Spring time and Company!

Yes we are actually alive down here!  Fact is,  we have been so busy that I have not had time to be posting anything to our BLOG. But I am determined to do better for the months to come. It is absolutely beautiful down here right now. Spring is certainly here. We had a very nice visit from my sister Trisha and Mom a few weeks ago. We pretty much hung out at our place, I actually put them to work some, but tried not to abuse them . We were blessed with very nice weather. Below are some pictures from their recent visit. 

                                                  Trisha and Mom getting some vitamin D.

                               Trisha, Shalo, Mom and Aki starting to clean out the garden beds...

Trisha was kind enough to volunteer her flower gardening skills and work with Mom and Shalo to start a new flower garden where we had a big tree removed last fall.

 I know Mom will want to kill me, but remember those yard butt signs?!....

This is not our horse, but the neighbors just down the road, this little girl was born with no human assistance this past weekend. The mare is an Irish draft horse, the stud stallion is back in Ireland. We are told there are only  about 500 of this breed in the USA, The foal will turn grey as she ages.

This IS our pig, thanks to Mom and Trisha

These are our first beehives on the homestead, they seem to be thriving with all of the spring trees and plants blossoming, I am hoping they will help with pollination of our mini orchard and garden as well as supply us with honey, though I an not counting on the honey until next year, we'll see...

I put this picture in here for Trisha to see, it is currently covered with light lavender colored blossoms. It is right outside the garden and is a great shade tree in the summer.  I am told it is a cotton wood tree.

 This splash of color is from our crimson clover cover crop in the garden

This is our new row of blackberry plants, raspberries below... I am hoping I can do a comparison picture in a few months and show them several feet high!? Though that might be wishful thinking. 

And these sickly looking sprigs are sweet potato slips, the planting directions said not to worry if they look pitiful, that they will "spring to life and provide a bountiful harvest"...I am trying to keep the faith! 

And that is all I got for now. There really has been a lot of activity down here, but need to do better keeping the camera on hand. I am just trying to get back in the groove after a long hiatus. Hope you all are doing well , more to come

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
.

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 .....

Dog Days...

Summer seems to be winding down here, with some mildly cooler temperatures, and not quite the seemingly constant pressing need to get something else done. Though my "to-do" list never seems to be any shorter. 

 The latest big accomplishment has been a little more progress on the barn restoration project. Finally we have gotten the front side of the barn resided. The project took a good month of weekends because there were only a few hours I could work on it in the morning before the sun started shining on the work area making it unbearable to work there. This fall I hope to get the North side finished as well. Then I can focus on some minor floor repairs in the loft area. Then we hope to have some simple furniture up there to hang out, read , or  watch over the field as the sun sets and the deer move in for their evening grazing ritual, hopefully some day they will be replaced by some sheep or a couple beef cows ! 

Before: Summer 2010

After: Summer 2012

The poultry flock has been blessed with little problems from predators this summer. This improved a lot after one neighbor with a chicken killing dog moved away, and the other completed a deer fence around their entire property. We also have been trapping and "relocating" occasional opossums and coons. Toby also recently treed a coon who likely killed three of the neighbors chickens recently. He made for an interesting evening of front yard coon hunting that was eventually successful. Unfortunately the carcass got wedged in a crook,... fortunately the vultures found him w/in 48 hours and took care of him.

One of our broody hens successfully hatched and raised three chicks and four guinea keets, one of them now thinks he is a chicken and continues to follow her around. Also, we successfully hatched a clutch of guinea eggs in an incubator and now have 11 young keets we need to sell. Our spring flock of layer chicks should be putting out eggs any day now. I think we have about 26 of them in addition to our other 7-8 adults. That will be a lot of omelets and quiche!

Incubator keets , 4 weeks old

Mother hen with babies, (photo a month old)

The chicks that hatched were from some cross breed eggs from a friend who had a rooster, as we did not. And of course, as you all know,  you need a rooster to fertilize the eggs if they are going to hatch. We ended up with one very interestingly feathered and colored charcoal gray bird that we think was aptly named Bruno, after the singer Bruno Mars... what do you think....

The garden blessed us with a bountiful harvest of  veggies this first year. We canned a lot salsa, spaghetti sauce, whole tomatoes, chutney, barbecue sauce, some pickles, green beans, froze a lot of peppers, zucchini, summer squash, beans,  snow peas, pesto sauce, jalapenos. Also a lot blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries in the freezer. This past week I have been tilling in  some cover crops and will replant an over winter cover crop in most boxes. Currently tomato plants and generally cleaning things up. Will try to get fall garden in this weekend. It should supply carrots, turnips, salad greens (most of winter), radishes, arugula, collards, etc. This winter and early spring plan to plant some of our own raspberry plants, blackberries, and some fruit trees. That should about fill in the space remaining.

Until next time...

HOT, again....

 Don't let the pretty flowers fool you, it has been HOT down here in NC!  Temps in the low 100's and upper 90's. Which I guess is close to the norm, but after fall, winter, spring, it seems I always manage to "forget" how miserable July and August are down here.

Despite the weather things are going well. The garden has been providing a good supply of fresh vegetable, and we have put up enough beans, pickles, squash, peppers to see us through the winter already. the tomatoes should be coming in any time now. We have gotten very little in the way of rain lately and have been watering parts of the garden every night. I feel we are just managing to keep things from burning up.

I completed the walkway from the garage to the house. That was a major project I will gladly cross off the "To Do" list.  The rocks were watered for the picture and to clean them off., they are not that shiny.

This is an evenings quick picking of summer squash, peppers, and a few stray early tomatoes. 

These are some of our 26 teenage chickens, should start producing eggs by October. I am pretty sure I heard a young rooster crow the other morning! We will see.

And this is Momma Buff who went "broody" this spring and hatched out these four chicks from a friends fertile eggs(well her chickens' eggs!) She has been a good mother to these. She also hatched out five of our own guinnia eggs a few days after these, unfortunately she did not want anything to do with them,and killed one. At that point I had to seperate them. They are alive and well under an intermittent heat lamp.

Our guinna hen went broody on a nest of  20 eggs out in our field, but that might be a whole 'nother  story....

                            Toby continues to grow and has been an excellent "farm dog " to date!