Haybale Cold Frames and the Question of Dead Fish

I want vegetables now. I always kill my seedlings and I just don't have the space yet to dedicate to the seed flats. I have had success with direct sow, a lot of success, but this just doesn't work with tomato and peppers.....luckily I get plants from wonderful friends and neighbors, but I still want to be self sufficent in this matter. I am still a beginner, a beginner farmer too. I have so much to learn, perhaps more than one lifetime's worth of knowledge was not passed to my generation and learning from books and the Internet is surreal sometimes. There is a lot of trial and error.

Enter the haybales. I read about this here and here. Basically you place 4-6 bales in a square and then top with plastic or old windows. Our neighbor delivered to us all the old storms off their house last fall. Wonderful!

So here is the first haybale green house/ cold frame. We have 5 weeks until last frost date so I'm not going to bother starting cold weather stuff that I can just directly seed right now. I am going to try...tomatoes. Brave, daring, and maybe a little naive. That about sums up my entire adult life!

Once the cold season has passed and the plants can stand alone, the bales break down and make excellent cover mulch. I did this last year with cut long grass and had major weed problems- to address this I read here that heavily watering the bales so they sprout, then letting them dry out again, kills the seed sprouts and fixes the weed sprouting issue once they are spread as mulch. I also used old paper feed bags as a biodegradable landscape paper under the mulch. Excellent for weed control and they completely break down by the fall turning.

One of the other things I am going to try this year is dead fish as fertilizer. We had a fish kill in our pond and pulled out HUGE grass carp. Lily is 3 feet tall. The fish is the same size she is, maybe a little longer. Wow.

I will not be using those though, the smaller fish will break down easier and were scooped up with other organic matter from the pond. It will all be wonderful soil nutrition. I'm not going to use nearly as much as we actually have though, just a few buckets full as a trial. I know they will be great, but the guy who runs the tiller (my Dearest husband!) is concerned that they will tangle up in the tines. It is a small walk behind model but I have put on my wish list a pull behind for the tractor. He's also concerned about attracting wild predators. I don't know about that. I would think that compost heaps and gardens in general attract wild animals, but once the fish are tilled in it shouldn't be a problem. Right?

 Just look at those nutrient dense little fish! I'm excited for this trial and will be doing before and after soil testing out of curiosity. I picked up the soil bags and forms last week. We are testing the orchard grounds as well.

This is the other garden bed that will get the fish treatment. I can't wait for the soil to dry out and be workable but we have a warm dry stretch next week and if we can catch the end of it and till then, I think we'll be good to go.

Future Farmers

Last week we delivered our bright orange buckets to the whey lady, cheese maker extraordinaire. We are so lucky to have this connection. I am a serious cheese addict and I am surrounded by enablers! In fact when my Dearest jokes about restricting my cheese inventory to less than 10 in any given week he gets called affectionately....the Cheese Meanie. Heh. 

Cheese season is also known as kidding season. Get it? Actually it really is as baby goats are called kids. Oh they are cute too. Here's my kids with her kids: 

 

It is neat to think that the first time I ever stepped foot on this farm, our own farm dream was so far off that it hurt sometimes to reach for it. Seemed so out of reach. It wasn't though. I could have given up, I could have written off as impossible and made due with where we were in the city, but I didn't want to. I yearned for the open air and rural landscape of my childhood. I wanted that for my daughters. 

Muck boots and all.

Lil'Bug stepped away from the ATV for a minute to load something up and Blueberry slid on over and found the power pedal. Away she went!  It was all sorts of funny and cute. Not quite two yet and she's a pretty good driver!

Meet Wilbur the pig. He's about 4 years old and has been cared for lovingly the entire time. He was a city pig, but as soon as we moved out here she built him a pen, one for winter and one for warm weather. She found an old calf bottle and now Wilbur is really babied. Also in the picture is the snout harness lead, his food, and his medicine. He likes playing pirate and it was his idea to pose for the picture on the poop deck. Oh, and we had to promise not to ever eat him. I kid you not.

Field Day

This is the Western field, where we will be running pigs this year and hopefully grazing cattle in the next few years. We need some fencing done, but I hope that this field is the key to our farm's permaculture. The second picture is of the little seen "frog pond". Funny story, the realty advert said 11 acre pond and the Realtor walked me to this one first. Ha ha. It is a cute little mud hole. Still funny.

Crawfish Boil

We had set a pair of crawfish traps out by the dock last fall and left them over the winter. 

Of course they were full of crawfish once the ice melted! Lil'Bug always checks them when she gets to the dock. Sometimes she's found crawfish or fish or even a turtle trying to bite at the trap (she says).

So Lil'Bug collected them, Dearest threw back the smaller, and these six little mudbugs came home for dinner. Well, snack really. 

I didn't find much as far as recipes go, (and all the recipes called for 45 POUND sacks of crawfish. WOW! Yeah, not exactly what I had here) basically make some stock, boil some vegetables in it, season it well, bring to rolling boil, drop critters (alive!) into boiling water and cover. Boil hard for two minutes, turn off heat and leaved covered for 25 minutes. Done. I didn't want to fill a stock pot full of veggies just for 5 little crawfish (one was almost dead once we got ready to cook, so he got tossed....)....so I used 4 cups of salted water, 4 cups of my chicken bone broth, and a lot of Mama Podkayne's Swamp Fire Cajun Seasoning. Oh, it was good broth on its own, that's for true! 

So in the pot they went, and yes, they screamed a little. That part is freaky and Dearest insists that I was imagining it. Hmph.

Honestly, I boiled hard for 4 minutes. I know it was overkill. Lil'Bug gobbled them up. She was a pro at cracking them open and pulling out the little bit of meat. Dearest said the taste was delicate, not muddy or fishy like at the dinner places we've had them at. I think it was that I used chicken broth instead of fish stock and I kept them in constantly changed out clean water for 2 days.

Baby Blueberry didn't have any. This is her expression as she looked on. I can't quite figure out if she was grossed out or mad that she wasn't getting a taste? She's a hard girl to read sometimes.

Me? I want to like them, I just held back a little. I mean, everything is better with Swamp Fire! Maybe next time?