Most gardeners will agree that the choices among hand tools at most home centers and hardware stores is extremely limited. Only the most basic tools are sold, and options are dominated by poorly made imports with weak handle connections and dull blades. I always find it amazing that we can put a man on the moon but we can no longer make a decent garden hoe. I searched nearby stores and the Internet, but eventually our garden was tilled by a helpful neighbor with a John Deere tractor, and I ground an edge on our poorly made garden hoe which was passable for weeding.

Fast forward a year, and Robin again needs seed beds prepared for planting onion starts. If only I had a grub hoe … so I threw caution to the wind and ordered from EasyDigging.com. The sales-pitch style of their website puts me off, but it’s a small business and they appear to sell sturdy tools made in Brazil and Britain. (The fact that contrary farmer Gene Logsdon put in a good word for one of their products didn’t hurt either.) Of course, the biggest problem with ordering online is that the shipping for one tool rivals the cost of the tool, so you can’t buy just one, can you?

My tools arrived Tuesday in a well-packed box, and I set about assembling and admiring them. The castings won’t win any awards (none of the blades are dead-square to the handle), but they are plenty sturdy and pre-ground to a decent edge. From right to left, here’s a description of each tool:

• Fork Hoe – This is a cultivating tool that I plan to use to break up dirt clods, stir compost, and tear up weeds in loose soil. Further uses are described in this Fine Gardening article.
• 4″ Grub Hoe – The steeply set blade and long handle on this tool are optimized for digging. I plan to use this narrower grub hoe to break new ground for garden beds. I’m hoping this little human-powered tiller will be efficient enough for us to postpone any plans to buy a gas-powered tiller. I also plan to carry this tool on occasional pasture walks to quickly eradicate undesirable plants, such as blackberries and Bull Thistles. This is the tool mentioned by Gene Logsdon in his treatise on the hoe.
• 6″ Grub Hoe – A wider grub hoe for faster digging in looser soil or when I’m feeling more energetic.
• 8″ Italian Grape Hoe – This is the only true weeding hoe in the bunch as indicated by the shallower blade angle and the lighter weight. The wide blade should be great for clearing large swaths of weeds in garden paths and around established plants.

So, am I satiated with tools for a while? Not likely. Robin tells me that the weeding this year will be largely my responsibility, so I’m still going to need a nice light hoe for the fine work. I’m hoping to find something marvelous at an estate sale, but if that doesn’t work out I know where I can find a nice one locally. And of course, once you have one nice garden hoe, you’ll think of others you need: perhaps a scuffle hoe, a collinear hoe or even a wheel hoe …

When I first heard the sound, it triggered a memory from a camping trip as a kid. One night at an Indiana state park, we joined up with a dozen people tromping around in the woods on a Ranger-led owl calling hike. Assorted poorly rendered owl calls broke the silence–futile attempts to lure in one of the puzzled birds. I don’t think we heard any actual owls on that occasion, but the call mnemonic is permanently engraved in my synapses.

Great Horned Owls range across all of the Americas, from the beech-maple forests of my midwest childhood, to the towering stands of conifers outside our window, and from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan. There’s probably one sitting in a tree near you right now.

Well, quite a lot, actually. I’ve been interested in management intensive grazing ever since I read Gene Logsdon’s inspiring book All Flesh Is Grass. We only have about 3 acres on which we plan to raise sheep, and we’d like to maximize our pasture productivity for the health of our animals, to save money on purchased feed, and improve the long-term viability of our land. The ideas presented in that book showed me how much I didn’t know.

So, when I heard about a course being taught by Woody Lane Ph.D., a nationally known specialist in livestock nutrition and forage management, I signed us up. The class runs 10 weeks, every Wednesday night, and will feature some pre-class pasture tours and a weekend farm tour of 4 sites. It will cover plant identification, nutrition, growth habits, livestock grazing, storage (hay and silage), problems, and more. The information will be Western Oregon specific based on local research and trials, and that’s something we definitely can’t get from a book.

I’m taking extensive notes along with reading all the provided material and assigned chapters in the class reference, Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence, which I fortunately already own. I thought I would write up a short summary of each class on our blog, for the benefit of those interested. I’ll include links to additional information where appropriate. This will not be a transcript of the class. I recommend reading the books cited in this post and looking for a course taught in your area. Here’s the highlight from March 3rd.

The chemistry of plants

At their most basic form, plants use water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight to produce carbohydrates, specifically glucose. They combine glucose with nitrogen to produce amino acids. Amino acids are used to produce proteins, and proteins are used to grow the plan bigger to capture more water, carbon dioxide, sunlight, nitrogen, and so forth. Pastures are like vast solar panel factories. A well managed pasture is a solid mass of green, teeming with energy, but few of us have seen pastures like that. One problem is nutrition.

