Bare Roots & Fruits

Yes it's still January and most people aren't thinking about spring planting yet, but we're getting excited to get things growing.  We've already staked and mulched the locations for our fruit trees a couple months ago, and now it's time to get the planting done.  We've decided on adding peach, cherry, plum, pear, apricot, and almond trees this year.  We'll also be putting in blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry patches as well as a nice big vegetable garden.

Blueberry and Fruit Tree Plots

For now we'll focus on the fruit trees though because this winter dormant period is the time to pickup bare root trees and plant them.  Bare root trees are less expensive and easy to start.   Hopefully the rain slows down enough this weekend to give us that chance to get them into the ground for a successful start.  I'm sure we'll have pics and another update on our busy weekend, we always have more going on than time to blog about it!  :)

Weekend Update

Oh, as usual we've been busy.  This past weekend seemed to pass quickly and yesterday when someone asked what we had done over the weekend I was honestly stumped.  Well it was a Monday morning and I wasn't quite awake yet, but it took me awhile to come up with things that we did.

I guess part of the problem was the fact that I had taken Sunday off to go fishing, so really Saturday was my only day of laboring on the farm.  It was nice taking a day off though, and I did hook a couple fish but only got one to the bank and lost the other.  It was a wild, so I rubbed it's belly for good luck and thanked her for the photo op before releasing her back into the river.  I'm sure she didn't appreciate the sore lip but was probably thankful to still be alive--or so I'd assume not really knowing what fish think.  It was a nice rainy day hanging with a friend by a smoky fire, fishing and drinking some hard cider, and sharing bullshit stories.

Wild Steelhead on the Notellem River

That wasn't the highlight of my weekend though, nope, it started off with a Friday evening with Theresa and I dropping the kids off at the Hult Center so they could enjoy a Broadway production, The Book of Mormon.  They met up with the grand parents and sat in the orchestra section, so while they enjoyed their good seats Theresa and I took off to appreciate our time alone together soaking in a hot tub!  Oh, there's nothing quite like soaking in a hot tub on a winter night with a slight mist in the air.  It made me realize we don't get nearly enough time alone together.  Afterwards we partook in some of the best chocolate around, Euphoria chocolate, warmed up and poured over some Prince Pucklers ice cream--infamous Euphoria sundae at Prince Pucklers.  If I had my A game on we'd have kept on partying the night away busting a move at one of the clubs, but we opted for a more restful evening watching a movie.

Saturday was more of our typical weekend day, getting farm chores done.  The pigs, chickens, and cows went through all of the hay we had stored in the barn so we ran to town to pick up some cow hay, feed, and ran a few errands.  We also hung some nest boxes in the chicken coop and rounded up the two cows that found a way through the fence and into the neighbor's pasture.  That will give me something to do next weekend, finding that week spot they were able to squeeze through.  Thankfully there's a gate between pastures and I easily coaxed them back into our small pasture with a bucket of grain.  They'll need to hangout there until I can find the weak point in the big pasture.  It's an old fence with mostly 4-strand barbed wire which isn't great for keeping cows in.  Just another one of those projects on the list waiting for that money tree to start producing.

Cow Whispering

Ron and Patty Eating Some Cow Hay

After work on Friday I had picked up the last of the fresh cut pork from the last pig we had butchered.  Unfortunately the processor didn't take care of us as they should have, I had scheduled our hogs to be processed 2 months in advance and they finished two timely but then set the other two aside and didn't get to them until later the next week.  They didn't even finish them the same day so I made several trips.  Grrrr.  At least Elijah and Ryanna finally got some of their pork!  They drove all the way from the coast to our farm on Saturday to pick it up, but they got the farm tour so their trip wasn't a total waste, well worth it.  :)

Probably the biggest thing we got done on Saturday was grinding up all of our own pork cutting scraps to make a couple batches of sausage.  We mixed a batch of basic seasoning and then a batch of Italian and packaged them up with the vacuum sealer for breakfast sausage.  I would have made another video but I was still frustrated and upset from dealing with the butcher and didn't want to be on camera with my crabby face.  Although, I may have taken more care with trimming and grinding because I took and ground everything from the scrap bags rather than sorting and removing some of the fat as I probably should have.  I'm sure it's going to turn out good though, it smelled amazing.

