I'm back! Sorry to have been gone so long.  This is our Daphne. She's grown into a gorgeous young lady but still has a lot to learn.

We just got our bees! We've been waiting for these babies for quite some time and they have arrived at last. Our two hives are young and just getting established so no honey for us this year as the bees will need all that they can make to get through the winter. By next year we hope to have thriving hives and maybe a little honey for us!

The bees are actively searching out pollen and bringing it home!

This is a shot of our 1000 gallon irrigation tanks and the corner of the garage. The water (when it rains, which is not much around here) is collected from the roof into the 35 gallon plastic garbage cans at each corner and pumped with a submersible sump pump into the big tanks. From there it goes into the garden via a series of irrigation tubes that deliver water to the roots of all of the garden plants.

Brassicas! Savoy cabbages, brussels sprouts, purple cauliflower, broccoli romanesca, and waltham broccoli.

I've never grown potatoes before but these babies are looking pretty good!

                                                                   This is our cucumber patch.

 I took 12'of 2x4 welded wire fencing and cut it in half lengthwise and put it against the corner of the fence, creating the opposite corner with a heavy metal stake - it is reasonably sturdy - thereby creating a 10'x 2' area.  I then filled the area with the last of our compost (about 2 cubic yards) and used a shoved to hollow out two 10"deep rows. These I filled with garden soil, planted half the back row with Long Anglaise cucumbers and the other half with Thai cukes. The front row is little gem lettuce - it will all be long gone by the time the cucumbers completely take over the space. In the back left corner I saved a little space and made another short row in which I planted Birdhouse gourds. The idea, and I have to give that credit to Diane, is that the heavy feeding cucumbers and gourds will take root in the soil and then spread their roots deep into the compost and have more than enough to feed on so they will produce a bumper crop. So far the results are amazing!

                                                                         Pass the Sugar Snap Peas, please!
We planted 2 double rows 20 feet long of these babies and it looks like we will have peas galore. We'll eat as many as we can fresh, maybe freeze some (though they are never as good when they've been frozen), juice them as part of our morning juicing concoction, and maybe even try drying some. Anyone have any good ideas on preserving Sugar Snap peas?

Okay, just one more garden picture. A row of atomic red carrots. By the way, everything we grow is grown naturally, meaning no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. It is a little harder to do. You have to pay a bit more attention to your plants. You have to work pretty hard to compost and weed and nurture. Just one taste of a salad made with fresh spinach, arugula, beet greens, 6 or 7 different kinds of heirloom lettuces, baby chard, spring onions, red radishes, and a dressing made with fresh tarragon, parsley, and good olive oil, and you know it is worth every ounce of effort it took to grow.

                                                                            Our LaMancha goat, Taylor.
The goats have been very happy since their arrival here last November, but they are much happier now that we have expanded their area to include a small grassy meadow and a bit of wooded area.

Thanks to Dr. Michael Mongno and his essential nurse, the lovely Brooke Raymond for working so hard to help me complete the fence!

We'll have a few pears from the trees we planted last summer.

And apples! We also have a few peaches and plums hanging on so the future looks good for fruit around here.

I've been baking a little bread too. This is the latest success story, New York Deli Rye. Chewy crusty good. No brag, just fact, as Walter Brennan once said.

 The pigs are my beautiful fat girls. I'm crazy about them.

All of the times have not been so good lately. We lost Diane's mother Antoinette Mongno in April. She was a wonderful woman, full of love and a dedication to bring light and joy to everyone she met. More than a mother in-law, she was also a friend. And this month our brother in-law Alan Beimfohr, a perfect travel companion, loving husband, father, and grandfather, statistics wizard (he always made them up!) and good friend, passed away after a long illness. We miss them every day.
I'll post again soon.

Animals

Our babies are growing up! The little piglets that we purchased in July are now pigs in every sense of the word. Check out the earlier picture of Diane with the piggies and take a look at them now!
There are pigs on the Iberian peninsula in both Spain and Portugal (called Iberian Blacks) that are raised on acorns in the oak forests of northern Portugal and Western Spain and produce a really special meat referred to as Jamon Iberico or Pata Negra. When Diane and I were in Portugal for a month in the summer of 2004 we made it a point to find a special little restaurant in the little town of Evora that had been recommended to whose owner prepared Pata Negra pork. The owner, Ze Diaz, treated us like family and served us crusty breads and assorted olives along with a local red wine that was, like so many of the Portuguese wines we had tried, excellent! And then came the pork - I was just looking at the journal we kept from the trip and my comment was "... finished with lemon and herbs, totally tender and without a doubt the best pork I have ever tasted!" I still remember that wonderful meal and and have even checked into getting some but at $20+ per pound it is beyond our budget. Why have I told this tale of eating pork in Portugal? Our land has many White, Red, Burr, and Pin Oaks and the White and Red Oaks have been producing tons of acorns, and our pigs love them! I give them a pint each twice a day with their regular rations and they eat the acorns before anything else. I have to be careful to put them on top or they will root out the rest of their food to get to the acorns! We'll see how this goes but the acorns have certainly cut into our feed bill.







We also now have 15 guinea fowl and they are a hoot! We didn't get these little weirdos until late August so they are still very young but they are really cool and have a sweet, if not cacophonous, sound. They are supposed to be great at keeping ticks and chiggers in check and are said to taste like pheasant. In any case they are another delightful addition to Little Ditty Farm!




