The great storm of 2010...

Welcome to a new week and new adventures. Last Saturday, some of the guys on the farm wanted to try some new bars so we went out on the not-so-world-famous Route 77! We went to two bars, The Roadrunner and Avery's. When we walked into Roadrunner's the jukebox came to a halt and everyone looked over at us. Everyone eyed us as we strutted over to the bar. Little did we know, there was a $4 cover charge. We managed to smooth-talk our way out of it as we were only staying for 30 minutes. Almost all of that entrance was true, minus the jukebox coming to a screeching halt. It was a cool place...the guy next to us had a bottle of Crown and stirring his glass with a rubber serving spoon. Talk about classy. Avery's was next on the list. Turns out this was a biker bar. We walked into Avery's and had some-what of the same welcome except these were bikers sizing us up. Avery met us at the bar and introduced herself. We sat down and found out that she is from Lancaster/Palmdale, the same place that she grew up. She walked away and 15 or so minutes later returned with her Dad. He thought it was cool that I was out there so he decided to buy us all a round! He stayed around and talked with us for about an hour...I stress the fact that he talked to us. Turns out he's an ex-Hells Angel that works at L-3 communications on aircraft instrument upgrades. He told us about the Hells Angels and how he got out of it. Apparently they're run like a company. They'll pay for you to get your law degree or a PHD so long as you'll help another HA in need. He gave an example of when one of his friends needed surgery and so they did it in a guys bike garage. He also told us how he got out of the HA. It's not something that you just walk away from. His sister married someone who was high up in the ranks in the organization so he was able to leave in peace. The guy doesn't talk to him anymore and he had to have his tatoo covered with another one, but he got out. He is now part of Sons of the South and told us if we had a bike we could ride with them. We were really tempted to ride over on 18 speed road bikes...He then talked about how he works at L-3 and has a top secret clearance. I'm confused as to how someone with a background like his could attain one. It was a crazy night.

Sunday was pretty eventful as well. I biked into town and tried to go to a mediterannean restaurant. Turns out all of Waco is closed on Sunday (Baylor is in town, it's a private Baptist university). I biked to a really cool coffee bar called Common Grounds and asked where some good local BBQ is. I had to cross back under a freeway and found that this hole-in-the-wall joint that looked really good was also closed. I eventually found a local sandwich place before biking back to Common Grounds. CG is your stereotypical bohemian hipster coffee bar with a Texas twist. There are antlers on the walls and most of the drinks have a western name. They're famous for their Cowboy Brew. I will admit it was pretty delicious.I was mostly happy get the chance to bike around town and learn how to get around. I got back to the farm and found out that one of the goats had kidded! We have a new male goat named Billy Jack (named after the best movie trilogy ever). The farm decided to sell Billy because he came so much earlier than the other kids (9 goats are preggers!). If we keep kids we have to bottle feed them, a chore that isn't worth doing when we have one goat (versus 10 or more). Another reason is because, being a male, we can't get milk from him. We may save a few for meet and breeding but Billy came at a bad time.

This week work was new and exciting. I spent Monday morning weeding, thinning and side dressing. Side dressing is when you add fertilizer around plants to ensure that there is enough nitrogen for proper growth. Something else that you have to be aware of is how close the plants are planted. This is the act of thinning. If there are too many plants in a small space, they will fight for the nutrients and all of them will be stunted. Tuesday was my cooking debut. I cooked red beans and rice, made salad, and cinnamon raisin rolls. Wednesday morning was spent digging a 30 foot long ditch for the RV area in the back of the farm. When we were a few feet from finishing the ditch my partner took a pick axe to the ground and punctured a pipe (with no pressure behind it, thank god). We repaired it and finished the trench all before lunch. I feel like we earned our merit badges on that project. One of the volunteers and I found out that we could start a garden of our own if we wanted to. We spent the afternoon preparing and planting one row in a garden. More on this later. We did this Wednesday because we were expecting rain Thursday. Little did we know we were going to get 4 inches of rain over 24 hours. Thursday morning about four of us dug ditches on either side of some carrots and other vegetables to increase the drainage. Since we have clay soil, water doesn't sink down into the ground, it runs off an pools up. If you're not careful it will pool up on your beds and drown the plants. Starting at around 12 the rain started. That night was man cave. I decided to make my cinnamon rolls again but this time with icing. The men were grateful for the bounty that I brought with me. If we were back in the old times I would have surely been brought a chicken as a token. Friday morning, all hell broke loose.

