Farm Theme Coloring Book

I'm excited to announce that Iron Oak Farm is almost ready to release it's first Farm Themed Coloring Book! It will be available in our Etsy Shop. If you've been following us on Facebook, you've probably seen the various images I've been sharing with our readers. Last night I finished the last of the 40 images that will appear in the coloring book. Subjects include chicken keeping, goats, pigs, cows, bunnies, turkeys, ducks, shearing sheep, spinning yarn, bee keeping, milking, maple syrup collection, gardening, vegetables, apple picking, canning, plowing with tractors, and much more. There's a bunch of baby animal images too!  

When I was a child, coloring was my favorite past-time. I would go through coloring books and crayons at a pace so fast that my mom would limit the number of pages I was allowed to color in a day. When I got a little older, I remember being frustrated with coloring books at the store. I still enjoyed coloring, but most of the coloring books were themed around cartoons that I was no longer interested in. If your child likes farming, gardening, or being around animals, then this coloring book is perfect!

I see the joy that children experience around farms, animals and gardening, and it's my hope that this coloring book can bring a bit of that to them. Especially in the winter months when not much is happening on the farm or outside. I tried to use realistic images and real experience to create a book that is not only fun to color, but educational as well.

The finished book should be available by the end of this week. (That's my hope anyway, I'm still working on printing issues.) But in the meantime, I welcome you to print off this free Chicken Yard image for your children to enjoy and color. (Click the link for a printable version, or visit the Coloring Book page above.) I'd love for you to share your child's coloring work on the Iron Oak Farm Facebook Page!  

Haying Part 3: Using the Baler

And finally the 3rd step in the haying process. Using the baler.

This video shows us baling the hay. the baler is an amazing piece of equipment. Part wood chipper, part sewing machine. The baler gathers the dried hay, packs it into a rectangle shape, wraps the bale in two strands of tine, ties it, and cuts it, releasing a completed bale. After the bales are dropped around the field we took the hay wagon and collected them. Someone would drive and 1 or 2 of us would bring the bales to the wagon. After the wagon was full we brought it to the barn and stacked it.

Haying Part 2: Using the Hay Rake

Continuing on our haying journey (in February no less, ha!) Here is the second step in the process.

The hay has dried for two days in the sun. You really have to watch the weather when making hay. The dry grass can now be raked into windrows or lines of mounded hay. The rake moves the hay down the length of tines and leaves a neat and tidy row for the baler to run over and turn into bales.

Haying Part 1, Using the Sickle Bar

I know it's not haying season, but I was deleting videos off of our movie camera to make room for the footage of the baby goats (if they ever come) and I came across some footage of us haying this past summer.

This is the first step in the haying process. We're using a sickle bar mower to cut our field. After the field is cut we let the hay dry in the sun. Then flip it into furrows with the hay rake and let it dry again. This was one of the hottest weeks of our Michigan summer 104 degrees and a country wide drought. We only got in one cutting but the hay we got from our field fed our 10 goats almost through the whole winter.

The Plow

I had a teacher in high school, (he was a bit eccentric to say the least) who tried to promote a new belief/movement, that the plow, and not the wheel, was the most important invention that lead to the development of civilization. I think at some point he even had t-shirts made up to unite his plowing followers.

At the time, I thought this teacher was a bit...uh strange...to say the least, and while I have no intention to "re-invent the wheel" (no pun intended...ok, maybe it's a little intended.) I can at least appreciate this amazing piece of equipment, and respect the importance and effect it's had on today's civilization.

In my post last week, The Creation of the Cornfield, I promised to take you through the different steps of our corn planting experience and highlight the equipment that we used to create our field.

Our tractors Alice and Ruby were truly the "get up and go" of the process, but I will be saving their introductions for a different post, as much of this equipment was at one point horse drawn, and for me, that brings even more romance and whimsy to the whole thing.

The plow is interesting in that it's such a simple design. It has few moving parts, but works so well. With a powerful tractor or horse it seems to effortlessly carve it's thick steel blades into the soil, flipping it over to make way for the next crop.

We were fortunate enough to have a friend with a plow (among other things) that was willing to help us out. This plow is an 18" double bottom plow that was made to be pulled behind a tractor. It has only 2 adjustments that allow you to adjust the depth on either side. On your first cut the far side needs to be adjusted to plow deeper since the gauge wheel is not yet riding in the trench you cut before. After your first pass, it can be adjusted up to match the other side.

To start out we decided where we wanted our corn field and lined up the tractor and plow on the far side. To engage the plow we simply pulled the cable attached to the left gauge wheel that allowed the plow to ride onto the cam attached to the wheel and drop into the lower position. As the tractor moved forward the plow shears dug into the virgin soil and began to work. At the end of the row we tugged on the cable again and the plow rode the cam into the upper position. On the next pass you need simply line up your right tires into the trench from the preceding row.

For more plowing fun read my post Plowin' The Four Tractors and an Army Truck Technique!

The Creation of a Cornfield

Have you ever wanted something? But that something is one of those things where it won't happen for so long that it's more or less a dream? You run the pictures of "how it will be" over in your head. You plan and pretend, seeing yourself in your mind's eye of how you will act, how great it will be? I know I do. These little games I play in my head get me through the frustrations of desire, impatience and longing.  The imaginings of a goal keep the spirit alive and moving forward.

The past month has been surreal. I have to stop now and again to remember that this is all really happening. It's happening now. The dreaming, the wishing, the planning...it's no longer wisps of color, the movie motion picture that plays behind our skulls, but tangible and real.

So many times I would think about the musky smell of soil as the plow slices through the earth and flips the ground to the sky. I would read books on farming and think, "one day, I want to live like that." Then all of a sudden, we are!

