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! -------->

The bathroom is finished!

Remember this mess?



It is finished and it looks great! We have new paint, new lights, new towel racks, new light covers, new towels and mats...

New camera!

We have a new camera! The old one broke... it was about 5 years old, so I guess it was time. The new one is very much like the old one, but it has some newer, cool features. Our old camera was 5 mega pixels, which was good for it's time, but this one has 12 and is about standard for the times now. It also has some anti-blurring stuff and other fun things to play with. Good price too... $100. The last one was $250. Reminds me of the time I bought Roger a 1 gig flash drive for $70 at a black Friday sale and now they're $10.

Check out the video at the end... I think it's clearer than the old ones.

Ugly chicks

Had to borrow a camera because ours appears to not be working... and this camera doesn't have sound, so here's a video sans sound. I'm trying to convey the awkward ugly phase of chick fuzz to adult feathers.