Wednesday afternoon, I found myself kneeling in a 3×5 foot shed with a 1500 watt space heater between my legs, a small LED flashlight in my teeth, and my back up against a propane powered hot water heater. The majority of the words coming from my mouth were expletives. Occasionally dashing out of the shed around to the front of our house and shouting, “TURN ON THE BATHTUB!” and running back to the shed. This continued for close to two hours. When I returned to the house my knees and back hurt.
You might ordinarily assume that my behavior was a result of mental illness, some bizarre prayer ritual, or a really quirky exercise routine. In this instance, though, I was attempting to return water service to our house.
The extraordinarily low temperatures we’ve had over the past few days (an archive of this month’s data from the weather station on our roof are available here: http://www.miscfarm.com/weather/NOAA/NOAA-2008-12.txt — note the lows on the 15th and 16th) froze a few of our pipes, including those surrounding the well pump pressure switch.
The pressure switch regulates the operation of our submersible well pump, based on the pressure that’s built up in two 75G tanks and the house pipes. By design, when the pressure drops below 35/40 PSI, the ‘cut in’ function of the switch is triggered and the pump runs until the pressure switch reaches the ‘cut out’ pressure (~60 PSI, in our case). It’s how our “water pressure” (at the faucet) is maintained.
Early Wednesday morning, Kat’s shower died halfway through her morning routine… it just stopped. We came to the conclusion that the water mains from the pump had frozen. We relocated a small space heater from the greenhouse to the garage, aiming it at the exposed galvanized pipe, and took off for work. We returned at 4 in the afternoon (around sunset) and my adventure ensued. After presumably thawing the pipes with a space heater, we still faced no water pressure in the house. I checked the well house and discovered some very chilly pipes, including drain valve that was frozen solid. Moved the space heater, again, this time to the well house… after the drain valve had visibly thawed, I flipped an L-shaped bail to reset the pressure switch. The encouraging snap of an electric arc and the needle moved from the ambient tank pressure (30 PSI) straight up to 70 PSI, only to drop back to 30, a second later. Another attempt with similar results.
After re-reading some information I’d found a few months back and a call to my father, who lived off-grid for 12 years and just knows this stuff, I was determined to figure it out. That’s where this post began… on my knees, with a small wrench, trying to adjust the ‘cut in’ pressure downward enough to get the pump running without hand-holding. I gave up. I spent some time with my new friend this morning, then, around noon, caved and called a service company. Late afternoon, I called to see if they were going to be able to make it. “Sure, he’s in your area and should be there in a couple hours.” Around 7:30, I talked to the service guy and he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to attempt to drive out into the sticks with the roads unplowed.
Thursday, we awoke to 7 inches of snow. Determined to gain running water, again, I decided to spend some more quality time with my friend, the pressure switch. There’s no way these ‘snow wimp’ service guys were going to drive out here. I was convinced that something had become lodged under the diaphragm/pressure plate and it just needed to be cleaned.
After all, I’m a smart guy and somewhat mechanically inclined, right? This is what I wanted, right? Yeah, we’re working to become self sufficient and I just need to persevere, right?
I flipped the breaker to kill the pump circuit and made my way out to the well house. I took a picture of the switch without the cover, so I’d remember the wiring. 20 minutes later, I’d pulled the wiring off the switch, drained the last couple gallons out of the well tanks, and unscrewed the switch. I brought it inside, removed the screws from the bottom, pried the switch open, and pulled out the rubber diaphragm. No gunk. Huh… there goes that theory. I reassembled it, put it back in place, reconnected it to the house wiring, flipped the circuit back on, and went back out there.
After an hour of futzing with the two adjustment screws, I had it cycling pretty reliably. The radical change in pressure had shaken loose some rust and corrosion, but hell, it’s water, right?
