Picking Up the Poop

Well, Yonkers seems gloriously healthy again. Which also means that Yonkers is back to her ornery self. Now, any time we come near the fence, she charges at us and bats little Yeti and Yazoo out of the way with her horns.

Just when we were getting friendly with Yazoo, too.

It also didn't help when Zen got loose the other day and I ran screaming into the corral to make sure they didn't attack him. Brat!

So they're not too thrilled with me at the moment, and picking up the poop becomes more challenging. Until I get back in their good graces, I'm waiting till they wander out into their pasture and then muck out the corral.

Somebody has to do this job, so it may as well be me. After all, I'm sure standing in pure manure could harm their hooves.

Fortunately the job itself isn't too bad. Unlike human and predator poop, yak poop doesn't smell that bad to me. I guess I associate the smell with my fond memories of my pony and my aunt's horses and cows. On the annoying side, life might be easier if I had one of these:

instead of one of these:

The annoying thing with the shovel is that I end up picking up large amounts of dirt or hay along with the manure. That won't hurt my compost pile, but it does mean I fill buckets faster. Is there a correct method for mucking up a corral or stall? Advice in making this job easy would be appreciated, since my girls poop a lot!

For those of you who need to know, yak manure is much like cow manure. It comes out either in little round pellets (I'm thinking this might be baby Yeti) or bigger stuck-together piles. I prefer the piles, since they're much easier to get onto the shovel.

My garden will be happy come spring. Quantum's also working out an idea for an incinerator to burn yak and maybe even human, dog and cat manure and heat the house with it. Note that this furnace will be outdoors, with a pipe of non-poop smelling air coming in. Anything that makes this trailer warm will make me a happy camper!

Water Rights and Wrongs: What's a New Farmer to Do?

The 20 or so 2-liter soda and Gatorade bottles and one 5-gallon camping container are nearly empty again. That means I'm going to need to drive all the way to town to our rented apartment and fill them up, lug them back into my truck and drive back home again. 10 miles of driving, and the gas to do that. At least an hour of time.

It seems silly when the stream on our land is flowing beautifully. All I should have to do is head over the bank with a bucket or two and carry it back up.

But of course there are the cooties and the rules.

The "Cooties"

In the process of getting onto our land, we figured we should have our stream water tested. After all, I know there are all kinds of nasty bacteria that hang out in water. Last thing I need is to end up with some icky bug and need to go to the hospital. I can't afford a hospital. I can't afford a day where I can't do the work of making our trailers and farm ready for winter.

Quantum calls up a water testing lab to find out how much it'll be. "For which test?" the lady says, "we have over 200 different tests that we can do." Two hundred? It boggles the brain. "Really, we just want to know if our water is safe to drink," Quantum says. She asks a few questions about our land, mentions the Latin names of a few types of bacteria, then suggests that we should just boil our water and not worry about testing it.

While I appreciate the savings, I'd sorta like to know what kind of cooties are hanging out in our water, if any. I'm daunted by the idea of needing to boil every cup and gallon of water that we're going to drink or otherwise use for the rest of our lives on this land. The idea of doing that is worse than the hard work it'll take to haul it out of the stream. Not to mention the energy cost of heating it.

Then there's the question of whether I need to boil the water for all our critters.  For my kitties and dog, I'd prefer they're drinking water that's as purified as whatever we're drinking ourselves. But for the yaks? After all, these girls suck down a few gallons each every day. Besides, deer and bobcats and who knows what other critters drink from the stream all the time. Cattle grazed here for years. Do I really need to boil water for the yaks?

But for right now, with Yonkers only just in recovery from pneumonia, I guess its best to use the cleanest water I can get.

When I had my Cactus War and moved a majority of cacti away from the puppy's tender feet, I of course had to water the poor buggers. For that I wasn't willing to use water I'd carted all the way from town. So I went down to the stream with a bucket. Well not only did I catch a mess of algae, but I also got some sort of wiggly thing in my bucket. Maybe it was a dragonfly nymph? So now I have to consider not only boiling the water, but filtering it as well. I know protein in your diet is good, but ... maybe not that - after all I'm trying to make water, not SOUP!

