Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day! Take a little time to do something good for this wonderful, beautiful planet that supports and sustains us!

- Plant a tree
- Plant a garden
- Ride a bike
- Walk
- Drive less
- Reduce, Reuse and/or Recycle
- Compost
- Start a worm bin
- Find a way to reduce your energy consumption
- Sit outside and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine
- Think of ways to incorporate some of these things into your day, every day

Happy Earth Day, but lets not limit it to once a year!

Aquaponics Experiment Up and Running

40 goldfish all named Dave

After a long time deliberating and trying to find a good source of fish, I finally settled on getting goldfish for the aquaponics experiment (see related posts here and here). They were easy to locate, produce lots of waste and are pretty hard to kill. We've had some goldfish in out animal water tanks (helping to keep them algae-free) for almost a year now. They seem to thrive on neglect.

So, on Sunday, I bought 40 little goldfish and introduced them to their new home. I then planted four tomato plants, three arugula plants, three romaine lettuce plants in the planting bed. I also pulled a bunch of lettuce out of our winter garden to see if it could make the transition.

Three days into the operation with no goldfish floaters and the plants seem to be doing well. I will monitor the water temperature over the summer and see if I will be able to keep it at a suitable temperature for tilapia, or something similar. If so, we will eventually transition over to a more useful fish.

So far, so good. Everything seems to be doing well. Lettuce from our garden is in the foreground and right. Romaine is to the left, arugula to the rear, tomatoes in the middle.

Worm Bin Expansion

New worm bins in place. 

Today we expanded our worm family by adding this new set of worm bins. This setup was very simple to make. All that is needed to make this is a clean barrel (that didn't hold toxic chemicals in its past life), one 8' 2x4, a jig saw, a drill with 1/4" drill bit and a straight edge and Sharpie marker for marking the barrel.

I simply cut the barrel in half with a jig saw using a multi-purpose blade following the lines we marked on the barrel. Then, to make the cradle, I cut the 2x4 in half to make 2 each 4' sections. Using the barrel as a guide. I marked the 2x4's with the curved profile of the barrel, placed the 2x4s together and gang-cut the barrel profile. For this I used my band saw, but a jig saw will work, too. Finally, I put two 1/4" holes in the low end of each barrel half to allow the barrels to drain.

I added this to show the profile I cut into the 2x4's

That's all there is to it. To set it all up, I placed the 2x4's parallel on an old pallet and put the half barrels on top. After creating the bins, I added shredded paper on one end of the barrel for bedding and wet it down to the consistency of a wet sponge.

We filled the half-barrels with a wheelbarrow load of pre-composted worm food each, leaving the shredded paper uncovered. I dumped a half-tray of worm castings and worms from my Worm Factory 360 into each of the barrel halves on top of the shredded paper, and voila.... a couple of new worm bins are born!

The worms loving their home and food

Completed and filled worm bins

Now we just sit back and let the worms do the work. To help keep the temperature somewhat cool and to maintain moisture, I placed the barrels under a shed and put a waxed cardboard box over top of them.

Waxed cardboard will help keep them from drying out too fast
and help to provide the dark environment the worms love.

Fall Leaves

My mother had 22 bags of  leaves from last fall sitting at the end of her driveway so I brought them home. There are lots of things you can do with old leaves. They can be composted, turned in to leaf mold, or used as bedding in the chicken run.

Today I put ten bags of leaves in the chicken run. The chickens LOVED it! Apparently, there were some tasty morsels nestled in the leaves because the chickens were scratching and pecking all afternoon long.

Eventually, these leaves will disappear as they are ripped to shreds and eventually buried in chicken poop. We will keep adding leaves until they are all gone. Later in the summer, we will clean out the run and spread the litter as fertilizer in the garden. It will be well-seasoned and high in nitrogen. 

The Eggs Are Here!

The chickens are FINALLY earning their keep! These are all eggs produced at the Red Clay Farm by our wonderful chicken staff. Of course, each of these eggs probably cost about $25 a piece, factoring in the building of the coop and six months worth of feed, but with each egg they produce, the cost per egg drops!

Six hens are not going to make enough eggs for us to sell them, but we will have waaaaay more than we need. We are getting 3-4 eggs per day and will probably hit six a day pretty soon.

