Follow the adventures of Ket, a city girl who is slowly turning into a homesteader. Along for the ride is loving hubby Ben, big girl Tamsyn, and bigger girl Morrigan. Oh, and the animals - 2 goats, a cow, bees, chickens, dogs, and guinea pigs!
Spring is always crazy on the farm (and I do consider us a farm now).
Last year I went back to work full time, so we put most things on hold. We sold our goats, paused the gardening, and paused the house renovations.
This year we're back in full swing. I'm no longer working (at least not for pay), so I'm back "in the saddle" so to speak. Here's a quick farm tour update!
One of the most recent (and most important) projects was the goat shed. We had to build that before we could get any animals, since they were tearing up our garage-barn.
Yes, those are pallets. The roof was made with some aluminum roofing materials that Ben's dad gave us. Overall the shed cost about $10, because we had to buy long screws to hold the pallets together. The next step is to nail on some plywood (that we got for free at work) for siding, paint it, and scatter a ton of straw on the ground.
In that picture you can see the new goat additions as well: Snowcap (brown) and Maggie (black).
We also were lucky enough to acquire a pretty little fuzzball:
Meet Checkers! She's a 4 week old holestein heifer. She's an absolute sweetie and follows you around. She licks you. Her ears are amazingly soft. She's had a hard life so far (more on that later) but has bounced back.
Later on i'll take you through a tour of our gardens, but for now, here is a glimpse!
The last few nights Ben and I have been looking for something other than movies to do after the kids go to bed. We figured out that our Wii can be used for more than just netflix. ;) We loaded up Sports and actually had quite a good time, bowling and boxing. And it's burning pretty good calories.
My weight has been steadily climbing since my last pregnancy and it's got to stop. I'm sure part of it is the ultra-fatty pasta alfredo, pizza, and fried pork chops we've been eating. So the last two weeks or so I have started cutting down on calories and getting more exercise. Luckily exercise is coming fairly easy now that the weather is (well, WAS) warming up. Mucking out a barn burns a lot of calories!
We found out that the goats are too small still for breeding. :( So now I am on the lookout for a doe that is ready to deliver in a month or so that we can purchase. I found a beautiful Alpine doe on craigslist, but alas, I can't justify spending $300 for a goat.
We have a flock of 8 chickens now - 6 hens and 2 roosters. Ole Red and Popcorn made it through the winter. Roosie Jr. Jr. did not. :( We had three generations of that roo on our farm and now he's gone. It makes me sad.
We have decided to increase our flock - again. We will be going to Tractor Supply during their Chick Days and letting the girls pick out a few. We'll also try to hatch at least one incubator (20-30 eggs). Ben is on the fence about trying meat chickens again this year - we need some equipment, but if we can make/purchase that in time, we'll do a small meat chicken order.
Over last weekend we dug up 12 wild raspberry plants and replanted them in our nice mulched/fertalized berry patch. I also dug up 3 of my grapes that may or may not make it - I can't remember which ones were growing last year. This weekend we hope to dig up all the wild blackberries that we have around - hundreds, easily, and add some of them to the berry patch.
I have fruit trees on order - quite a few, actually, as well as a few more grape plants. I have apples, peaches, pears, and cherries coming. It's very exciting. We have found these large 'cages' that are used with large glue tanks in commercial glue companies. They are about 5 foot square and they keep the goats from being able to eat newly planted trees.
Our bees are alive! We're not sure just HOW alive, but there was definite activity during the few warm days we had. I do hope that the cold snap again hasn't hurt them. Hopefully they got some pollen while they were out and have a tiny bit extra food. We saw a lot of small, tiny bees (hopefully babies = good breeding/hatching going on). Ben has another hive up and ready and we are getting another 4 pound package of bees in April, so we'll have two hives going. And hopefully our first hive will swarm and we will catch it - 3 hives!
We also took out our mason bee house and looked inside, which I will post later because I got some cool pictures of it. We only found larve. :( But we're going to try again. Mason bees and "orchard" bees are great for fruit trees because they buzz around right as most trees are budding and flowering - unlike honey bees, which come out either too early or too late, depending on what kind of tree.