I am in charge of tending to the pullets (chicks) in the morning before breakfast. They have a new cage that was build using chicken wire and PVC pipe.

The idea is that with a light cage we can drag it around and expose them to new ground much the same way the chicken coops are moved. In order to protect them from the weather we have a heat lamp, blankets, and tarps. I went out on Friday morning and the cage was in shambles: the tarps had retained water and damaged a quarter of the cage, water had built up all around the cage, and then light had gone out. The chicks were wet and miserable, in fact, one had died overnight. This can happen when they huddle around for warmth and one can't get out. I had to rally the troops in order to get the chicks to safety. We got cages to put the 40 or so chicks in and transported them to the barn where a warm, dry cage was waiting. They were rather reluctant to leave even when there were only a few chicks left. We got the chicks into the barn and dried them off. There were a few that were suffering from hypothermia but they all pulled through. The rest of the day was spent inside putting together a quarterly newsletter. When it finally stopped raining we had received about 4 inches of rain.

One cool thing that I started with a friend is a row of winter vegetables. We decided to plant potatoes, radishes, beets, carrots, and turnips in no particular order. There are several steps that go into creating a row that's ready for plants.

First you have to gather some fresh soil and fertilizer to put on top of the ground to mix in.

This will ensure that there is a good amount of nitrogen available. The next step is to break up the ground in big chunks to ensure that the weeds don't have their roots planted in the soil. The weeds will then die and decompose back into the soil without coming back to be a problem.

The third step in the process is to go back over the soil breaking up the larger chunks into pieces that will allow the plant roots to penetrate the soil. At this point you should start to see more black than green. The last step is to rake the beds smooth to ensure no water pools up on your beds.

Depending on what you're planting you can attach some small pipes to the rake to ensure even spacing between the plants.

Now you're ready to plant!

There are several methods of tending to your garden mainly tilling and no-till. One decision we made was to till everything by hand. You can use either a tractor or small roto-till machine to rip up the ground if you'd like. We felt it would be more reqarding if we did everything primatively. I'll write more about the differences in future blogs.

I can't believe January's over! One random thought that makes sense but you may not have ever put together in your head: trees lose their leaves to fertilize themselves. And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

Week 1 - MLK, goats, and MAN CAVE!!

Friday...the end of my first week on the farm and my second post.

The Farm's annual MLK urban gardening community service day was a success. All the people here on the farm went to one of six different sites and worked on an urban garden. I was posted at Lakeview Church with one of the Americorp volunteers Lucas. We were in charge of tilling and planting 14 rows of a variety of potatoes, onions, collard greens, and flowers. Tilling is done prior to planting and involves breaking up the soil to make it easy to plant things and, in turn, aerates the soil allowing for the nutrients to be exposed to the plant roots. We had about 54 volunteers show up with ages ranging from toddlers to grandparents. Making sure that everyone followed our instructions was no easy task. The kids wanted to plant everything about twice as dense as it should have been. We eventually got everyone on the same page and finished the rows. It was nice to talk to the volunteers and hear what they had to say about the farm and its impact on the community. One man made a comment that he wished there were more spots available in our community sustained agriculture (CSA) program. CSA is a program where local families in the community pay a monthly fee in exchange for a basket of fresh vegetables every week. The main advantage of this program for the farmer is the guaranteed sale of their vegetables. My response to him was that the best way to increase the amount of spots is to have more farms participating in this program! Something else we had at the same time was mural painting. I had a picture of a mural on my last post. Volunteers that didn't want to get their hands dirty were able to paint the mural at their site where most all of them would end up when completed. Unfortunately I left my memory card in my computer so I wasn't able to take pictures (epic fail on my part) but each one had pretty crazy colors.

That night there was a potluck at the directors house on the farm. Most everyone brought something delicious. I took a picture of the best part...
It was nice being around the directors family and some of the old volunteers that now live in Waco. There are also some older folks staying here, all of which I would gladly have as my grandparents. Having them around is a kind of symbiotic relationship: we make them feel young again and they amaze us with how upbeat and handy they are. We have a lot of broken equipment that has been sitting around the farm. One of the guys fixed three machines in this past week and helped to pull a chicken coup out of the ground. This was a great MLK day.
















