We currently have about 60 sheep that we graze across our pastures using intensive rotational grazing… sheep are moved to a new paddock every 2-5 days. Our current breed of choice for East Tennessee is the Katahdin Hair Sheep. They are a meat breed. These sheep have hair that sheds, not wool, so there is no shearing. They were developed in Maine from sheep originating in the Caribbean combined with established British breeds. They have excellent disease resistance, great mothering, and can easily handle the humid conditions of the South.

Our second son with the Katahdins.

Katahdins are sheep that tend to eat more like a goat; meaning they love grass and good pastures like all sheep, but they will eat more browse than most breeds of sheep. But they are still sheep, and they only lightly graze the blackberries and wild roses and “leftover” plants that goats love.

It is well known that goats are escape artists. They old saying goes, “If you can build a fence that holds water, you can build a fence that holds goats!” Now, of course, this is an exaggeration… mostly.

Our sheep are very well trained to our temporary electric polybraid lines with a portable solar charger. I wanted more even grazing of our pastures, but we have too much blackberry and wild rose than our sheep would care to eat. But I didn’t want to deal with difficult to contain goats.

Anni with the goats.

Then our dear friend, Anni, shared her dilemma. She raises goats for milking. She handcrafts incredible soaps from the goat milk. Well, she had bought two older Nubian goats that were supposed to be pregnant, but they turned out not to be. And unfortunately, her small farm cannot support extra goats that are not producing.

These goats are gentle, older (and not so focused on escaping all fences just because they are there!), and really respect electric line. And now we have two new additions to our sheep herd.

Anni and I unloaded the goats from the back of her vehicle, and the first thing they ate was the seedheads from the patch of Curly Dock (Rumex crispus) that our sheep had left over. Then they took down a half dozen blackberry seedlings. Then they decimated a wild rose bush! They are the Queens of Good First Impressions!

The goats immediately went to work!

So welcome, Anneke (“AHN-eh-kuh”) and Jantine (“yahn-TEEN-uh”).

The goats have been given traditional Dutch names, since my wife, while American, is 100% Dutch in ethnicity.

Yes, our Nubian Goats… a British breed developed from Middle Eastern and African and Indian goats… have Dutch names, but live on an American farm with a German name, the Bauernhof Kitsteiner (the Kitsteiner Family Farm”)… but, of course!

The goats meeting the sheep for the first time.

Showcase – This area is next to the main driveway next to the house. Since it is prominent and convenient for all visitors, it serves as a great example of a “permaculture design”. We have a mixed planting on multiple layers that is useful as well as beautiful.

Aesthetics – Many of the plants here have large or prominent flowers, interesting shapes/leaves, or nice fragrances.

Food – We’ve got a few perennial herbs we use on a regular basis next to the house, so we don’t have to walk far to harvest them for the kitchen at the last minute.

Unique – We planted a few common species that most people would be familiar with (sage, thyme, mint, iris, etc.) as well as a number of great, but unique species (flowering quince, Cornelian cherry/”edible dogwood”, clove currant, etc.).

Here are a couple photo pairs (non-labeled and labeled) from two sides of our Permaculture Showcase Garden. A couple of notes about the planting:

• Honeysuckle – invasive species that I did NOT plant. It is growing all over this area of Tennessee where we live. I don’t want it on the farm, and we are slowly getting rid of it. But our sheep like to eat it. And it does have a wonderful fragrance.
• Privet – also an invasive species that I did NOT plant, but I am using it. It is growing just upwind of the Cornelian Cherry. It is acting as a “nurse plant”. It is blocking the wind and offsetting some of the heat from the western, setting sun until the Cornelian Cherry becomes more established. I continue to cut it back as it begins to flower, so that it will not set seeds. It will eventually get removed, but all in due time.
• Comfrey – it is huge right now. We are using these Comfrey as a “chop and drop” mulch and soil builder. It will be chopped back in the next few days or so. We are also going to use this Comfrey as “seed stock” for plantings into the Forest Garden we are developing.
• Many more plants! – There are a number of other plants that are not labelled or cannot be seen in these photos.

Our plan is to have raised beds filling both garden plots, but we knew this wasn’t going to happen this year. And this project is still taking longer to build than initially planned… pretty much like every other project on the farm!

We’ve only installed five raised beds so far… you can see this in the photo above. You can also see our garlic, shallots, and elephant garlic in the foreground; they are growing great, but the elephant garlic on the far right has some scapes we need to prune.

In our other 40-foot x 40-foot garden plot, we are installing quick, straw raised beds. Planting directly into straw bales works very well… we’ve done this, and I like it. But you have to condition the straw, and this takes more time than I wanted to wait.

But we had another idea: use the straw bales as walls for a “raised” bed. We placed 6 straw bales in a rectangle with an open area in the middle where we placed compost for planting.

We dumped a few buckets of composted litter from our poultry brooder. We have used this brooder for the past 4 years with great success, and a lot of compost has been created from the deep bed of litter we create.

On top of the composted poultry litter, we added mushroom compost from a local compost and soil company.