A buddy of mine has helpfully sent me the URLs for a couple water filtration/purification systems. Some of them are even solar powered. Unfortunately they also cost money. So not happening just yet.

The Rules

Until you move to Colorado or some other semi-desert state, you've probably never heard of anything called Water Rights. Out here they're absolutely wacky about this stuff. And the laws regarding how it works are such a disaster that most folks hire water rights lawyers just to unravel the whole mess for them.

Now the funny thing, is that the spring from which this creek starts, is directly on our land. So I own my land, but according to the deed and the idiots who make the laws, I don't own the water on my land. Make sense? No, not to me either.

Here's how crazy the government and rules lawyers get about this: Some people have been told they can't even catch rainwater. That's right, RAIN water. Water that falls from the damned sky. Water whose molecules could have originated in the Pacific Ocean or Canada or Bangladesh for all we know.

According to our realtor, we can't put a pump in our stream. (Nothing that I know of stops me from building a small container, hand-carrying water into it, and then pumping that water up the hill to our trailer, but I'm not going to push things by suggesting it to the Powers That Be.)  We can't change the stream in any way. Can't dam it (not that we'd want to) can't deepen it. Can't use it to irrigate our land (at least not if we pump it from the stream).

On the other hand there's no problem with us grazing yaks on the land and letting them drink the water.

Meanwhile, this isn't just my problem, but a problem for land owners all over the state.

From what I'm told, many "old" families have bought land, sold off the land without the water rights, and basically screwed over the new landowners, often selling them back the water on their own land. And this has been going on for years. Sounds a bit sleazy and a lot confusing to me.

Granted I'm a bit biased, but I think this situation is ridiculous. Maybe I'd think differently if I was someone who'd inherited the water rights to everyone else's land. However I'd like to think that wouldn't be my attitude.

To me, things like clean water and clean air are a basic human right. And a basic animal right, for that matter. The idea of selling water, like the idea of selling air horrifies me. But no doubt, unless we make a change, the world is headed that way.

If you care about your water, consider signing the petition. If you have a blog, join Blog Action Day 2010 Water.

Change.org|Start Petition

Its a ...Dri! (Girl)

Yesterday we got the call we'd been looking forward to and dreading.  Looking forward, because we're thrilled to have our yaks.  Dreading because we're still scrambling to get packed, fix up our two trailers and trucks and get the heck out to our land.  We were hoping to already be in Colorado by the time she was born.

HCC Yeti-Starr was born around noon (Colorado time) on April 12th.  She's completely adorable.  Black with a little white star on her forehead.  The sellers were kind enough to send us some photos.

Here's Yonkers with Yeti-Starr.  Isn't Yonkers a beauty!  Regal and motherly.  You can just barely see the star that gave little Yeti the second half of her name.  (The sellers had already named a previous calf Yeti, so we had to either add to her name or change it, for registry reasons - yes there really is a yak registry.  I'll see if I can locate it at some point and add the link.)

Here's another picture of Yonkers and Yeti-Starr.  Isn't she adorable with her wobbly legs and her too little white rear hooves?  These pics were taken yesterday, so she's only a few hours old here.  I can't wait to pet her and play with her!  Of course that's going to mean making friends with Yonkers, since yak mommies are very protective.  I'm thinking a generous supply of carrots and apples. 

And here's Yeti's big sister, Yazoo.  She's about a year old now.  What a pretty young lady! Her star reminds me of a state map - is it Texas, New York, Nevada?  Or maybe just the state of bliss I'm in, contemplating the additions to our family.

Hopefully mommy won't be as protective of her now that she has the baby to worry about.  We don't know if Yonkers will be tame-able enough to milk, but we're hoping Yazoo will, by the time she's old enough to have her own babies (probably next year or so).  Meanwhile I'm going to work on making good friends with this big girl, so that she's happy being touched.

