Greenstorm's Journal

This went in the ground in the last week:

Cor Viriditas:

100 cells of the good-tasting promiscuous tomatoes harvested mid-Aug
140 sweet pepper seeds including sweet paprika and doe hill
100 hot pepper seeds including matchbox and black hungarian
25ish hot pepper mix from Metchosin seeds
A tray of holy basil from Metchosin seeds
Tomatillos from Metchosin seeds & E's saved seeds

up to 50 cells per type: KARMA miracle/zesty small green tomato
amaryllia tomatillo
exserted orange tomato
orange/red promiscuous bicolor late seed tomato
tomato mikado black
tomato lucinda

10 cells each of:
Silvery Fir
Tomato Minsk Early
Tomato Brad
Tomato Sweet Cherriette
KARMA purple/purple MF tomato (no number)

5 cells each:
Tomato Grocery Store Green Cherry
Tomato Galina
Tomato Maya and Sion
Tomato Golden Currant from Julia
Tomato Rozovaya Bella
Adaptive Seeds Tomato Uralskiy Ranniy
Early Annie
Metchosin Red Plum

Threshold:
48 cells northern mix -- everything that set seed last year up here
36 cells of the good-tasting promiscuous tomatoes harvested mid-Aug
12 cells of orange/red promiscuous bicolour
12 cells of Julia's solanum peruvianum

I cut back the dahlia coccinea and am rooting the trimmings

Plus I've been potting up the peppers.

I should start a tray of mixed greens, lettuces and kales and chards, to go out shortly. As it is we've had that snow, now it's heavy wind and some -10C on the horizon.

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

Yesterday something happened that I'd been worried about for a long time.

Penny died. I wasn't worried particularly about Penny, but about any adult pig dying. It being Penny makes it emotionally harder; she's the last remaining of my first girls, she was looking sick for a day or two but I can't get a vet up here so I'm blaming myself for not trying an antibiotic shot the first day; I loved her a lot.

It being an adult pig is logistically a nightmare. I got the Ossabaws because they're on the small side, but she's still a 300lb dead weight. Even if I could dig a hole deep enough for her to not be exhumed by wildlife (maybe rent a tractor) the ground is frozen right now. So I had to get her out of the pig house, across the field, and up into the pickup truck before the other pigs ate her. To be clear, I could drag her about six inches at a time using every bit of my strength, then rest awhile.

I am very lucky to have two things: Tucker, who's still (barely) in town, and wheels, in this case a furniture dolly which seemed the better option than the wheelbarrow. He managed to make time to help me between his new job and his evening concert; it took us an hour to move her about a hundred feet and get her onto the truck. She had died early in the morning, so she was starting to swell up and there was intestinal leakage from front and back.

People say they can't handle watching their food killed. Apparently plenty of people leave their animals in the vet's for euthanasia because they can't stand to be there. Today, the day after, I wish everyone the kind of intimate physical contact with a dead loved one where they're using every ounce of their strength and breathing in shit and gas in order to dispose of the body, not in an honoured spot under a beautiful tree, but out where it will be scavenged in the snow.

I don't wish everyone doing that between a workday and and evening second job(third, is the farm a job?). I don't wish anyone thinking they might ever have to do it alone.

So today I'm numb and raw and angry and Avallu jumped the fence and was chasing cars (also there's a neighbour that will shoot him on sight if he's out) and I need to figure out a zoom presentation for tomorrow and vaccine card regulations before heading to the airport to view the new property and I don't *want* to.

I've spent the last hour looking over possible gene inputs for the Sayward property summer cover; cool tolerance is good but so is disease resistance and I can handle a longer season.

Luckily it snowed last night so I could find where Avallu got out by his tracks and patch the fence there. I'm going to be gone and Tucker will be coming by to feed once a day; he really can't be getting out.

I'll water all the plants well and set them up for me leaving.

And I'll take this long-anticipated event as a sign that sometimes I really do need to be around folks who can help. It's not good to be doing something like this alone.

We are having another cold spike, -23C last night is supposed to be the worst of it. We'll see.

Meantime inside so many of the seeds I planted are coming up. First Moment then Fat Frog tomato are showing flower clusters; they were planted on Dec 25 so this is 59 days, I expect the flowers will be open by day 65. That seems very standard. There seems to be a little community around breeding micro tomatoes on the totally tomatoes forum; I don't have time to think about that too much right now but I'll likely revisit next winter.

Meantime artichokes are putted up, a bunch of my saved peppers and tomatoes - doe hill, pepperoncini, favourite panamorous toms, the zesty green one, sweet cheriette, some of the perennial onions, the dahlias, etc. It's almost time to set up my real production seed starting for peppers around March 1st, then it will be tomatoes April 1st. Hopefully my pepper seeds arrive by that time!

