June 18, 2014

Wow. Life is so busy. We have put up 17 quarts of squash with onions, 7 quarts of green beans and 26 two cup bags of grated zucchini squash. We are so excited to have discovered today that one of the chickens we have allowed to set on eggs has hatched a chick today that looks very healthy. This is our first naturally hatched chick! Yay! Every time something like this happens, we realize we have so much to learn. Our youngest is preparing to go off to college to finish her last two years, so we have a lot to do for her. We are catching up with building projects as my husband is out of teaching for the summer. Our egg mobile is working out nicely and we have moved it once. We did discover that the chicks are still small enough to be able to get out of the fence, so we had to put in a temporary run until they grow more. We have loved how the garden looks this summer (despite the major hot temperatures already - 95 yesterday and it's supposed to get hotter) and the raspberries are loving the half shade spot we moved them to.

June 8, 2014

A lot has been going on. I decided to start a page entitled "farm recipes", using ingredients grown on the farm. The first one was in May and was a beautiful salad.Turn to the Farm Recipes pages to view the ingredients.


On June 2nd, we got fish stocked in our fish pond. We got slightly more than 100 bluegill and 10 bass. The bass are to keep the bluegill in check. Here are some photos of the fish release: When Foster Pond Management came to bring the fish, they suggested that I put rocks in the runoff shoot that was bringing water to the pond. My husband suggested that we put flat rocks at the bottom. As we had just finished getting a friend to flatten an area around the barn to build a lean-to for the tractor and a photovoltaic shed, there were lots or rocks that needed a home. I used the trailer on my golf cart to haul them to the pond.
 

 Our raspberries were not doing well in the full sun (and are indeed not supposed to do well in North Carolina.) We moved them to a spot that has afternoon shade and they seem to like it well: