the big eaters.

Sunday afternoon 8 piglets arrived at the Waste Farm.  Friends at Ohana Acres (http://ohanaacres.com/) bred, weaned, and delivered them for us.  They a Duroc/Hampshire mix and so they range from red to black to striped.  Handsome pigs, nonetheless.

Yesterday, with the help of Ted and his Learning Lab for Life team, we processed 55 gallons of canned food.  This week’s slop recipe includes green beans, peas, corn, peaches, pears, pumpkin, navy beans, pinto beans, diced tomatoes, and a little condensed milk.  I trust our newcomers will feel welcome.

waste not…

The basic infrastructure is now built to manage waste food.  Compost zones.  Worms.  Fencing.  Gardens.  Containers.  Animals.  And just in time, too, because Care and Share is now delivering several tons of food every other week and expecting to back-haul the recyclable bi-products of our processing.

There’s been so much to do around here in this building phase that I nearly lost sight of our central purpose – leveraging waste.  The animals and crops must now transition to routine to make room for daily experimentation with waste food systems.  There is unarguably more food here than can be put to immediate use and so our priority is sorting for the givens: animal consumption and compost.  The mandate is to make it all disappear.  And we have to stay ahead of the curve on this or else we’ll lose our creative spirit and vision.

So, for the forseeable future, Philip and I will be discussing, moving, organizing, re-organizing, storing, opening, composting, and feeding this food intensively.  It’s the only way we know to birth a few reality-based systems.

crops planted.

We hauled about 6 cubic yards of aged horse manure from Brookside Stables to the farm last week, a final effort to amend this soil before planting all crops.  And while our waste food compost pile is only a month old, it’s been getting plenty of moisture (salad dressing, mostly) and carbon material (there are several dozen cubic yards of 10-year-old hay composting on site) so we’ve buried some compost in the gardens, too.  At the recommendation of Zach Bush, a horticulturist friend in Colorado Springs, we’ve started a few 55 gallon batches of manure tea.  This can be diluted and used on crops as a natural fertilizer.

With the soil quality as strong as we can make it this first year, we’ve planted the following crops:

corn, pole beans, bush beans, garlic, onion, spinach, bush tomatoes, mixed greens, arugula, pak choy, basil, cilantro, kale, beets, swiss chard, potatoes, snap peas, cucumber, zucchini, squash, cantaloupe, pumpkin, and carrots

 

“apiculture.”

Bees are remarkable.  It’s estimated they’ve been around, basically setting the universal standard for organization and production, for longer than 10 million years.  They transform nectar and other sugars into wax and honey.  In the process the bees pollinate flowering plants (a critical role in crop production), promoting vegetation, and produce honey for their winter survival.  A single bee colony, typically 30 – 60,000 bees, can produce 100 lbs. of additional honey, which can be harvested and consumed by humans.

Jesse Burnette, a friend from college and renaissance man (active magician, financial planner, and beekeeper), came down this weekend to deliver and install 2 bee colonies at the farm.  He also made several beers disappear from my fridge.  I was only sort of impressed.

burros.

Donkeys seem almost mythical, the sort of thing you refuse to believe exists until you’ve met it face to face.  Well, they’re real I assure you.  And two of them, Woodrow and Augustus, now live on the farm with me.  Besides having a gravitational pull which makes people, perhaps ALL people, want to scratch their furry heads and wrap arms around their necks and speak in baby-talk to them and wait tirelessly to hear the distinctive hee-haw, there are a few additional reasons to own donkeys:

1. Security: Donkeys are widely used by sheep and cattle farmers to protect herds from predators like coyotes, dogs, fox, raccoons, bobcats, etc.  With so much food being opened and fed and composted on-site here, we’re more likely to attract predators.

2. Manure: The donkeys will graze several pastures around the farm, rotating periodically.  Grazing breaks the soil crust, working nutrients and fiberous material deeper, thus strengthening and improving the growabilit of the land.  Some manure will get worked into the pastures while some will be collected for garden and compost.

3. Work: We plan to break the donkeys to drive carts and plows, hoping they might  at some point contribute to the work load around here.

“they’re making more people every day—but they ain’t making any more dirt.”

- Will Rogers

We are trying to make more dirt.  Our recipe: one part waste food, two parts manure, lots of parts waste water.

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veins of history.

Sunday afternoon, my mother and I ventured south of my farm into an expansive pasture where a grove of trees stood squarely in the middle.  Our wandering gravitated into the grove and as we approached, the remains of a homestead came into focus beyond the trees and atop a flood bank.  It was a sepia photograph just begging to happen.  But apart from being picturesque, the whole idea of happening upon a dilapidated homestead, likely from the early 1900s, really struck me. Just a half mile up the way…there I am, living my life, touching my own limits and deepening my appreciation for the essential.  This old homestead, now leaning about 45 degrees toward the north, stood at some point in history as a symbol of frontier, freedom, and survival. Building and growing and living actually happened here.

Standing out front of this lone, leaning home on the prairie humbled me.  This work and my life are not original or innovative but rather exist inside a long history of work, community, and livelihood.