For us, and for so many of you I'm sure, farming is more than tractors and plows and plants and animals. It's more than something functional, ...a means to an end...it's just more. It's something romantic. A way of being, a philosophy of life inherently human and simple.

I keep looking for qualifiers. For labels. When we get a tractor, then we'll be farmers, When we get a barn, then we'll be farmers. When we get goats, chickens, process our own meat, grow our own food, hay our own field, plow our own land, then we'll be farmers. Perhaps it's because I wasn't raised on a farm. I keep looking to live up to my own romantic ideals. It's probably insecurity, but I'm shocked to see that it's actually working.

Planting a field of corn was one of these romantic goals on the checklist of my own insecurities. We couldn't afford the equipment to do anything worth while, so I didn't think that it would happen anytime soon. We had planned on planting a small 10x10 corn patch by hand, and praying for successful cross pollination.

Then, before I know what's happening, we have tractors and equipment being loaned to us. Old and new friends coming through, and helping our dreams become a reality. The cool thing is that some of this machinery is over a hundred years old, and was once pulled by horses!

Over the next few posts I want to take you through the different steps that we took to plant our corn. (I hate to promise anything at the moment as we have moved onto the process of haying now, which is even more involved than planting...but I will try...) We hit many road blocks along the way, and the corn was late getting in the ground, but it's there, and it's growing, and it's amazing!

Sharing with Homestead Revival! 

Plowin' ...The Four Tractors and an Army Truck Technique

Today I'd like to share a new method of plowing that I'm sure some of our readers are not familiar with. It's a new technique that requires four separate tractors and a 6 x 6 army truck thrown in for good measure.

It started off as an exciting day. Plowing day! Tilling the soil is somehow inherently human and just feels right. We were feeling so blessed as we hitched the plow to our Alis Chalmers tractor. Our neighbor loaned us his plow and disk harrow so we could start our cornfield and pumpkin patch. Nostalgia and sentiments warmed our hearts as our farming adventure took another leap forward in this monumental new milestone.

After a couple of satisfying swipes, the double bottom 18" blades sliced clean through the soil and flipped the black earth to the sun. A couple little hick-ups here and there, but what the heck, it's our first time...things were going great!

And then suddenly Zach decided to make a large sweep with the tractor to get the plow lines straight. "Oh no" I thought. I knew it was marshy over there, I had seen a pair of mallard ducks land there just the day before, and heard them splashing around. I felt myself running toward the tractor in slow motion, hollering "Wait! Don't go so far." But it was too late, and the roar of the tractor drowned me out as the wheels sunk deep into the muck.

The difficult thing with our property is that the grass grows three feet tall everywhere so the marshy spots don't look any different from the dry spots. There's also a good 6 inches of dead grass from years past that creates this spongy almost boardwalk all over the property. So even if you walk the area before, the weight of a human won't always reveal the water that's hiding underneath. We're breaking virgin soil here and we never know what we'll find. 

Nothing to fear right? It's a tractor after all. Tractors don't get stuck. Well, they do in fact. Right to the frame they get stuck. So over came our trusty neighbor with his Ford tractor. This is the same neighbor that loaned us the equipment not an hour before. Side note: (At this point we're certain our neighbors think we're nuts. We hope that the idiotic entertainment we provide is fair enough trade for putting up with us. I'm certain that the "normal" people in our neighborhood make them self a cup of coffee in the morning and wait to watch the show at the yellow house.)

Anyway...we hooked up the chain, with hope in our hearts, surely another tractor could pull Alice out. After much configuring, miscellaneous tie straps, chains and five different positions...the Ford couldn't budge her. We hitched the plow to the Ford and at least got it out of the mud.

All hope was not lost. We called our friend Elliot, who just happens to have a 6 x 6, deuce and a half army truck, doesn't everybody? Surely 10 tires moving could pull out a tractor! Well...not if all ten tires also sink into the field.

At this point I was starting to pick out the types of flowers I would be planting in all the vehicles stuck in the backyard...I think petunias in the bed of the army truck and maybe some daisy's in the tractor shovel would look nice.

Luckily, Elliot also has a four wheel drive Kubota tractor, he promised to bring the next day. In the meantime, we hooked the plow to our Farmall H (Ruby) and finished the field. (more about this in a post coming soon)

In the end, a days worth of sunshine helped dry the field a bit and the Kubota got the army truck out. Then we used a longer chain and the army truck got the Alis Chalmers out, the Ford saved the plow, and the Farmall plowed on...

Our Field

I've been trying to identify the different hay types in our pasture. We originally thought it was alfalfa, but after a talk with our vet and doing some research online, I think the majority of it is a mixture of Orchard Grass, Canary Grass and Indian Grass. The stalks have the signature "rifling" that occurs where the blade folds over. And the tops have that "broken cattail" top.

I'm rather excited that it's not alfalfa as alfalfa is a legume and tends to be too rich for goats to graze on, especially when it's lush and green. We spoke to the neighbor and he explained that once we bail what we have that the alfalfa might creep in. Any of you out there that are hay experts, let me know what you think. This is a whole new world for us.

Be sure to check out the Attainable Sustainable Patchwork Living Blogging Bee. It's a great place to find awesome posts about sustainable living!

Zach's New Toy

Can't believe it's been almost a month since the last post. We've been so busy moving and my computer is still at the old house, so it's been hard going back and forth. I'm so excited, I have my studio almost set up where I can paint, draw, write, do yoga, create and it's a beautiful, inspiring view. I'll get pictures soon.

One new and exciting thing around the farm is the addition of our new tractor. It's a 1949 Allis Chalmers WD. Needless to say, Zach is in heaven.

We're trying to think of a name for her, something quirky and original.  Any suggestions???

I got Zach a hat as an early birthday present. Sort of as a joke. But I must say, the more we get into this, the less cliche's the hat becomes.