If you want to be a writer, you have to write.
Lately I've been thinking about how I want to write more. I have so many stories to tell, so much I'm learning, and also, a new growing season is upon us, how will I tell folks what's ready to harvest?
Well, the answer of course is that if I want to be a writer, I better get writing. I'm still going to be putting out the newsletter style summaries every season, but I'm also starting an email list for folks who want more frequent updates. Those will go out every week or so which means you'll be able to follow along with baby animals growing up (instead of getting the newsletter that says they're due any day, and then 3 months later another saying they're basically grown), folks who are near-by will know what's in season at the farm-stand, and nosey nellys (like our friends and family) get to learn what projects have my interest these days.
If you just want the seasonal updates, there's no need to do anything. This blog will still get a copy of every newsletter. If you're curious about my weekly wittering, the farm stand, local eggs, or just getting way more photos of cute animals, please sign up. I pinky promise I won't spam you with daily emails or anything like that. I do NOT have the bandwidth for that sort of undertaking. lol
We were without power for an entire day and it sucked!
So I do have to say that it's partially my fault. Not the outage, but how much it sucked for us. So, to start at the beginning...
We have a battery bank for the house hooked up to the solar panels. We haven't had to test the true capacity of the battery bank, but it had lasted overnight without us changing our power use in the summer. It didn't even dip past half full. But that of course, was summer.
Monday February 23rd, I had seen a storm was coming and there was a chance we would be snowed in for a few days. I knew the goats wouldn't be able to forage in a storm and that they'd have to be locked in the barn to keep them out of the wind, so we took a last minute trip to the feed store at 8am to stock up on hay. By the time we got home(before 9am), it was starting to snow. By the time all the morning barn chores were done and all the critters were safely tucked in with lots of food and water, I was walking back from the barn at 10am with the wind whipping snow at my face so hard it stung.
We didn't worry too much about the storm. We've had worse whether you're counting by wind, or by temperature... but what I wasn't counting on was the snow. It wasn't just a lot of snow... It was a lot of snow that was partially melted and very wet and heavy and clinging, being blown around every angle it could be. With the changing wind and the clinging snow, every window on our house was completely coated, and the sliding screen door on the deck was kinda funny because it was packed FULL of snow. Six feet high and an inch or two thick of just... snow, between the screen door and the sliding glass door. The rest of the drifts weren't that high at all, it was just the way it clung to the screen.
I had been outside with the snow blower and shovels trying my best to at leat keep a path to the barn and enough space to turn the car around, but it just kept comming. Around 3pm I heard a little tick from UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) we use for the router and such. That usually means the power has wobbled enough for the battery system to kick in for a split second, but not enough to actually trigger the full backup alarm. Because of that I checked on our solar/battery system. It confirmed that the grid power was out and that we were running on our batteries. No big deal. The NSPower crews usually get things back up in an hour or two, so we just carried on with our day.
Around 6pm I went to start a load of laundry and thought "you know, I should make sure it didn't go back down. Running laundry on battery would be dumb" and then checked to find out that the grid was STILL down and our battery bank had less then 10% power left. We hurriedly shut down our computers and.... welp it was just a few minutes before the lights cut out and we were out of time and out of luck. The power outage map said our area should get repaired by 3am so we had cold sandwiches for supper and bundled up to go to bed.
When I woke up at 6am I was unhappy to find the power was not back and the temperature inside was 12C. I puttered around, cleared some snow from the driveway, and tried to make plans about what to do if the power wasn't back up soon. No power means no well pump, and knowing that the sun coming up would help keep the house warm, but that might only stop it from dropping as fast, I decided to drain the pipes into buckets to make sure we had enough water for the animals and they wouldn't crack if the house got too cold. After Meg woke up we figured out that the little UPS batteries weren't strong enough to run the kettle... so we had no running water, no heat, no way to boil water let alone cook any food. When we found out the new repair estimate on our area was 2pm but many other areas were back up... well that cinched it.
I took care of the animals making sure they all had food, unfrozen water, and were safely tucked in out of the wind. Then we got in the car at about 10am and drove an hour to Yarmouth. While we were there we got a hot breakfast with coffee, found out (again) that the British shop is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and then we went to Canadian Tire to make sure that we wouldn't wind up without coffee again.
We wound up getting a butane camp stove and a camping percolator. Now if we're ever without power again, we can at least have coffee and fry some eggs. We also know we can be much better at the whole battery usage thing. We just didn't ever think it would be down for so long. Next time the grid goes down we can adjust usage right away and if we had done so last time we might have even had some heat through to the morning.
Of course when we got home the power was still out. The House had warmed to 14C so that was nice, but sunset was comming the the new repair estimate was 11pm. :-( I tended to the critters and we sat down at the kitchen table to play some boardgames while there was still enough light to see. Thanksfully around 5 or 6 the power kicked back on. When the router booted back up I checked the app to see how much power we were drawing with all the heaters and hot water tank and the bateries charging at the same time.
I really don't need a new hobby, but I've got one anyway
I was looking for an outlet for my creativity and programming just wasn't scratching that itch. I was drawn in by a "give us your email and get a free course on [XYZ]" type ads on Facebook a few weeks back. I'm very glad that hard sells disgust me because I was able to take the free course and learn a lot without shelling out the $2000! they wanted for the full sized course. Anyway, I learned a lot about digital design/art and I'm working on a new project that I hope to show off soon.
Speaking of programming, I am still working on my farm records app, and Megan's been working on some projects of her own. The job hunt has been disheartening for her but the personal projects let her shine and remind her that she is great at what she does. It's just a matter of time before someone starts paying her for it again.
