It's Blackberry Time!

For a few weeks each year I am able to enjoy one of my favorite fruits: Blackberries. These perennial canes grow rapidly, are easy to care for, and produce some great fruit.

Blackberries are expensive to buy in your grocery store since the fruits are fragile and have a short shelf life. These fruits are made to be eaten the same day they are picked. I love them right off the vine. Here's a pic of the snack I had today when I went out to complete the daily chores.

Blackberries are nice to work with compared to raspberries and other ribes since blackberries come in everbearing, thornless varieties. This extends the harvest and is easier on your hands. We have raspberries but I hardly ever do much with them since the fruit is so small and the canes are covered with thorns.

We have several blackberry canes trained up some fencing. They don't have to be tied up as they do support themselves a little bit, but as they grow they will tend to flop down so I just stick each cane through the fence when its about three feet long and then loop it back through when it's about five feet. Each cane only grows the first year, bears fruit the second year then dies. We have never had to prune, but I see that we are getting more canes than we need this year so I will be separating some to plant elsewhere. This is what our current setup looks like:

Blackberries want full sun and well drained soil. They prefer soil that is a bit acidic, so mulching with pine straw is usually a good idea. Be sure to give other plants and trees a wide berth as ribes are not the best neighbors and blackberries are the worst of the lot. If not attended to, they will spread and attempt to choke the life out of anything in their path. We have ours in their own "island" that we can mow around.

Blackberries are great in cobblers or pies, make great jams and preserves, and can pretty much be used in any recipe in place of raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries. Our latest idea was a spinach salad with blackberries, strawberries, and pecans. A touch of raspberry/walnut vinaigrette made this salad really pop.

If your interested in sustainable agriculture, permaculture, homesteading, or just like fresh fruit, try blackberries. You won't be sorry!

Spring = Babies

You just have to love spring. Everything wakes from it's winter slumber, the grass turns green, and flowers begin to strut their stuff. And then there's the babies!

Rabbits, not suprisingly, top the list for production so far. Both does are on their second litter this year. The New Zealand has 6 healthy bunnies. The Calfornia/NZ cross had a pair of stillborn babies, but still has 8 babies who have just began to open their eyes and hop out of the nestbox. We will select two young does from that litter as future breeders and the rest will either be sold or take a one-way trip to camp freezer. I might get a chance to try making rabbit jerky this time.

The turkeys are currently busy filling two nests with eggs. We are expecting them to begin incubating them any day now. This is a great news since the first batch of eggs was lost when our pigs broke into the turkey pen for a late-night omelet. The turkeys will have the last laugh after our 4th of July pig pickin.

Not to be outdone, the chickens have been laying non-stop and the roosters have been very "cocky". We have hatched out our 2nd batch of chicks and they have proven very energetic and fast growing. We are currently producing Red Rangers (a meat bird), black sex-links (dual purpose), and something we came up with on our own, blue sex-links.

The blue sex-links are a hybrid just like the blacks. The key to these birds is that the mother carries a gene that she can only pass to her sons, not her daughters, since it is linked to the sex chromozome. In birds it's the females that have the two different sex chromosome, not the male like it is in mammals. We use barred rock hens for producing both sex-links. The male babies get the barring from their mama so they have spots on their heads. The females don't have the barring gene so they are a solid color. Check out the blue sex-links in this photo.



You can easily see that some of the blue chicks have creamy colored spots on their heads. These are the males and the spot is due to the barred gene. The solid blue chicks are the females. This allows us to sex these chicks at hatch and sell guaranteed pullets. The males have another use.

The blue sex-links are not your standard dual purpose chicken. We have bred these to produce large, gentle pullets that lay well and make a great addition to the pastry pot at the end of their laying days while the males are bred for capon production. A capon is a castrated bird. This allows them to grow much longer & larger since we don't need to worry about them getting gamey or stringy. These chicks will be caponized at 4 weeks old and will then be put into mobile pasture pens where they will slowly grow until processing time.

We are using a huge, broad chested Jersey Giant rooster who happens to have two copies of the blue dilution gene. The Jersey Giant is the largest breed of chicken in the world. They grow slowly and were bred for capon production. Our rooster has a double dose of the blue dilution gene. This makes him a light blue smokey color and guarantees that he will pass one blue gene to his offspring. This allows us and customers to differentiate from the faster growing black sex-links which serve a different purpose.