Let us know if you want some fresh eggs. I think we'll have a few to spare.

New Kids on the Block

Elvis and Priscilla just hours after being born.

Things have been pretty slow here on the Red Clay Farm until yesterday.

I walked outside to go for a run yesterday morning and heard a strange bellowing coming from the back corner of the pasture. I knew exactly what it was the moment I heard it. For weeks we have been waiting for Prissy to kid. We knew it was imminent because she looked like she was about to explode.

As I got to the back of the pasture I saw Prissy standing over two baby goats. One was up and moving around, the other laying down. As I got closer, I saw that the on laying down had its leg caught in the fence. They were mostly dry and clean so they had been around for a couple of hours, but not much more.

I untangled the leg from fence and tried to get the little kid to walk around. He would not use the let at all. Instead, he would drag both rear feet behind him, kind of like that half of a zombie dragging herself across the town square in that show, The Walking Dead. After some quick research on the 'Net, we decided to splint his legs and see if that helped him. It did. A few hours later, he was up and moving around on all fours, looking rather stylish in his purple and white splints!

Elvis and Priscilla are doing well today. They are strong and active! Unless something bad happens, I believe we got them through the rough patch!

This is Elvis trying to get to his momma and
dragging his leg behind him.

Priscilla just after being born. It's amazing how
quick they are to stand up and get going!

Donkey Wrastlin' and Plantin'

Saturday was a great day, weather-wise. The sun was shining and it was warm. If I were to have one complaint, it was the wind, which was rather strong. It blew bird houses of their stands, the trash cans went for a tour of the back yard and the buckets I had sitting in the driveway wouldn't stay.

About a week ago, I ordered some plants from Ison's Nursery. They arrived Friday evening, delivered by FEDEX and wrapped in a plastic sheeting and a thick, brown paper bag. I got two more muscadine vines for the grape trellis, four raspberry plants, another pear tree, a peach tree to replace the one the goats killed last year and I couldn't resist trying out a pomegranate tree. So, with buckets, plants and shovel in hand, I headed into the orchard to plant me some trees.

This is the first time I've ever dealt with bare root plants and I sure hope I did things right. For each plant, I dug the hole about twice as large as the roots (except for the pear tree which had really long roots - I would have had to dig to China). Then I took the dirt and mixed it with some home made worm castings in about a 2:1 ratios (dirt to castings). As I filled the dirt back in around the roots, I would add a little water in the hole to help settle it down around the roots.

It took much longer to plant nine plants than I thought it would. It was mid-afternoon by the time I was done. After all that effort, I sure hope they live!

By the time I was done planting, it was time to feed the menagerie. I walked down to the feeding area to get the feed bowls set up and was greeted by 15 hungry animals. (I guess I should explain here that Rosalita, the donkey we acquired in Jan, has proven to be uncatchable ever since the farrier trimmed her hooves two months ago. This is unfortunate, because she has a bad case of thrush and her hooves are over grown and need lots of attention) Rosalita got just a little too close to me and a quickly grabbed her halter. When a 350# donkey doesn't want to be caught, it can put up quite a fight, but I managed to hang on and drag her out of the pasture.

I tied her up to the horse trailer and fed her separately, trying to make this as pleasant an experience a possible. I brushed her, gave her a carrot and then started working on her feet. That's when the real fun began. It was a tussle, but I managed to clean, treat, and file her hooves as best I could. Buddy the farm dog was a casualty, though. He got a little too close to the action and took a hoof to the right shoulder. No permanent damage, but I think he developed a very health respect of the donkey at that moment.

Anyway... That was my Saturday at the Red Clay Farm. At the end of the day, I was dead tired, but it was a good tired! Lots of fresh air and sunshine. Spring is in the air here in SC!

(Editor's Note: I will add pictures later. One of the things I've got to do better is take more pictures. Nothing is more boring than a blog without pictures! Who wants to read all the time?)

A Very Blue Trailer

When you have a farm, even a small one like ours, you need a flat bed trailer. They are handy for all sorts of things; hauling tractors, hauling hay, picking up 16' fence panels or hay rings, or even for transporting five cubic yards of mushroom compost.

I bought this trailer a few months ago. It is a well-constructed, sturdy trailer with a 7000# capacity, but it had a few problems. First, the brake lights didn't work, and second, the tires are in horrible shape.

