't stop to rest and tried to explore the incubator before she realized that she needed to learn to walk first. From what I've read it's best to leave the ducklings in the incubator for about 12 hours after they hatch, but this one only made it four before her propensity towards egg kickball (even after I set up dividers that no 3 hour old duck should be able to get around) got her a one way ticket to a separate brooder box. She's a great little duckling so far, chipper and friendly.
Another egg pipped this morning, I'm waiting on a hatch! The other two eggs don't seem quite as vigorous but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for them too.

Small update

2008-07-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the lack of posts over the last week. It's been filled with hot weather and yardwork for the most part. There's nothing fun to post about removing bermuda grass and the million layers of plastic all the people that lived in the house before me put into the ground.
I've also been quite the nervous nellie about the duck eggs in the incubator. I get up at least twice during the night to check their humidity and temperature. They are scheduled to hatch this weekend. All four have shown movement when I've candled them over the last few days, but I know it's not uncommon for birds to pip (break a hole in the shell) and then die (or even never make it to the pip stage) so I don't want to get my hopes up too high.
Jasper still seems very excited to see us, I carry him around with me when I'm doing outside chores or yardwork and sometimes just to visit with him. He's been flying away for a few hours and then he comes right back to where we are if we're outside, or if we aren't he just sits outside and waits for us and peeps until we go get him. He's turned out to be a truly amazing little backyard friend.

If I get any exciting action in the incubator, I will be documenting all of it as best I can. Hopefully there will be some picture posts coming soon!

Jasper addendum

2008-07-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

As soon as I finished typing that post, I left to go run some errands and as soon as I walked out the back door, I heard his cute little peep! He was sitting on the wall that he flew away from about 3 or 4 hours ago. I know it won't be long before he leaves for good, but I am very happy to have my little friend back for a little while. :)

Jasper flies away! and ducks in the incubator

2008-07-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

This morning I had Jasper out with me like usual and he sat around watching me do yardwork for a few hours sometimes on my shoulder, sometimes on a fence post. Later on, I got him out again, and he flew up onto our wall and sat there and watched me work for about 15 minutes and then he just flew off. I couldn't see where he went and I looked around for him for awhile, but I guess he figured it was time to go. I'm really going to miss the little guy, but I'm glad we were able to raise him successfully.

In other big news, there are four khaki campbell eggs in the incubator. A family with ducks had one that went broody and was sitting on the nest for a little over two weeks and then decided she was done with that. There were four viable ones out of the seven on the nest so I went and got them and put them in the incubator. Between the long car ride and all the temperature and humidity fluctuations over that 20 hours, I don't have real high hopes for them, but they're in the incubator now and the temp and humidity seems to be stable. If the eggs are still alive, the expected hatch date should be in just over a week.

Planting in 110+ degrees

2008-07-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

It seems strange to be planting things right now when everything else is wilting and having a hard time staying alive. We've had a heat wave this week, so it's been 112-115 with humidity. Hooray. Recently on a trip to Native Seed/Search in Tucson I picked up a whole bunch of native seeds, many of which are supposed to be planted during the monsoon, which is now. Theoretically rain (and big winds) will come, but maybe the rain forgot us this year.

I had gotten these seeds for my front yard native garden which I'm currently working on. I'm removing several island hills of planted (not by me) bermuda grass amidst a sea of big gravel and removing the plastic underneath the gravel. I thought that gravel part would be a little labor intensive but if we plugged away at it, it would get done, as opposed to the Bermuda which will be a several year affair. We got done with moving the gravel and removing the top layer of plastic in most parts of the yard, only to find another layer of gravel and another layer of plastic. This wasn't all bad, as I like this gravel better (it's smaller). However, I'm having a wall built to surround the garden and the wall builders found a THIRD layer of plastic when they were digging. Great. Three layers? Really? Who does that??! Anyway, I can tell it's going to be at least winter season before I'll be able to get planting out front so I started planting squash and black-eyed peas in the backyard.

The squash is Magdalena big cheese which look like funny pumpkins.