The matchbox peppers on the windowsill are covered in baby peppers and flowers and flower buds. I can't believe how many peppers those things want to produce! I did fertilize them, maybe that was what did it. There are so many flowers I've lost which ones I crossed with hungarian black, so I'm going to have to do that cross again. I marked the cross on the hungarian plant ok, but the matchbox plants are so delicate I'm uncertain how to mark them, maybe by tying a thread around?

I still have not threshed all the barley and wheat. I think I need rubber gloves to do it.

Mom is up for a couple days and yesterday was a holiday, so we rearranged (arranged?) my basement so I can put the production transplants down there. I added two more big shelves and for the first time I feel like I'm starting to have a handle on this space. It basically means lining every wall with shelves, and with whatever size of shelf will fit (short shelves under curved walls, tall shelves against straight walls) but it is finally beginning to be functional.

Next step is a castor type device for my pottery wheel so it can scoot away and out, and then line the back of the downstairs main room closet with wine rack probably.

Today this went into pots, last part of the entry is where seeds were grown. Specifically aiming to sow my own seeds anywhere I saved them, vs leftovers from previous years. The tomatoes are to maybe do some crosses before the heaviest of summer hits or are microdwarfs.

Onion Andy's green mountain multiplier, Experimental Farm Network
Tomato Bloody butcher, Myself
Tomato Bunny hop, Growers blend
Tomato Carbon, Secret Seed Cartel
Prickly pear Colorado, Experimental Farm Network
Dahlia Dahlia coccinea, Cultivariable
Sorrel French sorrel, Julie fb
Tomato Tasty firm bicolour grape/berry, Myself
Tomato Grocery Store Green, Myself
Tomato Hardins mini, Growers blend
Tomato KARMA miracle, Myself
Tomato KARMA purple?, Myself
Tomato Lime Green Salad, Myself
Tomato Lucinda, Woodland creations
Tomato Mikado Black, Myself
Tomato Minsk Early, Myself
Tomato Native sun, Myself
Tomato Pygmy, Growers blend
Tomato Ron's carbon copy, Myself
Herb sage, Stokes
Onion Shallot multiplier, Steph OSSI forum
Tomato Silvery fir tree annapolis originally, Myself
Root Skirret, Experimental Farm Network
Sorrel Sorrel, Richters
Daylily Stella D'Oro, Lisa Allard
Tomato Sweet cheriette, Myself
Tomato Taiga, Myself
Herb thyme, Richters
Sorrel Transylvanian sorrel, Adaptive
Tomato Uralskiy Ranniy Myself
Prickly pear Vineland hardy, Experimental Farm Network
Rhubarb Victoria homestead, Seed treasures
Tomato Zesty small green tom (karma miracle?), Myself
Tomato Weird promiscuous green berry firm reddens tropical, Myself

Because I did this, the stirrings of "maybe someone will buy a place in the lower mainland and want me to move there" have recommenced this afternoon. We'll see what happens. I'll keep planting; peppers in March, Tomatoes 1st of April.

Building something garden-y into my life every day is good for me. Even if it's just topping up the reservoirs on my aerogardens, some sort of involvement keeps me feeling a little more connected and even-keeled.

Today I overhauled an aerogarden; it was the lettuce one, and the lettuce was bolting. I cut back the overgrown plants, pulled them out of the unit and then out of their baskets; they'll go to the geese. I disassembled the little pump inside the unit to remove all the roots wound through it, wiped and rinsed everything, refilled it, and reseeded new sponges with some cimmarron and australian yellow lettuce and trieste sweet chicory, plus a cutting from my hungarian black pepper plant. I also left one of the original lettuces, cut way back and with the roots cut way back, just to see if it bolts immediately again or what it does.

My tomato aerogarden has sprouted several seeds in each cup so I need to pull a couple of the extras out. It's hard to kill them so I may try putting a couple of the babies in soil.

I need to cut back the aerogarden basil really hard, the sweet basil I can just dry but the thai basil I'm not sure what to do with. I looked up some salads, there seem to be some good cold meat/lime/chili/thai basil ones that look appealing.

Speaking of hydroponics, I'm also thinking about setting up some kratky (basically set-and-forget little-equipment) hydroponics for greens but I haven't made the move yet. I don't love the idea of buying rockwool and netpots for it (everything else can be bits of recycled things) so I'm looking into alternatives.

On the soil end my peppers are doing well, all except the capsicum praetermissum which sprouted germinated but didn't emerge when moved to soil. Most of them have their first or second true leaf, and they got watered with the aerogarden reservoir hydroponic solution which should be good for them. Habaneros are up, 100% germination on my yellow habs -- I got them as part of a blind seed trade so I'm not sure what I'll do with them all but they seem happy. The microdwarf tomatoes are also turning into lovely sturdy plants, and the sweet baby jade are slowly taking up space.

