Exploring Several Gardens

When she was very tiny, Lightening, the beautiful and playful daughter of Gloria the Glory Goat, had a freak accident and broke a bone in her leg.

For a milk goat, a hind leg is extremely important. A pregnant goat puts much of her weight on her lower back and back limbs.  A full udder can hold a couple of quarts of milk, placing great stress on the hooves and legs.

Adult udder - a burden!

If a break isn't corrected right, it could mean a permanently damaged animal. So the decision whether to repair or euthanize was a serious one.

But she is young, willing to be confined, her bones are still growing and she had the chance to heal just right.

 True to her name, lightening healed swiftly, faster than anyone expected.

Today, on a sunny day in the high seventies - the perfect Seattle day , I let her explore new parts of the farm.

We fence off the vegetable and fruit garden from the goats to protect it. Goats will eat the tips and leaves of all the branches they can reach on a tree, often breaking them in the process, then strip the bark off the lower trunk. But one goatling with a still developing stomach can't do much.

Lightening was content to nibble a few stems of grass growing between the bricks on the path, taste some grape leaves that hung down too far, and explore while staying safely close to her mom and me.

Days like this are few and far between.

It's usually too hot or cold, raining or sticky, I have to go to work, or some chore is waiting to be done. But it's a perfect day, and this little animal is learning and exploring and I'm here in the present for her.

We watch a hen picking the seeds out of a borage plant. She may have been eating whole flowers too. Lightening samples the borage and likes it but doesn't go back for seconds.

A huge onion is ready to harvest. Lightening tries its leaves and decides they're too spicy for her.

The ducks are resting in the grass, three black ovals so motionless they must either be very happy, or dead. As she approaches, I see them moving slowly, trying to decide whether to get up. 

The idea of permaculture is still new to me. As I understand it the goal is to design a so that the animals, the plants and we humans benefit each other in multiple ways without any element having to be pushed too hard. A goat wanders down a path nibbling the trailing parts of vines that grow too low, cleaning up grasses between the cracks and choosing not to eat the vegetables.

A hen gleans the seeds from a nectar plant, and keeps it from over planting itself next year. Some ducks clear out the slug population, eat any leftovers from the other animals' dishes and thus eliminate a food source for pests

A wasp is too busy pollinating a fennel blossom to sting me. Later, she will gather cabbage moth larvae to feed her young.

A lady follows behind taking pictures. I'm in the beginning stages of putting things together in my mind. Seeing things on such a glorious day helps me imagine possibilities. So does seeing what interests - and repels- my little goat.

Pretty soon, the goats got nervous about being separated.

Gloria started baying, and Lightening responded by calling in her shaky, treble baby voice.

The gate suddenly became a barrier, and it was time for her to go back into the more familiar yard.

She doesn't seem too stressed out or tired from her exploration. Soon she'll be back to climbing trees and getting into mischief, and later she will be a strong, healthy mama goat with four good legs.

Barn cleaning

Of all the chores at Several Gardens Farm, barn cleaning has the least glamour. It's also easily put off. A barn that needs cleaning will still need cleaning another day.

Add to that, cleaning a barn on a damp day is an exercise in futility. It never dries properly, and dust, present even in the rains of winter, finds every sticky surface and leaves a layer of new filth over any efforts to clean it.

But if you can smell your barn, the animals smell it too. They have no choice; they can't go into the house because the barn smells bad.

So clean I must.

Of course, animals produce waste. Chickens mostly poop at night. They sleep on roosts, and wake periodically to jettison their droppings onto the bedding below. There are a couple of choices for dealing with this.

Soiled bedding can be removed daily and immediately moved into compost, or it can be deep-litter mulched, adding layers of bedding over the offending material. That's what we do. It means fewer cleaning days per year, but more work when cleaning finally happens. It also means the bedding is rich with nutrients when we finally take it out.

Goats do their business outside, wherever they happen to be. Goat poop is less obnoxious than chicken poop, but they pee a lot and over time their urine soaks into the wood chips near the barn. I am not going to clean those today because I need to order wood chips first.

 Goats and chickens gravitate toward dust for their personal grooming. Both species love to dust bathe, ruffling fine, dry dust through their coats or feathers to the skin, where it removes oils and destroys pests. But alas, it also gets all over fixtures and walls.

