We’d located the old garden plot next to the driveway, but it had been quite some time since it had been tended to.

The front-tine tiller wasn’t exactly cutting it. Luckily, we saw an ad in the local paper for garden tilling. Upon calling, it turns out it’s our neighbor (on the NW corner) and he stopped by 5 minutes later to take a look at the spot we wanted tilled.

The next day he showed up on a sub-compact John Deere tractor with a 5′ tiller, and proceeded to till up a nice big garden plot for us.

4 rows planted so far, Brassicas (kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage), peas, beets, tomatoes, lettuce and probably more stuff that I can’t remember at the moment.

The peas are trellised with a few T-posts and some twine.  The Tomatoes are being trellised with more T-posts, a high-tensile wire up top, with twine strung down to each plant (all 100 of them).

Oh, and there are a few of these spiffy Honeycrisp apple trees, it’s only fitting, as they are the state fruit of Minnesota.

So that’s what we’ve been up to around here in the past few days.

It must be spring, cause we got our first batch of chicks.

Hard to believe these little peeping puffballs will be weighing in at 6# in 6-7 weeks.
There are only 50 chicks in the first batch, we’re hoping to gauge interest with these chickens. We need to figure out how much interest there is, what size birds our customer prefer, etc.

Much better to figure that stuff out with 50 birds instead of 5000.

So there they are. Cute chicks hanging out under their hover brooder and being cute for at least for another week, at which point they enter their “awkward teenager” phase and their cuteness evaporates.

Ok, so this is a pretty minor update, no major overhauls or anything.

Even with the adjustments that I did last time with the Mega-waterer, we still had a problem with excess moisture making it’s way into the bedding. It’s not that the nipples were leaking, but the chickens weren’t the most efficient drinkers.  The chickens peck at the nipple to release water.  Unfortunately, they don’t drink every drop that they release, and a few drops end up falling down into the bedding.

A few drops isn’t a big deal, but multiply those few drops by 50 chickens drinking several times per day, and you end up with enough water to cause a problem. Ideally I could just get smarter chickens that would figure out how to drink more efficiently, but chickens aren’t exactly known for their mental prowess.

If only I could come up with some sort of pan to catch the drips that’s slightly larger than the (21″ diameter) barrel.

Say maybe a 24″ water heater pan?

$9 and done.

Despite the best efforts of a flock of ornery chickens, the bedding remains dry, the drain pan stays just damp.

Oh, and having just been through one of the longest Minnesota winters on record, I’m happy to report that the Mega-waterer (in all it’s iterations) performed admirably in below-freezing temperatures.  Throw a stock-tank heater in there and nary a single frozen nipple was witnessed all winter long.

As I wrote about before, we’ve been hard at work getting our farmers market trailer up and running.  It’s nearly there.

After a lot of strategic cutting, caulking and cursing the dairyboard walls and ceiling are all finished. The linoleum floors are all done too. Very spiffy.

Meanwhile, up in the nose of the trailer, the magic happens. That’s a nice little electrical outlet (110v) and light that we’ll use to power our freezer and refrigerator.

There is a corresponding outlet on the outside of the trailer that allows us to plug in to a power source with an extension cord.
While we’re on the road we are supposed to be plugged into a generator, so the freezers are always on. We got our hands on a nice little Honda generator, but we’ve got nowhere to put it while on the road.

But after one sheet of expanded steel, two pieces of angle iron and some crappy welding (mine), we’ve got a place to put just such a generator.

After being postponed once last week due to 14″ of snow, we finally got our appointment with the MDA inspector. She spent approximately 5 seconds looking at the trailer and gave it her stamp of approval. She jotted down the make and model of our fridge and freezer, took my $85 check and issued our Mobile Retail Food Handlers License.

And with that, we’re ready for market and moving on down the to-do list.

This morning I noticed a bunch of small birds flitting about over the neighbors pond across the road.

After a while my curiosity got the better of me, so I walked down to the road to see if I could get a better look. They were still too small, too fast, and too far away to identify.
But I took a few shots with the telephoto lens.

Sure enough, blue bodies, white bellies, slightly forked tail. The tree swallows have arrived.
I hope they all stick around, build nests, and keep eating flies.

Encouraging these little birds to hang around is our form of Eco-friendly fly control.  Instead of treating our cattle with a broad-spectrum insecticide that kills beneficial insects as well as flies, we build birdhouses. Tree swallows eat flying insects, and a lot of them.  The beneficial insects, like dung beetles are unharmed, and through their natural dung-burying behavior, also help to reduce the number of flies.

Well, it’s finally decided to be spring here in Minnesota. It hit 79° here today, a darn sight better than the snow we got just a few days ago.

Anyhow there was also another hay auction this Saturday, and much like the weather, the results were much improved.

Apparently word got out that hay prices went sky-high last time, so anybody with any hay sitting around made darn sure to truck it over to the co-op and get in on the last auction of the season. Last time there were around 40 lots for sale, this time there were just over 100.

What a difference some high prices can make.

Anyway, we’ve been buying some hay from a local guy, and paying $230/ton for it. It’s higher than we’d like, but the hay is really pretty nice stuff. Nicer than we need really. They’re 1600# round bales of grass/alfalfa mix, so they end up costing us about $180/bale. That’s pretty high, but then again they’re much bigger bales than almost anything else around here.

I figure that most round bales up here are around 1100#, so any round bales I buy would need to no higher than $125/bale to be a better deal than what we’d been buying.

Lucky me, most round bales were going for around $125, although the first lots that I saw sell were pretty nice hay. That meant that the not-so-nice looking hay further down the line would be even cheaper…

Like the first lot of 6 bales I bought for $55/bale.