I put together a couple soil pots of cilantro, since the cilantro did poorly when I tried it in the aerogarden. My understanding is, it isn't much of a cut-and-come-again crop so I'll probably be cutting them once, then discarding.

In the meantime the pepper crosses I did dropped their fruits, so I need to try again.

Still need to clear out all the shelves for starting transplants; I also need to figure out how many starts I'll grow, so how many I'll keep and how many I'll sell or donate.

Outside it's been super warm which means everything is ice with not-quite-standing water over it. The snow keeps melting on my roof and dripping down past the window. I could probably start greens in a sealed greenhouse if I had one, and maybe maybe they'd make it through the cold yet to come.

I probably need to chew on whether there's a realistic way for me to afford a proper sealed non-cloth-popup greenhouse, like the ones at https://plantagreenhouses.ca/ . Now that I'm moving my tomato production out of the greenhouse and into the field it's feeling like something that size would be worth playing in, even if it's not a 20' x 50' high tunnel. With the double walls I could even deep-bed animals in there until Feb, then use composting heat to do an early crop of greens. A really heat-efficient geodesic dome or clay-backed greenhouse will still have to wait, but I can probably figure out a happy medium there. Besides, the lean-to greenhouse is slowly falling in on itself as the shed collapses, so it's not so much in the running anymore.

I should probably budget out some options around re-covering the first greenhouse (needs to be done this year or next), dealing with the wood tent (needs re-covering probably this year) which could involve re-covering it as a woodshed or making it into a greenhouse and figuring out a new woodshed, getting a new greenhouse, and knocking down the falling-in shed or redoing its foundation and potentially doing a new lean-to greenhouse against it if it's salvaged.

Ok, not to get drawn too far into the future here: seedlings are growing, it's lovely. Next action is cutting back basil and starting the sage and rosemary seed and maybe thyme seed. Starting a pot of parsley probably wouldn't hurt either.

There is a Morden Russet apple. Wow.

Reminder to look up prairiehardynursery.ca before they sell out next year.

Morden.

Russet.

Morden bred things that are reliably hardy here, including the earliest corn in the world.

Russet apples tend to be actually worth the energy to eat them in flavour return, and honestly some are even better than many other fruits while in season. They tend to store well.

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

Yesterday we had a "flash freeze" weather warning. I've had snow, cold, and rainfall warnings before but nothing like that. I'd known the weather was going to drop so I hauled out the snowblower in the rain and got most of the heavy snow off the top of the driveway and loaded up the pigs with fresh straw. Sure enough, between 3pm and 9pm it dropped from 3C and lightly rainy to -10C with tiny snow flurries. By 4:00, when I woke up to check the dogs, it was -15.

This kind of weather turns snow into concrete. Earlier this winter it was very cold and the snow was fluffy and weightless and easy to move. When it warmed up the snow was heavy and relatively malleable, at least unless it was compacted. Now the ground is just 3' higher.

It's easier to move around. That's good for me, I can go to the back of the property if I want. It's not great for the animals. Wild animals can come in easily over the snow and eat my birds; my dogs can go over the fences which are now effectively less than 2' if they realize the crust is there and deviate from their paths.

So, when I woke at 4am, I went outside to give the dogs treats. Avallu was curled in the side where the saddleback geese nest and Thea was out under the big straw bale on the driveway. Neither was barking, neither was wandering. My thought is that if they get treats at unpredictable times they'll stick around a little more rather than going to, for instance, investigate the new neighbours or the rival dogs down the way.

It was really beautiful out. With this moon we've had and the crust of frozen rain reflecting back from the snow I could easily read. It's so neat to be out when all the shadows are in different places; the moon goes where the sun never can. It wasn't death-cold or anything so I could sit there in my boots and big jacket and pet Thea and watch the moon for a bit, could take a moment between worlds to breathe. We all came in, I built up the fire and stared at it for awhile, then I went back to sleep. I feel rested now.

I do need to raise the fences some, this involves twinning the posts with probably t posts and hanging snow fencing or whatever is around on them. If there's a visual barrier the dogs won't go through. They also won't go through on the south side of the fence so it's mostly along the road I need to worry about. If they do get out, I can't see the one neighbour making it in for them to harass unless he's on a snowmobile.

Luckily the birds are all nicely tucked away in the goose shed (formerly the woodshed) and the chicken coop etc. I'll step out this morning and check on the new chickens who went without heat last night; I'm trying to wean them off the lamp and it really wasn't that cold.