Transformations

We've recently had a cool little project going on here at the farm. For Christmas last year, Sarah and BJ got creative and gave the girls a "San Diego Butterfly Extravaganza!" Essentially they took them to the Reuben H. Fleet to see the Flight of The Butterflies at the Imax, then they went crazy with cool butterfly stuff. Milkweed was brought home and planted (apparently milkweed is the only thing that Monarch caterpillars eat,) a butterfly terrarium was bought and a neat learning experience was had.

Soon after the milkweed was planted, teeny tiny monarch caterpillars began to take it over. Contrary to my beliefs, we didn't have to purchase the larvae or eggs or anything - they were very proficient at finding the plants naturally and proliferating. It didn't take long for the young plants to be eaten all the way to the nubs, and those tiny caterpillars gave us a whole new understanding of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We grabbed a few and stuck them in the terrarium to see what would happen next.

Within days, the caterpillars found their way up to the top of their temporary home and attached themselves to the lid with a silky web. They hung out upside down for about a day and then magically transformed into chrysalises.

courtesy of http://lifecycle.onenessbecomesus.com

Now, these guys looked nothing like the silk worm cocoons I had witnessed as a kid. All of a sudden, these yellow and black worm things completely transformed into these beautiful hard shelled green things like this guy above. It wasn't an hours-long process like the weaving of a cocoon, it literally seemed like it was in the blink of an eye. One minute it was a hanging caterpillar and the next time you looked it was a mint green pupa. I did some research and discovered that chrysalises aren't formed in the same way as cocoons at all. While a cocoon is spun out of something the larva excretes and then covers itself in, a chrysalis is actually the exoskeleton of the bug itself. Basically, it sheds it's baby skin and the new skin underneath is the chrysalis. This is the pupal phase of most butterflies.

phases of chrysalises - about to hatch out of it's shell, a newly formed one and one that recently became a butterfly

The emergence of the butterfly itself is almost as quick as the evolution of the chrysalis, if you blink you'll miss it. I did get a good picture of one just after it came out, though.

We now have monarch butterflies all over the farm and have learned a lot about their evolution and lifecycle, as well as their amazing migration. One last shot of Jeremy hanging out with one of the little guys:

A collective planting party

We're teaming up with the Coffee & Tea Collective to host a planting party at Radio Acres this Saturday. A potential Radio Tea blend could be the product of our labor! Please join us if you can! 

 

Lord willing and the creek don't rise...

Permits are through! Ground breaking next week! The addition to Radio officially has begun... at least in the eyes of the city.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures from our recent rain, and the creek fillage this year.

Owls: nature's rodenator.

Sarah and I (BJ) have been a little obsessed with owls lately... I know they're trendy right now and its hip to have vintage owl bric-a-brac around your home, but what about the real thing?  We have a Barn Owl that flies around our canyon at night, and I have been trying to attract him and his friends to our property since we moved here in May of 2010.  Why? because the one thing we are really good at growing on our farm is gophers.

The gophers have made it clear that they were here first and aren't leaving without a fight.  I've tried traps, smoke bombs and even flushing them out with water from the hose. All to no avail. Our biological controls (our cats) were working OK.  Like the gophers, Max the Cat also came with the purchase of the farm (although I don't remember seeing him mentioned in the lease agreements).  Max survived on gophers for the 1.5 months we were in escrow and continued to be his favorite food after we realized he wasn't a neighbors cat and he was our responsibility.  Unfortunately, like all bad ass tom cats, Max would not be contained indoors after dark, and eventually he and a coyote had a run in.  I like to think he took a piece of that coyote with him before the end.

What I really want is a Rondenator, but I can't justify spending $1,600 on something that blows up gophers (a little too much like the movie Caddy Shack). Which brings us back to the owls.

Right around the time we moved in, that OwlCam thing online was really big, my dad kept sending me the links, so eventually I too got sucked into watching baby owls eat various rodents for hours on end.  It was here I learned that nesting owls can consume something like 3,000 gophers a season!!  So I promptly built my first owl box and precariously hung it in an old pepper tree on our back hill, and to my surprise someone promptly moved in. Unfortunately it was bee colony.  Owl box #1, Fail!

I currently find myself with a lot of free time, so I decided to try again.  This owl box is complete with metal roof and is attached to 4 separate branches in a tall lemonade berry via hooks and wires.  My thought was, if it fill with bees again, I can lower it down by the wires and scoop out the bees and put them in our unoccupied hive (currently Sarah's project).

