Summer came and went without a single blog post here, I suppose my busy life limits my blogging time or I'm just not as ambitious as I thought I was. Farm progress has been slow and steady so here's a summary of what's been going on...
On the gardening front, all of our bare root fruit and nut trees that we planted survived the summer drought and were a bit of extra work to maintain watering. The blueberry bushes did well, although, the raspberry plants all died. I'm pretty sure the raspberry issue was more about the plants being trampled by the dog (Dexter) rather than a failure to maintain on our part. We'll need to choose a better location for getting them established next year.
We finally bought a 3-point tiller for the tractor, but it was a bit late to get a garden in like we had hoped. We did plant some spuds, onions, tomatoes, pumpkins, and watermelons. Harvest was small since we didn't amend the soil as needed, but we got some practice in and established a nice garden area. Now we just need to focus on improvements to the soil, install some irrigation, make fencing improvements to keep the animals out, and focus on an overall plan for what we'll seed next spring. We tilled up areas for some more perennial plantings, like: asparagus, artichokes, strawberries, and raspberries.
The four mature apple trees that were already established and came with the farm are doing much better. I pruned them last winter and tilled the ground to cut down on the codling moth population, generally that was somewhat successful. We still had a lot of damaged fruit, but not nearly as bad as last year, and the volume of fruit the trees produced was much greater. We had more apples than we could deal with! Lots of processing! We canned, dried, and juiced apples until we couldn't do it any more...
Photo Album of our Apple Processing of 2018
We'll continue to be busy working on improving our gardening this fall and winter in preparation for a big spring planting!
On the animal husbandry front, the chickens are doing well and the cows stayed in the pasture mostly. Well, Ron got out quite a few times and Becky got out once, so I had to make some fence repairs and fretted a bit about the poor condition that much of our perimeter fence is in. That's going to be slow going because fencing takes money and lots of work, and the money is always the problem around our place. I may need a second or third job I suppose because our little farm will never bring in the money it will take to maintain itself in reality. I suppose if we charged $8 a dozen for the few dozen of eggs we sell each week we'd be banking the dough...or not.
We'll have some beef in early January. We'll begin processing our angus steer on December 21st, so with hanging time and processing we'll likely have beef first week of January. We anticipate selling at least 1/4 of it to help offset our processing costs. The price would be $2/lb by hanging weight, plus cutting and wrapping fee (usually around $0.65/lb). We'll be using Farmer's Helper out of Harrisburg to process the cow. An average 1,000 lb steer will have a hanging weight of about 600 lbs and produce about 400 lbs of boneless trimmed beef to give you an idea of the cost. So a 1/4 steer would cost roughly $398 cut and wrapped for roughly 100 lbs beef. That's a little more expensive than Walmart's 20% fat ground beef, but not by much, and you'll be getting more than just ground, and you'll know it was a well cared for steer.
Our bee hive is still alive, but barely. The yellow jackets were really bad this year and took a toll on our honey bee hive. We put out about 20 yellow jacket traps and they filled almost daily, it didn't seem like we even put a dent in their population. We'll be working on more aggressive measures for addressing the yellow jacket population next year because we intend to add another honey bee hive, and we don't want to lose one!
Photo Album of Farm Animals
On the farm improvements front, we've made some progress on the farm house and the barn. We built another chicken coop, added stalls to the barn with rubber mats and doors, Just yesterday I finished installing new bathroom flooring in the main bathroom after Theresa and Victoria finished a fresh coat of paint on the ceiling and walls. It looks amazing compared to what it looked like previously. We installed two new exterior doors on the house, replacing doors that wouldn't close and had visible gaps at the jam that rodents could easily pass through. It's so nice having insulated doors that close snugly! We cleaned out the Lion's Den (small out building), added more rock to drive areas to curb winter mud issues. We've been working on pasture improvements clearing drainage, smoothing bumps and ridges on ditches, and mowing to decrease the weeds. We'll be over-planting some fresh pasture mix grass seed to improve forage for the cows and horses as well. Worked on general cleanup clearing more debris that was left behind from previous owners and trimming trees that needed some maintenance. We have a few more floors in the farm house to go and some major work on the den, as well as, a number of other major projects around the farm, but everything requires money so we'll progress as we can with the little resources we have.
Photos Album of some farm improvements of 2018
Even though the farm has added a lot of work to our schedules, it brings lots of joy. We're not always working, we do enjoy taking the horses out for rides, fishing, movies, visiting with family and friends, and just enjoying life! Hopefully I won't wait so many months before my next blog...we'll see.
