Yakkity Yak (July 2011)

In our search for what livestock are right for us, I heard a lot of good things about yak. These Tibetan relatives of the typical cow are quite beautiful and unique! Like buffalo, they have leaner meat and can produce a useable milk. I was delighted to find out that Hooper’s yak ranch, home of one of the largest herds in the U.S., was in Minnesota. Thanks to the graciousness of John Hooper, we were able to visit and meet the yak this past spring. I can’t wait until we can get our own babies and start a small herd! It's still a few years off but I'm excited already.


The yaks were very tame and personable!

Vantid and an adult female yak (they are quite small!)

I love their fuzzy tails so much.

Me posing with one of the females.

Baby girl!

Jericho’s horns were so heavy they have developed this unique downward curve.



A yak/cow hybrid – hence the brindle coloration and different look.



Hybrid yaks grow more quickly and larger than purebred yak.



Jericho’s size and calm demeanor were amazing!


Yak skull.
One really appealing thing about yak is that the females do not have to be milked when they are producing - they will only 'let down' what is being used, so unlike a dairy cow, which is a huge commitment of time during her productive period, you can get small amounts from a yak when you want it. We don't consume a lot of dairy and mostly want milk for making cheeses - so this is a great compromise! I would like to eventually get a few babies to bottle feed, once we have our fence completed and set up for animals. John is actually able to ride some of his yak and has traditional ceremonial garb for them. He was a really kind man and also showed us his collection of Tibetan artifacts. After our trip to the farm we had a fantastic lunch at a restaurant who used John's yak meat, a Tibetan place in Minneapolis. It was delicious! We also brought home some meat and made burgers and a roast - it was delicious, much more flavorful and lean than cow meat but not altogether different.
http://www.yak-man.com/ – The yak man offers yak meat as well as animals for sale. If you’re in the midwest and interested in yak I highly recommend contacting him!

The Land - Part 2 - of Beaucerons and Gardens (June 2011)

Ignoring the rest of the insanity that has been this week, enjoy some pictures:

Rocky, excited on his way to the land. Aka - 80 acre dog park

The drive up to the garden - spring style.
I am going to skip around a little bit and post some images of our current major project - a 6000 sq. ft. garden that we planted this spring, reclaimed from part of an old corn field.


First, a few silly photos of Rocky.

Rocky's first time really crossing the stream by himself - he was on the otherside like 'uh, guys? You forgot somebody!'

Maybe if I sit, this will get fixed. Sitting always works.

After much milling and whining, he decides to walk across.

Oh gods, this is hard! Funny enough he tried to walk exactly where we did - which is easier for people but much harder for puppies. He's so full of observation and mimicry for a dog!

Since we don't have phones out there yet, we have developed a system of communication based on howling - Rocky approves.

Stream in the early spring with the vegetation starting to grow up a bit.

More stream.

Smith, our Vibe, who is massively abused - despite being an anti-off-road vehicle manages to make it across the river and through the weeds and muck more times than not.

So - the garden project. This is the field - a 2.5 acre field used previously for corn cropping. Eventually this field will host our aviaries/bird building and apple orchard as well as the garden.

This is what we had to start with. Old corn stalks and lots and lots of rocks and weeds. We don't have electricity or proper equipment, so we tried to find a way to install and till such a large garden that we wouldn't be able to visit every day (and protect from heavy deer pressure). First big problem was tillage. We had to get rid of the corn, add some fertilizer and organic material, remove rocks and get it ready to plant.

Our solution - a tiny mantis-type front tine tiller about 10 inches wide. Vs 6000 sq foot garden space. It was an interesting learning experience - not one I'm eager to repeat.

I actually tilled most of the garden with it, but Vantid and Mbala took turns with Mbala even working in the pouring rain one day when the sky decided to explode. We had to stop constantly to pry out rocks stuck in the tines. Eventually on our second pass through one of the main components in the transmission (a thick metal screw thing) snapped and the whole thing stopped working. Hopefully we can fix it and sell it and maybe buy an ox. Or teach Rocky to pull a plow. Most likely, next year, I will try the 'one straw' gardening method of no-till.

An idea of the perspective of the tilling project - every 10 inch strip needed to be gone over, pulling and pushing the plow about three times to do a row. Looking back at it I'm really amazed we managed to finish it in a few days time.

We also had to construct a fence, which required digging 25 fence posts out by hand with a post hole digger tool. We made a double layer fence - the outside multiple strand electric fencing run off a solar panel charger and the inner layer an 8 ft. mesh and twine deer barrier fence - the idea being (hoping) that deer don't have good depth perception and would see the multiple layers, come in slowly, get zapped, and avoid the place altogether. So far the fence has been working - despite our lack of experience with electric fencing it's holding about a 6000 volt charge. :) The posts we cut down from dead trees on the property.