Yak Pics Have Arrived!

Finally got some pics of our girls.

This elegant cow is Yonkers.

And this sweet little girl is Yazoo.  Her star looks like either the state of Texas or the state of New York, not sure which. 

Community Gardens

Back when I lived in upstate NY, we had a community garden.  Actually, I can't say "we" since I had my own garden at my home, and only visited the place once or twice to help out a friend.  But "we" as in "our town" had a garden.  Some of the plots were wild and overgrown, others were gorgeously neat and productive.  Most were the latter.  At the time (about 20 years ago) you could buy into the collective for, I think $20/year and plant what you wanted on your small plot.

So I'm reading this How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine book (by John Jeavons) and I'm thinking of where I live now, the small condo association that we're trapped in here until March or so, which is, it seems, our set-off date for Colorado.

Since I've been living here, I've had a small container garden on my porch.  Most of the condos here have a tiny backyard, but we're living on a second story flat, and all I have is the porch.  Even so, I've managed some herbs, even a few tomatoes on this 4x8 postage stamp, without getting in the way of our entrance to the door.  Meanwhile, the homeowner's association is super strict (despite the fact that they do a crappy job of keeping up their end of the bargain) and although we allegedly do have a small area we can plant down below, we also have a psychotic downstairs neighbor who thinks she's the only one who gets to make decisions here, so we don't bother with it.

But since I was talking in my last blog about how small a plot you'd need to grow on and be at least partly self-sustaining…

If we were going to stay here (and we're not) it occurred to me that I could talk to the board about starting a small community garden collective.  There's a heck of a lot of wasted space in this place.  Several large grassy places between the buildings which are far wider than the little golf cart they use to tour around the place and conduct repairs.  Almost all the two-story places have a tiny area in front of their houses and a little back yard.

One of my neighbors has a beautiful rose garden in his front space.  The lady (and I use that term loosely) downstairs plants gaudy plastic flowers.  Truth, not fiction.  The majority of places have something in between.  Some have pretty shrubs.  Some have completely ugly and depressed looking shrubs.  Some cacti.  Some even have - yeah really - more plastic flowers. 

When I walk the dog, not one place I've noticed has veggies growing in the front space.  Don't know about the back garden-yards, since they're fenced off, but from what I gather, most are merely slabs of concrete with dirt edging them.  Actually, my girlfriend, who lives next to the lovely man with the roses, did try a couple tomatoes and peas last year.  Gardening's not her thing, but she got some tips and help from Rose-man.

But why not start a collective - to support ourselves in dealing with the homeowner's association who will no doubt find all manner of problems, as they do with most ideas?  Some of us could volunteer to help out the older folks, dig their gardens.  Those of us with less knowledge could learn from those of us with more.

It would be lovely to walk past this place, and instead of seeing ghastly rows of scraggly bushes, find glowing tomatoes, fragrant basil, carrots, peas, pole beans.

It's not a new notion; it's being done in cities worldwide.  If a food crunch comes, it's going to be efforts like this which might keep people from starving to death.  So the real funny thing is why I didn't think of it two years ago or more.

I'll pass my idea along to my girlfriend and Rose-man.  Maybe they can do it.  Me, I'm off to 40 acres in Colorado, and I need to get packing.

Compost and Saving the World at 3am

Compost.  Who would think I'd wake up at 3am and spend the next three hours researching that? 

The next book - and perhaps another I'll be recommending, is How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons.

This one is weightily technical (actually there's a "for beginners" book which I probably should have bought first) but full of information.  Actually it's not that hard to understand. 

So Mom was online when I got up, we discussed the book and she asked if it said anything about compost.  "I'm sure it does."  She had a problem with her composter smelling bad and drawing pests.

I did some research and found one particularly good site. Compostinfo.com Perhaps the most in-depth tutorial on the subject I've ever read.

