Raising Food

(previously printed in Black Hills Simple Life Online Magazine)

The more we know about food, the more we want to have better control over the entire life cycle of what we eat.  That is a big undertaking, but increasingly more important for Rick and me.  It started with gardens.  I wanted to grow all of our veggies.  A couple years later with gardens in place and vegetables growing we realized we needed manure for composting our gardens, so we might as well get some chickens and collect their manure while simultaneously getting eggs.  We did not want to order sexed chicks, so we decided to order straight runs, which means we would potentially get 50% males with each order.  For us, that meant butchering cockerels for meat as we did not wish to have more than one or two roosters.  Then with all of the bad press about large corporation-raised meat birds testing positive for various viruses and bacteria, we were further convinced to go ahead and raise our own broilers.  Even though chickens can produce a lot of manure, it is not enough for two greenhouses and six outdoor gardens.  We started talking about other livestock.  Ever since I was a kid I had wanted to have a few sheep again.  We decided to take on some bum (bottle-raised) lambs last spring with the intention of manure production, grazing, and ultimately a freezer full of organically fed lamb in the fall.  What else might we easily raise about the gardens that could be beneficial to our gardening process as well as serve an ultimate purpose of providing food for the family?  Turkeys!  For years I had been either sourcing a local Thanksgiving turkey or ordering as wholesome of bird as I could find from a local health food store.  Why not try raising a couple turkeys?

The thing about growing healthy, happy animals for your own family’s food is that when other people find out what you are doing, they want healthy food for their family, too.  Maybe they are not wild about knowing all of the details, but they certainly would rather know that the chicken, lamb, or turkey they are cooking for their own dinner table was happily going about its business on a sunny hillside a few miles out of town a short time ago rather than think about so many animals that are raised for our dinner tables in very confined, smelly spaces and being fed low-grade feed. 

We get a lot of questions about our attachment to our animals and the fact that the chickens, turkeys, and lambs are raised for food, not necessarily companionship.  No one shames us for it, but a lot of customers state that they could not do it.  Sometimes I am surprised that we can do it.  We thoroughly enjoy baby animals and just love everything about them….their frolicking energy, fuzziness, cuteness, and dependence for food and shelter.  From Day One we know that specific animals will eventually be food for us or for our customers, but that does not keep us from caring for those animals and tending to them just as we do our pets.  Fortunately, farm animals have a way of becoming independent, large, smelly, demanding, and well, not so cute.  As that transition happens from tiny, sweet baby animals to full-grown animals we still take great care of our livestock, but we give more thought to how we will conscientiously honor the animal’s life and make sure its last days are sunny, well-fed, and just plain enjoyable.  We both enjoy having meat with our meals and we feel we need to materially participate in raising and butchering some of that meat to fully appreciate it.  Raising animals for food is fun, entertaining, melancholy, soul-searching, rewarding, and difficult all at the same time. 

So, as the scope of our Bear Butte Gardens vision grows, we gradually add in the components that we need for the gardens and for our own family and also see where our customers’ needs take us.

June!

Wowsers it's been a while since I blogged!  That usually means one of two things:  I've been pretty busy OR I don't really want to talk about something because it didn't go as planned.  I'd say the former is my excuse this time.  At any rate, let's get caught up a little.

What have I been doing at the gardens since April?  Ummm.......planting.....and then some planting.....and a little more planting.  It's been an interesting mix of really warm 85-95-degree days and really cool 50s to 60s with a lot of wind thrown in and maybe a quarter inch of rain here and there.  All in all it's a pretty dry spring, even for South Dakota.  Hence part of the reason I've been so busy--every time I decide it's time to plant something I MUST first lay drip irrigation because we just aren't getting the normal spring rains.  I usually have a little leniency about getting drip irrigation in place up until about the first of July, but not this year.  So my preference is planting, not laying drip irrigation line; however, I certainly do appreciate the advantages that drip irrigation allows for larger-scale gardening.