Regina was very sick but is okay now.
Poor Regina was curled up miserable and hiding under the nest boxes one evening when I went to lock up. Her comb was blue (means low oxygen / poor circulation) and she was barely moving when prodded. (I honestly thought she was already dead and stiff at first.) I brought her in to warm her up and check for injuries. Everything was moving as it should when I stretched out her legs and wings. No signs of blood. She was gurgling when breathing so my first guess was some sort of upper respiratory infection. I left her some electrolytes, gave her the chicken version of vix vapo-rub (called VetRx), as well as using a feeding syringe to give her a dose of iron and vitamin Bs to give her a fighting chance before letting her rest. I did check on her before bed a few hours later and she actually raised her head to look at me, her comb was less blue, and I couldn't hear gurgling any more, so I took that as a good sign.
In the morning her crop was still mostly full which is bad (although it wasn't hard or very full, it should be empty by morning), but her comb was red again which is good, and she even stood up to get out of the way when I changed her water which was a marked improvement. I double checked my chicken resources and they confirmed that it was likely she ate something tough to break down (like straw) that was not getting digested properly (due to hiding inside from the weather so much and unable to get at grit) so it was blocking the crop from draining properly (it's called impaction). Treatment includes making sure she has plenty of water and no hard food, but do offer small amounts of grit she can eat if she wants. The idea is for the crop to drain and for any swelling to go down without irritating it further. Since she was in such rough shape I made sure she had electrolytes (in the form of watered down Pedialyte), and even let her have one scrambled egg because it was soft and easily digested.
The next morning when I went to pick her up and check her crop, not only was it empty (as it should be), she was feeling well enough to kick up a fuss over being handled. I was very happy and she got to eat some chicken feed I softened into mush with water and a drizzle of sunflower oil. That night she had finished the small amount of softened food and was nicely rambunctious, so I tucked her in with the rest of the flock at bed time. Queenie greeted her and no one caused a fuss because she wasn't gone too long. Next winter I definitely need to have some suitable grit on hand inside the barn. It wasn't a problem before because they could always go outside after a couple days, but the snow kept piling on and the poor things just didn't have the access to gravel like they used to.
The rest of the critters are doing well.
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| Believe it or not, this is very pregnant for this far along. |
As you likely know, we took Star to the buck in October and I thought she caught, but in November it was clear it didn't take so we took her back. At that point, it was very clear that she was very interested, so we were confidant when she didn't cycle back into heat. That said, pregnancy is tricky and things can always go wrong so the fact that it's March and she's due at the end of April and she's looking pregnant, it definitely a good thing. By the fact that she's so ... waddley already, I'm thinking triplets.
Honey's been providing our milk this winter. The production went down a bit in the coldest part of the year to the extent that some days we only got 700-800mL, but already she's ramping back up and we're getting 900mL+ a day. Should be back to a litre or more when the bushes start greening up in a few weeks.Unfortunately every time I attempt to leave the boys with her over night, there's little to no milk in the morning. They really need to stop that so Star and her babies can use the kid corner soon.
The chickens are laying well and we're getting 5-6 eggs a day. Should be 7-8 once Kelly's done her molt and Regina's laying again. We've even been getting the odd giant egg again and I've seen Isabella on the nests occasionally. I haven't 100% confirmed they're hers but I'll be very surprised if they're coming from anyone else. To be fair I am already surprised that she might be laying again. Chickens are marvels.
Shadow is a lovely lil lady, and has found more of her voice. Mostly to yell at bugs for not being in jumping distance, but sometimes also chatting to bluejays. She communicates with us mostly by gentle pats that turn into claws if ignored. Then, once she has our attention, she'll either sit still for petting, or walk us to her cause of concern. (eg: if her food is "empty" and we need to shake it so the kibbles don't form a donut exposing the bottom of the bowl anymore.)
The indoor plants are doing great
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Gardening club is a good start
One of the things Meg and I agreed on over the winter was that we needed to get out of the house more often. We were in this cycle of no where to go means we stay home which means we don't meet new people which means we have no where to go. It's like the lottery right? Can't win if you don't buy a ticket. So in order to work on our goal of finding new friends, on the first Tuesday of January, we went to our first monthly garden club meeting at the library across the causeway. There was a presenter discussing the issues of Japanese knot-weed, and how to best avoid spreading it. February garden club meeting was about how to sprout sweet potato slips, and this month it was just the organizer (Jennifer from Yellow Brick Road Farm), Meg, and me. I had brought a bunch of seeds for the seed library and since there wasn't much of a showing, so we chatted about what we plan to grow and Jennifer's pasture plans and eventually got talking about websites and the state of the internet these days.
It's just appalling to me how many businesses don't update the maps providers like google or apple, don't even run one static web page, but every single one of them use Facebook as their platform instead. You literally can't get hours or a phone number for any of the mom and pop shops without logging into Facebook. We had left Facebook when we lived in Ontario and lived just fine without it, but then we moved here and found that folks don't even text or email, they just Facebook message. Even if it wasn't for the fact that Facebook decides how many people get to see your posts (whether they've followed your page or not), just the idea of putting all your eggs in a basket someone else gets to hold is terrifying to me. This is why I'm looking at diversification of front end and back end and backups.
Anyway, hopefully we'll find other groups to join and maybe we can start something at the library ourselves. Getting out of the house for something other than errands has been a wonderful experience.
And again the snow is melting, the year churns forward, and the winter recedes into the distance.