Alright, so, first on the agenda. Are cake pops becoming the new cupcake? Because that would suck. Although the fight to see who would win would be awesome. I mean, the cupcake could be a sumo wrestler type fighter, and the cake pop could be like the kid from The Karate Kid, the tall stupid one who knocks people out with a well aimed one-legged kick?
Or even better! Cupcake could be Darth Vader! And CakePoP could be LUKE! Becuase you make cupcakes cake and crumble it up to make cake pops. So, really, Cupcake COULD be CakePoP's father!
And then we'll hand Cupcake a tray, have him order a penni, with peas, and kill everyone in the cafeteria. (Watch it. I dare you. It's hilarious. Although Warning: Some expletive language. In a funny way.)
And cake! While we're talking about cake, here's another lovely clip to make you shoot coffee out of your nose smile.
So Ben, my wonderful handy man husband who can fix everything from dishwashers to car sensors to building a new wall, has rigged our dryer hot air out vent to, well, vent inside. This is HUGE since we only wood heat and we are running out of wood. This has been bothering me.
Talk about an incentive to do chores... do laundry = heat! Be warm! BRILLIANT! Now I wish I could just find a way to vent all the extra heat from the dishwasher that way. I guess it already does that, though, since there's a vent in the front.... hm.
Speaking of heat, the fire is lying to me. It gets hot and red and goes "i'm burning, i'm burning!" and I close it and come back 10 minutes later to find it out completely.
GRR.
I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that I saw a grocery store ad that had bananas for $.29 and squealed in delight. I squealed. At a grocery store ad. At bananas for $.29.
Yeeeeaaaahhh....
The Russian language has no word for "the" or "a". They also do not use "to be" in the present tense. In other words, there is no "is" in Russian.
So, translate "He is a journalist."
Turns into "He journalist"
"Where is the letter? Here it is!"
Turns into "Where letter? Here it!"
Makes me think of that chick from The Fifth Element.
MULTI-PAZZ! Big bodda boom!
I wish I could rock out the orange hair.
I have never dyed my hair. Seriously. I've had blonde streaks once (horrible) and red streaks once (that you couldn't see). But never any color.
Must fix that.
Do we want peas this year in the garden? I've never had a pea plant grow successfully. Actually, thinking about it, I've never had a bean plant grow successfully. Me? Or the ground? I'm betting on me.
Going to try broccoli ths year. We should have asparagus this year from planting the roots last year. They were one-year-old roots, grew last year, so this should be their 3rd year, where they start producing.
Broccoli. Asparagus. Lettuce, if I can get it to work. Do you "grow" baby carrots or are they just shaped that way from regular sized carrots? Because if you could grow them, that would be a.w.e.s.o.m.e.
I've been drinking coffee a lot lately. I'm not normally a coffee drinker. But lately it's been nice in the mornings. Maybe cause the new meds I'm on makes me a zombie. And coffee jump-starts everything. Which is great, but I don't particularly think coffee is healthy (on a drink-it-every-day level), AND the coffee I enjoy is $10/bag. Which I pay. Because, ya know, I never drink coffee.
Crap.
I need a jump start today, man. I don't know how but apparently my awesome-house-cleaner-self got 'turned off' over the last few days and the house is deteriorting and now that I know I can actually clean, it's bothering the crap out of me. Who knew that under that blah exterior, there was a perfectionist? Hm.
Okay. I'm done. Actually I'm bored. And my coffee is done. Kudos.
Need more random thoughts? Head over to The Un Mom. She's got some awesome lair home decorating tips.
Memorial Day weekend, after a relaxing day with Ben's parents and family (Happy 59th birthday, Rusty!) we were gardening our butts off! All together we put 80 plants in the ground. 36 tomato plants, organized and caged; 36 peppers, including a few different hot and spicy varieties. Our asparagus is exploding in wonderful stalks.
The house bed has been tilled, hoed and weeded. You can see all the weeds in the back here. There were a ton of thistles and weeds! Once, last week, the WHOLE house bed was covered in all these weeds.