If you don't know what composting is (maybe you've spent the last few decades on Mars) it's the process of turning your garden waste (the part of the plant you don't eat) and your kitchen veggie waste into stuff that your garden can use to grow more and better plants.

Right now I'm reading about the double-dig method, crop area percentages, companion planting and more. 

If this works, then I've been gardening "wrong" all my life.  Well I have always used compost, so I'm doing something right. 

The introductory section had some info that was downright scary.  Something that I only vaguely understood before:  "United States croplands are losing topsoil about 18 times faster than the soil formation rate.  This is not sustainable.  In fact, worldwide only about 42 to 84 years of topsoil remains." 

That's based on a 1994 survey.  Meaning that we're down to about 27 to 69 years.  This could happen in our lifetimes.

Remember the Dust Bowl? From 1930 till around '36 entire cities were covered in dirt that had eroded from farms in Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico.  In some places the storms lasted till 1940.  Caused by poor farming techniques and drought, these massive dust storms, called "Black Blizzards" reached as far north as Chicago and Boston.

Check out this video on Surviving the Dust Bowl.

In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck writes, "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."

If we don't get our acts together and heal the earth we're in big trouble.  The good news is that according to this book, you can grow enough food to feed yourself on as little as 1/4 or even 1/8 acre.  We can return sustainability to the Earth.

They're making some big claims, among them, their plan will let crops grow with a 67-88% reduction of water use, 100% increase in soil fertility, a 200-400% increase in caloric production per unit of area.

Quantum says, "if it even does half of what they say, are you going to be disappointed?"  Heck no!

Once spring starts I'll be double-digging the garden and doing my small part to save the world.

Yakking about Yaks

Well we went and did it.  Just sent them the money for the yaks.  The shakes set in for a while, this morning.  Now we're really committed.  Not only do we own the yaks, but we need to hustle to get our butts out of Florida by the time Yonkers' new calf is born, probably in late March or early April.

Well since you probably think I'm insane, I should write a little about Yaks.  Maybe then you'll have a clue why we decided to do this.

Here's a pic of Sherpa, Yazoo's daddy.  Pretty, isn't he?

The yak, or Bos grunniens is an ancient long-haired bovine from the Himalayan region.  If we want to get picky, in the Tibetan language, Yonkers isn't actually a "yak" since that means a male.  She's actually a "dri" or "nak".  The name for the species in Tibetan is "gyag".  Oh and just to round out our little language lesson, a wild yak, as opposed to a domesticated one is called a "brong" or "drong".  Isn't Wikipedia helpful?

Yaks seem to do best between altitudes of 10,000-18,000 feet, so our land, at about 6100 feet is close enough that they should be fine.  I've found several yak ranchers in Colorado, so things are looking good there.

They're used for milk and milkfat, meat (don't even think about it!) wool and as beasts of burden.  I'm told that the milk is a rich creamy color that's not quite pink, and has a very high fat content - about 5-7%.  Anthony Bourdain says that yak butter tea (which is made it seems from tea and yak butter, go figure) is surprisingly tasty, so I'll be looking forward to trying that at least once and I'll let you know it goes.

I've wanted to learn cheesemaking for some time.  Since I love fresh mozzarella, I'm planning on that being one of my first projects.  In Italy they use domesticated water buffalo to make mozzarella, so I figure yak mozzarella should be doable.

I'm looking forward to packing with our yaks too.  Parts of our land is are a bit steep and rocky, and if we're going to move anything heavy around, teaching our yaks to help carry it will definitely help.  Fortunately yaks tend to be very nimble, and can go places that would be dangerous for horses.

 According to Wiki the wild drongs make terrible pack animals, so it seems that in domesticating them, humans have made some changes in them.   Humans tend to do that kind of stuff.  In this case it seems to be a happy change, though.

Quantum wants to teach the yaks to plow - yeah, the old fashioned way!  This way we don't pollute the air with gasoline from a roto-tiller. 

