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.