Then it was planted with 8 wonderful herb plants, including rosemary, basil, lavender, spearmint, and peppermint. We surrounded it with chickenwire to make sure the chickens, and other assorted wildlife, would stay out.
We have 8 more herb plants waiting to go in the ground, a few various veggie and fruit plants like watermelons, cucumbers, and zucchinis.
I also found a grape plant hidden behind all the weeds in the house garden, fighting it's way up the trellis. We have another grape vine growing in the front garden, and I believe that I will transplant it on the other side of this trellis.
In the hidden, overgrown area of the front garden, we found this absolutely beautiful rose bush. The one flower I am absolutely in love with is roses. The other flowers really don't interest me, but roses are wonderful.
Whew! We both got sunburned and dirty. I love it. This year we will have homegrown produce, homegrown herbs, homegrown honey, goat meat, goat milk... Our homestead is really taking off!
So, Ben's grandmother, bless her, was an avid flower lover. She brought in the flowers, artfully aranged, to her church every week. They ALL were from her garden.
There are rows, ROWS of these flowers. Our yard is a fantastic, colorful picture during spring.
The problem? I absolutely hate them.
They are invading our gardening space. They are invading the weed patch (aka front garden to-be). So today I dug some up.
I'm hopefully giving them away.
In other news, the bees are doing good. They seem to be business as usual, which means the queen is still alive.
In that one you can kinda see a few at the opening of the hive, if you look real close. I was a little afraid to get too close because of last week's fiasco.
And today was our first strawberry harvest! They were new plants last year so we only got a couple of measly berries, but this year they're in full swing! Here's a handful so far, but there's a TON of still-unripe berries, and a bunch of flowers left too!
Other than that, life has been pretty calm lately. This weekend will probably be a chaotic one, because the next few weekends are full!
This weekend is, thankfully, free. Next weekend we have a birthday party. The weekend after that we have a baby shower! The weekend after that I go to the dentist. The weekend after that the girls go to a new pedi!
Whew!
Luckily the weeks seem pretty empty.
June 29th summer quarter at school starts. I have three at-home classes. It will feel good to keep learning, even if it's at home! I hope to go back for real classes by winter.
Life on the farm chugs along! One of our hens hatched her chicks a week or so ago. Out of 15 eggs, only three hatched. :( I was very sad.
She seems to be taking care of them, at least. She protects them from the roosters and feeds them.
I love watching natural-hatched chicks. They act so different from hatchery chicks.
Our asparagus is also popping up, finally! We planted 25 roots a few weeks ago, luckily before the rains set in. Now I'm sure they've had plenty of water, and we mulched on top of them to keep the weeds out and give them nutrients.
Also in the asparagus bed was some odd looking fungi that I pulled up after I took the picture. First off, I'm allergic to mushrooms, and second off, I didn't want the kids getting into it and chance that it was poisonous.
Not sure how good you can see it.
My strawberries are also taking off! I hope to have a good harvest this year, out of the six plants. I'm sure the rain are helping them too!
I need to mulch the bed really bad... the weeds are getting ridiculous.
So anyway, thats the update from the Doran farm!
Kudos,
Ket
When we first moved to the "country", Ben wanted a garden. I said no way. The thought of getting my hands dirty was a foreign concept, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Two years later, here we are. Last year we did a bunch of tomatoes and peppers, a few watermelons, and a few cantaloupes. This year we're hoping to vary things a little more.
This is what we have to work with:
There is 8 boxes total, plus the strawberry box: Please excuse the weeds...
And then we have this "bed" right in front of the house next to the door. I've determined that this will be my herb bed, after a year of compost and mulching. The rocks will ring it (hopefully), and the tulips or whatever the heck those are have a date with the shovel, come fall. The bed actually stretches almost double to the left. It's pretty big.
These bulbs, as well, have a date with the shovel. But their estimated time of departure is, well, this weekend. Invaders!!!!
And these little guys were hanging out right outside our garden fence:
