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| the house in 2004 |
My husband, Jason, and I bought a house and 7 1/2 acres in Jack County, Texas in late 2001. The climate is semi arid with around 20 inches of rain a year. We live on top of a windy rocky hill in a native grass (Little Bluestem) cattle pasture. We thought, hey, these are perfect farming conditions! Here's a brief history of the place so far...
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| the Araucanas |
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| mixed Cochin group |
Our goal was to try to live off of our little plot of land as much as is possible. The chicken house came first in the fall of 2002. The chickens free range most of the time - they are only locked up in the spring when the garden plants are little. We have Araucanas (Easter egg chickens), Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds and some neat white chickens with black spots that we haven't been able to identify. In the spring of 2010, we added a Cochin rooster and a group of little chickens (2 are Cochin hens) to our flock.
Gardening vegetables has taken a long time for us to succeed at - at least 4 years! Our first spot became so hot and dry during the summer, even the okra shriveled. We started squares (as in Square Foot Gardening) in various spots in the yard a couple of years ago. This has proved the best way up here on a dry rocky hill! This growing season (2010) we have raised onions, tomatoes, beets, garlic, swiss chard, collard greens, burgundy beans, pole beans, green beans, various lettuces, Yukon Gold potatoes, Japanese eggplants, yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash and spaghetti squash. Some crops were more successful than others! Our experiment this year was to plant an Italian squash called Trombetta di Albenga. My parents have been looking for years for a squash they grew called 'Zuchetta'. I finally found a similar squash that I thought may be the one they were looking for (it turned out that this still wasn't it)! I found some seed from Renee's Garden and planted them along our yard fence. Trombetta climb and grow and produce huge squash that you can use like yellow squash, zucchini or butternut - depending on how big you let it get. This is our favorite veggie to photograph!
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| trombettas! |
In August of 2009, we decided to get some dairy goats. Thinking it would be best to start small, we bought 3 little Nigerian Dwarf does - Minnie, Miracle and Maisie. These girls taught us a lot about keeping goats, including how to have a birth fiasco. However, I finally decided that they were just too little to milk! So we sold them in May and bought a beautiful Alpine doe named Lacey in milk. For her companion, we got a Nubian/Saanen cross and named her Daisy. We also kept Miracle's little crippled wether, Magic. So now our little goat herd has three members.
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| Liam and the Nigerians |
We also have a couple of guineas running around, various cats and a border collie/black lab named Shadow. That's all the livestock we have for now. I'm hoping to fence off our property from my dad's neighboring cow pasture this winter, so that I can improve our pasture and add some more critters (including my horse, Katie).
Our biggest challenge up here is water. When we moved here, there were about 7 dry wells were the previous owners searched for a water source. They finally dug a pond about 500 feet from the house and we had decided to use the pond water for our needs. For the first couple of years, the pond worked fine. A submersible pump was placed in the pond and it pumped water up to the 'wellhouse' and then into our house. Then it stopped raining. One year we had 13 inches of rain! During the winter of 2008, we had no measurable rainfall for six months straight. Mesquite trees even died that winter! We lost 3 trees in our yard. The pond would get too low and we'd have to turn off the pump or risk burning out the motor when air got into it. After a few month of having to bucket water into toilets, taking cat baths and taking our laundry down to my parents' we started looking for an alternative.
In July of 2009, we hired Greg at The Rainwell in Arlington to set us up a rainwater catch system for our roof. First we had 6" gutters installed on the house to carry all the rainwater to the north side where the tanks were located. Greg installed two 3,000 gallon tanks so that the gutters would take rainwater into the tanks and then a pump in the 'wellhouse' would bring the water into the house. Our original plan was to keep the pond water flowing to our outside water faucets and to hook our tank water to the pipe coming into the house. We knew where the pipe was supposed to come into the house, so Jason started digging to find it. And digging and digging...for a week. After gaping holes began to fill the yard and Greg came to install the tanks, we gave up. Instead we hooked into the pipe on its way into the wellhouse. The only downside was that to use pond water, we'd have to turn off the tank water to avoid getting pond water back into the house. Luckily, we had a 1500 gallon tank that we filled with pond water before we made the switch to tank water. So we just water the yard (and garden and animals) from the pond tank. We just have to refill it occasionally.
During all this, I've been going to keep a kind of farm journal to keep track of events. I have never been able to keep one going for long, so this time, I thought blogging would keep me motivated!