We will be planting melons, squash, and cucumbers into these beds. There are a number of benefits from this set up:

• The beds are not filled all the way to the top edge to protect the young plants from the wind… we can get some heavy wind in this area.
• The raised edges will let us cover the seedlings with nursery cloth to cut down on pests when the plants are young and more vulnerable.
• The straw will leech nutrient every time it rains. The mushroom compost is rich. The poultry litter compost is extremely rich. The melons and squash are heavy feeders, so all this nitrogen should be great.

Our society keeps passing the bill for “cheap food” on to the next generation, and the tab keeps getting larger. The bill must eventually be paid.

Permaculture is not the only solution. But the ethics and principals of Permaculture make the most sense to me in practical terms. This is why I call our farm, the Bauernhof Kitsteiner, a Permaculture farm.

Our food is not cheap. It is not subsidized. It is not mass produced.

Our food is real. It is healthy. It is good for my children. It is good for our earth.

It is making a difference.

Even if that difference is small.

“The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for own existence and that of our children.”
-Bill Mollison (cofounder of Permaculture)

• The blue lines are where the trees and shrubs are planted. Each line is on contour (meaning it is perfectly level). The hill slopes down in a south-south-east direction.
• The orange line is where we planted a row of Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) that runs parallel to the small, country road we live on.
• The two purple squares on the top left are two 40-square-foot garden plots. The dark purple one has half of the raised beds we have installed. The light purple square doesn’t have any of the raised beds yet.
• The sun rises where the yellow dot is in the sky (pretty original, I know). And the dotted line is the general path it takes across the sky.

A spaghetti squash I found a few weeks ago.

These Cushaw Squash are huge!

This year, my wife stumbled (almost literally!) across these melons. She sent me a photo and asked if they were edible. I was thrilled!

She had found a Cushaw Squash, sometimes called a Kershaw. These large, crookneck squash are actually an heirloom vegetable. In fact, they are listed on the Slow Food Ark of Taste! I could give a lot more background, but this Slow Food article does a great job telling the history and importance of this squash that is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Oh… and they are immune to squash vine borers (an insect that destroys most squash unless treated with chemicals) and they can store for 3-4 months! We will be planting these intentionally in the years to come.

So apparently, somewhere along the way of gathering squash from neighbors to being food for our animals, we now have a sprawling piece of history nestled in one of our fallow fields.

And I can’t wait to taste it!

(Here is another fun article on preparing and eating Cushaw Squash)

Rotational grazing is not a difficult thing to learn or to do. It is more time intensive than open grazing (i.e. no subdivisions of a pasture… all animals in one area all the time). But it is significantly cheaper than conventional animal management. We do not own a tractor. I do not hay my pastures. I believe I fed our sheep one and a half square bales of hay in total for the last 365 days. And that was just because we had a few days that were extremely wet, and I didn’t have time to move them to a new paddock. Our local price for a square bale of hay is about $5.50. So, my hay cost for the last year was less than $10.

We do provide a kelp-based mineral supplement from New Country Organics, but we feed nothing else. As you can see from the photos below, the pastures are improving. And, our sheep are doing exceedingly well.

Photo 1

• To the far left is an area that has not been grazed since we bought the farm 3 years ago.
• There are three hills in the background that are up against the treeline. The far right hill was grazed a few months ago. The center hill was grazed a few weeks ago. The left hill is where the ram lambs are right now.
• The big green area in center front is where we had our ewes in early-Winter, about 4 months ago. It does look particularly good since we’ve had some warm weather and good, early Spring rains.

Photo 2

• This is the same area as Photo 1, but a different angle. I was standing at the far left of this image to take Photo 1.
• The brown hill in the back is the area that has not been grazed since we moved here 3 years ago. The rams are currently in square-rectangular paddocks almost dead center in the photo. This is what we call “standing hay”. The sheep love it. It’s what they eat all Winter.
• The green hills in the foreground is where our ewes were in early-Winter.
• The shrubs in the center of the green hill area are Prairie Rose (Rosa setigera). I intentionally let some areas of the pasture stay a bit un-managed for a few reasons. I want to keep some wildlife habitat for birds and rabbits and other animals. Also, a little variety in the sheep’s diet is great. I try to expand the diversity on the farm instead of reduce it. I have been slowly documenting the wildflowers, trees, birds, mammals, and mushrooms on the farm.

Photo 3

• This paddock is not the result of only rotational grazing with sheep. Here is what we did for this paddock:
  • First our sheep grazed it.
  • Then our mobile chicken coop was parked here.
  • Then our pigs tore it all up.
  • Then I reseeded it with a mix of pasture seeds and clover.
  • Then our mobile chicken coop was parked here again.
• This area was an almost dead, rocky mess. Now it is one of the most lush areas on the farm.
• I call this Rotational Grazing Plus.

All photos in this article are ours. If you would like to use one, please let me know!

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• We raise Katahdin Sheep with rotational grazing/holistic management.
• We raise mixed heritage breed pigs on pasture.
• We raise free-range, mixed heritage breed laying chickens.
• We raise Cornish Rock Cross broiler chickens on pasture in Salatin-style “chicken tractors”.
• We raise Broad Breasted White Turkeys on pasture.