There's nothing for it but to sweep smooth surfaces and then scrub them down and hose them. The dirt floor is shoveled and pitchforked free of bedding. Scrubbing a dirt floor won't work. Instead I sprinkle it with lime, which locks up the ammonia and kills odor. My friend Sheila contacted me out of the blue with a new bale of straw, perfect for bedding. Hay, which the goats eat, doesn't work as well. It gets soggy instead of letting moisture escape. Also, when we use it as mulch, it sprouts from the many seeds it shouldn't - but often does- contain.

The compost bin is quickly full of barn cleanings. It never really stood a chance.

Lightly soiled bedding get piled around plants as mulch. It isn't deep enough to kill all weeds below but it sets them back long enough to let the plants I want to grow.

The milking stand is scrubbed often, and sunned whenever possible. Here it is catching rays. I used to think the old farm management books that tell you how good sunshine is for this and that were obsolete. I would think 'yeah, that was before we had bleach and other strong cleaners'.

But then I got an aquarium with a UV sterilizer and started to think of the sun as the biggest ultraviolet radiation source in the solar system. Mine. For free. Now I use it to clean and bleach stuff all the time. Thank you sun.




When our bodies metabolize the nitrogen in proteins,  ammonia is the very toxic byproduct. Fish wash their ammonia out quickly, using copious water. For land animals, water is precious, and we can't waste it cleansing ourselves of ammonia. So we convert the ammonia into the less toxic urea, and birds, reptiles and insects make the even more harmless uric acid - the white substance that makes bird droppings so recognizable.

When I learned about this in college, it was a revelation that kept me excited for days. Up until then, I had absorbed the notion that our bodies were filthy and that waste was a sign of how unpleasant we were. I had also learned to think of my body esthetically - as something that should be beautiful and smell good all the time.

Learning the wonderful chemistry of the urea cycle changed how I thought of the body. The gawkiest, nerdiest, homeliest of us all is still capable of these amazing metabolic feats. The idea that I had been doing this all my life without even knowing it blew me away.

Cleaning the barn gets me very close to this cycle again. The waste from the goats and chickens may smell bad, and my back may hurt. But the barn is clean and the animals are happy. And out in the farm, nitrogen is moving, into the compost pile, into the garden to help the plants grow.

Hiving a Swarm

Just before dinner, David got a call from the Boeing plant in Renton. A swarm of bees was hanging out on one of their signs. Could he come get it?

We are on a swarm list provided by the Puget Sound Beekeepers http://pugetsoundbees.org/, We are not only willing but hoping to capture bee swarms. It's a win/win - the caller gets the pesky ball of bees removed, we get another potential hive. By collecting bees from swarms, we hope to capture bees from colonies that have successfully overwintered, and may pass on good survival genes to future hives.

Most people love and respect bees, but there are certainly places where they don't want them living.

They weren't really giant bees, but we loved the illusion in this picture of them roaming over a sign. If they were really that size we would have driven away as soon as we saw them!

A swarm is what a hive does when it is so full of honey, workers and brood that it has no room left to grow. It raises a second queen, and then the old queen takes a band of workers off in search of a new place to live.

When bees swarm, it looks terrifying but is really one of the safer ways to encounter that many bees. The bees are full of honey, and they have the queen with them. They are not looking for a fight, and will avoid stinging at all costs.

 What isn't always safe, though, is the rest of the situation. Bees prefer high places. A keeper who fears heights need not go on swarm calls.

In this case, the sign was only accessible by lift.

David brought along a box with some comb in it, and scooped as much of the swarm as possible into it. The queen is in the densest bunch of bees. Once she's been boxed up, the other bees are attracted to her scent and become easier to capture.

 Sugar syrup is a great beekeeping tool. It is sprayed or drenched over the bees, who pause to clean themselves and are distracted from flying or stinging. It can perk up starving bees, settle down agitated ones, and make swarms more manageable. Here David is sweetening their spirits.

 Soon the majority of the bees were in the box. But in this situation, "most" wasn't good enough. 

Bees produce a chemical called Nasonov Pheromone which is an attractant used to orient other bees. These bees are fanning their abdomens to waft the scent out. This will signal any workers left at the site of the so they can collect into a new, smaller cluster.

David kept collecting, and returned in the evening for any stragglers.

What next? Well, we always have room for a hive of bees. We got our swarm settled into a hive, where it can build itself up before winter. Our Boeing bees are carrying on the tradition of flight, and can now be seen coming in for a landing in their snazzy new Warre hive. Let the bees live long and prosper.

Photo credits: Noah Darwin Feinberg