Punchline to the story? Sometime between the pipes freezing on Wednesday morning and this Thursday afternoon, we ran out of propane. The company that we’d contacted to refill the tank every 2 months, somehow lost our account. So, after all this hoopla, I still don’t get a hot shower.
A few things I’ve learned from this:
- The pressure switch is a really simple and elegant electo-mechanical device.
- Having the propane hot water heater and well tanks in the same shed is a poor idea. Too little ventilation and the thermocouple on the water heater will burn out. Too much and the pipes/tank/switch will freeze in the winter.
- We really could survive here with very little from the outside (no, we’re not survivalists). While it’d degrade our quality of life some, we could boil water from the creek on the wood stove.
- 3 conductor 10 gauge romex is a pain in the butt, in enclosed spaces.
- Sometimes, even paying someone to do it doesn’t mean it’s going to get done. Just do it yourself, city boy.
A couple helpful links:
http://pumpsandtanks.com/faq_page.htm
http://www.inspect-ny.com/water/Water_Pump_Control_Repair.htm
A good short article on urban farming including poultry and beekeeping in San Francisco, California. We hope to get bees in the future ourselves.
“Each morning when Colin Phipps’ two young sons get up, they run outside to the chicken coop to gather eggs for breakfast. Next year, the family is planning on expanding their farm by adding a little pig or a hutch of rabbits. Just another day in rural California? Not exactly. Phipps lives in a row house in Bernal Heights — one of the city’s many high-density, single-family neighborhoods. The houses here tend to be more like cottages, the backyards downright postage stamp-sized. Yet Phipps is not alone.”
Urban Farming: Back to the land in your tiny backyard
First Snow of Winter
This is our first full winter will all the animals. The chickens weren’t out in the coop until this spring/summer and while we brought Molly, our first dairy goat, home in February 2008 we had snow but temperatures weren’t terribly low. With the weather dropping in to the teens over the past week this is how we’ve been managing to keep everyone comfortable:
Chickens
I let the chickens out when the temperature was around freezing on Sunday but they did not show any interest in getting their feet cold. They would actually fly from object to object to avoid the snow even though it was only 3 inches deep or so. They spent most of the day roosting on the potato boxes that are being stored next to the far side of the house. Unbeknown to us at the time we placed them on either side of the dryer vent. The chickens happily roosted on the boxes keeping toasty warm as I do the week’s laundry on Sundays. A few took up playing in the dirt in the front flower bed under the eaves. I’ve kept them indoors the last few days with temperatures in the teens and 20’s as I’m concerned about frost bite since most of our’s are single comb breeds.
Their coop has a radiant heater that normally adds approximately 5 degrees to the internal coop temperature. We’ve sealed up some of the ventilation on the coop to preserve more heat but it’s also leading to more ammonia build up from their waste so we may have to revisit that. We get approximately another 5 degress due to practicing “deep litter”. That essentially means the litter in the coop is allowed to breakdown in place and fresh litter is added on top. As the litter breaks down it generates heat. The chickens had managed to bury their thermometer this fall and it was registering temperatures of 80 to 100 degress in the litter when outside temperatures were in the 60’s.
Since our coop is sized for free range chickens it’s not actually large enough to keep the chickens indoors at all times. We have to be careful about our decisions to do so due to the potential for ammonia build up which will cause respiratory illnesses.
The only other concern for any animal is access to fresh water. Due to the internal coop temperatures that’s only been a problem on the night we got down to 14F. The water in the bottom of their metal waterer froze blocking the rest of the water. Running the waterer in hot water the following morning and refilling with warm water fixed the problem and it hasn’t reoccured, but we haven’t seen temperatures that low again yet.
The chickens always have access to pellet food in their coop which under normal circumstances they eat little of. Additionally during these cold spells I’m giving them scratch grains which are basically chicken junk food. It has the effect of giving them a bit more energy and when sprinkled in the coop, encourages them to turn the bedding.