The lone dissapointment so far has been the ducks. We have 17 muscovy ducks and 4 drakes. The muscovys are known as some of the best of all poultry for naturally hatching their own eggs. I don't think my ducks have been told this little tidbit of information. Don't they know it's spring? If anyone has any calanders in the native language of ducks I would be willing to take one off your hands.

I do love spring. There is something wonderful about seeing all the new life, both plant and animal. My wife mentioned this the other day when she was talking about getting to hold her cousin's babies (twins!). I certainly don't need her getting into spring and thinking about having any babies.

Maybe I should have my wife hang out with the ducks.

Who am I and what in the world am I doing?

Well, first let me say that I'm the last person you would ever expect to be farming. I'm lazy. I wasn't raised on a farm and I don't have anyone in my family who farms. I have worked in the IT field my entire career, not the corn field. Plus I'm lazy.

But something changes when you have children.

Computers are simple. The quality of their performance is directly related to what you put into them. We call that "garbage in, garbage out". It's not the computer's fault you told it to do something stupid, it's yours.

So what am I putting into my children?

- My love and affection in their hearts? Absolutely!
- A good education in their minds? We will call it a "work-in-progress".
- A decent roof over their heads? Yeah, it keeps the rain out.
- Clothes on their back? A constant battle, but yes.
- Good, healthy food in their stomachs? Ummmm, I don't know....

Where do I get healthy food that is safe for my family?

Sure, I can get them a diet Coke with their Happy Meal. But is that healthy food? What do you call healthy? Do you measure it by calories or carbs? or is it cholesterol? What about sodium? How about "organic" food? Can't I just add a vitamin pill and be fine?

It's no wonder Americans spend so much money on weight loss programs yet we are still getting fatter and fatter as a country. I have been overweight my entire life. I still am. I grew up in a culture of fat, lazy people who cram obscene amounts of calorie dense, nutrient deprived food into their greedy little triple-chinned mouths while sprawled on a couch watching TV commercials about a magic pill that can help you lose weight without exercise or changing your diet. Oh yeah, and smoking wasn't bad for you either.

I want to feed my family high quality, healthy food. This is what I want:

- I want my beef to come from a steer who lived a happy life grazing fresh, green grass free from any pesticide or herbicide, who had never been given any antibiotics or hormones, who was slaughtered humanely, then was processed in a clean environment, was not treated with ammonia, and had no fillers or by-products added.

- I want my chicken to come from a bird who lived a happy life as a chicken, not as a fat blob sitting in it's own excrement, who did not receive any antibiotics, was never fed arsenic, was slaughtered humanely, processed in a clean environment, was not "mechanically separated", and tastes like chicken, not mush, when I cook it.

- I want my tomato fresh, ripe from the vine, juicy and full of flavor, without any pesticide or herbicide, and grown in rich active soil.

- I want my hamburger to be from one cow, not 100 different cows. (Some of which might not have even known each other. Scandalous!)

- I want the sugar in my food to be sugar, not high fructose corn syrup.

- I want to be able to look at my food and recognise what plant or animal it came from.

- I want to know that the farmer who produced the food was able to make a fair living, that farm workers here or abroad are not exploited, and that there are no "losers" anywhere in the system.

- I want to know that the food is produced by methods that create soil, not damage it.

- I want to know that the food's production was not overly reliant on fossil fuels.

- I want tofu to be the only food that tastes like soy. Soy should taste like soy, not like everything else.

- I want to know that I am not slowly poisoning my children or dooming my future grandchildren with ADHD, autism, or some horrific birth defect.


Well, I've looked high and low and I can't find any of that. Apparently clean, safe, healthy food is about as easy to find as an honest politician. If you want guarantees on the quality of the food you feed your family then your going to just have to produce it yourself.

I started learning by trial and error, mostly error, in the summer of 2008. I'm still making mistakes now, but I'm still learning. I barely produce a tiny fraction of the food my family consumes, but it's always a little bit more each year.

This blog will be a place to record and share all of these trials and tribulations, the successes and the failures, the common sense wisdom and the hair-brained ideas. Read at your own risk, some thoughts may be contagious.