Finally, a new post...

Well, we've been a little busy in 2010. As most of you know, Kristen and I were married in May and we're expecting a baby in January. This doesn't mean that farm and garden stuff has stopped, however, but the blog posts sort of have. Anyway, here is a rapid update!

The first new thing we did this year was raise chickens. We decided to pick them out ourselves from a big batch of day-old chicks a friend of ours received in the mail. It's very difficult to tell the difference between roosters and hens at that age, so we thought we were smart by picking out the most active, healthiest-looking chicks in the bunch.

Which turned out to be all roosters. All 13 of them.

Anyway, we raised them over the spring and slaughtered them in the summer. Slaughtering and cleaning birds is a lot of work, but now we have a freezer full of chicken.

Our second batch of chickens came in late summer. We bought these from a hatchery, and 25 out of 26 of them appear to be hens. Half of them are Ameraucanas, and the other half are Rhode Island Reds. We should be getting plenty of eggs this spring.

The second big project for this year was getting sheep. We wanted some kind of grazing animal in order to keep the grass down in our pastures, which we'll be converting into a hazelnut orchard. But we also wanted something that would be easy to care for and move around.

We settled on Katahdin sheep. This is a breed of "hair sheep," which means they shed their winter coats and don't need to be sheared. They're also mostly raised for meat, so lambs are affordable. Katahdins also have a reputation for disease resistance and being able to do well on rough pasture. So we figured this would be a good breed to start out with for people who haven't raised livestock before.

As you can see, there's a lot of variation in color. This is probably due to different strains in the Katahdin mix. The brown-and-white sheep in the back is named Jersey, who might have some Desert Paint in her. The one in the middle, Jackie, shows most of the markings of a Barbados Blackbelly. Annie, in the foreground, might have more St. Croix in her than the others.

We started with 2 ewes and 1 lamb, but returned 1 ewe because she learned to jump the fence. Then we got 3 new lambs, one of which died from barber pole worm (or its side-effects). So now we have 1 ewe and 3 lambs, and we'll probably pick up a few more sheep next spring.

Pictured above is the electronet enclosure we use to rotate pastures. This is basically a portable electric fence made of nylon, steel thread, and plastic support stakes. The energizer is solar-powered, portable, and about the size of a small suitcase.

The electronet enables us to rotate the sheep around our land. More importantly, it will let us pasture the sheep between the rows of young hazelnut trees in a way that will prevent them from eating the leaves or stripping the bark.

If I had to do it over again, I probably would have just used electric tape rather than electronet. The netting gets caught on things very easily, and it's not very well-suited to hilly areas (changes in elevation cause it to lose tension). On the other hand, the net is probably better for keeping out predators, so I'm glad we have it.

It's hard to see, but the little dots at the center of this picture are me and Kevin putting up a perimeter fence along the front of the land. After moving the sheep around a few times, I realized that it would be a good idea to have a "backup" fence in the event they got out. Our property had a barbed-wire fence around it, but sheep slip through those very easily.

For the interior fence-line that separates the pasture/hazelnut field from everything else, I decided to add electric strands to the existing barbed wire, since these would be much cheaper than fencing the entire thing. The nylon-electric strands are very easy to work with. I'm pretty happy with it so far, although it hasn't been fully sheep-tested.

These are peaches from our trees. We canned some of them. We also tried to make peach wine, which might end up being canning vinegar.

We also had a lot of apples this year. It's a little hard to see in this picture, but that is a tree loaded with apples. The variety of different types of apples on our land is hard to keep track of. I can honestly say that some of them have been among the tastiest apples I've ever had, and the pies/crisps/apple sauce/cider we've made from them so far have been much more flavorful then anything I've had store-bought.

Some people say that apples are difficult to deal with because they get a lot of diseases. This is true. But it's also important to understand that there is the picture-perfect, blemish-free apple you get in the grocery store, and then there's what you have on your overgrown apple trees. The first category of apple is indeed hard to get. But the second category isn't. Our trees have been unpruned and unfertilized for years, and they produced many more apples than we had the time or resources to make use of.

Picking apples is only half the battle. Apple-sorting can be difficult work. Above, the Bell family debates the aesthetic, structural, and nutritional merits of each fruit before deciding its fate: pie? Storage? Apple sauce?

Above is a little bit of fall color from the back of our land.

We did a lot of new stuff this year. The garden took a back seat to a lot of the establishment projects we had on the land. We still managed to produce a good number of tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and other vegetables, but we probably wouldn't have had anything without help. My father and sister helped us plant tomatoes, basil, and other vegetables, and Hollis and Jay Wild were once again very generous in keeping our little vegetable starts alive in their greenhouse for many weeks after we should have planted them out.

Greenhouse!

Well, we've been a little busy here, but we've been meaning to get a post up about our beautiful new greenhouse.