Goats
As per my previous post, we put coats on the goats. Since then we haven’t seen any evidence that they are suffering from the cold. They are cold hardy animals and will warm each other. They prefer not to be in the elements anyway and will stay in their shelter so they are not affected by the wet or snow. They have room to sleep and relieve themselves in different areas in their shelter and their bed area is protected from drafts by an additional wall/roof. Their hay manager is in the shelter as well, giving them no reason to leave normally. They have a 17 gallon plastic water trough that has been forming a thin layer of ice on it over night on only the coldest nights (generally 20 or below). We break the ice and replace a portion of the water with hot tap water a minimum of twice a day.
The goat “shed” is in a heavily wooded area and located underneath a large old evergreen which appears to have the affect of sheltering them and their yard from strong winds and snow fall as well. This wasn’t entirely intentional, but we’ll take it just the same.
The goats always have free access to hay and minerals/vitamins but we are also giving them some additional grains during the inclement weather. Normally grains are given when milking. We are giving them grains now to get them some more concentrated energy to help them in keeping themselves warm.
I was really disappointed when I found out that 2008’s Slow Food Nation event was going to be held in San Francisco only because we’d moved from the Bay Area ourselves just a year prior. I wanted to attend!
We’ve been members of Slow Food for the last two years. For the most part it’s primarily meant making a small financial contribution to the organization. This last year we were able to attend a Slow Food gathering for our (new) local convivium here in Snoqualamie Valley. I’m really glad to see that our area has it’s own convivium actually, most of the active ones are surrounding large urban areas (Seattle, San Francisco, etc). While I think it’s quite important for urban dwellers (as we once were) to reflect on these topics as they certainly have specific challenges, I also think it’s great for those of us in the agricultural regions that often supply these large urban areas to kind of get out and celebrate what we contribute to the system.
This article spotlights the Victory Garden put in place for the Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. I can definitely see the logic for taking these large evenets to “the big city” (better audience for change and larger exposure) but I hope they don’t entirely lose track of their roots. I’m also not trying to deny those determined urban farmers, I want to see more of them!
“Farm aid, the annual concert dedicated to raising funds for the American family farmer, has been held in such agricultural strongholds as Manor, Texas, and Ames, Iowa. But the most recent venue, the distinctly nonrural borough of Manhattan, is not as incongruous as it seems. With its estimated 600 small-scale farms (which are often large-scale vegetable gardens), New York City is part of an urban agricultural boom in the U.S., where rising food and fuel prices are making city farming seem less and less outlandish. In July volunteers began transforming the front lawns of San Francisco’s city hall into the first edible offerings on that site since 1943, when civilians across the country were encouraged to aid the war effort by growing victory gardens.”
TIME: Inner-City Farms
Molly modeling her coat
We’ve been checking on the goats several times a day with the frequency increasing as the temperatures have dipped to record lows. Molly, our Oberhassli, has a very thick coat (and a layer of fat on account of being a bit spoiled) that seems to be serving her quite well. I haven’t noticed any signs that she’s bothered by the cold. Obsidian, our Nubian, however kidded this year and we milked her until a few weeks ago. She’s been putting on weight and is probably at about her ideal weight, but doesn’t have quite the thick coat that Molly does. We’ve noticed her shivering when we are up to visit them which has worried me. When we aren’t around they spend inclement weather in their “barn” and they sleep together to warm each other, but when she comes in to the yard she starts shivering.
I had seen many reference to goats in coats or sweaters in the winter. Many folks simply use regular human clothes for them with relative success. I decided with this weather that I would feel better if Obie had a coat. Due to our tendency to hoard garish and outlandish scrap fabrics on discount for various Burning Man related projects I knew that we had at least some scraps of fleece in the stash. Fortunately I happened upon several yards of a tie-dye like pattern that Bengt had purchased and quickly guilted him out of it in order to make goat coats.
