It's that time of year, to look back and see how far we've come and plan ahead for the next coming days. This last year was a whirlwind (I say this every year, and yet, it still takes me by surprise), and much has changed on our farm, and much continues to change in the future, I'm sure.
We started the year with a shipment of fruit trees. They were hard to find and at sky high prices, but we bought as many as we could afford. As the saying goes, you want to buy your fruit trees yesterday. Large, close to fruit-bearing trees are hundreds of dollars, and still require 3-7 years before you can harvest anything. We got smaller bare-root stock and planted a second orchard site, an experiment to see if different places on our property would do better for them. We've discovered that "micro-climates" can vastly change the way the sun/precipitation/soil are from house to house. Sometimes the weather and growing conditions at my house are vastly different from a friend who only lives a ten minute drive away! We have had to study and note the special differences and adapt accordingly.
This year, we added peaches, apricots, pomegranates, cherries, apples, and figs. So far the trees have been growing very well, and we hope to be able to harvest fruit in a few years. This year we also started dabbling in plans to turn our orchard sites into permaculture food forests. The idea is basically to put different height perennial plants into your orchard to maximize the benefits. Not just trees, but mid-height shrubs, low-profile plants, and ground cover that attract beneficial pollinators, can be useful/edible/medicinal for people, and also function to restore the health of the soil--replenishing nutrients instead of stripping the earth. We have a long way to go, as anything starting from scratch does, but we put some plants in the ground, and hopefully they will survive the winter to get us started.
For the vegetable garden, we filled the deep beds my husband made with rotted logs, compost and planting soil and planted sweet potatoes. Garlic and onions thrived in their planters, and I put in over twenty asparagus plants to expand the perennial vegetables. Our garden was the biggest it ever has been (and this year it will be even bigger). Perilla and cucumber, melons, tomatillos, and zucchini as well as corn and pumpkins did very well despite the blistering heat and drought of this summer. We put the pigs on the sites where I planted corn and everywhere else was heavily mulched with compost. Unfortunately, the spreading, choking hold of Bermuda grass also seemed to love this new rich soil. It ended up throttling our tomato and pepper plants. I spent DAYS pulling out the "devil grass" as it is sometimes called, with my lovely new broadfork, gifted by my brother-in-law, however a short while later, it was back and thicker than ever. This year, we are trying plastic mulch for the first time in the hopes to smother the choking grass once and for all.
One of the biggest threats to the garden was the chickens. They found holes in my (poorly-made) garden fence and would peck holes in unripe melons, eat the bottoms of my cucumbers, and devour my zucchini. I never saw a single leaf of kale and all my broccoli seedlings were gone after an afternoon of chicken visits. One hen decided to go broody in my perilla patch and of course, my over enthusiastic three year old trampled it down in order to get the eggs and shoo the bird away. We ended up protecting the last of the melons by covering them up with old milk crates, but sometimes they got through anyway.
We got our first watermelon! It was tiny and not very sweet but I had completely given up on them and only discovered one rogue melon at the end of the season when it was overripe and mealy, but it was a triumph nonetheless!
Also, we harvested wheat! It was a tiny little square for experimenting with. A bit of it got eaten by the cow, when she slipped out of her fence one day. A bit of it was lost during the harvest as lots of eager hands and trampling feet swarmed the little wheat patch. A bit of it was lost during the threshing process (one that is ungainly and tedious and time consuming...) so we managed to harvest about as much as we had planted. It was good to know that we could do it and maybe as our little helpers get not-so-little, we won't lose as much in the process.
We put in new drip tape lines instead of using the regular sprayers and that seemed to make a big difference in saturating the earth. Our summers get so hot, and it feels like the moisture just evaporates in the air. This way, long soakings kept the ground loamy and soft even at the height of summer's sizzle.
We experienced a bumper crop of produce for the first time ever. I got a giant pressure canner and spent a summer canning beans, fermenting syrups, making sauces and jams, making pickles, and stock from all of our butchered animals. Canning supply shortages everywhere have made me really cautious and so I buy a carton of jars whenever I see them, and I've amassed a collection of reusable lids and gaskets in case there are any more shortages.
For animals, we've had our ups and downs. We decided to go with American Guinea hogs as our breeding type of pigs. I'll be adding a post dedicated just to them in the near future. In the middle of the summer our boar, because he was extremely obese when we got him, and in combination with the extreme heat, despite our best efforts to get him down to a healthy weight, died. He still fathered a pair of piglets, the two of which currently enjoy grazing on the newly greened hillsides. We are currently on the lookout for a new boar. This time, we will be more careful about what condition he will be in.