Sausage - Plain Cure & Pepper/Cure & Italian

Vacuum Sealed Portions

Well, that was pretty much what we were up to over this past weekend.  Just keeping busy.  Hens will be laying eggs soon so stay tuned for fresh eggs and chicken pictures!

Tori & The Golden Girls

Homestead Blogging, The Latest Fad

Apparently we're just "sheep" or "conformers"...this whole homesteading thing we're doing is really nothing more than the latest fad.  At least that's kind of what I thought after looking at all the links shared in a Facebook post Theresa tagged me in yesterday.  The post was from an urban farm blogger offering suggestions for how to be more successful at blogging and asked followers to share a link to their blog.  Maybe I'm just assuming it's the latest fad and really it's simply because the page's following base would be urban or small farmers and we're just in that audience group like the others that shared their links.  Either way it doesn't really matter much.  I'm not looking to earn income off blogging nor do I feel the need to become a blogging pro.

I honestly started this blog as a way to share what we're doing with family and friends rather than create a customer base as a writer or blogger.  I'm not as good of a business person as my beautiful wife, I don't have the personality nor the patience to work with satisfying customers on a regular basis.  Theresa on the other hand has a wonderful personality, far more outgoing, and much better at working with people from a customer service perspective than I.  I actually enjoy my day job, and for a variety of reasons, but mainly because I get to routinely help people in support of using computers and systems on a regular basis.  Generally I simply enjoy helping people.  I suppose the benefits and income working for a premier employer in the area also has its draw as well, but honestly I'm fortunate to work with a lot of good people at my day job.  Don't get me wrong, if I could farm full-time and make a reasonable living I'd gladly hang up the day job because I enjoy the farm labor.  I like to keep myself busy.

I see our farm as a lifestyle, a way of living that I've always dreamed about and for years thought I'd never get to here--living on the farm.  If sharing any of our experiences with how we're living and how we got here helps others, that would be great too.  As far as blogging goes, the only improvements I'd like to see for myself would be in my writing ability.  How can I improve my writing to entertain and engage, that's what I want for myself and for anyone reading my posts.  Are you excited yet?  Have I made your day?  Did you read anything entertaining, inspiring, or useful?

Getting positive responses from those questions is my blogging goal in general and success is actually completing a post, whew, got that one done!

If you came here thinking you'd learn something about homesteading being the latest fad, well sorry to disappoint.  Here' all you'll find are bullshit posts about stuff we're doing or random thoughts and who knows what.  Pretty sure everything is a fad nowadays!

What I really hope to be doing more of is leather work, so once we get caught up on the renovations that we've already run out of money for I'll focus my attention on some leather projects...after fishing and horsing around of coarse.  Here's a pic of Victoria sporting one of my first leather projects I did a few years ago of a holster I made for my black powder pistol.  She was participating in a steam punk photo shoot with professional photographer Leanna Weber.

Victoria as Steam Punk Buffalo Gal

See what I did there, started blogging about blogging and drifted straight back to other stuff.  You've got to keep up if you want to read my posts!

First Weekend of 2018!

I didn't realize until this moment that I spent this past weekend, first of the new year, doing farm chores.  Wait, first weekend of the new year?  Shouldn't that be like a special occasion or some sort of celebration!  Well, I probably should have at least gone fishing, but that didn't even happen.  Nope, just worked on the farm and here's my latest updates.

As usual we've been busy wrapping up small projects on the farm.  I spread the load of gravel we had delivered and it covered the driveway in front of the shop, it's going to take a lot more rock to finish what we want done.  Just more time and money is all.

I also hauled the piggies to market.  Actually, to the processor and once the processor has finished their work then we'll have lots more to do.   Since the hogs are gone we also removed the panels and posts this weekend and will clean out the area of barn so we can add our desired horse stalls now.

For our hog I only had them do the fresh cuts, so we'll be grinding and making all our own sausage.  We'll also be canning a bunch of pork for storage as well.  We'll only freeze the chops, bacon, ham, and some roasts.  The cut orders for the pigs we sold were a mixed selection of fresh cuts, smoked, and ground sausage.  It's going to be great pork and we learned some valuable lessons this first round of raising hogs.  In the future we'll be processing our own because the butcher is not cheap! 

