Many Hands Make Light Work

Life on the farm is accelerating now, with more and more veggies coming into maturity. Two good friends came into town and gave us a hand on Sunday and the old say of "Many hands make light work" held true. I had a huge list of things to get done and they were all done by 2 pm!

On Saturday, after the horse show, we went blue berrying again and brought home 10 lbs of berries. We've ordered a pressure canning set online and will wait for it to arrive before we do any more canning, so this batch of berries is destined for blueberry pancakes, cobbler, or flash frozen.

The first beans of the year were sampled by my friends and we harvested the first tomato in the greenhouse. Things are just getting warmed up, we should have more in the coming weeks.

We also dismantled the wee chicklin pen since the flocks have been integrated in the main coop. Not everyone is with the new program and I have to round up errant chickens each night and place them in the coop by hand. Hopefully, they will wise up soon. The wees are still a month or so away from laying, but they look full-sized. We are getting just 6 eggs a day right now, so I can't wait for more pullets to come online and start laying.

We also got a tree down, cleaned up some branches, did more work on the compost piles, weed wacked, and generally got things in order.

Starting next week, I will be out of state for training for my new job. I will spend four weeks away from home, although I get to come home on the weekends.

I am trying to get as much done as I can to ease the burden on my SO in my absence, but it will be most welcome to just be home for the fall. Foxhunting season starts in two weeks. Fall harvest will start soon as well: potatoes, perhaps some corn, squashes, beans, peppers, and eggplants.

Happy times.

The Month of June

June is almost over and with it, hopefully, my blog silence. Despite the rarity of posts, it's been a very busy month. The weather has been, er, difficult. It has rained every.single.day since June 8. That is 20 consecutive days. Sometimes it rains in the morning, sometimes at night. Sometimes it drizzles, sometimes it hails. Luckily, my little acreage is considered "well drained" so the garden has flourished instead of drowned. Some of my neighbors and friends have not been so lucky.

We are harvesting salad most nights now and can't keep up with the growth. We harvested our first 3 lb head of cabbage and it looks amazing, no rot or bug damage. The tomatoes and tomatillos are in full bloom. The Sweet Ann Sugar peas are about ready, sometime this week. The outdoor cabbage, brussels sprouts, and broccoli are looking like they may produce sometime this fall. The potatoes have been hilled and hilled again and are standing near 3' tall now. The beans are up and climbing up the poles every day.

First cabbage of the year, from the greenhouse.

Not everything turned out as planned. We had a fox steal a hen in broad daylight. We gave chase and he released her, relatively unharmed, but it did prompt me to purchase a .22 rifle. We lost our first batch of cucumbers seedlings and are starting over, but it may be too late. Our strawberries were decimated by our chickens. We placed a net over the plants and that merely slowed the chickens down in their carnage. The greenhouse broccoli got too warm so the heads were stunted. I waited too long to see if they would grow bigger and they ended up flowering. Broccoli produces lovely little yellow flowers. Who knew?

On the chicken front, we've had a definite slow down in egg production. Two hens have gone broody and have to be forcibly removed from the nest. The wee chicklins are not so wee anymore and are getting bigger by the day. We had two wee roosters begin crowing at 10 weeks and were causing mayhem among the rest of the chickens. I decided to butcher them, even though they were small.

Beer can chicken and cabbage fry.

The actual butchering went well. I had expected some pretty horrific things and the whole procedure took 15 minutes per bird and there was no blood, no smell, nothing gross. They dressed to about 2 lb, 3 oz, which is very small. I am expecting better results (near 5 lbs at 12 weeks) from the meaties that arrive in a couple of weeks. One of the roosters was the main course in our first "farm meal" tonight. We ate our rooster, our cabbage, our broccoli, our salad. Of course, butter and salad dressing were from off farm. But I feel like we are making some real progress.

So tonight we raise a glass of wine to the animal gracing our table, and to our vegetables, and to our labor. Cheers!

May you always have a clean shirt, a clear conscience, and enough coins in your pocket to buy a pint!

Too Long

I am a bad blogger. It's been way too long since a decent update. I got home today and grabbed the camera. So here we are in May... things are growing, there is hope.

