End result of hard work

The boys worked hard in their watermelon/melon garden this year, they got a lot of watermelons and we froze a lot of melons for eating later.

Team work!

Slicing open that first watermelon

Pure yumminess!

Blackberry jam

A friend was nice enough to invite us over for a morning of blackberry picking.  We picked.. and picked... and picked.

And made 7 lovely jars of blackberry jam :)

Around the farm

Today we managed to get the electric wiring done in Pasture 2 so we could move the pigs into that pasture. It took us all day, first moving the shed, then finishing the barbed wire fencing in one area and then putting in the electric. But it's done! I am so glad DH built the pig shed on skids so we could move it from area to area. The Farmall got put to work today!

All we haven't done yet is put a pig water nipple on the waterer on that side, so we left the small gate between the two pastures open and will add the water nipple tomorrow.


This is the double sided waterer we were lucky enough to inherit with the house and land. If you look closely, you can see my wonderful DH has added a pig water nipple on the front and connected it to the waterworks. SO wonderful not to have to carry buckets of water around! The pigs love it too. We installed the green gate on the left last weekend, that is our human gate between the two pastures, we don't have the livestock gate in yet, so the animals use this too. Butterbelle was a bit hesitant, but has since adapted to it quite nicely. DH is going to add another water nipple on the other side of this waterer so the pigs will have water available in both pastures.

Exploring the wonderful green grass. I am pretty excited that our rotational grazing plan is coming along nicely. We still need to divide the third area in two and then we'll have four pastures total, with a possible fifth in our vegetable area.

Our little Daredevil. He has caused a bit of havoc on the farm in the last week! He was climbing on the haybales and knocked one onto the chicks container after I moved them into the garage. They haybale broke the container so I had to figure something else out for them. What we have now is actually better, I'll share a photo of that later. He also rode into one of our newly planted fruit trees today, luckily no damage, but he was grounded from the ATV for the rest of the afternoon.

The tree in question, as you can see it's just fine. Look at those buds! Other things are doing great on the farm as well....

The garlic.

The spinach, broccoli and cauliflower bed. They are doing wonderfully well. We had some really strong winds here the last few days, and a lot of the greenery you see is those "helicopter" seeds blown down from one of our trees.

The gooseberry bush we got from Henry Fields. I cut it down to half its height after we planted it. We've never had gooseberries before.. so we really hope they're good!

Grapes coming along nicely.

DH gave lessons to our oldest DD and oldest DS on how to drive the tractor. They both did great!




The chickens haven't quite been pulling their weight. We have 13 laying hens and only get about 8 eggs a day. They've definitely slowed in production, so we're looking at adding oyster shell to their feed again.

Today was a very busy, but productive and satisfying day!

Fruit trees galore.. and more!

This weekend we worked on getting our newest order of fruit trees planted. They all got planted in the "horseshoe field" that our driveway encircles. We ordered 2 peach trees, 2 pear trees, 1 cherry tree, 1 plum tree and a brown turkey fig tree from Stark Brothers. We also got a gooseberry bush from Henry Fields as part of their free $25 order promotion. The fig and gooseberry bush got planted in our soft fruit area. Now I'd love to be able to impress you with photos of these trees.. but really they just look like sticks. But in case you don't believe me.. here's a pic for you of three of the trees. We have surrounded them with cages to protect them from the marauding chickens and dogs.

And while I'm here, I may as well share some photos of things that are starting to bloom, it's an exciting time of year on the farm!

Strawberries starting to do their thing!

The grapevines are starting to waken and push out shoots.

I planted some mint in the small little garden area at the bottom of our deck steps. The chickens are leaving it alone and I'll be able to contain it easily enough. Plus it's really handy for picking for the kitchen.

I love Spring!

Making hay, yard work and more!

Dan has been keeping the "horseshoe" part of our circular driveway growing so we could try our hand at making hay. It was nice quality grass, with very few weeds. Since we don't have a scythe yet, he cut it with the JD garden tractor and then we let it dry for a bit and then raked it into windrows. We don't have hay rakes, so used regular leaf rakes. The three eldest helped.






Had to add a picture of myself too under grave duress. I hate pictures of myself.