I used this link as a start, although I think my “design” is simpler: http://kinne.net/goatcoat.htm
I made no darts and no belly flaps. I did use the recommendation to make the ties high on
Molly and Obsidian playing in their coats
one side so they’d be under the coat and less likely to snag or be pulled on though. I left a vent in the front seam to allow for more movement while not sacraficing length. The ties were double stitched and I did a X reinforcement, they shouldn’t come loose easily. They are simply tied in a square knot off to the girl’s side. The ties themsleves are made of scrap fleece in the hopes that it would be more comfortable than alternatives.
Molly’s ended up being a little short (neck to tail), but otherwise they seem to fit well. We did two fittings before I sewed them. I think it worked out pretty well for probably 30 minutes worth of work. We’ll see how clean they actually keep them. The fleece should wash up well, but I don’t have enough fabric to make a second set so I can swap them for washing while it remains cold.
Back from vacation and our first snow of the winter.
Audio only version: http://www.miscfarm.com/2008/12/14/farm-report-audio-only-5/
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This may seem like a bit of a non sequitur, but one of the motivations for us around raising our own animals is because of concerns for commerical animal treatment. We half-jokingly refer to commercially raised products as cruelty-X, for example “cruelty chicken”, “cruelty beef”, and on rarer occasions “cruelty carrots” (yes, in most cases that’s a joke). It wasn’t a conscious decision, but started occuring in our conversation as we became more eduated about commercial operations (including organics unfortunately!). Yet it remains as a regular reminder when we make decisions to go the “easy route” and disregard, or fail to research, the origins of the product of choice. This article is enlightening because it also demonstrates how far reaching commercial livestock products are. I didn’t realize that there were animal products in the laudry aisle. The feel of fabric softeners has never appealed to me, but now I have another reason to avoid it.
“Dihydrogenated tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride
A derivative of rendered fat from cattle, sheep, and horses. Just boil it down and mix with ammonium (NH4). After a series of chemical pit stops, out comes a quaternary ammonium compound, or quat—a positive ion in which the hydrogen is replaced by long-chain organic molecules. Quats effectively coat your clothing with lipids, making the fibers soft to the touch. These fats also make fabric a bit less absorbent—don’t use on towels or cloth diapers—and the positive charge neutralizes static electricity. There are a few other quats in Downy, with easily pronounceable names like 1-methyl-1-tallowamidoethyl-2 -tallowimidazolinium methylsulfate.”
What’s Inside — Downy Coats Briefs With Horse Fat
We often relate to two movements which are similarly focused but opposite directions in our adventure. One is “urban farming” and the other is “homesteading” or “back-to-the-land”. This is a great article about real people’s experiences in urban poultry farming. Even though I don’t think it would change our decisions, I wish I had known more about this when we were living a more sub/urban life. One of the biggest revelations for me, out of our experiences to date, really is just how incredibly easy it is to keep chickens.
“For Brooklyn real-estate agent Maria Mackin, the obsession started five years ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country. She, her husband and three children—now 17, 13 and 11—sat down for brunch at a local bed-and-breakfast, and suddenly the chef realized she’d run out of eggs. “She said, ‘Oh goodness! I’ll have to go out to the garden and get some more’,” Mackin recalls. “She cooked them up and they were delicious.” Mackin and her husband, Declan Walsh, looked at each other, and it didn’t take long for the idea to register: Could we have chickens too? They finished their brunch and convinced the bed-and-breakfast owner, a Mennonite celery farmer, to sell them four chickens. They packed them in a little nest in the back of their Plymouth Voyager minivan and headed back to Brooklyn.”
Newsweek: The New Coop de Ville
I’m sure you are familiar with the phrase, ‘more money than sense’? That appears to be my approach towards gardening.
In California I had picked my last apartment based on the fact that it had a patio, roughly as big as my one bedroom apartment’s livingroom, that got plenty of sun. That was the extent of my gardening experience going into this. I managed to successfully grow tomatoes, peas, peppers, herbs, and a few other random items in the abundant california sun in little containers from starts purchased at the local nursery. Gardening is easy, right?