Of course, right after we planted the beginnings of the garden we had to leave for 12 days out of town and there was no way to get water to the plants. We had hoped that the mild spring would continue with a bit of rain on and off, but instead we had record breaking weather (over 103 degrees one day) and no rain at all. Amazingly, only a few plants died - most made it. These are our incredibly hardy little strawberry plants.

They even gave us our first garden edible, despite all that!

It was incredibly delicious - we split it and it tasted like strawberry pie, baked and hot from the sun.

Also, our first row of corn had appeared!

When we decided to get plants and seeds for the garden, we made a field trip down to Seed Savers farm in Iowa - http://seedsavers.org/ - they are an amazing nonprofit organization dedicated to saving and storing thousands of varieties of heirloom plants, especially vegetables. Heirloom variety plants represent thousands of years of human effort breeding and cultivating various plants, a heritage that is rapidly being lost in the days of monoculture agriculture and big agribusiness. The sheer variety of amazing vegetables available at this place is incredible! If you need to find over 500 varieties of potatoes or 100 types of exotic garlic... this is your place.

My first flower - a bearded iris. I have always wanted to be able to plant flowers like this; most of our flowers will wait until we build a house and landscape it, but I couldn't resist starting a few that would grow and split for later use!

Vantid went to scope out a wild growing apple tree and came back having lost her virginity to vampires. She couldn't remember anything about it, but she had blood pouring down her neck and a nice pair of fang marks to show for it.

We are gardening organically, and one of the most fun things we are dealing with are bugs. Ticks, deerflies, gnats in every orifice, and many amazing creatures I never knew existed - all of them wanting a bit of our blood. Every inch of the soil is alive with something. We also don't have running water yet, so watering the garden involves moving gallons of water 500ft from the stream by hand.

Oh yes... did I mention the flies?

I love working on the land. :)

The Land - Part 1 - Purchasing the farm (June 2011)

I have gotten quite behind on posting photos from our recent adventures - in large part because of what I'm showing you now - our land, part of the Devil's Coulee region (in the Bluffs region of eastern Minnesota), which we've been working on almost daily for months in between our other jobs and commitments. There is something incredibly zen and amazing about working on the land, physical labor, surrounded by birdsong, biting bugs, and sunlight dappled through the forest trees - it's made time flow by in such a fashion I'm not altogether sure where the last few months have gone.

I will share some of our first photos from our land, mostly taken last December and early this year. I will continue in another post with adventures of trout, chainsaws, giant gardens, and deer skulls.

The old barn before we cleared the trees around (which were all overgrown, weedy box elders which made me feel a little less bad about cutting them)



My apologies if you've seen these photos from before, but here are a few pictures of old cars nested on the property before we removed them.

There were mostly VWs, including two vans.

I was told this was a 57 Bel Air. It completely fell apart when it was moved, it was upside down and a tree had fallen on it, reducing it to an amazing pile of rusty pieces.

Mossy fallen structure.

Inside the old barn.

Barn ceiling.

There were old signs of beavers wandering through, though no signs of any current habitation.

The bluffs on each side of our main valley are over 200 ft high and very steep.

A panorama of the main building site area up on the first level of bluffs.

To the right here is an open 10 acre field along the private, dead end road cutting through part of the property.

This tree near the driveway is one of the largest we've found so far - it is an oak, at least 9 or 10 ft in diameter.

Small old storage sheds, not sure what their original purposes were.

We have a lot of these interesting 'sister' trees on the property - I am not sure what type they are but they are beautiful and many intertwine in really interesting fashion. I look forward to getting to know all of our trees as the years go by, and planting many more!

This is all that is left of the old house that burned down. There is an old marking inscribed on it that says 1916. It's really too bad that it's gone, but we're planning to use the old foundation to build a root cellar.

Another view of the barn and bluffs behind it before we cleared the falling trees.

A taste of the car graveyard before we hauled them all away.

The old barn, before clearing and cleaning. We pulled out 16 vehicles and a massive dumpster full of scrap metal - old appliances, metal barrels, all sorts of broken farm equimpent, and many odds and ends of dubious background.

The constantly changing sky over the bluffs is usually dotted with bald eagles, red tail hawks, turkey vultures and crows - I love it!

One of the small hidden fields nestled in the woods.

Bluffs overlooking the future aviary/bird building and orchard area.

Part of the stream, we have about 3/4 of a mile of it meandering through the parcel.

Two people walking near the stream for scale - this is actually part of the stream that really needs rehab - corn was being cropped up to the edge and you can see how bad the erosion is. We've pulled the field out of production, planted native grasses on it and will have to grade it down to the river to prevent further damage in the future. We really need a Bobcat!

Another part of the stream.

A smaller stream which connects to the main one further down.

I'll leave on that note with the winter photos and continue on again later with some from this spring. :)