For those of you that want to build an owl box there are about a 100 different ways to do it, and every internet site will tell you their way is best.  But really Barn Owls they need is an enclosed space with a 6" diameter hole in it.  In nature, they use tree hollows, they aren't picky.  Just make sure there are some drainage holes.  And think through if there are anywhere from 2-10 owlets in there (plus parents) how much space they might want.  Lastly, make the entrance hole higher on the box, so baby owls can't accidentally fall out. So there you go, build a box, put a hole on it and hang it at least 10-15ft up.  Happy owling.

Way too many chickens

Did we mention in a previous blog that we got about 30 meat chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery? (and yes, that really is their name).  Well that was about 3 months ago and know those cute chicks are big and in my opinion, eating us out of house and home.  Literally, they eat non-stop.  I guess that's what happens when you get meat birds, they are bred to pack on the pounds. 

We also hatched out eggs from our late rooster, Doodle-do, about 10 or so.  And if that wasn't enough, just last week we bought 14 fertilized Maran eggs to put under another hen. So in about 2 more weeks we will have 14 more.  Which means by the end of July we will have approx. 60+ chickens, of which about half are roosters and just learning to crow. 

To complicate matters, I just saw a moving truck at our neighbors. Uh-oh....Maybe we should bring them a chicken dinner....

Our Bathroom...the stuff of dreams.

We have built a bathroom!

You may remember that we built another bedroom a shed/office on our property. We impressed even ourselves with how great it turned out. You can read more about it here.

Now there are two fantastic structures on our property! We have built the most awesome outdoor bathroom, right next to the studio. They sit side-by-side, two miniature architectural wonders (at least for us, who are all surprised that these things became reality... better than we ever imagined.)

Many thanks to Ron, Jeremy's uncle, and all of his skillz. He really made this bathroom, while at least I sat back and watched (I think I was actually out of town.)

There are many amazing features of the bathroom, of which I will let the other farm members blog about. I will simply comment on my favorite. The clawfoot bathtub.

There are a few things that I routinely search for on Craigslist. (Are you surprised?) One is a clawfoot bathtub. I have dreamed of having a clawfoot ever since I visited this amazing hostel in the wilds of South Africa, and partook of an aromatherapy soak. This was a clawfoot tub brimming with water heated by a woodburning stove, essential oils and flowers. I soaked in one of these, under the African stars, in the middle of the savannah, and it was magic. Obviously, I've wanted one myself since then.

The problem has been their exorbitant price, and thus my searches on craigslist. One fine day, I saw an ad for... be still my beating heart... a FREE clawfoot bathtub. It must be too good to be true. I thought to myself. Maybe rotting out or completely rusty. I emailed her, and this was her response:

"Yes! If you want it, I will give it to you at no cost. We just want to get rid of it. You must come right away, however. I will give it to whoever comes first! It is a nice old tub. Was in a house I lived in during college. House burned down and I got tub for free. Have held onto it for 30 years hoping to put it into our new house. My husband said NO!"


It was still a risk, but we sent the guys into Alpine (where she lived) to pick it up. I always get a little nervous when picking up Craigslist items, because you just never know if it will be a waste of time. Finally, the guys reported that they got it, and I could tell by my husband's voice that it had not been a waste of time. Hooray!


Overjoyed, we welcomed my dream tub to the farm! It was rusty and needed work, but it was solid, and had the most amazing lion feet. So we stored it outside by the studio, where it sat... for months... waiting for some attention.


Finally, as the bathroom was getting built, Kim and I decided to tackle the restoration. I called around and asked about getting it professionally restored (there's a cool place in San Diego that will come to your house and restore it for about $300) but in the end we decided we could do it for much cheaper.


We brought it into the backyard, flipped it over, and began washing it out with Barkeepers's Friend and some steel brushes.

We found this on the bottom, but Kim searched the Internet and couldn't find anything about A & O Manufacturing Company in Louisville, Kentucky. If you know anything, fill us in. And check out the date: Nov 12 -- 95...that sure ain't 1995.

These are the claw feet. Aren't they lion-y and Narnian? I love them.

There was much debate about whether we should paint the tub, and what color. In the end, we all liked the rust and decided to leave it in it's natural state. After the good scrub out, we screwed on the feet and placed it in the bathroom. That was the extent of our renovations.


The trickiest part was getting the shower kit for the clawfoot. Not an easy or inexpensive piece to find, and even though we got one, it seems to be made for Victorian hobbits, so my tall husband has to duck about two feet to wash his hair.

But nevermind that. We got this incredible, original clawfoot bathtub for FREE and it looks absolutely fabulous in our bathroom.


The bathroom being as it is (part greenhouse, part bathroom) I think the aromatherapy soak under the stars could be a reality.

