Farm Update 2023

Hello World! We are back online again after a few very busy years. I have a lot of exciting changes to share with you. Here goes...

  In the summer of 2020, we were evacuated multiple times due to fires close to our home. The SQF Complex fire came within two miles of our farm and produced dangerous dense smoke for months that left me and a few of my goats with long term lung issues. We made the tough decision to leave our birth state and everyone we love behind and decided to move east.

  We sold the house quickly, put everything in storage and boarded our animals with friends and headed east on Interstate 80. We searched all over Utah where my BFF now lives, but property prices there were higher than those in California for small homesteads. We continued north to Idaho which had little available at that point too, so we kept moving east through Wyoming and into Nebraska and then north to South Dakota. We then traveled east to Virginia, checking properties along the route.  

  My heart was set on The Mt Rushmore state. The plains are beautiful. The Black Hills are majestic. The people of South Dakota are warm and friendly and they helped me win over My Hubby.

  Escrow closed Spring 2021 on our latest small farm and I trailered my goats here myself to begin our journey.  We bought a historic homestead with a farmhouse that was built on this lot in 1909. We have just six acres, but they're all level and tillable. We have two older barns Jerry has been remodeling for maximum comfort for the animals, a large chicken coop and the soil here in The Missouri River Valley is so fertile it is amazing.  

We finally have high speed internet again, after many years stuck in the Sierras with only satellite internet so I plan to start blogging again. I am eager to share some of the things I've been working on. Stay tuned.

Heidi

 

The Country Garden Showcase #41 Special Edition

Happy Monday!

It's been another crazy weekend... If you've read recent posts you know that we just started escrow on our dream homestead.  It's a fixer-upper on the Kaweah River with about 7 acres to farm and graze.  Things have been moving along so well, we cannot help but feel as if our heavenly father has been helping us.  

Well, Friday we called the local real estate agent that sold our current home to us, back in 1995.  She came by to look at the place at about 10am.  She came back with clients she thought "might" like our home just a few hours later, and by 5:30pm we were signing the contract for the sale.  It's SOLD!!!! Whew!  Thank you Linda Costelloe-Clough, you are the best agent EVER!

Things have been moving at the speed of light around here lately, and my head is swirling just trying to keep up.  I keep thinking I must be dreaming.  Things can't really be falling into place so perfectly like this, can they?  

Well, since we start escrow here on this place today and we will have to be out in 45 days... this will likely be my last chance to share pictures from my garden here because everything is staying.  The buyers liked everything, and even made the sale contingent on the coop, arbor, and three of our sweet laying hens.  Don't you just love that?  I did.  I am going to miss my greenhouse and raised garden beds, but we can build more later on.  I am so grateful to this nice couple.  I was really worried about  having to remove the raised garden beds and the coop if the buyer did not want them.

Here are a few pictures from my gardens from the last year or so...

Thank you for reading and for supporting me with your own blogs and ideas as I have taken my gardening and homesteading journey.  I look forward to sharing my next garden journey with you.

Okay, if you have a garden post you'd like to share... please get right to it!

The Country Garden Showcase- Week 2

     Happy Monday!  The weather here in the foothills of the Southern Sierra-Nevada Mountains remains unseasonably warm.  I am quite worried about our fruit trees, they're not getting nearly enough hours of freezing temps to set much fruit AND- they are budding out.  In my 27 years living in this region, I have only seen this a few times.  It usually ends badly, a late freeze that kills flowers and a long, cold, dry winter.

   
     On the bright side, since I am not expecting much of a harvest, this a GREAT year to heavily prune a few damaged or ill shaped older fruit trees in my garden, like the example above.

late red flowering peach tree blossoms

     A great resource for anyone pruning fruit trees is HERE!  This UC Davis/Cooperative Extension publication covers training and pruning of deciduous fruit trees.  It includes dwarf, semi-dwarf, and standard tree information and it provides a good basic education on the three most common fruit tree pruning systems: open center, central leader, and the modified central leader system.  It includes images and examples.  Please check it out.

     I have taken many cuttings from this heavy pruning session and have bundled them up, labeled them, and have them sitting in a dip n' grow rooting hormone/water mixture overnight.  In the morning, I will double check my cuttings to be sure all the cuttings are exposed a bit at the base and cut near nodes which are meristemetic tissue (rapid cell division tissue), a place that will root.  Then, I'll prepare a 4x4 area in my garden and DIRECT plant the fruit tree cuttings in a peat moss, perlite, and bark mix which I will keep moist.  They should be rooted within 4-6 weeks.  I need to get started taking root stock cuttings this week too.  I will treat them similarly with rooting hormone, and making certain to plant them in the correct direction (polarity= up/down) I will plant them in a peat moss, perlite mix and grow them out too. Next year, I hope to have strong root stock and scion stock to graft together to get my orchard going.

   That's what's been going on in my country garden.  Please tell us what YOU'VE been doing in YOURS.

I have linked up to the Homestead Barnhop!