The geese are having a blast!

















The pooches are growing up!

The Fall Garden and Pigs in the Field

Today is September 1^st and it is a searing 95 degrees here in Northern Arkansas but I am in the shade and there is a cool breeze that kicks up on occasion so it isn’t half bad. The animals are all pretty much asleep or just lazing about. Diane is cleaning house in preparation for the arrival of our guests tomorrow. It is just another day in paradise.

The raised garden beds are all in and the 15 yards of topsoil that I purchased is all shoveled and distributed. I used 2”x 10” x 10 ft. treated lumber to frame in the beds and though it was a bit expensive I think it will be worth it in the long run as the beds should last for years to come. All that is left to do is to plant the rest of the fall garden. I have planted flats of lettuce of varying varieties, Brussels sprouts, kale, arugula, broccoli, cabbage, and some herbs. Two days ago I direct seeded turnips, spinach, lots of radishes, atomic red carrots, and two kinds of peas. Tomatoes are setting on the single bed that I planted at the end of June and it looks like we will get a bit of a crop, though I had my doubts. The original bed that I planted soon after we arrived here – remember I mentioned that I almost destroyed my new tiller breaking up the ground – is producing lots of cucumbers and peppers and beans, but in my haste and over zealousness I planted everything a bit too close together so everything is a bit crowded. I mixed 10 bags of store bought cow manure into the hard packed clay and rocky soil and that seems to have provided enough of the nutrients that my late garden needed.

Our GOS pigs went out into the field the day before yesterday and after spending several weeks in the shade of the barn they were ill prepared for the late summer sun that is nothing if not relentless during these waning days of summer. After one full day in the sun their floppy ears were burned a bright pink! They fared much better yesterday and today as I let the hose run in a little hollow next to their shelter and they have made a nice mud wallow to lounge in during the hottest part of the day. The mud has helped to protect their skin from the sun and it is endless fun to watch them wrestle around in it.

The temporary area that I have designated for them is fenced off with poly-wire electrical fencing with a solar energizer. Being the amateur farmer that I am, it was quite the ordeal for me to put the fence up, but after all is said and done it really wasn’t so difficult. I will provide a detailed explanation and photos of the project in a later post for those of you that would like to give it a try. I trained them for one full day with a single strand of energized poly-wire in their pen and that seems to have been all that was necessary. It was a little heartbreaking to see them put their nose against the wire and then squeal bloody murder but it certainly looks like they have learned. They are very wary of the fence and seem quite content in their new habitat.

More to come.

Welcome to The Amateur Farmer

This is the continuing saga of Jack and Diane, amateur farmers. We left our home in Thailand in early June of 2011 and we are working hard at settling in on our farm of 25 acres in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. It is truly beautiful here so we have to be careful not to spend too much time enjoying the view, oh hell, what am I saying? We don't spend enough time enjoying the view. This farm work is hard and there are so many projects that we barely have enough time in the day to do our chores and work on our projects before it is time to put all of the animals up for the night and get inside for some dinner - which usually gets eaten very late around here, but we're working on that. Anyway it really is beautiful here. We are nestled between stunning Bull Shoals Lake and the White river, each about a mile in either direction. The land is not flat and it is not fertile. The easiest crop to grow would be rocks but we are making our way and have already put in 6 large raised garden beds (I mentioned the rocks - I almost ruined a brand new tiller trying to till the first bed and gave up on that) and the late tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and beans that we planted are doing well. We have a South facing property with a 4 acre pasture to the West and about an acre to the East. The West pasture is where we put the garden. The next big project for the garden will be a greenhouse with a block wall for heat retention - I'll take pictures and show you how I did it, when I do it. The picture here is of me with a black snake that I had to kill - it had one of our baby geese halfway down its' throat!

Our menagerie is growing seemingly by the day. We ordered 50 Rhode Island Red chicks while we were still in Thailand and they arrived a week after we did. Stupid me. We were anything but prepared for chickens or anything else. Our little farm has a barn but it was in such sad shape and so full of the garbage of years and years of being a catch all that I didn't know whether to tear it down and build a new one or try and salvage it. I salvaged it and I am glad I did. All of the junk is gone now and thanks to the help of my 82 year old father, my 31 year old son, and my brothers in law Steve and Ed, we got one of the barn stalls converted to a chicken house just as the chicks outgrew the brooder.
So we are off to a good start. We have lots of animals, all babies and all fun. In the order of arrival I will break it down for you: 50 chickens, 7 Cayuga ducks, 5 Khaki Campbell ducks, 3 Toulouse geese (we lost one goose to a 6' black snake and one duck to our own carelessness, so this is what we have left), 2 lovely kittens, 1 Blue Heeler puppy named Delores (Dolly), 2 Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs named Bernadette and Roxanne (these will be our breeders so we felt reasonably safe naming them), 1 New Zealand White rabbit Winnie the Wabbit, after our lovely sister and sister in-law Linda who wants to take care of the rabbits when she visits, "Tell me about the rabbits again, George" (we're working really hard to find more - the county fairs start this week!), and our latest addition is a lovely little German Shorthair Pointer named Daphne.
This is a good start, I guess. More to come but I had to get this blog started - I promised. Peace and Love!