So what started out as fixing the brake lights turned out to be a major project. I first started out to fix the taillights but once I managed to unbolt them, it became clear that they were unfixable. The body of the lights were rusted through and wire casings were cracked. I decided to scrap them and buy new ones.

Of course, if I buy new lights, I might as well re-wire the trailer while I'm at it, right? And before I bolt the new lights in place, I ought to clean and paint the tail light bracket so it doesn't rust any more. Once I painted the tail light brackets, I decided I might was well paint the rest of the trailer while I'm at it. Oh, and the wood could probably use some wood preservative since I don't have a shelter to park the trailer under; Thompson's Water Seal to the rescue!

So here it is, in all its blue glory. In retrospect, blue probably wasn't the best color for the trailer. But it does now match the tractor color, as you can see in the picture. Plus, blue is my favorite color. The paint job is what you would expect from a spray can paint job. It has its share of runs, drips and oversprays, but it still looks better than it did before. Bob the tractor will look sweet riding on this trailer!

All this and I STILL don't have the brake lights on or the tires changed! It's not safe, but it looks good and that's what's important!

Pre-Composting Worm Food

I love my experiments!

We've been throwing old produce into the compost bin and layering it with alpaca manure for the past week. The intent is to pre-compost it just enough and feed it to the worms. As you can see by the thermometer (even if it is kind of hard to see), we've started to see an increase in the temperature. It hit 120° today. I expect that it will reach 130° - 140° sometime this week and then start to drop off. When the temps start to drop, I'll mix it up and let it cook again. In about two more weeks, it will be perfect worm food - soft, mushy, rotting and loaded with bacteria and fungus. Yum, Yum!

Isn't science cool?

IBC Aquaponics

I finally finished building the aquaponics experiment I wrote about earlier in the year. This week I got it filled with water and have the pump going to cycle the water. All that's needed now is a source of fish so I can stock the thing.

Here's a list of what I needed to build this system, cost and sources.

IBC Container - Craigslist.org - $75. (Delivered)

Two each 2"x4"x10 - Lowe's - $7.

1" PVC pipe and misc fittings - Lowe's - $23.

4x65# bags Sunleaves Rocks Growing Medium (.5-1.5" diameter) - The Urban Garden - $97.50

EcoPlus Submersible Pump ECO1056 and 1" flex tube - The Urban Garden - $82.75

All totaled, I've spent about $280. on my experiment. That's not especially cheap, but not too expensive, either. I'm not sure how much fish will cost me yet but as soon as I find a good source I will update this post or add another.

Alpacas Join the Team

I've always said that I would like to raise alpacas. They are great animals. They are clean, pretty easy keepers, easy on the land and just so darn cute!

Well, this week, Mrs Red Clay Farmer purchased three learner alpacas for me as a Army retirement gift. These girls have been pets for the past year or so and the previous owner decided he was too busy to keep them. They are named after the characters from the Golden Girls. Dorothy is the white one, Rose is Brown and Blanche is the black one. They came with two donkeys as well - Scarlet, the mom and her son, Harpo.

The girls and Harpo have made the transition to the farm and seem to be well adjusted. Scarlet, on the other hand, has not made it to our place yet. She has proven to be a challenge to catch and seems to be very happy at her old home. We are going to make one more attempt to bring her home later in the week.

Grape Pruning Time

February is grape vine pruning time, or so I've heard. I don't think the grapes on our trellis have ever been pruned and the trellis is a little worse for wear as the posts rot from the top down and the cross beams are dry rotting as well.

Back in early January, I got motivated to cut out all the wisteria vines that had wrapped themselves around the trellis and interwoven themselves among the grape vines. That was quite a chore. Once I chopped out all the vine pieces, I shredded them in the chipper and mixed them with a pile of horse manure to do a little bit of composting. Later in the spring, I will spread the piles out on the pasture.

This week, I pruned back the grape vines in accordance with the guidance I found in the Ison's Nursery and Vineyard website here. They provide a variety of guidance on how to care for grape vines, fruit tress and more. I also ordered my strawberry plugs from them and was very pleased with the plants I got.

Anyway, here are the before and after shots. Hopefully I didn't cut they back too much. I am looking forward to a good grape harvest this year!