First, we got two fruit trees from the county extension: A Champ Black Cherry and a Quincy Garnet Beauty Peach. They don't look like much now, but they are going to be spectacular additions to the homestead.

Plants in the greenhouse are very happy. Plants outside are not so much. We got fish emulsion fertilizer to help things along since we lost a winter's worth of compost.

I am way behind in my planting. I need to plant seed to replace my fried herbs, my next salad green rotation, more peas, more beans, more... everything.

The Quincy peach.

Signs of spring in the peach.

The Champ cherry.

Asparagus is UP!!!

Strawberries donated by a friend in their new home.

Greenhouse Kale. Very happy Kale.

Greenhouse spinach.

Greenhouse Broccoli.

A permanent resident of the greenhouse. Please leave name suggestions in the comments.

A feral strawberry patch near the terrace in the front yard.

A Japanese Maple. Just wait until the fall on this one. Stunning.

A big bumble bee visits the Azaleas.

What's Up?

Ask me "What's up?" Go ahead, ask me.

...

Peas! Peas are up! The first real veggie sown directly outdoors showed up this weekend. And, lo, carrots are also up.

So I planted some more today. Onions, carrots, more peas, more potatoes, turnips. I transplanted cucumbers and pumpkins. It might be early, be the forecast is for HOT, and they were getting root bound in their seed trays. So out they went.

Yesterday, in between getting ready for the show and lessons and bathing the International Horse of Mystery, I wired the greenhouse fan to turn on when needed, based upon a thermostat. Too little too late, the 90 degree record temps fried some spinach, cilantro, and tomato seedlings. Oh well, we'll plant some more.

Lots of work is getting done around the farm, the barn roof is almost finished and it looks awesome! Some drainage work is being done to clear out the spot I hope to use as a compost. The sacrifice areas got more stone dust, leaves got raked, fencing got repaired.

And now, the farm is starting to look presentable. The house is a complete disaster. So off to clean the house. You can call me fat, but you can't call me lazy. :)

Investing in Asparagus

We made lots of progress around the farm today. We got the front gate installed (we had dismantled it to widen the driveway for the Brego-size trailer). I added a few more tons of stone dust to some low spots in the sacrifice paddock. I moved several mounds of dirt around, consolidating them into a single mound. I planted some seedlings into the outdoor garden: broccoli, brussels sprouts, spinach and kale.

But the most exciting thing is that we started our asparagus patch! Last week in the mail, I received 30 crowns of Certified Organic Jersey Giant F1 90% male asparagus. Yep, that's the good stuff. These crowns must have been hand-picked by virgins and rinsed in unicorn tears because they cost a mint.

But no matter, I finally had my crowns so we excavated the asparagus patch. It's in a primo spot, very well drained, good sun, near the greenhouse, tastefully decorated with country kitsch signs.

I am very excited to be eating asparagus... two years from now. It feels like such a real commitment, a real investment, to put asparagus in. It's possible the asparagus will outlive my time on this particular farm. It will surely outlive my shoddily constructed greenhouse. :)

The Patch

Crowns in the furrow

Chickenistas inspect the work

Education for the Ignorant

I put together a small list of some of the books I've read over the past years to get ideas about how to go on with this farming business. I posted it as a sidebar on the front page of the blog. I am woefully ignorant, and lacking in a paternal/maternal figure who knows the soil. My grandmother used to have an acre garden with great yields but she is past the point of remembering the essence of many details, such as canning, weather, growing patterns, etc.

I have been doing well with the fauna education, but now is the time to focus on the flora. I know very little about soil, except some basics from color, consistency, acidity. I can't identify many tree specifies and am even worse with weeds and mushrooms.

So any tips on which books to add to my bookshelf? I am looking for books about organic, diversified, small-scale vegetable and herb farming. There are literally thousands of books touting these attributes in this day and age, but are there some real gems I should pick up? Winter is a time for reading and planning, and although I missed the boat on many important items, such as liming, I would like to enter the Spring as prepared as possible.

Thanks is advance! Every comment is greatly appreciated!