Bathroom

Some of you may not know this, but we've been a one-bathroom community since we moved in this past November.  Four adults (at times, 5) and two kids all sharing a tiny 5' x 7.5' bathroom.  That's a lot of poop, not to mention the towels and toiletries.  Although everyone has been a fantastic sport about someone inevitably in the shower when you REALLY need to pee, or small kids walking in while some adult is trying to shower, we really would love a second bathroom somehow.  We don't have a heck of a lot of money, but we are good with random ideas and recycling old materials.  BJ came upon this picture of a greenhouse bathroom that has been an inspiration to us:

Recently, a friend of Jeremy's parents was replacing all of their old windows and french doors, so we nabbed them specifically for a project like this.  We also came upon an old claw foot tub that someone was giving away on craigslist and it happens to be in decent shape.  The last thing we really need is a composting toilet so we don't have to plumb it in to the main sewer system.  About a year ago on craigslist, I came across a really good deal for one and thought we might use it for something like this, so we picked it up.  This is what it looks like:

You can find info on in at the sun-mar website here.  Unfortunately, the toilet really has to be on a raised area so that you can put the composter somewhere below it, like in a regular house with a crawl  space or  somewhere with a raised subfloor.  If you know anyone that might be interested in this awesome toilet, let us know!  It is still in the box and everything, just really doesn't work for our purposes.  We really need to get something more like this:

This unit is all rolled into one so it works on something simple, like a slab of concrete.  So the exciting news of the day is that we finally broke ground and got a slab poured!  Hopefully in the next month we will be proud owners of a second (modified) bathroom.  It will provide some relief (haha) for the needy and just give us all a little bit more much-needed space.  

Nick pouring our slab!

A revisiting of priorities

We, at this farm, have the tendency to get ahead of ourselves.  Yes, yes, it's true.  In case you did not gather that we are a group of people who are likely to make rash decisions and jump into things, well, we are.  About a month ago at this time, we were ready to be fully immersed into the animal business.  We began building our goat pen, pulled out our donated bee box, talked about how we could hurry up with the rabbit project AND we ordered a couple dozen hatchlings from McMurrays so that we could get our meat chicken production under way.  We made a broody hen veerrrry happy by letting her officially hatch our first clutch of even more chicks (because we thought that the two dozen coming were not enough) and we now have clutch number two incubating under another broody.

Take a step back.  This new month rolled around and we've realized that we really need to prioritize and not do a million things at once.  Not because we don't want to, but because we physically can't!  We don't have unlimited time, resources or money.  We need to *sniff* reign ourselves in and take things one step at a time.  We have this shell of a trailer sitting in our front yard that is going to be AWESOME in a couple of months as we pour our resources into making it a modern "room" to add to our landscape.  This is a necessity!  Before we can really swing into expanding things to grow or raise, we need to be comfortable in the amount of space we have here.  So, for the next couple a months, hopefully we will be able to keep a good log of the progress on that.  The sooner we get this done, the more quickly we can move onto the rest of the list.  And although we've put our own goat acquisition on hold, we have an awesome neighbor who let me milk theirs last night!  I'll be counting the days...

Help us order our next projects!  What would YOU do first?

1. bees
2. goats
3. rabbits
4. greenhouse (we got a bunch of AWESOME old wood windows donated)
5. tilapia

Up and Coming Projects

bees. 

meat birds.

goats.

 trailer.

(*picture courtesy of el cosmico, our inspiration.)

stay tuned.

Shed

The shed is almost completed!  There are more pictures in the slide show on the right, so you can see what the free standing unit itself looks like if you haven't seen it in person.  This is J. finishing up some of the flooring.  It's got a floated bamboo floor, thanks to some overstock from his dad's shop.  Thank you, Wooden Floor Co., Inc!

We've just been pouring all of our spare time into 1) trying to finish the shed and 2) packing up and sifting through all of our stuff.  It's nice to be able to stretch it out and try to organize and get rid of stuff as we go.  We really need to whittle out any excess, so if you need anything at all you might want to ask before you go buy anything...

Jeremy mentioned yesterday that Andy told him there is a 90% chance the short sale will go through.  I guess I just (stupidly) assumed that since it got approved, there was no way it WOULDN'T go through.  Silly me!  I guess either way, we are out in the next two weeks.  There's really no way we can get 95% ready to move and then just unpack and stay here.  It's now or nothing.  Fingers crossed that everything pulls through, though, because I'd really much rather see someone who really wants this place get it instead of having it sit uncared for AND getting slammed with a foreclosure on our record.  We've loved this house, and cared for it and poured a lot of our energy into it for the past few years.  It would be more than a little heart breaking to just see it be one of the thousands that sit empty in this wreck of a market.

A time of excitement, of change, of movement and purging.  Emptying out our old life and jumping into the new.  It feels good to clean out all of this dust and throw away all of this trash.  Let's keep moving!

Exponential Reality

Imagine your life as a math problem. Sometimes you would be living in the world of negatives, sometimes operating in the world of positives and on rare occasion your life would speed up and operate exponentially. Life would speed up and sequence of events would flash before your eyes with speed and tangled beauty.

We have been talking about living in community, talking about sharing a farm and talking about short selling our house since May. We have shared our communal vision with countless people and dreamt about the endless possibilites of an urban farm. The theoretical became the inevitable this week when we found out our short sale went through. A jumbled web of emotions ranging from shear panic and utter delight, to sadness and giddy elation ran through us. The stress and inconvenience of occupying 2 worlds screached to a halt. God's plan is rolling.

So back to the math problem. Life which was already busy burst forth with a new pace. We got to get the hell out of our house in 4 weeks which means 3 weeks to move. On your mark, get set, oh crap we still both have full time jobs. So we sat down with our new family of 6 and made the plans. Mission One- get the turkeys back to the farm. BJ was loving this plan. Turkey poop and cardboard boxes here we come. Mission 2- finish the shed. Mission 3- garage sale, next weekend. Mission 5- clean out 4 years worth of junk. Mission 6-33 Move in 3 weeks.

Reality is in the eye of the beholder.

Now stress is handled in many ways. Drinking exessively, cussing, taking it out on family, throwing chickens, or praying. God has been drafting this multi family farm/community plan for quite some time; ever since BJ and Sarah were 2 days from closing escrow on the wrong house and since Chase lost our refinance paperwork for the 13th time 2 years ago. I am happy to be joining our families together and look forward to a steady stream of possibilities that this community holds. We/I need to remember to breath and enjoy picking up chicken poop and moving boxes. When life becomes exponential it is an exceptional gift to have caring people to help you move turkeys in trash cans and to remind eachother it is OK to BREATH........

The chickens, part one.

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Originally uploaded by radioacres

This really was our first project... as we started accumulating chickens long before the farm came along. You can read about our original chicken (and other) adventures here. A couple years ago Kim, Jeremy, BJ and I had built a chicken coop and run in their backyard and purchased our very own six hens. They had been a great investment, and we knew that one of the first things that we wanted on the farm was more chickens.

In anticipation of moving onto our farm, we had started to scour craigslist for chicks being sold. We were particularly looking for unusual breeds of chickens, which would produce a variety of egg colors. I think it was BJ that actually found the post, but when I read it, I got that craigslist syndrome... you know the one where you read the post, see the pics, and immediately need to buy whatever it is they're selling? All rationality goes out the window, and you begin to plan your day around getting a hold of this person and driving wherever they are to claim your items.

At that point, we were a few weeks away from closing escrow and getting the keys, so I was hoping that I could go and look at the chicks, give her a deposit and ask her to hold onto them until we were ready to come and pick them up. I thought up this plan as I was driving to her house in Del Mar, an unusual neighborhood to have a chicken raising operation.

This Del Mar chicken-seller had a plethora of fancy kinds of chicks she had hatched, as well as other unusual fowl such as peacocks, spread out across her nicely manicured lawn. Speckled-sussex, Wellsummers, marans, so many different breeds with the potential for such varied egg colors! I was sold. I asked her if she could keep the chicks until we moved into our new place and she said yes. Paying cash for 20 chicks, she said she'd throw in a few more for free! I drove home to our tiny apartment, excited and feeling very satisfied with my plan. Now we would have the beginnings of our chicken farm right when we moved in!

Kim was also very excited. The two of us comprise the more spontaneous (read: impulsive) side of our farm quadrant. The men tend to be more... shall we say realistic? I think they were worried about pre-purchase of our chickens.

I pooh-poohed their silly concerns, as I was sure it would work out perfectly. We were set to get the keys in about two weeks. Then, we could quickly throw up a chicken coop and viola! Our chicken farm would be ready.

Unfortunately, two things complicated my plan.

The first was Arnold, our governator. He decided to allow a California tax credit for home-buyers, which we found out we could qualify for, along with the national tax credit. It was great news for our pocketbooks, not great news for our chickens, as it pushed back our close of escrow two weeks longer.

The second unfortunate event was a tragic raccoon attack on our pre-bought chickens in Del Mar. I got a frantic call from the chicken-lady, telling me there had been an attack, she was afraid it would happen again, and I needed to come and pick up the chickens right away.

So... there we were, with 20 chickens and no place to put them for a month.

Transporting 20 chickens, their storage and care while living in a tiny apartment, and building a behemoth of a chicken coop in part two...