They Have To Eat, Too

This is just a nice volunteer sunflower.  Nothing to do with the post, really.

Last night while sitting eating my 'lunch' at what I've come to regard as my night and day job, I was thinking about what to plant as my fall crop this year.  I don't have a lot of luck with fall crops.  Either I plant too late or it gets too dry or the frost comes too soon or not soon enough.  But I was reading about growing carrots as a fall crop, so I decided to give that go.  I haven't tried that yet.  As a bonus, I happen to have leftover carrot seeds.

So, I'm out in my garden in back of my house digging up what is left of the carrots I planted last spring. I planted a rather long variety and I've pulled a few that were well over 10 inches long. They are some very nice carrots. I had to literally dig some of them out of the ground lest they break off and cause the prolific swearing and subsequent stabbing of the earth with my little garden trowel in frustration.

What can I say?  The sweat was in my eyes.

So I get the last carrot pulled finally!  I'm sitting on the edge of the bed breaking off the carrot greens and dropping them on the bed for mulch when some movement catches the corner of my eye. I look more closely. To my surprise, and horror, here is a baby bunny digging its way up out of the soil.

Gulp.

Right where I was digging mere moments before. Right where I could have ended his hippity-hoppity life with my little garden trowel.

Double gulp.

I decided to poke around a little, with my hands this time, because you KNOW baby bunnies don't come in singles.  I promptly unearth three more.*

That's when I threw up in my mouth a little and eased the wanderer back into the nest with his siblings before I could find any more or any potential carnage.

Now I know what you're thinking. Why am I not freaking out about a cottontail nest in the middle of my carrot patch?

It's the irony. It seems so appropriate to find rabbits in a carrot patch that I can't complain at all. After all, who of my generation can forget the Saturday morning images of Bugs Bunny tunneling under a carrot farm and popping up in a carotene-induced stupor wondering if he should have turned left at Albuquerque?

I expect Momma Cottontail will move those babes lickety split in the night once she realizes they've been found.**

Unlike some gardeners, I don't mind sharing some of my bounty with the wildlife. I don't like that the birds ate so many of my apples. But in a few years, I'll have more apples than I know what to do with.  It's part of the web of life. Besides, they don't understand our arbitrary boundaries.

Not to mention the fact that they have to eat, too. 

*I took my husband out to view the tiny dinkers and we found a fifth bunny.  All carrot replanting operations are on hold for the moment.

**Update 31 July 2016:  Nope.  They're still there.  And we have a wicked rain storm approaching.  Why am I worried about them?  Yes.  I covered them up with some discarded carrot tops.  Hopeless.  I am hopeless.

Smitten!

There is exciting news from Picofarms today.  Well, I think it's exciting anyway:

Rabbits.  More specifically, meat rabbits.  Holy buckets!  We have livestock!

Today, we trekked across the state braving roads both paved and unpaved to a tiny town called Palmer.  There, we found a lovely woman and a whole lotta rabbits.

They were all absolutely adorable.  But we limited our selection to two does and one buck.  Here they are making their interwebz debut!  True to form and following our own weird tradition, the rabbits have unique and oddly satisfying punny names.

This is Janis. Janis Hoplin.

This is our buck, Gordon Whitefoot...for obvious reasons.

We call this little girl Jane Doe.  We call her that because she just would not tell us her real name.

All of our rabbits are littermates and they were born in February of this year making just about 4 months old.  They were produced by crossing a Harlequin female with a male black New Zealand.  Both of the does look grey, but they are actually called 'blue'.  The male is black except for that one white foot thing.

I am smitten.  We plan to wait until next spring to start the breeding program. They're a bit young right now and we don't want to worry about bunnies in the winter time.

Next:  what to name the rabbitry.  So far, I've come up with House of Blues.  It's okay for a working title.

Picofarms Produce: A {tiny} Little Slice of Heaven

We had a sudden thunderstorm roll through last night around midnight.  The wind was blowing and the thunder was crashing and the lightening was flashing!  The rain pelted the house with a crazy fierceness for about five minutes until the fast-moving squall line stormed on through and left us be in peace.  We didn't get much out of it in the way of rain.

But it gave me an idea.

I've always hated strong storms since I was very young.  I was lying wide awake in bed, quaking a little inside from the ferocity of the storm and wondering if the neighbor's gigantic elm tree would finally land on my roof once and for all.  (It did not.)  I worried for my newly planted fruit trees on my tiny farms.  My so very tiny, minuscule farms.  Very tiny, indeed.  In fact, I don't think all of the plots put together would make up an entire city lot. 

My wired-up brain started free associating a bit as it is wont to do when under stress.  Small farm?  No.  Mini-farm?  Nope.  My places aren't big enough.  Micro-farm?  Doesn't feel right either.  So I went further.  Nano-farm!  Naw...that sounds like a place on Ork or maybe someplace where tiny robots are made.  Besides, that still seems a bit large for my really tiny Little Slice of Heaven.

All due respect to Mr. Williams.  Nope.  This will never do.

So what's smaller than a nano-something? A pico-something!  I did some quick math and determined that we have less than a quarter of an acre actually in production. Yeah, I told you it's small.  When the average privately owned farm is more like 1100 acres, my 0.19 acres seems to-tal-ly mini-scule.  Or, maybe, pico-scule.

See what I did there?

Anyway, tl:dr, I decided during a raging thunderstorm to call my place Picofarms.  Picofarms Produce.  If you follow me on facebook, you might notice the change.  In my heart, it will always be my tiny Little Slice of Heaven.  But that's kinda long on a business card.

See you at the market.