Here's what the trellis and vines looked like before I pruned them. This fall, there was more wisteria than grape vine.

Here's how it looks now. I replaced a few cross boards and straightened the trellis. That big pile in the middle is grape vine trimmings.

Sustainable Williamson Project

I wanted to take a moment to share a project from a fellow Appalachian State University alum who is making a difference in the World!

From his most recent email release:

Dear Friends,

On March 1st, 2013, we are launching our campaign in an effort to raise support for making the coalfields of central Appalachia sustainable and economically diverse! 

Our hope is to start a movement to make Williamson an example to other communities in central Appalachia and across the nation, changing how we approach economic diversification and sustainable development.

We aim to create a replicable model from our existing projects that positions Williamson as a hub for sustainability throughout the central Appalachian region.

We invite you to join us, taking action in sharing this campaign with your friends, family, communities, and networks. And as we begin our Campaign Tour across the east coast, stay tuned to our upcoming event to join us the national celebration for sustainability. 

We sincerely appreciate your support, and look forward to working with all of you over the next two months and beyond! Get excited with us! 

The Sustainable Williamson website goes live on 2 March. Check it out if you have a chance.

The New Garden Update

The garden is slowly taking shape!

I added four cubic yards of mushroom compost from Allen's Market this week and mixed it in with the tiller. Then, planted two rows of potatoes (both white and red), a row and half of onions (white, yellow and red) and seven cabbage plants. We're not too fond of cabbage in our family, but we are going to try it again. Maybe it tastes better when you've grown it yourself. I sure can't wait for things to start growing!

The folks at Allen's were very helpful when it came to offering advice on planting the potato and onion sets I bought from them. As I've said before, I'm pretty inexperienced in this gardening stuff. They also have some very reasonable prices on started plants. You get a three pack of plants for $1.00 - not too bad.

As for our sustainability score, I think we get an A+ for expanding out garden area. This new garden will really expand our ability to grow our own food. We probably get a D for the addition of the mushroom compost, though. While the compost will definitely improve our growing capacity, I later learned that it was shipped from mushroom farms all the way up in Pennsylvania. That's a long way to transport compost and I'm sure required a fairly significant quantity of fuel to get it here (and all the other places it was shipped). In the future, I will have to find a more local source of compost.

Prepping a New Garden

We broke ground on a new garden this week. After all, it is the season to start planing! This brings us to two garden plots now. We started one beside the house the first summer we were here.

This particular garden is going to be a challenge. It's a 35' x 30' plot on a little bit of a slope. The area where we placed it used to be grass (kind of), and I've spent hours trying to rake out all the grass roots but they seem to keep popping up. I know I will be pulling grass out of the garden all summer long! Being on a hill, I sure hope the dirt doesn't all run out of the bottom side in a big rain storm.

I will be adding some mushroom compost to it soon because it is nothing but hard, red clay with a few rocks here and there. It definitely needs some organic material in it. It probably also needs a little lime added. We have some pretty acidic soil here.

We are going to plant some potatoes and onions in the near future. I think that's all we can plant at this time. It's not quite warm enough for anything else.

More to follow...

New Windows

There are hundreds of ways that houses waste energy. In the case of our house, I think we have thousands. Today we are taking care of one of those issues.

We are replacing the windows upstairs with new double pane, low-e energy star rated windows. The old windows original to the house were single pane wood frame windows. They had cracks, holes and the glazing was dry and cracked. It was time for them to go.

The new windows are Simonton brand windows. They're not the absolute best in the world, but they are pretty good, especially for the money we're spending. These particular windows are Energy Star rated in the south east (and other areas).

It's going to be interesting to see if these new windows make a difference in the comfort of the rooms and efficiency of the heating system. I can tell you that they look a heck of a lot better than the old windows did! 

My Hairy Ass

The Jennet hanging out with her new friends, Moe and Curly.

Yesterday we drove up to the Raeford, NC area to pick up a donkey. It is a rescue donkey that had been mistreated and abused at its former location some friends of ours had acquired and tried to keep it at their place. Unfortunately, their neighbors didn't appreciate the braying of the donkey and our friends asked us to pick her up as soon as possible.