The fiber makes a smooth, soft down - and they say it's not itchy!  Amongst a myriad of other things, I guess I'm going to need a loom and a spinning wheel.  About 20 years ago a friend who had a goat farm taught me a little about weaving.  Guess I'm going to have to relearn that.  I could sell the stuff, and it seems to get a good price, but I think our family probably need at least one warm comfy robe each, for the cold winter days.

Yak dung is used for cooking fires.  Somehow I think I'll forego that one.  I'd much rather put it into the ground as compost.  They also use the butter for oil lamps.  Given the choice, I'll use normal oil and put the milk into my cheese.

So those are the possible benefits.  Now on to taking care of them:

Yaks eat about one third the amount of food that the average beef cow does.  That means that we can keep them on far less land than if we had regular cows.  They seem to be easy to fence, and they don't need shelter except during the worst weather.  When we visited our land last March, we saw bobcat tracks, and Quantum says the "dirt guy" (the guy who is supposed to do our driveway) saw cougar poop.  And we definitely have bear.  In fact the local name for our stream is Bear Creek.  With that in mind, I think we'll have to build them a barn for nighttime, though the lady we're buying them from says that a yak cow will have no problem chasing away mountain lions.

Another plus, they "calve easily" according to every site I've found.  No doubt calling a vet out to help birth your calves is expensive, so I'm going to appreciate that.  I just finished reading All Creatures Great and Small, a story about a country vet in Britain in the 1940s, and his book starts with a description of him with his hand up a cow, trying to turn the calf around.  I could very happily live without that experience if I can help it.

Yonkers is 9 years old, and has given birth to seven calves so far.  Five of those have been heifers (females) so we're told that the baby is about 70% likely to be female.  All their cows have "Y" names, so I'm thinking of naming this one Yeti.

The sellers want us to be there for the birth and meet our cow beforehand.  Yak mommies get very protective of their babies, so making friends with her is pretty important.  We'd vaguely planned to make the move in March.  Now we have to.  No pressure, sure.

Can't wait to see pictures of her and little Yazoo.  They're Imperials, by the way, meaning they're a piebald (like a pinto) black and white, as opposed to the more common browns. 

Horns, now there's a potentially "sticky" problem.  However I'm told that by handling them, the yaks learn to use them to be guided by, much like a bridle on a horse.  I'm a little scared that there could be a challenge between our puppy, Zen, and the yaks.  Going to have to spend the next couple months really working on Zen's obedience training.  Zen is a pit bull mix.  (We suspect there's some boxer and lab in there too.  We call him a North American Wigglebut.)  He's a great dog, sweet and gentle as heck, but with a very dominant personality, and thus far, watching the Dog Whisperer hasn't helped us make him behave as much as I'd like.  The neighbor downstairs doesn't help because she calls animal control the moment he makes the slightest noise.  I'm sure that'll come up in a blog real soon.

Back to horns, I honestly have no clue how well Yonkers is trained on that.  The folks we're buying from haven't really given us a lot of info regarding her.  Probably because we're not asking the right questions.  LOL!  A couple city-slickers starting our own farm.  I already know that a lot of our learning experiences are going to be based on the mistakes we make early in this.  Oh boy, won't that be fun?  They have about 8 yaks, and their herd bull is as tame as one could ask for.  Yonkers has never been used for milking, however.  That means I'm either going to have to teach her to be comfortable with being milked or I'm going to give up the idea of her as a milk cow and focus that intent on Yazoo and Yeti.Why in hell did we buy these yaks?  Shouldn't we have waited?  Probably.  But the price was good and it "felt" right.  I guess we'll just have to see.  To this point, taking leaps of faith has put us in the right direction.  The land was a complete leap.  We bought it sight unseen except for a few photos, a glimpse at its general location on Google Maps and a few talks with the realtor.  When we finally visited it last March we were astounded.  It was all that we'd hoped and more.  Dead gorgeous.  I should probably blog about our land.  I promise to do it soon.

And just Quantum and I meeting and falling in love…that was another leap of faith and will probably get blogged about soon.

Meanwhile I'm taking a leap!  Please gods, catch me!

