Barn cam, Hen cam, and Goat cam, or, Additional Ways for Me to Procastinate

Everybody, stop what you are doing rightthissecond (unless it's something important, like open heart surgery or purchasing pizza rolls) and check out HenCam.com. I'll wait.

Hello again, and welcome back! I assume that it's been at least a half-hour and that you have experienced the phenomenon of missing time, because seriously, multiple hen cams? Plus a goat cam with inside AND great outdoors views? You had me at "Here's something Katie can do besides grading these last few freshman comp papers." Or "Hello," if you're Jerry Maguire, aka Tom Cruise before we all knew about the Scientology stuff and saw the couch-jumping and got kind of weird taste in our mouths and made That Face, like a collective "Are you sure this is 'regular' and not 'diet'?" pucker.

Mavis from OneHundredDollarsaMonth.com first alerted me to this ideal procrastination device. The first time I looked at the goat cam, the goat looked like s/he was trying to eat the cam, which struck me as very, well, goat-like behavior.

"What a delicious piece of technology!"

 

I can't decide what I dig more: this, or the hens struttin' their stuff.
 

 "What are you lookin' at, punk?"

Yours in not getting a substantive amount of work done this fine Thursday afternoon,
Katie

On Animal Husbandry

I love animals. I've thought for a long time that I'd like to have a small hobby farm one day, something with some chickens and dairy goats, maybe, or even some sheep. But I'm starting to rethink this now that I've learned about the genetic mutations that create anomalies like Two-Pronged Attack Goats and Snooki's Beach Party Sheep.

(from nickholmes.tumblr.com)

(from xmarksthescot.com)

What will we be munching this year?

I was going to write a "What will I be growing?" post, but really, now that I'm focusing on more of an edible landscape approach, this is really a "What will we be munching?" post.

When it comes to fruit and vegetable seeds and starts, I have an "eyes bigger than stomach" problem: I always want far more than I could possibly plant or feed my family. Half of my problem is the gorgeous, glossy seed catalogs. They are the devil. In The Dirty Life, one of my favorite farm and garden books, Kristin Kimball writes that "the whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be seen clearly," and describes her first winter's worth of seed catalogs as "piling up next to the bed like farmer porn." How perfect of an analogy is that? Esssscuse me while I just jam a few more of these under my mattress where Mom won't find them...

Botanical Interests is, to me, the sexiest of the sexy when it comes to seed catalogs. Those illustrations!

Botanical Interests, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

I dog-eared just about every page in my BI seed catalog after I got it last month, and some of the pages? Double-dog-eared. It was ridiculous. So I had to figure out a way to pare it down, and I finally landed on an ingenious solution: employ the Magic of the Painfully Pragmatic Husband.

"Which of these do you think we'll actually eat?" I asked, and lo, after our brief conference, the list became much shorter and more manageable. Okra? Out. Cauliflower? Ick. Forget it. Greens? Snow peas? Fancy carrots? All systems go. Beets in a rainbow of colors? Got some side-eye on that one, but we'll let it slide. Melons? Tomatoes? Potatoes? This is America! Those are REQUIRED GARDEN PURCHASES!

So now I'm sitting pretty with about twenty packets of Normal People Food seeds, plus Tristar strawberry starts and Adirondack Blue potatoes. In my next post, I'll profile what's headed into the dirt first: Asian Salad Greens. Mmm!

Best Practices for Preventing Damping-Off and Other Fungal Diseases

Illustration of damping off Pythium sp. affecting tomato seedlings, by Margaret Senior

Damping off is a fungal disease that can cause germinating seeds to rot (called pre-emergence damping off) and young seedlings to shrivel and die (called post-emergence damping off). My first experience with damping off was textbook: I was growing cantaloupes from seeds, and one day, the seedlings looked pinched at the base, where the soil touched the growing stems. As happens with post-emergence damping off, the seedlings had begun to rot from the roots. Within a few hours, the stems of the infected seedlings turned brown, and the seedlings later collapsed on themselves. As is often the case, none of them were salvageable once the problem became apparent. 

Happily, damping off is preventable if you follow these best practices:
 

1. Start your seeds off in sterilized seed-starting mixes, not potting soil or dirt from your yard.

2. Don't get your seedlings soggy-wet. Make sure that whatever pot you're using has good drainage, and let the planting medium get fairly dry between waterings.

3. Make sure there's good air circulation in the room you're growing your seedlings in. You can ensure this by setting up a fan, just like a small-scale version of what commercial greenhouses do, which will provide the added benefit of helping your seedlings grow strong stems as they push back against the gentle air flow you've provided.

4. Don't sow your seeds too close together. You want air to circulate between your seedlings. 

5. Give your seedlings adequate light, preferably in the form of some grow lights. (I just use fluorescent grow lights that I bought at the local hardware store.)   

Starting Seeds: Preventing Fungi and Damping-Off with Cinnamon

It's seed-startin' time on Virginia's tiniest farm. I woke up early this morning, grabbed my trusty old Carhartt hat and my coffee, and headed out to the back forty, where I hitched up the tractor to bring our seed-starting operation up from our damp basement to our sunny and airy kitchen. My son made sure I had plenty of farm hands to assist me, as you can see - Lightning, Finn, and two (two!) Tow Mater Trucks. Very helpful.
The seedlings made the temporary move in an effort to defeat the dreaded Fungus Among Us that had developed on the cheap-o peat pots I started everything in this year. (Note to self - next year, go coir or go home!) As you can see in the picture above, I deployed my crop duster over the Tiniest Farm in Virginia, using it to sprinkle cinnamon, which has natural antifungal properties, on the surface of the seed-starting mix and the peat pots.

Cinnamon has saved me from several Katie-created seed-starting disasters and even stopped a bad case of damping-off from spreading even further a few years ago. It's cheap (I think I paid a buck for my container of Trader's Choice Cinnamon), it's effective, and it's a great alternative to chemicals for those of us who hang with the organic crowd. 
Prevention is far easier than management; I'll cover prevention strategies (in other words, "do as I say, not as I did this year") in my next post. Right now, I'm getting ready to attend my first Dirt Works meeting with Tammy of Casa Mariposa. Fingers crossed that she's baked some cookies for our inaugural meeting...