Let me first explain that I am the grandson of one Julius H. Johnmeyer, a man who attended many auctions, and was known to bring home many unexpected (and unneeded?) things because “it went too cheap.”

This was not the best hay I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t exactly the worst either, but wasn’t about to just stand there and just let it go for $50.

On down the line a bit I managed to snag 11 more round bales (better hay this time) for $95/bale. Three or four lots went for about the same price, so the dramatic shift in the weather seems to have had a dramatic effect on the bidding.

So we bought some hay, just have to go pick it all up tomorrow when the truck and trailer get here.

Oh, and I’ve got to get all these Minnesotans to figure out that my name isn’t “John Meyer” I think I’ve devised a clever strategy whereby I’ll spell out my name “Joh-nme-yer” We’ll see how it goes.

So the UPS guy had quite a struggle the other day.  It was the big 50lb box that we’ve been waiting for.

Something to make all that fence we have to build go a little bit smoother.

A very fancy new post driver. Now we already have two post drivers, but this one is a bit different. It’s a propane-powered post driving maniac. You see, we like using well drill pipe for our fence corner and gate posts. Drill pipe is priced similarly to treated wood posts, but it’ll probably last longer, and because you can weld braces (and gate hinges) on, it makes stronger fences. Plus, if you drive them into the ground you can string up wires right away, which speeds up the fence-building process quite a bit.

The big problem with drill pipe is driving it in the ground. Driving it with a normal t-post driver isn’t exactly a possibility. Tractor-mounted fence post drivers are too expensive and too hard to find. There are hydraulic fence post drivers, but they require a separate hydraulic power source (expensive). Pneumatic fence post drivers look like a pretty good option, as they’re cheap and only require a gasoline-powered air compressor to run them. The problem is that the ones I’ve seen only fit one narrow range of post size. You’d have to own several pneumatic post drivers to have all your post sizes covered.

That left us with the Tippman propane hammer. It uses little propane cylinders, which are easy enough to find, and they claim that it’ll drive darn near anything under 3.5″ in diameter, right down to 1/2″ grounding rods.

So we got the propane hammer in and unboxed, and quickly noticed a bit of a problem. All the material we’d seen showed that it used the standard 14.1oz propane tanks that your normal propane torch uses. This was obviously not the case any longer. They apparently saw fit to change the whole thing to only use 16.9oz propane tanks, which are apparently a new thing in the propane-torch world. I’ve never seen them before, but since we needed them to use the post driver, it was off to the hardware store.

Turns out no hardware stores have these mythical 16.9oz propane tanks. The 14.1oz tanks are everywhere, but they’re too tall to fit in the redesigned post driver, so we’re stuck looking in vain for the new “fat boy” tanks.

Fortunately, we found out that a standard Coleman camp-stove 16.4oz propane tank works just fine.

This is actually makes the redesign a good thing, because every sporting goods store is just filthy with the Coleman tanks, and they’re usually dirt cheap. It sure would be nice if Tippman went ahead and told you up front that the 16.4oz tanks will work.

Anyway, after finding the right propane cylinders and adjusting the pressure, it was time to take it out in the field and see if it would actually work. I’ve seen video of the pneumatic post-drivers pounding in a drill-pipe, so I was fairly sure the propane hammer would work, but you never know until you try it.

It worked out pretty darn well.

Amidst the flurry of activity that is a new farm in the beginning of spring, we have managed to get our hands on a new trailer.

It’s a pretty basic 6′x10′ enclosed trailer, and it ought to work just fine for our purposes.  Unfortunately, they don’t exactly sell them all done up in a way that’ll pass muster with the MDA.  We’ve got a bit of work to do to get the trailer up to snuff.

The inside walls are finished in Luan, with some little luan strips covering up the gaps where the panels meet. That’s all well and good, but the MDA requires a non-porous easily-cleaned surface.
In order to get this new non-porous surface to go on smoothly, I promptly broke out some tools and proceeded to tear up the nice new trailer.

With all the luan strips out of the way, the FSB (or dairyboard) can go on a bit easier.  We’re installing the diaryboard over the luan panels with plenty of construction adhesive and several stainless-steel screws per panel.  I bought several packages of the pound-in plastic rivets for fastening dairyboard, but quickly decided that it’d be a pain in the butt to have to drill a hole for every fastener I wanted to put in.  Stainless self-tapping sheet metal screws go in much faster, and being stainless, are just dandy for a food facility.

It’s less than halfway done, but we’ve got the bulk of the ceiling done, which is the hard part. Dairyboard is a real pain to work with, because it’s relatively heavy for something so thin. That means that if you ever try to pick it up above your head, it does it’s best to curl down around you from all 4 corners. Putting dairyboard up on a ceiling is most certainly a two-man job.  Cutting diaryboard isn’t much easier.  It has too much fiber (FRP stands for Fiber Reinforced Plastic) to score and snap easily, and cutting thin plastic with a circular saw is always a crap shoot.  I quickly settled on the electric power shears, which cut through the stuff like butter.

So, that’s some stuff I’ve been doing.

Now we’ve just got to finish up the diaryboard, put linoleum on the floor, get it wired up with a 110v outlet and light, get a generator, and get it all inspected.

No sweat.

Well it’s finally starting to thaw out around here (he typed as snow fell).

The cows are stuck, for now, in the only two lots with a good enough fence to hold them. It’s quickly turning into a knee-deep muddy mess.

The frost has finally left the ground, enabling us to do lots of things that we’ve wanted to do all winter.

Like pull up the “For Sale” sign that’s been frozen into the ground all winter.

And even do a little groundbreaking of the garden plot.

It hasn’t been used in a decade, so it’s going to be slow going.