The rest of the week was filled with weeding, tilling, planting, and milking! Most of the live-in volunteers spent the week weeding and tilling in preparation for planting carrots and onions. We milk our goats twice a day and put it up for sale in our farm store. We all get to do this once a week on either shift. Milking the goats is fun but there are a lot of procedures that must be followed to ensure the quality and safety of the milk. The equipment has to be sanitized as well as the goats themselves. We have to clean the udders to ensure that nothing harmful will drop into the milking pale and prevent the goats from kicking during the milking process. I finished milking my first goat, turned to the other volunteer helping me to tell him I was done and the goat decided to kick the bucket getting dirt and other bacteria into the pale rendering the milk useless (I think the goat was out to ruin my farm cred)! I'll be the first to admit that touching a warm teet on a cold day feels really good...just throwin' that out there.

In continuing the tour de farm...

There's a pen that leads to two fields where we keep the dry goats (dry meaning non-milk producing). Feeding goats is no challenge. As unintelligent as they are, the one thing they respond to is food. There is a piece of PVC pipe that works to hold the feed at about mouth level allowing us to distribute the feed easily. I helped one of the interns feed them. When we walked over to the fence, they immediately jumped on the pipe to get a few feet closer to the top of the 8 foot tall fence (still no where near high enough to jump it) breaking the pipe off the fence. Now, we had to go into the pen to feed them. I went in first as the diversion luring them towards me with an empty bucket. It was only a matter of a minute until they had caught on to our little game. Unfortunately this was not long enough for my partner in crime to get the feed dumped off. This forced him to dump the entire bucket onto the ground leading to the great WHRI goat scrum!


It was a very violent moment in the farm's history. No goats were harmed during the taking of this picture.

Across the road from the dry goats are two chicken coops with about 50 chickens that is surrounded by a nylon fence.

One of the sustainable practices here at the farm is to have the chickens moved every few days to expose them to new grass and allowing the old grass to recover. The chickens eat and fertilize the grass all the while laying eggs in their coops. By the time the coops are moved back to the section they started at the grass is strong and full of nutrients. Their diet is supplemented with a mix of feed, corn, and oyster shells as well as scraps from our meals. The eggs are sold in our store and, if there are enough eggs, some get put into a fridge for farm use. During the winter months egg production slows down due to the lack of sunlight. In order to trick the chickens into thinking that it is later in the season than it is there are lightsplaced in the coops that come on around 4 immitating extra sunlight. This helps to increase the egg yield. Now I know why the chicken crossed the road.

Another sustainable practice that is done here that I like is the dish washing system. We have a lot of people here on the farm that eat lunch and only a few people clean all of the dishes after each meal. Having an electric dishwasher isn't worth the time or effort. Instead, everything is washed by hand. The method that is implemented involves filling up large tubs with water to prevent the faucet from being on the entire time.


The first bin has warm, soapy water, the second bin has hot tap water used to wash off any soap, and the third bin has water with some bleach. This system works to get the dishes clean and sanitized while saving a great bit of water not to mention money.

There are several weekly activities that occur on the farm. Two of them are male and female bonding nights; The female bonding night is called 'stitch and bitch' and the male bonding night is called 'man cave'. Last night I attended my first man cave session...it was epic. There was some drinking and a lot of unspeakable man things...like eating apple pie.


On a personal note, I managed to get my road bike in working condition and took it to the local H.E.B. (a Texas grocery store). I had heard some horror stories about people getting hit here so I was careful when crossing under freeways and major streets. I also tried my hand at some archery. I may be color blind but I have deadly accuracy.
After being out here for a week, I can say I'm truly amazed at the amount of farm related conversations people have. This stems directly from the resources and experience that has been compiled over the years. I hope to share some insight into farming resources in coming posts.

So this is it!

As my brother said , "Enjoy the first day of the rest of your life." I feel like this pretty much sums up the way that I'm feeling at this moment. This is the end of my first full day at the farm and I must admit I missed it. I found out about the farm by participating in the North American Summer Service Team (NASST) last May for 10 days and had the time of my life. It's pretty cool being out in the middle of Texas, living the agrarian life everyone once knew.

