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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Notes From The Farm (March 2006)
  • Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2006 12:11:37 -0700

Things are running so smoothly here. I got 4 new lambs, and they've
become acclimated. Last year, with no shed even to protect a salt dish,
I had nothing to offer them except a twice daily bowl of cereal feed, so
they became very spoiled. Now they have a new barn area, and it's quite
different. They have a salt dish and an automatic waterer, and the only
feed I've given them is some alfalfa every evening.

The goose hen is generating egg after egg and sitting on them under the
PVC hoop house that I put over their night pen. She's not a very
responsible sitter. But my understanding is that this goes on until
May. Maybe the heat from old fermenting eggs in the mud, combined with
a change of seasons, can help some eggs to hatch. I'm skeptical, but it
is fun to watch, and eggs from birds fed on cat food probably aren't too
tasty anyway. So I'm just letting nature take its course. At least
she's safe from raccoons at night.

I got ten baby chicks from the feed store about two weeks ago and
they're all doing fine. They're in primitive quarters, on the floor of
the temporary chicken coop, with nothing but a bed of waste plastic
sheeting and straw, an aluminum flashing barrier, and a heat lamp. I
have two waterers, so I just bring out a new one twice a day. It only
adds a few seconds onto my daily routines. One chick already jumped the
20" barrier, but that was several days ago and it hasn't happened since.

I have two great beds of peas and a bed of potatoes that I started back
in February, but since then it has been hard to dodge the rain to plant
things. In the last week I managed to plant sunflowers, carrots, and
strawberries, and to transplant a few native clover plants. Before that
I got the new bed of Amity raspberry in. I have quite a few seedlings
needing attention now: peppers, basil, lime basil, huacatay, lettuce,
cauliflower, and summer savory. I planted two tomato varieties a couple
of days ago.

For the first time I feel that I have real hope against slugs. I made
several traps and they already show promise, in the form of ugly slime
trails from the dying slugs that emerge. One's with the sunflowers, two
are with peas, and the fourth is somewhere. I take a strip of wax paper
and place it in the center of a bed. Then I put a tiny mound of wet COB
(rolled corn, oats, and barley coated with molasses) in the center.
Then I draw a thin line of Deadline around the bait. The trap is
covered (this time of year especially) with a rain shield made from a
14" x 8" strip of scrap flashing.

We're working on a new idea for raised beds. We've decided to try
bending and connecting eight 3' lengths of roofing material in a
circular cylinder, with vertical corrugations, and setting the entire
cylinder in cement (with drainage holes). It would be quite a bit
cheaper by the square foot than the present beds. After thinking about
it some, I've decided that each bed needs a strip of banding placed
somewhere up around the halfway point. With banding, the cheapest type
of corrugated roofing would probably do. Deciding where to place the
banding has resulted in an interesting math problem. Intuitively
speaking, the lower you place the band, the less bulging is happening
around the middle. But if it's extremely low, then the flaring top
creates constriction at the banding. Somewhere in the middle, where
these two effects are in balance, the bending moment on the skin will be
minimized. To find this point, I modeled a vertical strip of the
roofing as a beam with a distributed load, with one support at the
concrete bottom and the other at the banding (only in this case the
"beam" is vertical and the force comes from the inner side). This
resulted in a 6th-order polynomial equation whose solution gives the
ideal location of the banding (really, the second support for the
vertical "beam"). We haven't approximated a solution for it yet, since
I want to check my work. I know this problem is really more complicated
than I've made things out to be, but it's a start, since otherwise we
have no clue, except that the banding should not be so low as to allow
rats to gain access, and obviously should not be at the very top either.

I had quite a bit of fencing to repair before the lambs could go out. A
big fir tree fell over right at the fence line, and lifted up the fence.
So I had to add several new posts. And since last fall's mowing
eliminated some vegetation, the old fence started to fall inward on the
east side, and also needed posts. I also completely reworked the
portion of panel fence that keeps them away from the house, so that for
now they have access to the grapes and the upper garden. I need to
bring them into the area between the house and the garden, not only
because the grazing is so good there, but because if they ever escape
and need to be herded back in, that's where they would have to go
through, and animals are sometimes reluctant to enter an area where
they've never been. I also need to get them attached to the grain can,
so that I have some way of attracting them.

I don't seem to get much work done on software per se, although I've
thought a lot about how to do some things. Right now we no doubt have a
program that does algebra, but we're still wondering exactly what the
best way to implement it would be. It has to interact naturally with
the user. It's hard to figure out how to make the compiler do some of
the things we had wanted, but it should still be possible to create
something really great, without compromising.

We've decided to put some fertilizer on trees and I'm still debating the
best option. The cheap fertilizers available don't have reliable trace
nutrients, so I've decided to make our own trace mineral mix. A pottery
supply store is a source for zinc oxide and several other useful
compounds. I've been studying about how to create soluble chlorides
from metals and ores that are available. For instance, cobalt chloride
is added to salt for ruminants (and rabbits and guinea pigs) solely so
that digestive bacteria can synthesize vitamin B-12, and its carbonate
is used to impart a red color to pottery. This behaves just like red
chalk when added to muriatic acid, with lots of fizzing. The process is
different for each compound, and potential dangers exist. Only vanadium
eludes me, but when I found out that vanadyl sulfate is actually a
natural mineral, my heart softened toward buying it in pill form. Some
day we may want to make trace mineral salts for livestock (hence the
vanadium, among others), from cheap plain salt, and for that we would
need to do the same thing for some non-metals, iodine and selenium.
They both dissolve readily in lye solution. With selenium the challenge
is to create only selenite, not selenide or selenate, because although
all three have been used in supplements, the dosage is radically
different, since selenate is by far the most absorbable form. But the
little vial of pure iodine that I have is such a neat conversation
piece, with its blue-black crystals that smell of the sea, I'd hate to
have to use it.

Since the rain won't stop, I'm doing spring cleaning. Today I'm going
to clean out the refrigerator. There's less than a week left until Lee
arrives for Easter.

Bill






  • [Homestead] Notes From The Farm (March 2006), Bill Jones, 04/02/2006

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