Last week I also finished Zach's closet and installed the organizer rack.  After some drywall work I painted the interior of the closet and with what we thought was matching leftover paint I put a coat on the surrounding exterior wall only to discover is was a different shade of light blue, more like a light slate color.  Either the paint was old or I didn't mix it well enough, either way it's going to take repainting his room to make it look right, so I'll need to finish that up this coming week so we can get the base trim installed.  At least the base trim is stained and ready to go.

New Organizer in Zach's Closet

It's not all hard labor though, I've been having fun too.  This past week I worked on one of the projects I've been tasked with and finished some nice coat hangers for Theresa.  Simple horseshoe hangers made from cutting some shoes in half then welding, a coat of paint, then nailing onto a nice stained piece of oak.  It's part of the motif in the entryway.

First New Coat Rack Hung

New Horseshoe Coat Rack

I also spent some of my weekend working on trapping some moles that are digging up the pasture.  Didn't have any luck catching yet, several traps were tripped but no moles!  I picked up a couple bigger traps and will continue working on the sets until we make a dent in the population, so many moles in the valley and they're really tearing up the pasture.  They'd make quick work of the garden so we've got to get that problem nipped in the bud.

We also worked on some pruning and trimming.  I took the week wacker out along the pasture and cut more blackberry growing outside the fence along the roadway.  Theresa worked on trimming the bushes back around the house and pump house.

Oh, I'm sure there was more things accomplished but I need to work on remembering to capture a few more pictures to share the visual excitement, maybe a few smiling faces after the job is done.  Overall we started the new year out right and made a list of our projects to work on...it's a long list and every day I think we'll realize that "other thing" we forgot to add to the list.

That's farm life, 24/7-365.

Sometimes It's the Little Things

On the farm sometimes just getting the little things done makes a big difference.  Just a couple nails tacked into a wall to hang up a broom or pick can make a world of difference.  It may not seem like much, but having your tools hung up so you know where you can find them means you can get to it and finish those chores without wasting time.

Here's a few little things we've been up to the past several weeks.  Oh, this isn't everything we've been doing, far from it, but it's some of our progress.

This past weekend was filled with all sorts of little things on the farm.  First I wrapped up some of the little projects on the pump house that started weeks ago.  I added a new step.

New Step on Pump House

It's not much of an out-building, but having a place to house the well pump and filtration system is important, so the pump house should be reasonably serviceable.  This little shed has been neglected for years, one end had settled to the ground and it was full of junk.  A couple weeks ago Zach and I emptied the junk and hauled it away, cleaned up the spidy webs and dirt and created a usable space again.  This past weekend I took the tractor and with a little leverage lifted the sagging end of the pump house and blocked it back up, then finished it off with a new step.  Kyle and I hauled in some gravel for some of the driveway work we're doing and added a nice path to the pump house, so now it needs some bushes trimmed around the outside, a new coat of paint, a little floor repair, and some new gutters.  Plenty of little things to work and keep me busy here.

New Filtration & Softener System in Pump House

Usable Organized Space in the Pump House

A few weeks ago we finished fencing in a yard area for the dogs, so Dexter the coon hound doesn't go running off chasing deer or bobcat at night.  I built a gate as well, but didn't finish it off so it was a plain squared off ugly gate.  This past weekend we finished off another little project and I trimmed the gate up and we laid down some mulch to make a pathway around the house to keep the mud traffic down.  Just another little thing done to improve the overall farm landscape.

Yard Gate & Mulch Pathway

Oh, I also built a ramp for loading the hogs, and we started letting the chickens free-range the yard now that they're big enough to fend for themselves.  We hung a new ceiling fan in the den (living room), installed new flooring in Zach's room and in process of remodeling his closet space, and pruned a few trees.  I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting that we've done since my last update, but it's hard to keep track of all those little things.

Ramp for Loading Hogs

Free-ranging Under the Apple Tree

Chickens Under Foot

You see, all those little accomplishments can add up in the end, so appreciate every little thing you do.