So, how do you load a stubborn, scared donkey into a three horse, slant load, stock trailer? Very carefully! After 1.5-2 hours of coaxing, bribing with food, brute force pulling/pushing, we finally got the jennet  loaded on the trailer. Then it had to be properly restrained, which was a whole other challenge. The problem was she was just short enough that she could get herself under the dividers if she worked at it. We tried a number of different tying configurations before we found a way to restrain her that we felt comfortable with.  

The ride home was uneventful and she rode well. By the time we got home, it was dark. We considered the idea of giving her food and water and leaving her in the trailer over night, but she was eager to get out of the trailer. Rather than traumatize her further, we lead her into the pasture and put her into a paddock separate from the horses. The horses were very excited to see a new pasture-mate! I hope they get along.

So, the jennet has some issues... Her feet are overgrown and need trimming bad. I think she has thrush based on the smell I smelled as I struggled to load her. She also has a very hard fat deposit along the crest of her neck which indicates some metabolic and nutrition issues. If I can catch her this morning, I will clean and treat her hooves for thrush and we have the farrier is coming out on Thursday to fix up her feet. In the meantime, I think we're going to have to put her on a special diet to lose that fat on her neck. 

More to follow... Let the hairy ass jokes begin!

Erosion Control Success!!!

Well, after some pretty big storms and lots of rain last night, I'm please to say that the retention dams did their job well! Woo Hooo! Time to start looking at terracing for the rest of the pasture now. Hopefully I can get some grass growing on these dams to hold them in place.

From the top, looking down. You can see where Red Clay Farm gets it's name!

The water adds some definition to the size of the dams

Erosion Control

One of the challenges we have here at the Red Clay Farm is that we are on the side of a hill. The road is to our front and the land slopes away from the road toward a stream that runs along the back of the property line. In all, it's about a 50 meter vertical drop from the front to the back.

Courtesy of Google Earth

When we first moved here, we had a huge gully that ran through the middle of the property. It was terrible and in places is was at least six feet deep. One day I couldn't find our little goat, Timmy, anywhere. I walked the pasture for an hour before I heard a faint Timmy call. I had to listen for a while to figure out where he was. I finally found him at the bottom of the gully, covered in red clay from head to toe. He was so deep that all I could reach was his horns.

After saving Timmy, I decided that I had to do something about the gash that ran across our property. So, the following week, I burned all the brush we had thrown in the gully to stem the flow of water and got the tractor and box blade out. I spent the next few days using the box blade to push in the sides of the gully and fill it in. Over the next few months, the soil settled and the gully started to reappear. There were low spots developing in area where the gully was the deepest. Water was still flowing down the hill pretty fast in this area.

Today, I pulled out the box blade again. This time, my goal was to create some small retention "ponds" along the gully to keep water from flowing like a river down the hill. After about an hour and a half of work, I had created four retention dams along the area where the gully used to run.

From the top of the hill, looking down.

I put the dams on the down-hill side of the low spots that formed. The smallest dam is about 1.5 feet deep and 12 feet across. The largest is about 18 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.

The bottom-most dam. Also the biggest. The picture doesn't show the depth very well.

So that's how I spent my day here at the Red Clay Farm. I won't have to wait long to see how these dams work. There is a big frontal system bearing down on us tonight and we are due to have strong thunderstorms and rain. I'll report on how they held tomorrow.

Not Out Of The Woods Yet!

I walked out to check on the goats this morning. It was a cool 27 degrees. Everyone appears to have made it through the night but the new guy... Just barely.

I brought him into the house to warm him up. He started shivering as he warmed. Once he got over his shivering, he got a little more active and tried to stand. He was weak and stumbly.

While he was warming I stuck my finger in molasses diluted by warm water and rubbed it in his mouth. I got very little response. We tried the bottle again with no luck. He just wouldn't take it. Several websites suggest sub-cutaneous injections of lactated-ringer's solution and tube feeding. I don't have the experience or supplies for either. I guess I'll have to figure that out and stock some supplies for the future.

So, once he was thoroughly warmed, I took him back to the herd. He started bleating and they all came running. I put him with Junie and he started nursing. Maybe getting him good and warm was the key!

UPDATE: As of last night the little goat was doing well enough to tentatively name. He was moving around and feeding on his own. We named him Petie.

For future reference, I found a link to the supplies every goat rancher needs here and another website that talked about how to manage weak and wimpy kids here. This link about warming a chilled kid was also very helpful