Plants need a variety of minerals to grow. The big three are potassium (k), phosphorus (P), and nitrogen (N), but sulfur (S), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), magnesium (Mg), manganese (Mn), and other elements are also needed. These must be present in the right proportions. Too much can be poisonous. Too little can affect the efficiency of growth. Most pasture plants have 6″ deep roots, so if the the minerals are deeper than that, they effectively don’t exist. Rain drives minerals such as nitrogen and sulfur deeper into the ground. Also, taking products off the land without paying back reduces the available nutrition. Consider this: every ton of hay removed from a field removes 40 lbs of potassium.

Types of pasture plants

There are three important groups of pasture plants: grasses, legumes, and forbs. Grasses are familiar to most people: perennial rye, timothy, orchard grass, johnson grass, bermuda, etc. Legumes are nitrogen fixing broadleaf plants such as: alfalfa, clovers, vetch, peas, beans, etc. Forbs are broad leaf plants that don’t fit in the other categories: brassicas, chicory, plantain. Yes, brassicas–radishes, turnips, rutabagas, and so forth–can be used as forages. Plantain apparently does very well in Oregon, with it’s deep tap roots and high levels of growth during the cloudy months of January and February.

Two types of grass

Grasses are divided into two types based on the first carbohydrate molecule they produce during photosynthesis. Most grasses produce a 3-carbon molecule, and are called C3 grasses (or cool season grasses). These have shallow roots and prefer cooler temperatures, with most growth occurring in the spring. They are easily stressed by lack of water, and generally go dormant in the summer. All the grain crops (wheat, barley, oats) are C3 grasses, as are most of the common lawn and pasture grasses.

The other group of grasses uses a modified chemical reaction to supercharge photosynthesis in hot weather, producing a 4-carbon molecule. These are called C4 grasses (or warm season grasses), and they are capable of producing explosive summer growth. These grasses are generally very water efficient, and can be properly timed in Oregon to fill in the dry summer months with useful forage production. Corn is the most famous of the C4 grasses, but also the least water efficient. Other species include sorghum-sudangrass, millet, and … wait for it … crab grass. Yes, crab grass can be a useful forage crop and has been tested in the Roseburg area of Oregon quite recently. Unlike most C4 grasses, it actively self-seeds (just ask anyone trying to keep a monoculture lawn), but has the potential to run-amuck without a well developed management technique. Warning: planting crab grass might get you tarred and feathered if you live in an area of grass seed production (much of Linn and Lane counties).

Some people will tell you that the grass only grows in Oregon for 4 months and then you have to feed hay the rest of the year, but this is entirely species and management dependent. The Oregon climate lends itself to forage production 365 days of the year.

Nitrogen fixation

As mentioned above, legumes have the unique ability to fix nitrogen. They do this forming a symbiotic relationship with soil dwelling rhizobia bacteria. The bacteria form in colonies called nodules, which are tiny white bumps on the plant’s roots. These colonies capture N₂ from the air, break the powerful triple bonds, and convert it to soluble nitrogen forms that the plant can use. This gives legumes a distinct competive advantage over other plants, as they can sustain growth in low nitrogen soil by tapping into the 78% nitrogen content of the air.

There are many species of rhizobia bacteria, and a specific species can partner only with specific legumes. If the right bacteria is not present in the soil, legumes will still grow just fine but they will use existing soil nitrogen instead of fixing it from the air. This eliminates the greatest advantage of planting them. When seeding with legumes, be sure to buy pre-inoculated seed or coat with the appropriate inoculant before seeding. Also, you should occasionally pull up plants to ensure that the nodules are present on the roots. Note that nitrogen fixed by a legume is not immediately available to other plants growing in the pasture. When the upper potion of the legume is cut or grazed, the roots will die back proportionally, leaving high-nitrogen plant material underground where it can break down and be absorbed by grasses and forbs.

Well, that’s all for my summary of the first class. We discussed many other things (basic grass identification features, the commonly misidentified rushes and sedges, yearly growth patterns, vernalization, classic varieties vs. cultivars, use of scientific names, and mycorrhiza), but I want to keep these posts to a reasonable length. Robin says she didn’t know there was so much to learn about grass. In reality, these 30 hours of instruction will only scratch the surface.

I got worried we had mites so off Lee and I went to get some food grade diatomaceous earth. The only store where we could find it only carried 50 pound bags, so I am well stocked on that now. I went nuts with it dusting down the coop. Then I got two of the girls and checked around their vent areas and other places as well as I could. I still didn’t find any of these bugs or eggs on them. Later that night, when I went to go lock the hens in for the night, I looked around the walls again. Most of the bugs had disappeared. I don’t know whether this was because it was colder by then or if it was because of the diatomaceous earth.