One of the guinea hens managed to hide a nest of eggs from our dogs and cats and paraded home with a contingent of beautiful, fluffy keets. Unfortunately all but one of them died in one tragic way or another. They aren't particularly smart mothers, and also viciously attacked us several times if we tried to help their babies in any way. It was very frustrating to watch.
Our last round of meat chickens was disappointing. The summer this year was particularly dry and hot, and these birds did not fare well. Our laying hens discovered they could escape from their movable netting and wreaked havoc on my garden and left messes everywhere in the yard. Towards the end of the year, we have been experimenting with a deep bedding coop to keep them confined but with plenty of material to scratch through. It doesn't seem to be the right solution, so we might go to the traditional permanent chicken coop. It is a little disappointing because the roaming chickens were a great help to the flies in Cookie's pen. I think we are still experimenting.
Cookie gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. You can read about the whole experience here. He is about six months old now and is growing to be a strong, stout calf. Cookie is so much happier now that she has company. She has proven to be a doting mother and the two of them romp around, lowing at each other wherever they go.
With the arrival of a baby calf came milk. Beautiful, rich creamy milk. There was a little bit of a learning curve as we got used to milking and getting to the once a day milking schedule, but I had a fridge full of milk that we were using to make yogurts and butter and cheese and guzzling down with abandon. And still there was leftover to share with our neighbors and family in exchange for a crusty loaf of sour dough or a bag of garden fresh veggies. Being able to trade and share all of our bounties has been a wonderful experience.
This coming year we have many projects. We are finally going to be putting in our permanent pasture fencing for the cows. We experimented a lot with electrical fencing and putting in temporary pastures to see where the cows were happiest. In the summer time, the ground is too hard and dry to carry an electrical charge and so the fencing was useless. In the winter time when the rains come and the grass is green, everything works again, so we've had to come up with fencing types for both seasons which has caused a few headaches, but hopefully it will all come to fruition this year. One of my favorite things is looking out the window and seeing Cookie and Butters wandering the hillsides, grazing to their hearts' content.
We're also expanding our garden (again), and hopefully will be putting in longer row crops, making better use of the garden spaces and doing better irrigation maintenance. Also, we're trying to get rid of our lawn space as much as possible. We have a great deal of acreage, but only the area near the house has access to water. Outside of that small circle, everything dies in the summertime, and we don't have the means to irrigate that land now. Keeping things close to home will also hopefully deter pests, and make me more attentive to how everything is growing. I tend to wilt in the heat and close myself into the house for days on end, which is bad for the garden and all the living things I am responsible for.
Not exactly farm related, but impactful to our lives is trying to figure out alternative forms of electricity. The area where we live in frequently suffers from long power outages. It's not a large enough community to get immediate responses from the power company. No electricity means nothing to keep our freezers going, no fans to cool the house, and hardest of all, no water. We have spent the better part of this year researching generators vs. solar systems vs. manual pump systems vs. whole house off-grid systems... it's complicated and oftentimes prohibitively expensive, but I am hoping that we have something figured out before the weather gets hot again.
This summer, the wildfires were very close. Most of the summer was spent inside, not necessarily from the heat, but also because the air was too dangerous to breathe. Plants would be covered in a fine dusting of ash and the sky was perpetually gray and orange. The beating throb of helicopters flying overhead and notifications of which zones were being evacuated were a daily and sometimes hourly obsession until the rains came and the fire was finally contained.
It would be fun to dabble in some mycology this year. We have a couple trees with mushroom plugs but it will still be another year before we can see if those have been productive. I tried to make a little mushroom bed with some inoculated grains gifted from a family friend, but the birds found it and decided a fluffy bed of hay and grain was a great place to scratch around and make a nest. Sad to say, no mushroom spotted this year.
I also have big plans for a medicine garden but that requires a bit of dirt moving and construction to make a good space. Perhaps this might not be the year either. But one can only dream. I have a treasure trove of seeds that I am excited to pull out and sprout. Seeds are so exciting. They have so much potential in them, and I have yet to kill it. My husband teases me about how much joy I get out of looking through the seed catalogs, and dreaming about a lush garden, teeming with life. Each little tiny thing possesses so much potential and a promise of beautiful life--it hasn't shriveled under the heat, or been ravaged by bugs and birds and pestilence. It hasn't been overcome by mildew or beaten back by careless hands and feet. It is as perfect as it ever will be, and I am always hopeful that this coming year, I'll be able to eke out a touch of that perfection for our farm.
My thoughts are all a-tumble. The close of the year was one of chaos and recovery as we were sick and now getting back our bearings and getting back up to schedule. I wish everyone happiness and health and the hope that a little handful of seeds can bring.
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