Bear Tractor (chicken tractor)

Soon Reed will make a more thorough post about this, but I cannot resist sharing this picture of our finished product:
(A chicken tractor is basically a movable chicken pen, and we have built one that could probably house a family of bears.)

*UPDATE*

We've been using the chicken tractor for a couple of weeks now, and I made a short video of me and Aaron moving the chickens to a fresh spot. Here's the video:

A wonderful visit from our friend Cory

thanks to reed for the use of his camera, and to sarah for her camerawork
here is cory's myspace

Lots of squash, fire

Last week we grew over 150 pounds of squash, partially because we didn't realize how often peak squash needs to be harvested (about every other day; we were harvesting every 4 days). Most of the larger stuff doesn't sell as well in market, but we all still enjoy it (Reed: "it is immoral not to eat squash at every meal")


In other news, we had a fire at the farm. No major damage was done, except for the tractor/mower that started the fire.


Nick can probably tell the story better than I can, but basically he was mowing when the tractor caught on fire (perhaps because the grass was bunching up underneath the mower, but we still don't really know why). Nick ran and called 911, and a fire truck came pretty promptly.

We had to babysit the fire for another 12 hours or so, since it kept trying to resurrect itself from the coals. Probably about 1/4 acre burned, which has since been tilled in preparation for planting!

back at the farm

I'm back at the farm for the first time in 6 months, and it's crazy to see how much has changed. For example, look at this before&after of the blackberry field:
We've also had a few changes in our web presence. Michelle is still doing fantastic work on the website, and Reed & Kevin have been giving regular updates on the google group. If anyone wants to join the google group, send an email to community@glasscenter.org and we'll set you up.

New Season at Glass Farm

A lot is being done to prepare for the change in seasons. The Texas summer sun is too hot for many plants currently in the greenhouse, and we're working hard to transplant them outside. Crops are starting to fruit, and we have gotten tomatoes, radishes, and the biggest zucchinis I've ever seen. Collectively, we've learned a lot this spring, and we will be better prepared to come into the fall season, Texas' second growing season.

A lot of other things have changed at the Glass community. Hugh moved to our community in Tyler, so I've taken over the greenhouse. Jeff will stay on the farm every other week, the other week out of town. We have two new members, or maybe I should say returning members, Tyler and Laura. They have been on the farm before, and they are returning to spend a while at the Glass Center.

The situations with the farm animals has changed, too. The goats now live down the street at the quonset hut. We were given 4 more hens and a rooster. The chickens have gotten out of the pen and now live free-range around the coop. The good news is that we have a hen brooding 18 eggs (!) which will surely give us a few baby chicks. The bad news is that the chickens are in danger from predators when they are outside the pen, and the goats are running out of food. The solution is to have movable fencing systems that can be put over land that we need the chickens and goats to feed off of.

Things are starting to heat up, and jumping in the lake looks like a better idea every day. Hopefully Texas summer won't be any worse than Florida summer.

Chickens

Chickens are great. I'm not sure why we didn't have these little magical egg producers before, but I'm sure glad we have them now.

Reed and I visited a local Chapel Hill farm where a nice couple, Tony and Caroline raise chickens and sheep. It was a riot to see these free range birds laying eggs in trees and even funnier when we chased them down to catch them.

I worked out a barter for some valued plants in exchange for 5 chickens and we took them home to the farm. At first they lived in the goat pin before we made a chicken coop out of recycled building material.

After taking Tony's advice of picking up the hens and throwing them into the coop every night for protection, the little obedient birds are doing it themselves automatically and are already laying eggs in the roost. We have gotten over a dozen eggs in less than a week, without even needing to feed them.

We plan on extending our operation with more hens and a rooster to hopefully maintain a sustainable population of this eggselent source of protein.

Garden and Aquaponics

Spring has come and everything at the farmer is getter greener. The water is starting to warm up, and trees are lively and awake. We’ve also had lots of rain to fill up the lake completely, causing the spillway to become a roaring waterfall gushing with foam.

Jeff and I have started to find our niche in some projects that we deem the most important – me with gardening and aquaponics, Jeff with blackberries. I’ll let him explain the blackberries sometime but now I’d like to share some information about aquaponics.

This relatively new field is based on creating a symbiotic relationship between plants and bacteria with fish. Our 1500 gallon fish tanks have been filled with lake water and 12-14 Tilapia. (We started small because once they get started, Tilapia are known to put rabbits to shame.) The water is cycled, along with all the effluent and emulsion from the fish, through this tank and into the growbeds for plants. The water then passes through a bio-filter, a fancy name for media on which bacteria is housed, to transform the nitrates and nitrites the fish produce into nitrogen for the plants to use. After the water is filtered, it is pumped back into the fish tank to aerate the water for the happy Tilapia. This recirculating aquasystem is designed for minimum input (tilapia are great protein converters), with virtually no waste, and is a great way to grow food organically without the use of chemical fertilizers. Once we can find a way to grow the fish food in the system it will truly become an integrated, sustainable approach to food production.

In addition to aquaponics, Michelle and I have made our own potting soil from decomposed pine bark mulch, decomposed manure, peat moss and some sand for the raised beds and greenhouse plants. They seem to love the concoction and have begun to flourish. Here is a link to the web album to view photos of some of the gardening progress.
http://picasaweb.google.com/HughADaniel/GlassCenterGardening
Unfortunately Michelle’s job calls her away from the farm, but she has been an inspiration for all and I am optimistic about continuing what we have started together.