Lots of hard work! Now to leave it to dry so we can bale it.

Today we also played a lot of catch up with mowing and general garden work. The girls and I weeded, mulched and mowed the soft fruit area so now it looks much nicer.


General view of the area


Blackberries


Raspberries


Grapes


Strawberries

Everything growing here looks really good. We haven't had any fruit from any of these plants yet, with the exception of the strawberries. The raspberries are supposed to produce in the fall, but I don't think that will be happening. The grapes had some small little grape clusters but the chickens pecked them all off, so now they are fenced. They're all really healthy though, so hopefully next year we'll have a really good crop.

Oh, while I'm at it, our beans are growing like crazy! Looking forward to picking beans. We planted Blue Lake Bush and Contender.



While we were busy with the soft fruit area, the boys were using the JD garden tractor to move logs, branches and other yard waste to our burn pile area. I don't know what we'd do without that tractor!

Apples & Peaches

We bought 1/2 bushel peaches and 1 bushel of apples for processing from a local orchard. We bought some for eating too, and they are so good!





1 bushel of apples cost $10, a really good deal compared to grocery store prices.

It took a lot of work, but we got 7 quarts of peach halves, 6 quarts applesauce and 7 quarts of quartered apples.

Fruit trees and soft fruits

Our apple trees are growing wonderfully and look nice and healthy. Unfortunately our peach tree didn't fare quite as well. The area we planted it (30 feet from the apple trees) turned out to be quite waterlogged and the peach tree died. I guess that's why they say you should first spend a year on your property before planting/planning. Live and learn. The two varieties of apple we have planted is Honeycrisp and Stark Golden Delicious.


Apple tree one


Apple tree two

The grapes, blackberries and raspberries are also looking nice. We had to put fences around the grapes to keep the chickens from pecking at them and messing with the mulch. No grapes this year, but we're hoping for a good bounty next year!


Raspberries


One of the six blackberries


Dan spraying down one of the three grape vines

Our blueberries are very sad looking. I think the stress of moving them was just too much, plus they're really a "patio" variety and not suited for this area. Our feed store had a huge sale and I bought 3 blueberry plants for $1.50 each. One got uprooted by good old Ribsy and will probably die. I am waiting until the beginning of fall to plant them out. I also bought a clematis and two daylilies. All waiting for fall planting.

New photos

Just a bunch of new photos today, put here especially for Mike Jr. :)

Map of our planned outlay for our 5 acres.

Pic of the kids playing "Stargate." You can see how GREEN everything is in these pics!

One of our two grapevines. We planted Concord and Reliance.

Dan tilling with our "new to us" garden tractor. These little tractor is FABULOUS! Love it.

The cute little chicks have grown! We have also added 4 barred rocks to our collection.

The temporary chicken coop. Can't seem to keep the kids out of it! LOL.

They all love the chickens :)

No really... they LOVE spending time with the chickens!

We've seen lots and lots of snakes here. None of them venomous though. As long as they keep the mouse/rat population down, I'm happy to have them!

Hail we got back in the beginning of April. This was one of the largest hailstones.

Jam, jam, jam!

We made some blueberry jam and raspberry freezer jam today, eight jars of each.

I love making jam, it looks so pretty in the jars and tastes so good! I can't wait until we're growing our own berries instead of having to buy them.

Emerging Beauty

Yesterday the first of our seedlings just barely started to emerge, and today a few of them were big enough to go under the grow lights.

Isn't that just a thing of beauty?

Our grow lights are set up on a bookshelf in the basement. DH attached the lights to chains so we can raise them up slowly as the seedlings grow. We also use a small fan to blow gently on them. This discourages mold and also makes the seedlings stronger. If we do spot mold we spray the plants with a diluted solution of hydrogen peroxide and water.

So this is their new home for a while:

I have to check them every day to make sure they aren't getting dried out. Colorado is extremely dry and these little pots aren't great at retaining water.

We didn't do much today that was terribly exciting, but we did shop some great sales for fruit at the grocery store today. We bought apples, oranges, grapefruit and green, black and red grapes . The kids love it when fruit goes on sale because they would rather eat fruit than candy! Wednesday night is our dessert night, but we chose to have grapes for dessert instead :)