The harvest frenzy is finally starting to wind down. We've been using the extra time to kill off our old chickens and ducks and start getting the garden in order for the winter. I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that I'm still adding more items to our to-do list every day than I remove, though.

The only relatively large harvest we made this week was sorghum. I'm mostly just playing around with grains at the moment, but have to admit that sorghum is a keeper. The heads are easy to cut free, they dry on our curing racks without molding, and then the goats eat the seeds right off the stems during the winter when I think they deserve a special treat. In the meantime, the sorghum stalks (well, leaves really) are superior even to sweet-corn stalks as morning goat fodder. Finally, our sorghum grew better than our field corn in the waterlogged, clayey soil where I stuck it, figuring an experimental crop didn't deserve better. I think next year we'll delete the field corn and stick to sorghum as our primary goat grain.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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