Drip irrigation on pumpkins

So at some point this spring as I was laying yet another 100-foot increment of polyethylene tubing I started wondering, just how much drip irrigation line have I put out so far?  It seems like I'm always ordering more tubing and drip emitters, so it must be a lot.  Here's what I've come up with:  1120 feet in the potatoes, 1900 feet in the pumpkins/melons, 900 feet in the tomatoes, 400 feet in the peas/beans, 1400 feet in the cabbages/garlic, 700 feet in the peppers and corn, and potentially another 700 or so feet in the high tunnel greenhouse when it's done.  So altogether that is about 7120 feet of drip tubing and a mile is 5280 feet, so I've laid out a mile plus 2000 feet of tubing.  Sheesh!  And that doesn't even count the new shelter belt.

Killdeer nest in the middle of the pumpkin patch

Planting has been going well for the most part.  I really wish I had more spring greens.  They just aren't as easy to grow without a lot of nice spring rainfall.  I seeded various kinds of greens a few times in different places, but when they didn't really take off after a few weeks, I would re-designate that plot of garden to something seemingly more important like celery or tomatoes or cabbages.  So I am just starting to get some sign of spring greens coming up now and it's already the middle of June.  I may do some close-space planting of greens with intensive water under a section of the new greenhouse when it gets up to see what I can do there.  I guess if all else fails, I can just wait until late summer and re-seed them again for a nice crop in the fall when we will all appreciate them after tomato season is done.

I have a young lady, Kayla, helping me in the gardens this summer as a part-part-time job.  She has a couple other jobs, so I get to see her early in the morning at 6 a.m. or late afternoon, which works out very nicely in the gardens.  I know it seems obvious, but two people can just get things done so much better!  When I'm working by myself it usually takes me 1-2 hours to lay out drip line, then install the drip buttons, then I finally get around to planting 50 to 100 of whatever I'm working on that day.  Usually by then I'm beat and don't get the mulching of the new plants done until Phase II a little later or the next day or so.  When Kayla helps me one of us can be working on the drip irrigation, the other following up with seeds or plants at the appropriate places, and then quite possibly we quickly throw the mulch on and voila! instant garden!  I do have a concern, though.  A few days ago while I was laying drip tubing, she was seeding the squash and she convinced me that we really did NEED to plant 40 zucchini seeds.......and I let her.  So there may be some peer pressure going on here.

The high tunnel greenhouse is a continuing project.  We need to get it finished up very soon, so we'll be really focusing on it for the next week in the evenings and on the weekends.  It's going okay, it's just a first for us putting up something like this and we're trying to make it super strong to withstand all the winds it's going to have to endure.

One guinea and two turkeys of the five bug eaters

We have some new additions to the gardens:  3 young turkeys and 2 young guineas!  After a two-day incarceration in the dog kennel-turned-bird-coop to get them used to me feeding them, they now get daily excursions for many hours about the gardens to eat a nice variety of their favorite bugs.  They are doing a GREAT job.  I've never had turkeys before, so I'm excited to see them grow and watch their personalities.  Right now the turkeys seem to think they are also guineas, so that's kind of interesting.  I think they were all actually hatched and raised by a chicken......so kind of similar to a lot of our present-day human "mixed" families.  :-)

Although the CSA shares have been small the past couple weeks, I think the shareholders are really enjoying them.  I get reports back on how they are preparing and cooking their veggies each week.  So far they have gotten small packages of mixed greens, quite a few snow peas, new potatoes, garlic scapes, and radishes.  I'm looking forward to having the bigger items in the coming weeks like broccoli, early tomatoes, summer squash, and beans.  It all takes time and patience.  I have quite a bit of time, but not always a huge amount of patience!

I've seen this recently in articles I've read and some web sites:  S.O.L.E. Food = Sustainable Organic Local Ethical Food

Please seek out and enjoy your local foods.  There's more out there than your realize!

Michelle
Bear Butte Gardens
www.BearButteGardens.com
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com