Right now it looks like this:
Magdalena Big Cheese Squash Sprouting

The second thing I planted are called Bisbee Red Black-eyed Peas, which will give me these:
Bisbee Red black-eyed peas
I planted them amongst my nearly empty corn stalks. The corn failed this year as the pollen came out just in the middle of a heat wave of 115 degrees.

I hope we get some funny pumpkins! I love plants that make unpredictable fruit. I will save the black-eyed peas for New Years, so we can have a homegrown lucky lunch.

More canning-- this time vanilla pears, and of course, Jasper

2008-07-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

A pyramid of pears

I adjusted a recipe for canning pears to make them vanilla pears. I was pleasantly surprised how they turned out. I thought that because of the long (25 minute) processing time, the pears might get mushy, fortunately they didn't. Here is my recipe:

About 8 pounds of pears
4 tbs vanilla
4.5 cups water
2/3 cup sugar

Peel, core and quarter the pears (a melon baller works very well to core them). Stir together the water, sugar and vanilla in a large pot and bring to a boil. Add the pears and boil them in the vanilla syrup for 5 minutes. Pack the jars with pears, using tongs and then pour the hot syrup over the pears leaving 1/2" headspace. Process canned pears for 25 minutes (20 minutes if your altitude is below 1,000 feet)
Mix any remaining syrup with seltzer water for an Italian soda. :)
Yield: 6 pints.

Jasper began flying last night. :) My husband opened his cage and Jasper gave him some funny looks and flew up onto his back, and later onto his head. This morning when I went out to feed him he flew out of his cage and onto my lap peeping for food. Two feet seems to be his current range. I think tomorrow we will move him to the large enclosed aviary that was built for the new chickens coming in the fall. This way he will have plenty of room to practice flying and we can wean him before releasing him. I am afraid though that after all these car rides and hand feeding that he may not be able to be released. I'd hate to send him on his way and have him trying to make friends with things that would like to eat him.

Pickles! (and a brief Jasper update)

2008-07-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

I made pickles!

I made 8 pints of garlic dill pickles. Here is the recipe I followed:

About 6 lbs of cucumbers cut up
4 cups white vinegar
4 cups water
4 tbs pickling salt (plain salt without iodine or preservative/anti-caking agents)
8 tsp dried dill
8 big cloves of garlic, roughly chopped.

1. Combine vinegar, water and salt in a pot, bring to a boil.
2. Put equal parts of dill and garlic in each jar. Pack in sliced cucumbers.
3. Pour boiling vinegar solution over cucumbers in each jar, leaving 1/2" room of headspace. (You will probably have a little liquid left over)
4. Process in a boiling water canner for 10-12 minutes.

I opened a jar that night for my husband and I to try and they tasted like Aunt Bee's Kerosene Cucumbers, I was pretty disappointed, but put them back into the fridge. The next night I gave them another try and they were much better. I guess they need to rest for 48 hours or so before they taste like pickles and not vinegar bombs.

From these dill pickles I decided to make fire and ice pickles. Apparently to make those, most people just buy store pickles and go from there, but since I had 8 pints, I wanted to use my own. I found some recipes online, most of which used a bunch of tabasco, but not much actual hot pepper, and I thought it tasted a little too sweet-- like pepper jelly with pickles. After experimenting and adjusting here is the recipe I ended up with:

1 pint dill pickles
1 cup sugar
1 tsp dried red peppers
a splash of tabasco

Drain the dill pickles, and put them in a bowl. Add the 1 cup sugar (I use a tiny bit less than a cup) peppers and tabasco, and stir it up. Let this mixture sit on the counter for 2 hours and the sugar clumps will have magically turned to liquid. Put your pickles (and the liquid) back into their original jar and refrigerate.

Note: If you leave the pickles on the counter for much longer than the 2 hours, they will shrivel up, they will still taste good, they just look like old wrinkly pickle prunes.