Last year we applied for a grant for a greenhouse. Unfortunately, we did not get it -- or so we thought. When my Aunt Kathy heard that we didn't get it, she generously offered to fund our greenhouse project, and asked only that we name the greenhouse "Anna-Mae" -- my grandmother's nickname.

Sadly, my grandmother passed away earlier this spring, the same week the greenhouse went up. My grandma wrote in beautiful calligraphy, which was the inspiration for the style of the sign painted by Kristen. My grandmother was a very patient, caring woman, and I like to be reminded of those qualities when working on our delicate little plants and young trees.

But we had a bit of work to do before we could get it up. Here's me digging the foundation for the greenhouse. Our land isn't exactly level, and we're too stubborn to hire anyone or rent machinery, so there I am. My arms hurt just looking at that pile of dirt. There were some big rocks in there, too.

Here's Chief Engineer Kristen working on one of our piers. The greenhouse is anchored into the ground with six concrete piers going about 2' into the ground, with steel stakes running through the middle of them and going down an additional 1' or so. On the sides are rot-resistant recycled plastic lumber for the sill plates. The "Anna-Mae" isn't going anywhere!

We dug trenches in the bottom for drainage, put in gravel, bolted the sills down onto the piers, and Kristen put together a very pretty brick walkway through the center. You can see from this angle why we needed to dig down a bit to make it level.

Here's Kristen and friend & mentor Jay Wild working on the base. Jay was a big help getting the greenhouse up. Since our seedlings were taking up space in his greenhouse at the time, I can't blame him!

The walls are made of 8 and 10mm twinwall polycarbonate -- very heavy-duty stuff that will hopefully last a long time in addition to providing premium insulation. Early on we decided that temperature control and durability were the main features we wanted.

Here I am puttering around with some of our hazelnut trees. My grandma really liked red geraniums, so we put some pots of those to either side of the door.

The greenhouse will allow us to germinate, graft, and chip-bud hazels under controlled conditions, and it also has shelving that will allow us to start vegetable seedlings without using much space. And because it's small, we probably won't use a lot of energy heating it. It's really the perfect greenhouse for what we want to do.

Wood Stove!

It's been an unusually cold winter in the high country, with two major snows and two ice storms. The largest ice storm came on Christmas Eve and left large parts of Ashe and Watauga Counties without electricity, in many cases for days. Below are our willow trees, which were hit particularly hard by the ice.

Anyway, it's the sort of weather that makes you appreciate a good heat source. So we worked very hard in December and early January to get a second woodstove in the house. Below: stripped molding, cement board, and some plastic storage containers used as a mock-up of the stove. Makes you feel warm just looking at it, right? We sited the stove near an interior wall, close to the center of our living room-dining room-kitchen, and pretty close to the stairs... we're hoping it can heat the living spaces and the bedrooms upstairs.

We have wood floors, so we had to build a hearth. The cement board is mostly used to stabilize the hearth tiles and provide a good adhesive surface for the mortar and cement. It also probably prevents the wood floor underneath from getting hot. We used HardieBacker(tm) -- the best cement board money can buy.

In the end we decided to go with slate tile, which has a more natural look than most of the manufactured tiling we could find. The disadvantage to slate is a lack of uniformity. Tile thickness and size varied considerably. Fortunately, such differences disappear quickly under the expert guidance of tiling veteran Ed Perzell (below, with Kristen) who helped us a lot through this project.

Below: grouting. As you can see, grouting leaves a beautiful white coating over the tile, which gets into every crack and crevice and can only be removed by tootbrush. My knees hurt just thinking about it.

The almost-final step was the border. We found a stone tile border that matches the slate. The diagonal pattern of the border also complements the diagonal arrangement of the tile. The border comes in strips backed by a kind of plastic webbing -- this makes it much easier to install.

Below is the finished product. All it's missing is a stove and some kind of molding around the hearth border.

Installation day was a lot of fun. It was one of the warmest days of the winter. We bought and had our stove installed by Mountain Home and Hearth in Boone, who were great from start to finish. The sales manager provided us with a lot of advice, calculations, and re-calculations while we were figuring things out, and when we were finally ready, the installers were great.

Below is the first fire in the new stove. It is not like the old stove, which is in our basement. It heats a larger area with less wood, is easier to light and keep lit, burns cleaner, burns for longer periods of time (up to 18 hrs according to the manual), and is much nicer to look at.

It's a Harman Oakwood. Modern woodstoves are very different from the behemoth we have in the basement (or any old woodstove). For one thing, they either have catalytic converters or some other design mechanism that allows for complete combustion of the wood. If you burn wood below a certain temperature, a lot of the volatile gases simply leave through your chimney as pollution. New EPA-rated woodstoves have what amounts to an "afterburner" which allows these gases to ignite at low temperatures, which translates to less pollution and more heat.