Foster Dog Dash

New foster dog... a few days ago I got an email from the shelter that said they had taken in 25 cats in 2.5 hours last Monday and the rest of the week wasn't much better... they were saying if they couldn't get animals moved out they were going to have to start euthanizing just for space reasons. So of course I go in and get a dog... Foster Dog Dash.




Dash is 5 months old and a cattle dog / russel terrier mix. He's a wild ball of energy. He's been at the shelter for 2 of his 5 months, and they were worried he was missing his critical socialization window.

He's not completely house trained. He bothers the cats. He has WICKED gas. It's okay, we like him. Hopefully he'll get a home soon. With someone who jogs or something, because he will not stop running through the house.

odds and ends

Apologies for not posting recently. I'll try to catch you up to speed.

First, all the plants are out. Here are small tomato plants and a garlic plant. The garlic is planted in the fall and roots through the winter and continues to grow through mid summer. So these guys have a few months left to go. But it is nice to start the season with something already in the ground! As far as tomatoes go, we have several varieties... two yellow cherries, a roma, a 'big pink', something striped, and a purple I think. I actually can't really remember, when I bought them I didn't label them, so we'll just be surprised!


Also, in case you were interested, this is how we started seeds inside. Roger has a huge setup of florescent bulbs (industrial plant growing kind) that we lower over the plants and slowly raise as the plants grow. If the bulbs are too far from the seeds when they start they will bolt and get really thin and fall over.


Also, an update on our favorite neighbor, Neighbor Bill. Neighbor Bill is so awesome. He watches our place like a hawk and tells us everything that happened while we were gone. 'A chicken hawk was eyeing your chickens', 'I saw a woodchuck in your field', 'someone turned around in your driveway'... He invited us to go camping with him and his buddy... they go fishing a lot, and I guess they go to this place that's an hour away and fish all day and then 'camp'. And when he says 'camp', it turns out it means make dinner over a fire, then sleep in the car. We think it will be fun and we're going to try to go with them. We will be using a tent. Here is Neighbor Bill and his buddy grilling pork chops:



Also, I cut my hair. I donated it to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program
Beautiful Lengths I have a sister who is a cancer survivor, and it was important to me that my hair go to a place that makes wigs for adult women. Here is a kind-of picture of my new hair, plus me harvesting rhubarb. Yes, that is a rhubarb plant. The huge kind. In this picture it looks kind of boyish, but I think it works for me.

And lastly, here is a picture of my dear friend and coworker Sarah, holding a chicken for the first time.

Max catches a mole

Foster Dog Max really likes to dig and smell things. He likes to smell things and then 'point' at the source of the smell. Today he would not leave this one spot he was pointing at, and then suddenly shoved his face into the ground AND CAME OUT WITH A MOLE.


In other less interesting news, our rhubarb plants are finished growing. We have a variety of rhubarb that is mostly green. This is normal, it doesn't get totally red when it's ripe. I made a pie, and it was amazing. Pie recipe:

1 and 1/3 cup sugar
6 tablespoons flour
4 cubs chopped rhubarb

mix sugar and flour, put a heap on the bottom of a 9 in pie crust, then heap rhubarb, then cover with the rest of the sugar mix. Put a pie crust over the top. Bake at 450 for 10 minutes, then 350 at 45 minutes. We put a pizza pan on the bottom rack to catches spilling juices.

foster dog

We have a foster dog! His name is Max. They think he's two years old and some kind of hound mix. To us, he doesn't really look like a hound but a Beagle mix, but he will howl, so we're deferring that he probably has some hound. He was very scared when I met him at the shelter, and I had to lift and shove him into the car to get him home. But he jumped out of the car, saw Dia, and ran for her. They've been Best Friends ever since.

Max is leaving us May 4th to catch a bus to New England to go to a shelter up there. Apparently, they have shortages in shelters in New England, and there is a program that takes bus fulls of dogs from Indiana up there. The woman who runs the foster program says that the shelters up there hand pick the dogs they want from the Indiana shelters and they are often adopted before they even get there.

Spring has Sprung

We had our first day at the market! We sold luffa sponges, purple jalapeno starts, dried herbs, and chili pepper strings.




Chickens:


We planted two types of peas, spinach, lettuce, greens, and strawberries. We also planted two very small pawpaw trees. For those of you not from the midwest, Pawpaw trees are about 10 feet tall when grown, skinny, and produce fruit that looks like a small mango and tastes like a mango/banana. They are very good. This plant is only a year old, so they're small. It'll be a few years before we get some pawpaws.

A strawberry plant:

Killing things

A few days ago neighbor Bill killed a woodchuck for me over my lunch hour that we had trapped. I was telling this story to a coworker, who was judging me for killing such a big, furry creature. Coupled with the 'inability-to-kill-baby-mole' story, this brings up the question; at what point do we kill something on the farm?

Well, what we do is weigh how much damage the creature is doing and multiply that by what the creature is damaging (venue), subtracting a few points for cuteness.

For venues the creature is damaging, in ascending order of importance is:

yard < garden < barn < chickens

So if a mole is ripping the hell out of the yard, we have big damage, less important venue. If a possum bites a chicken but doesn't kill it, we have small damage but most important venue. In conclusion, we would attempt to drive the moles out of the yard through humane solutions, and shoot the possum.

When we first started trapping the woodchucks, we attempted to relocate them. However, the barn is freakin' GROWING woodchucks like it's a petri dish. We trapped seven woodchucks last year and we're having massive tunneling already in April. So we will continue to relocate them when it's convenient, but lets be honest, I'm not going to drive every woodchuck in Monroe County out to a farm. The huge tunneling is a problem because it compromises the foundation of the barn and also creates huge entries into the barn for raccoons and other chicken eating predators. So we have big venue damage to both barn and chickens. Even with the points they get for being cute, it's just impossible to treat them like pets when there's an ARMY of them.

So ends the explanation of how we determine what gets dumped in the back field for coyotes and what gets to live another day to annoy the crap out of us.

Moles

We have mole problems. They tear up our yard, and nothing we do will get rid of them.

Today, while moving some straw bales by the house, we discovered a nest of baby moles.

We didn't have the heart to kill them. We put the bale back over the nest.




We've been doing some hiking at a state forest nearby.

Mexico

A thousand apologies for not updating in so long... I've been in Mexico with a group of students from the college I work at. We took 12 students to a small town called Calnali, 7 hours by bus from Mexico City. It's up in the mountains. The students pour concrete floors and put up walls in a shanty town, and then they go to an indigenous village and give out shoes.

They shanty town is an acre of land that was donated by the government for a group of 10 homeless families to live on. The shacks are one room boxes with dirt floors and plastic wrapped around the sides to make walls. The students mixed the concrete by taking sand, gravel, a giant bag of concrete mix, and buckets of water from the river. They mix each batch by hand by turning the ingredients with shovels. The few walls they built were either cement block (if they were lucky) or cardboard painted with tar.

Before we left we did a shoe drive around town here in Bloomington, and collected about 400 pairs of shoes, mostly childrens. We were only able to take about 300, due to space. Each student checked a huge bag with nothing but shoes. At the village we gave away every pair of shoes in 2 hours. Many of the children didn't have shoes, and many of them that had shoes were wearing something that was in horrendous shape and not near the right size.

That's the synopsis. Later I'll post my report to the college.

chickens out to barn

The chickens got moved to a stall in the barn:

New Poll! -------->