I love our animals, but when we first moved I was more excited by the prospect of having dirt, real dirt, than anything else. I couldn’t wait to dig up swathes of it and plant to my heart’s content. Since we moved in the winter I had to appease myself with a local CSA and began counting down the days 
until spring and the farmer’s markets began to open. I bought numerous books on gardening including the well regarded Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening
. I attempted to pour over these books but they got so clinical and prescriptive that I abandoned most attempts to put their advice in to action. I felt like gardening should just be in your blood… or something.
I spent the winter pouring over the catalog at Seed Savers Exchange picking out every heirloom, organic seed that I fancied. Through my snow crusted view, I was unphased. I had ordered five kinds of corn, which can’t be planted together… oh. I had ordered four kinds of melons, which are generally left to the experts to grow around here… oh. My order arrived with a couple hundred dollar price tag and a large reality check.
When the weather started warming up I started making designs on where I was going to put my little garden and we purchased a walk-behind tiller and bags of organic compost. Once warm enough we tilled up a roughly 15 by 20 foot patch in the middle of the backyard. We didn’t bother removing the sod first because green stuff is good, right?
When the winter stretched on strangely, we got 4 inches of snow in April, I got paranoid and dismissed guidances about last frost dates and such things and ended up waiting until June to plant. Eager to get started I purchased warming mats, grow lights, and seed trays and set about trying to start my wide variety of seeds in the protection of the garage. Most of the seedlings did miserably being poorly suited. A few did well enough, mostly tomatoes, and in an act of desperation I moved them in to the house and on to the kitchen counter. Our kitchen has several large skylights and is 
closest to the woodstove and the remaining seedlings rocketed up towards the natural light. I’ve since learned that technology (at least in the hand of an amateur) is no match for a warm kitchen and good ol’ sunlight.
Eventually everything was transplanted to the garden, but in my overzealousness in all things gardening I had many more seedlings than I had space in my little garden. Out came the containers and a trip to the garden store to purchase lots more potting soil to accomodate the overflow.
Our harvest the first year was acceptable but I supplemented my lack of planning by purchasing starts in several cases and didn’t utilize the garden space very well. The summer was mild and had a delayed start which made it challenging for many staples (like tomatoes). Late summer I decided to purchase a small greenhouse and a small heater for seed starting in the spring and managed to successfully pull some of my tomato plants through the fall and early winter and still get a moderate harvest.
I’ve since found the Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guide 
which is much more suited to my unstructured gardening approach with month by month guides on what to plant, varieties for the region, and what to focus on for the month.
I’ve learned a lot about pests, weed suppression, and what to plant already and have largely avoided any large investments in the garden my second year out. I still need to learn better pest and disease maangemengt and how to better utilize space before we start identifying an area to build an expanded garden.
We had planned to get chickens our first year and wait until the following spring to get a goat. I had emailed around looking for where to get chicks since we weren’t planning to get enough to form a full order from a hatchery. In conversations with “Farmer Joe” on where to get chickens the topic took a turn and we were discussing goats. He had recommended them to me to help clear blackberry bushes that are so pervasive in the area and I had admitted we wanted to get a dairy goat eventually. I had already been doing my research in anticipation relying heavily on http://www.fiascofarm.com, Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats
, and even The Goat Handbook
.
A few days later Joe sent me an email suggesting that we could “borrow” a goat he would be getting. Joe would be traveling to Oregon to pick up some goats from a relative that could no longer keep them. He knew there was a dairy breed in the mix and that she might have been bred and therefore pregnant. He offered to let us “borrow” the goat in the hopes that she would kid (have a baby goat) and be ready for milking. We could see how we felt about milking. He insisted that we could return her at any time if we decided we weren’t so keen on the process. I was thrilled and thought, ‘Loaner goat! Why not!?’ and quickly called Bengt in California to get his blessing. He agreed it seemed like a foolproof plan so I called Joe back and arranged to pick up the goat in a couple weeks. We needed a goat structure first!