Plasson Bell Waterers: We bought these from Cornerstone Farm Ventures. These are wonderful waterers that we use with our laying chickens, our broiler chickens, and our turkeys. We connect ours to a 5-gallon bucket. I wrote an article about setting up the Plasson Bell Waterer. They can occasionally clog up, but the entire unit can be easily broken down and cleaned. We’ve had to do this about once a year, but it is not hard. In freezing temps, the water will freeze and the water will not flow. But we’ve never had a part break due to freezing. Once the temps warm up, everything starts flowing again. If a part does break, and there is one part (the handle hook) that has broken on us a few times, you can buy just the individual part to replace. I highly recommend this product.
Plasson Bell Waterers

48” Galvanized Poultry Feeder: We bought these from Cornerstone Farm Ventures. These high volume feeders are fantastic in the Salatin-Style Chicken Tractors. We used other, smaller ones in the past, and we had to refill them way too often. These have been durable and have reduced our work.
48” Galvanized Poultry Feeder

New Country Organics Feed: For our chickens, turkeys, and sheep mineral, we exclusively use New Country Organics. I have not found a poultry feed that has a better nutrient profile, and if I was designing a poultry feed, this would be almost identical to what I would want.
New Country Organics

Prairie Moon Nursery Seeds: This amazing company only sells native (to North America) wildflower/prairie seeds. We have added small amounts of their mixes to our other re-seeding mixes for our pastures. We have also recently planted some larger portions of our lawn to wildflowers… we want to get rid of as much mowing as possible and attract native pollinators/beneficial insects. Their products are high quality, but can be expensive, so pick the mix that best suits your site and finances.
Prairie Moon Nursery

Walnut Creek Seeds: This company provides multiple seed mixes for pastures. We have used the Super Soil Builder mix after frost through the Summer. We use the Nitro Soil Builder mix in late Summer through Autumn. And we use the Winter Grazing Mix starting in October. We have been very pleased with their seed mixes. We will often add other cold-weather pasture grasses to these mixes or a small percentage of wildflower seeds (above) to theses mixes.
Walnut Creek Seeds Agricultural Mixes
Walnut Creek Seeds Grazing Mixes

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I had found various piles of scat (animal droppings/manure) around the pastures, but they were too indistinct for me to tell which animal they came from.

We tried to go out late at night and really early in the morning to spot an animal. We never saw anything.

One of our farm volunteers even stayed up all night with a large spotlight in an attempt to catch a glimpse of a possible predator. Again, nothing.

So finally, after trying without success, I bought a game cam.

I first set it up near our mobile chicken coop, the Egg Mobile. We saw some rabbits and a few opossums. But that was it.

I then set it up near our sheep. Nothing.

I set it up near our pond. I saw the black and white cat that occasionally visits our farm.

But no predator that could take out 5 geese in one night (last year) or 4 ducks and one goose in one night (this year).

Eventually, I set up the game cam at the treeline bordering our pastures.

Here is what we found:

I am disappointed to see the coyote on the farm. The coyote is the likely source of our animal losses (although the bobcat may be contributing for sure). We know that if coyotes are hunted heavily, litter sizes increase dramatically. So in our attempt to fix the problem, we are actually making it worse. For now, I am still working on a plan to deal with the coyote, but I am not sure yet how I will proceed.

But I am so excited to see the bobcat on our farm. To have a high level predator like this means that we have a functioning ecosystem. There is obviously a trade off with this. If we lose a few chickens or ducks to these higher level predators each year, I am okay with that. To me, this is the cost of having a farm that encourages natural diversity. And I love it.

All photos/videos in this article are ours. If you would like to use one, please let me know!

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Most people are familiar with the common “Black Beauty” or “Black Bell” varieties. These are very good eggplants, which is why they are so common, but there are so many other varieties from around the world. They range in shape from small and round, to long and thin, to large and bell shaped. They come in shades of white, green, orange, red, purple; striped and solid.

We lived just off Edirne street when we lived in Turkey, and so I thought I’d love to try this Turkish variety in our garden. Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds describes the Edirne Eggplant this way:

Originally collected in Edirne (Adrianople), Turkey, in 1948, and stored by the USDA ever since, until we grew it out in 2008! Gorgeous 6-8 inch fruits are richly striped in purple and off-white. May be even superior to Listada de Gandia in appearance due to its deeper luster, and actually preferred over it in our trials! Vigorous plants, very productive.

I made a version of Turkish fried eggplant (Patlıcan Kızartması) yesterday. Just slice the eggplant, fry in oil, and serve with a garlic-yogurt sauce… very heavy on the garlic! Simple and sublime!

I’ve made variations of this dish in the past with the common Black Beauty Eggplant, and this version was way better. I can’t say that it was entirely due to the Edirne Eggplant versus the Black Beauty, as it may have been the freshness of my eggplant. But for now, I think it may be my new favorite!

All photos in this article are ours. If you would like to use one, please let me know!

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