Fall Catch Up

Greetings again from NC.  Life as always has been busy and that has resulted in quite the dry run here. But fall, and soon winter is here, and I am hoping that means we can take a breather from the unending projects down here on the farm. This entry is really a "catch up" of some of things that have been going on down here over the last couple months
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The garden is pretty much put to sleep for the winter with the exception of this hoop house, which is a poor man's version of a green house. It gets covereed in plastic for the winter. It is 11/24/2012 and we are still harvesting broccoli, chard, cabbage, brussel sprouts, cilantro, lettuce, and carrots from it. It will be interesting to see how long it works until things finally freeze out. We managed to get seven fruit trees in this fall. Plum, pear, apple, and peach. The two fig trees planted this spring have quadrupled in size. We should have a good crop next summer!

These two bear plots are being prepped for blackberries and raspberries. The blackberry plants are actually already in. I also got the cedar posts in already for the future support trellis for both of them,

This is a bench I made from a Black Walnut tree we salvaged from the neighbor last fall , it is pretty permanently installed near our outdoor fire pit.


 A good part of our past few weekends this fall was used making firewood. We had to take down one big dead oak tree as well as split a lot of the bigger pieces of wood from last fall's wood pile, which seemed to have toppled over from our novice wood stacking skills.



Remnants of last fall's wood pile

New wood 2012

We ended up renting a log splitter for a weekend and with Ethan's help the thing ran for 8 hours each day. By Sunday night we were all exhausetd and finally had to throw in the towel as the sunlight dwindled.

I think Dad would be proud of my obcessively and neatly stacked new wood pile this year!

To make life easier this winter we built this wood shelter for closer to the house. The main wood pile is quite distance from the house. Shalo helped build this, and the following weekend Ethan and I knocked the rack below out in less than two hours. It is on the side porch that conveniently opens up right into the living room with the fireplace.

The spring chickens have finally reached maturity and we are averaging about 12-14 eggs a day now, with a nice variety of colors!

This fall Karen volunteered to try her hand at mowing the field, she took to it fast and I welcomed the help! There is something enjoyable and almost mesmerizing about coursing up and down the field on the tractor...

After some recent yard work,  routine "farm" equipment maintainance, and generally a long summer of hard work we took a weekend  off up to a cabin in Virgina for some R and R .....