We had decided we would keep the structure simple and build it ourselves. We had done a back-of-the-napkin plan and I estimated it would cost us around $400 dollars to build an 8 foot by 16 foot structure using plywood and 4×4 posts. We have since learned to have a *real* plan before undertaking any structures in the future. We started scouting our heavily wooded property for a location for the structure. We wanted something relatively level which is not entirely easy on a property that is on the side of a valley. We also knew it would not have running water or electricity in all likelihood so it needed to be accessible by foot or truck. The closer it was to the house, the more likely we could put in either of those systems in the future.
After tromping around in the woods for half a day, Bengt climbed up on a fallen tree and announced he’d found our location. It was perfect. Just up the old logging road from the house, only a few yards back from the back yard, but far enough that through the trees you couldn’t actually see it. The only catch was that there was a 62 year old tree (I counted!) that had fallen across the logical path from the road to the mostly clear spot. Bengt was thrilled to give his new chain saw its first real trial.
The first weekend was spent working on the tree to open up the pathway to the clearing. We hauled some good firewood out of there. The second and part of the third weekend were putting up our poorly preconceived structure. We, of course, u
nderestimated the lumber necessary and found our happy-go-lucky approach to building design didn’t always work out as we had thought it would. We ended up spending more on the order of $600 in building the structure, partly on our underestimation of the number of corrugated roof panels it takes. After some long days we felt we had something good enough to manage for now. We then undertook the arduous task of putting up fencing. Now that is something that someone should create an instructional video for!
We had never put up fencing in our lives, let alone 150 feet of 4 foot high braided non-climbing horse fence. We had t-posts, a t-post driver, a roll of fencing wire and the foolish determination that only comes with not having any idea what you are actually doing. We wrestled that roll of fencing, pulled the fencing, and tied the fencing coming out of the whole afternoon sorer and more exhausted than we’d ever been, and not particularly confident that the mess we’d made would actually contain a wily goat. They are known for being hard on fences and good escape artists.
At this point we didn’t have a gate, we’d left room for it, but it was now time to pick up the goat we had decreed to be named Molly after Molly from Fiasco Farm. We threw down a moderate layer of white shavings for bedding and put up a couple bucket hooks to take flat-back buckets for water and food. We had already picked up a bale of alfalfa and had it down in the garage. We slapped up a pallet where the gate would be and Bengt secured it as best he could to the fence posts and corner of the goat structure. We thought it would hold her until the following weekend when we could put up a gate. We dashed off to pick up Molly and drove her home in the back of our “farm truck”, a ‘94 Land Rover Discovery.
We settled Molly in and retired back to the house eager to t
ake a breather and rest after a couple of long weekends putting together her structure. As I’m sitting in the living room lazily looking out the living room picture window I see something… a deer?… Oh no… “Goat!” I shouted. “Goat! Molly’s in the front yard!” I shouted to Bengt in the kitchen. We both jumped up in a panic and ran out the front door just as Molly was sauntering up to the front door casually as if to say, ‘I’ll live here too, kthxbye.’ We broke down in the giggles that come easily when you are exhausted, while we walked Molly back up to her new home. Our only solution was to secure her in her structure by attaching a sheet of plywood over the door way. I spent the week using a feed bucket to climb up on in order to pitch myself over the short wall to change her food and water. We finished the gate the next weekend.
We became immediately smitten with Molly, her lopsided grin and gentle demeanor. Any idea that we might “return” her quickly vanished. She didn’t end up kidding that season, but she’s earned her place in our family. She is of the Oberhasli breed and we are guessing that she was approximately 2 years old when we got her.
Goats aren’t solitary creatures, we eventually learned, and while Molly never complained too much they are happier in herds, so that necessitated… more goats!
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