Yaking it up!

If you'd told me that tomorrow morning I'd be the owner of three (or is that 2 1/2?) yaks, I'd have said you're crazy.

Yeah, I really do mean those huge horned and shaggy bovines that if anything you've probably only seen in a zoo before.

Not that our nefarious plan for creating a sustainable farm hasn't been in the works for a couple years now, but it's pretty amazing how this is all coming together.

Should I start at the beginning?

Around 2005, my hubby started getting antsy to leave Florida.  I couldn't disagree.  I moved out of New York to avoid the miserable wet winters.  For a while I'd been thrilled with the fact that I didn't have to shovel the humidity out of the driveway.  Now it was getting weary.  Florida summers are nothing short of miserable.  For all that we get a gorgeous winter akin to summers back home, in summer we're stuck with racing from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned car and back.  Anything else is purely horrible.

So one day we decided to move.  No clue how we'd do that or pay for it or whatever.  My honey wanted to be close to Four Corners.  That's the Native American "Grand Central" for the West, and since my husband is Chiricahua Apache on his dad's side, he wanted to go "home".  I remembered a family vacation to Colorado when I was seven.  Dad had been drawn there by an employment offer which he later rejected because he was afraid to leave familiar territory.  I'd been enthralled with the beauty of Colorado since that visit. 

Clear mountain streams where we fished up rainbow trout and fried them in cornmeal.  Daddy holding me over the edge of a cliff, and my view down a mountain chasm into a river.  It was in my mind, the most beautiful land on the face of the planet.

So I said, "Colorado" and we searched through the land available online.  Somewhere along there we came across this gorgeous piece of land.  No clue how we'd afford it, no clue on pretty much anything.  It just felt right.

And I licked it.

Licking it … might sound weird to some of you.  I'm amongst other stuff a metaphysician, have been since very young.    One of our "spells" was that if you licked something you wanted, it became yours.  I'll try to explain this at some later point I guess.  For now, just bear with me.

40 gorgeous acres in southern Colorado.  Pictures of wildflowers, a meadow, rock formations, a small stream.  I licked it and hoped that it would one day be mine.

Two years went by.  Then my Dad died in a horrible and weird sort of way.  I might go into it further in another post, but for now the basic info is that he had a heart attack and they found his body a week later.  His dog was still guarding him.

As a result of this, I now had a small amount of money.  Once I got over the general shock, we called the realtor about the land.  Maybe it was still available?  Dad had loved Colorado, and it felt like by purchasing the place we were honoring him.  Within a few months of Dad's death, we somehow owned it. 

So getting back to the Yaks…

Somewhere early in the process, years before we even owned the land, my husband turned to me and said, "How about yaks?"

My reaction was much like that of supposedly sane people worldwide.  "A yak?  Have you lost your freaking mind?"

Now when I was a small kid visiting the Bronx Zoo, the yak had for some reason been one of my favorite animals.  Even so I was pretty sure that hubby was nuts.

So I did some research.  Turns out that yaks are extremely docile.  They're also very efficient.  You can pasture 3 yaks on the amount of land that just one modern beef or milk cow would use.

Their benefits include milk, wool, and if you're willing to murder your critters, meat as well.  Two out of three anyhow.  Not a chance in hell I would use an animal for meat once I'd made friends with it.

We'd spent two or more years intermittently researching yaks.  We still weren't living on the land, but were getting closer to the process of moving. 

So last week we were talking about the yaks again and doing some more research.  There's not a huge amount of information on the web about yaks, but one of the yak breeders mentioned that she gave away a small pamphlet when you bought the yaks.  I wrote to see if I could purchase just the pamphlet.  She wrote back to say she had a couple yaks she was selling rather inexpensively.
   
Yonkers is a 9 year old cow.  Yazoo is her daughter, 8 months old.  On top of that Yonkers is pregnant.  They're going to board them for us till we move.  Can you believe?  I don't even live in Colorado yet, and I'm about to own three yaks!