Just before bed a few nights ago
Also Jasper the dove is still doing well. We had a trip to my parents house planned for a long time, and since Jasper needs to be fed every 2-3 hours, he got to go on a vacation with us (along with the 2 hour each way car ride). He peeped a lot at first, but then went to sleep in his cage in the back of the car. Here's a little picture of him. I have learned some things that make feeding him much easier, I will post all about adventures with rearing Jasper on a later date.
Jasper this morning just before eating

Jasper the exasperator

2008-06-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

Jasper in the little nest I made for him yesterday
Here are two pictures of Jasper taken about 24 hours apart, it's kind of hard to see in the picture but he/she is growing really fast. 48 hours ago I couldn't even tell what kind of bird he was, now he's about halfway feathered out into a little white-winged dove (insert Stevie Nicks song here). I have to feed Jasper every 2-3 hours during the day and he is not the least bit grateful for it. I feed him a formula for hand-feeding baby birds (You can buy it at the pet store) and I mix it up with warm water and try to dip his beak in it. Sometimes he then takes the hint and starts eating the formula, but most of the time he just attacks me, the cup or anything else. Feeding is very trying for both of us, but is way better than the tube down the throat method which is dangerous for novices like myself. (It's very likely that you'll put the food into their lungs instead of in the crop where it belongs, and they will drown.) Poor little bird, he must be terrified.
Jasper on my shirt today just after eating

I'm getting very excited for the new (chicken) chicks to get here. Only about 3 more months to go, let the countdown begin!!

A tiny dinner.

2008-06-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, well not even enough for a mouse's dinner. This is my first potato ever (the thing that looks like red yarn is the arrow pointing to it):
The smallest potato

I hadn't even planned on planting any potatoes this year, but there were some growing vines in my cabinet so I stuck them in pots. I was planting when everyone else was harvesting, but since I wasn't going to eat them anyway, I thought I'd give it a shot. They are dying in our 110-115 degree heat, I think after checking them for miniature potatoes, I'll just turn the vines over in the pots and they can be compost for next years potatoes.

I tried some mesquite flour that I made from a neighbor's mesquite pods, which were a different type, they tasted about 100% better than that last batch. Lesson learned. I found a recipe for mesquite cornbread on the internet, and I found a cute cast iron cornbread pan/mold at goodwill for $4, I'll be making that tomorrow along with some solar oven beans.

And finally, there is a new addition to the tiny farm. It's a baby white-winged dove. My husband found it after clearing some bushy lantana in the front yard just sitting on the ground, since he inadvertently destroyed its nest (if there was one there?), I'm taking care of it. It has started to feather in, hopefully it will do okay, though it doesn't seem to think I am its best friend yet. His/her name is Jasper. I will post pictures soon.

Making flour from Mesquites

2008-06-24T07:49:00.001-07:00

Out here we have Mesquite trees everywhere. In parking lots, around schools, medians, they are just all over. There's a little park I rode my bike through on my way to Trader Joe's last week and it had about 10-15 large Mesquites, most of the trees were kind of close to the road, which is generally not good for collecting food things, but I tried to get most of the pods from trees that were about 100 feet away, maybe more.

I took home the beans and put them in the dehydrator for a day and a half to make sure they were good and dry. You can't just put mesquite beans in a regular grinder because they are way too hard and will not grind and probably mess up your grinder. The flour is made primarily from the pods, and not the bean itself, but they are attached inside and you can't just separate them out of the pod like you can with a regular bean. Lucky for me my parents had this stone grinding thing in the backyard as decoration when I was growing up and they gave it to me recently. Grinding the flour wasn't as labor-intensive as I was expecting-- the beans just kind of separate themselves as you're grinding. From dried bean to finished flour, it took me about 5 minutes to make half a cup with not too much elbow grease.

The mesquite pods
Ready for grinding
Starting to make flour
Flour!

I tasted the flour and at first it has a very pleasant sweet taste, but then it tastes a little bitter and has a bit of a skunky aftertaste. I have heard that each tree's pods have a little different flavor, even within the same species, so it's best to taste the pods from the tree before you collect too many. I will heed that advice next time. I am going to mix this in with regular flour in a recipe and see how that tastes. I hope I can make it work, it would be a shame to not be able to use all the free flour available around here. I will wait until I use the flour in a recipe before making a final assessment. Plenty of people seem to like mesquite flour, so I am crossing my fingers.