For those of you who don't know the details I'm currently a live-in volunteer at World Hunger Relief, a Christian-based sustainable, organic farm that prides themselves on "helping those that struggle to meet their basic needs by sharing and investing in others what God has given to us." Basically they want to teach those that are interested how to get the most out of their land without harming the environment (more on this later). Being a live-in volunteer involves working 20 hours a week (a morning chore then work from 8:30 to 12:30) in exchange for room and board. This combined with the company of about 19 like-minded individuals (I never can seem to stay away from large, communal living situations) coalesce to make one amazing experience. This leaves me most of the day for a part-time job and time to apply for the future. I'll be here until the end of May or the beginning of June...what comes next is still unknown.

I have taken some pictures so y'all can get a feel for what the farm is like:

This is a picture of 'the dorm'. This is where a lot of the socializing and all of the sleeping takes place. There are about 15 people that live in here, a small kitchen, and a TV with a VHS player (old skool). It's a pretty cozy place...maybe not the cleanest place in the world, but cozy. If you don't believe me, take it from the dorm gnome.

The next picture is of the education building (also known as the "Ed" building). This is where the educational sessions take place. There is an industrial sized kitchen, a small store where fair-trade food, clothing, and gifts as well as farm-fresh eggs,

goats milk, goat meat, and vegetables are sold. To the right of the Ed building there is a house known as the 'Nic' house (short for Nicaragua). Habitat for Humanity came to the farm and built a model home for what they do in Nicaragua. When I came last May this is where I stayed. It's pretty much a brick house with cement floors, screen windows, and a palm leaf roof. We may or may not have almost burned the house down when we were there last time....
In front of this is a small, open-air building with a wood-burning stove used in a third-world simulation (as well as for education for the kids that come).

Before this becomes too long, I'll postpone pictures of the rest of the farm 'til my next post.

Some interesting practices done at the farm:

All of the toilets here are composting. This means, as the name implies, there is no running water that goes to the toilets. If you go #1, you close the lid and get on with your life. If, however, you play 'bombs away' as my Dad likes to put it, you put a scoop of sawdust into the toilet and any odor is neutralized. This will save the between 80 and 90 gallons of water per day for the average family (considering we have 20 people, that's a lot of water saved for other uses). The best part is the waste goes back to where it came from!

A new practice that is starting to take shape is 'urine bucket 2.0' (did I mention this is a sustainable farm?). Urine is high in nitrogen, a major ingredient in the chlorophyll and the green color of plants, which, in it's initial state can't be used. If you let it sit and become stale, the urea becomes 'healthy' for the plants and, with a bit of water, can be as effective as commercial fertalizers. This contraption allows guys to hook the hose up to a milk container and collect their urine. May sound gross but in practice it's pretty cool. Ladies, watch out, I hear they're inventing the 'urine bucket 3.0'...

Moving on to a much to a more pleasant subject, when we were out here before, we witnessed the birth of two sisters. We decided to name one 'Ann'and one 'Arbor' (for obvious reasons). I'm happy to report that they are both doing very well. They can be seen below: Ann

Arbor

It's crazy to think that when we left in May these little guys could barely walk and now when they jump on me they're as tall as me. My little girls are growing up so fast!

For MLK, the farm is going around to different areas of Waco and working on urban gardens. There are 8 sites that are setup around town. Most of the sites will be planting potatos and onions as well as painting boards with messages of peace.

Yeah, it's pretty much a bunch of hippies out here. On off days the farm manages to keep themselves busy. Last night a group of us listened to This American Life, a great radio program, and watched Cool Runnings. Sunday mornings are reserved for church for most of the tenants followed by a lot of relaxing and reading as well as taking care of on-going farm projects. As I don't go to church, I'm going to start my own ritual of playing my sax after breakfast.

There is a lot to talk about in terms of what goes here and ways you can take some of the same practices and apply them to your (civilized) lifestyle. Oh, if you want to send anything to me, send it to:

Chase Estrin
World Hunger Relief, Inc.
P.O. Box 639
Elm Mott, TX 76640

More to come on the shenanigans of the farm. If you want to come visit, let me know and we can arrange it. I would love to have visitors! I hope everyone has a relaxing MLK Day!