The Big White Farmhouse

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+ Well, the suffering brassica situation was a huge fail.  Just a few days after planting, we had two days of hard frost and even though I tried to cover and protect them, not a single one made it.  Womp womp.  My husband picked up a handful of established transplants from a big box store and while it’s not ideal (and $$$), I’m hoping I’ll have much better luck with these.

+ I planted potatoes using the no-dig straw method.  I also sowed lettuce, carrots, spinach and kale.  In other spring garden news, I ordered a “collection” of intermediate day onion transplants, not realizing the sheer amount that comes in the package!  We have onions here, there and everywhere now.

+ I fertilized all of the fruit and nut trees with this fertilizer as well as the strawberries, blueberries and raspberries.

+ In an effort to make a little money back to the farm, we started selling our excess eggs every Saturday.  We only made one sale the first day, but you should have heard the whooping and cheering from my kids when they ran home, cash in hand.

+ The broilers went out to pasture.  There is something so beautiful about watching them explore and run and eat out in the sunshine.  This is how all of our food should be grown!

+ We got four little Khaki Campbell ducks!  They are so adorable and have grown so quickly.  The breed is known for being a little skittish, so we’re all working hard to teach them that they can trust us.  After one short “field trip” to the front yard last week, they even followed behind my son back to their temporary home in the garage.  We now call him “Papa Duck”, ha!

+ My husband finished up the woodshed and started chopping up dead trees to fill it.

+ I discovered a new small business via a Pinterest ad of all places.  The shop is called Barebones and I ordered their Japanese weeding hoe.  The hoe is definitely built for right-handers, which I didn’t think about until it arrived.  As a leftie, I’m going to have to hold it a little wonky and pray I don’t chop my fingers off.

+ I transplanted a handful of tomatoes slightly earlier than normal and integrated a tip I learned about using milk cartons as mini greenhouses.  It worked great and their growth was promising…until we had yet another random freeze and it killed just about all of them.  One step forward and two steps back over here.

+ We started the breeding process by putting Fred and Ethel in the same paddock together.  Since we’re still figuring out estrus cycles (oh man, the things I have had to research and learn this month…), they’ll be together for about 30 days and hopefully we’ll have a pregnant pig at the end of it.  We’re all super excited for baby piglets in late summer!

+ My husband is trying his hand at growing his own tobacco.  We have no idea what we’re doing but Youtube is a great teacher.

+ After watching a video about taking your garden vertical, I completely changed my plans for the in-ground beds.  We made trellises from sixteen foot cattle panels and a bunch of T-posts and I cannot wait to have a shady tunnel full of food this summer.

+ And finally, the project that has been taking up all of my time: the food forest!  We’ve been planning for awhile now and decided 2022 was the year we make it happen.  It’s a huge project and will take years to finish, but I’m so excited to get the infrastructure and main elements in.  This month, we added more fruit trees (including summercrisp pears and white lady peaches), two “pink lemonade” blueberry bushes, and two grape trellises.  The food forest will wrap around my existing garden with a pathway throughout.  We have the weed paper path laid and just need to have wood chips delivered to cover it.  Next up: flowers!