Today when I went out to do another dusting of diatomaceous earth in the coop I still saw them but not nearly as many. It was also a colder day so I don’t know if that affected the bugs any. So what I am wondering is if I have a mite problem or a spider problem. I can’t seem to find anything that tells me you can find mites during the day time in plain sight on walls and such. The hens are laying just as fine as always. In fact I have more eggs per day then last year. They don’t seem to be adverse to getting into their coop. Those would all be signs of mite infestations. Now they do have some peck marks to their combs but I am attributing that to their 5 days of being stuck in the coop.

Here are two links that talk more about mites in poultry.

• http://ipm.ncsu.edu/AG369/notes/poultry_mites.html
• http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8162.pdf

*In other news, apparently 80% of people can pull statistics out of thin air.

Besides the time savings, deep litter is reported to help control coccidiosis, reduces aggression, and supports chicken health by producing vitamin B12. Deep litter is best used in conjunction with open-air housing so excess ammonia is ventilated. The concept is very similar to operating a compost pile. You can find a complete guide to the whys and wherefores here. We didn’t use any lime in our management of the litter, because although it would help the texture it must be manually mixed to avoid hurting the chicken’s feet.

Since the girls got moved out to the garden I decided that I was going to clean out the coop so I could use their litter to make compost for the garden later. It was also getting quite built up in the coop which made it difficult to close the door.

I left a little bit of the old litter in the coop so all the microbes would start the new batch of litter cooking.

Then I added a whole bag of new pine wood shavings to the floor.

During the past 9 months of using the deep litter approach I probably should have lofted the litter more regularly then what I did, but it still seemed to work out fine. Another problem that we had in the coop was that the litter would get a little too wet from our waterer. We have a hanging waterer that, once it gets low, tilts and spills water onto the shavings below it. Sometime soon we are going to try to solve this problem.

So I go into the coop to find out what happened and expecting to see someone with a very bloody head. All I could find was a Bob that looked like it had a peck to the comb. A lot of the Rhode Island Reds and the Barred Rocks has what looked like small peck scabs on their combs. I’m thinking that they REALLY are not happy with the recent confinement in the coop. Today would have been their fifth day in the coop. I can understand why big chicken places clip the beaks of their chickens if only five days brings out this sort of pecking. The only other thing that I can guess with what happened was maybe the chicken got hurt somehow in the latest move.

Since so many of them seemed to have little pecks to their combs, due to what must be boredom, there was no way I could separate that many. Saturday they will be let out to forage finally and that will hopefully solve that. Today to help with the problem I put new bedding in, fluffed up their deep litter to make scratching easy, and sprinkled in about a quart of cracked corn on the floor to keep them busy. I will keep a close eye on them for the next week to make sure the problem doesn’t get worse.

It involves using wooden posts as rollers under the coop. Lee is much more cheery looking today don’t you think? Must be the ‘third times a charm’ outlook on life.

The coop was farm jacked up on both sides and the first round wooden post was placed under the coop.

The new bolt was attached.

The farm jacks were removed and the coop sat down on the round post.

A discussion ensued over the rough sound of Lee’s tractor. It was probably on whether the tractor was going to make it without dieing again. Lee – Tractor problems have been traced to faulty distributor wires. I’m going to replace them, and the leaking fuel shut-off, and hopefully it will go back to purring like it did last year. Robin – Wow, only men ever talk about an engine purring. Anyways …

WOOHOO it seems to be working!

New posts are added as needed to keep the roller effect going on.

Half way through the coop had to be jacked up again to get another post under it.

We only used three fence posts for the whole process.

Once we had the coop where we wanted it the concrete blocks were put under it again. It managed to rain the whole time we were out working with the coop.

I can’t believe that we actually got this thing moved considering how many problems seemed to come up along the way.

Jack had been forcibly ejected from our bed a little bit earlier. So she is still feeling thoughts of hopefulness in these pictures about her chances of reentry of the house for some more snoozing. You can really notice her bum eye in these pictures. Her butt is growing to amazing proportions due to her biscuit addiction and her strict exercise routine of sleeping on our bed. It has been about six months now since she was abandoned on our property.

Jasper is feeling quite grumpy because Jack decided to pester him. Jasper will be 16 years old this year. We adopted him when he was 10 years old. Lee felt sorry for Jasper because he didn’t think anyone would adopt an old cat. Jasper has never forgotten that. In turn Jasper has an intense deep love that follows Lee around, much to Lee’s dismay when he is trying to accomplish something.