Babies and berries

My wife and I welcomed a new baby into the family this week.  It was probably a good thing it rained this weekend so I don't feel bad not being able to work out at the homestead.  Despite the rain, I did get a couple things done.  My dad brought over some corn crib sections that we put up around the grape vines that should serve three purposes.  First, it will obviously give the grapes a place to grow.  Second, it should cause the grapes to droop down through the wire and make for relatively easy picking.  Finally, it'll provide a nice shady spot in the summer to have a little bench.  The grapes seem to be very slow growing, and I think a couple died, so we'll have to replace them and then extend the hoops.

We also decided to try heavy tomato cages for the blackberries.  I'm not sure it will work, as it tends to keep them kind of bunched up, and so I'm not sure if they'll get enough air around the leaves, but we had seen some of the local Amish doing this for raspberries, so decided to give it a try before we put up the permanent trellis for the berries. There are little "suckers" coming up, so once we get the strawberries all transplanted, I'm going to work that area up to expand the blackberry patch.  We plan to mulch the berries with old hay and see how that works to keep down the weeds.

Strawberries--lots and lots of strawberries

I work full time during the week, and don't work on Sundays, so Saturdays is the only real day we have to make a lot of progress on the homestead.  Unfortunately, that puts us at the mercy of the weather.

This week we had planned to do quite a bit in the garden--move strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and plant early sweet corn.  But since we got a lot of rain this week, things were still very muddy, so we had to modify our plans a bit.  

The only garden work we were able to do was transplant strawberries.  We were able to do this because we had covered the strawberry bed with black plastic when we planted the first row, and so the dirt underneath the plastic was dry.  (We poke holes in it after we get it planted).  Last spring we had planted about 75 plants, and they spread throughout the summer.  We moved about 140-150 plants to the new bed, and expect them to do pretty well.  The plastic will keep weeds down--the biggest challenge with strawberries, and will help warm the soil.  We will either clip the runners or let them whither, in order to allow the plant to maximize the energy being put in to the fruit.  We'll have another bed without plastic on which we'll let runners develop as we prepare for the next strawberry bed.  Because you should rotate beds every 2-3 years, you have to be constantly thinking ahead to the next patch.

I also mowed grass around the gardens and the various trails I have for getting around the homestead.  Next week we'll hopefully till some more ground and plant sweet corn.  In the area where strawberries were last summer, I'll work up the soil and expand the blackberry patch.  

We also cleared some more trees along the one side of the hayfield.  We're slowly getting the junk box elder trees cleared back to the original edge of the woods, and giving air and sunlight to the oaks, hickerys, and other hardwood trees.  Plus, it will give us more open area for pasture, hay, etc.

Finally, we weeded around each of the fruit trees.  This really needed to be done, so the trees to don't have to compete so much for moisture and nutrients.  When we planted the trees last spring, we put a lot of composted horse manure around the roots, so they seem to be doing very well.

    

Our oldest decided to dig a "turkey trap" in the one garden bed, but all he caught was one of our own turkeys.  

Asparagus and more

Spring is a full month ahead of last year and at least a couple weeks ahead of normal, so things are really greening and the trees are leafing out. Our fruit tress are showing more life each day, but fortunately have not decided to flower yet. Perhaps they won't flower at all this year (we planted them last spring), but since they're dwarfs and semi-dwarfs, I would expect them to try flowering. We're still getting frosts pretty regularly, so I'd prefer they wait a few more weeks to flower.

I've been waiting for a new blade for the brush hog for the BCS, but since it has not yet come, I sharpened the old one up as best I could--it was pretty rough and jagged from years of rocks, etc.--which alone made quite a difference. It feels like I have twice the power and I can go twice the speed without bogging down. Now that I have it together, I've been mowing all the paths around the gardens and around the woods, but I have a little ways to go.

As inevitably happens in fields like this, you can tell how, over the years, the woods has crept out. As a tree falls down, farmers--especially renters--will just farm around them, and so each year more and more trees grow up until you have a 30-40 foot wide strip that is taken over, often by junk trees like box elder trees. Because of this, we cut a bunch of these trees down and chopped out some of the smaller trees to try to reclaim the farm ground, and get back to the good hardwood trees. In this same area there are quite a few old patches of black berry and black raspberries, but they have a lot of weeds and cockleburs in them, so I'm going to mow them off and start fresh. Because we have rocks in our area, we have to walk through and pick out rocks, as past farmers were prone to just "thrown them down in the woods". Widening the pasture area and clearing the junk trees back to the line of oaks that used to run a long the field will be very nice.

A local guy that raises a great deal of organic produce every year asked me recently if I wanted to buy some asparagus, as he was ordering some 5000 roots because he gets a good deal on the quantity and I agreed to take 500, even though I wasn't quite sure what I'd do with all of them. In the end, he only had about 280, which we planted in last year's potato bed because the soil is so rich and has been worked. We created the trenches by using the rotary plow to kick the dirt each way and laid the roots down in the trenches. We then back-filled. Hopefully they come up decent.

We also laid out an area with black plastic that we are in the process of transplanting strawberries from last year's bed. The place we put them last year seems to shady, so we're going to move them up on higher ground where they can get full son. Hopefully they do well, as our kids love strawberries.

The one thing that has done really well in the shadier garden area we previously used has been the blackberries, which were planted last spring. They seem to like a little less sun and the old soil seems to be treating them well, so once the strawberries are gone, I plan to work the area up again and expand the blackberries.

I also solved one of my dilemmas for the spring regarding the 4-5 acres of farm land on the adjoining 9 acre piece we purchased last fall. It has been in conventional corn (meaning sprays and fertilizers) for the past few years, so I'm anxious to get it back to organic. I don't have the equipment to do it myself, and I had considered seeding it down to a hay/pasture mix, but in talking to one of my neighbors down the road (who once owned and farmed the land we have now), he's going to put corn in the land again this summer. Fortunately, he's organic and is small scale like me, so it will be a win win.

I'm going to attach a few videos that show the main parts of the homestead. I'm sorry if they're a little bumpy to watch. I just snapped them with my phone while walking through the gardens. Enjoy.