Summer Heat

Well the weather has certainly warmed up recently. But it has brought with it some problems. The first one being the millions of grasshoppers hatching in the field. They have all made a beeline for my vegetable patch and eaten all the leaf material off my potato plants. I have had to dig them up and I only got about five pounds of new potatoes from them. I was hoping for a lot more, but it's all a learning curve. I will try and get some row covers before I plant anything else in that bed. They have now taken a like to my onion stalks, so I may be digging them up this week. The only other thing I have growing in those beds are some peanuts.
The other problem has been the heat preventing anymore than an hour or so work each morning. We are also experiencing a bumper crop of ticks this year,, so every time we come in from the field we have to check for the little bloodsuckers. I hate them with a vengeance and really enjoy killing any I find.
We have been busy every other evening picking blackberries. So far we have about five gallons of berries and there are still lots more to come. The birds seem to be letting us have all the pick of them this year.The mulberry tree on the west side has had a good crop of berries too, and it has been a grazing stop for us when ever we have passed it.
I have also been cutting hay, but on a small scale. I have been using a trimmer with a brush blade on it to cut the grass, leaving it in windrows throughout the week and then the family workforce goes into action every Saturday morning to bring it all to the barn where we have been making square bales with a homemade hand baler I made. So far we have just over a dozen bales that I will keep for litter for when we eventually get the chickens.
The orchard trees continue to flourish, even though we have had hardly any rain. I did have a worrying day or two when I found Japanese beetle on them, but I sprayed everything with soap spray and it seems to have stopped them.
More fruit is growing in the kitchen garden. We have some watermelons growing and the kids are looking forward to cutting them up. I actually prefer honeydew melons. I think they have lots more taste to them and they don't feel like you are eating water. We bought some recently and I happened to comment that it would be cool to save the seeds and try to grow some. Well I got ignored and the seeds were tossed onto the compost heap. A week or so later we had honeydew melons growing in the compost heap. Lea Ann tried to transplant some into the kitchen garden but they died off. Luckily she had left some on the compost heap so we are letting those grow and will see what happens. I love free food.
Future projects include a hoop house greenhouse, fed with water from a rainwater catchment fitted behind the barn. It will also irrigate the vegetable beds. I may eventually build an aquaculture system in the greenhouse with a wind generator to charge the batteries powering the water pump.
I also want to convert an old tiller into a walk behind tractor, so I can build attachments to use around the farm such as grass rake, snowplow, chain harrow and seed drill. Eventually all the gas engines will be replaced with electric motors with the batteries being charged by solar and wind power.

Spring Fever

It's been a busy time here at Outlaw Farm. We've dug two new vegetable beds and are about to dig one more at least. The first two were for the potatoes and onions, and the next will be for the birdhouse gourds and Jerusalem artichokes. Sixty one trees have been planted so far. The latest were native wild fruit trees. Blackberry, elderberry, black chokeberry and paw paw were planted on the edge of the wood lot, and serviceberry, golden currant, black cherry, wild plum, persimmon and red mulberry were planted in the orchard. There was five of each of these, except for the blackberry, where we had six. It took some digging to get all these in, because the ground is so full of rocks that I had to use a tree bar and post hole digger to get them in. I was averaging a five gallon buck of stones for every five trees.

These stones won't go to waste though. I am saving them to make corner posts for the livestock pastures. The idea is to make cylinders of welded fence wire and fill the cylinders with the stones. This will save me having to buy fence posts and then struggle getting them in the ground. The cylinders are kept in place by a couple of t posts and just sit on the ground rather than in it.

On a sad note, the kitten we found in the barn died. Whether mom had abandoned her, we don't know. I have seen Midnight about since so nothing happened to her. Hopefully the kitten was just one she had left behind, and the rest of the litter are doing okay.

The next jobs are more planting. I have more paw paw and elderberry to plant as well as two types of grapes. The grapes will be trained up and along the fence separating the orchard from the front yard.

I managed to get a truck load of manure last night. A friend of ours has cows and a mule, and this was a load from last winter when the snow storm hit us. He had struggled to get feed out the animals and the hay was frozen, making it difficult to  remove the netting. As he usually spreads his manure with machinery, this load was of no use to him as the netting would jam up the spreader. For us it's perfect as it's matured well and pulling out the odd length of netting by hand is no big deal. There is more to be had when this load is used up too.

One last point. This blog is more of a journal for our benefit, but if you are reading it and you find something we had done that you like, then please feel free to try it. That's what blogs are for in my mind. I'm a member of several homesteading forums, and although there are lots of great information on them, there seems to be a lot of politics and religious opinions posted on them, that tends to be a little tiring at times. I would like to state here and now, that apart from this paragraph, you will never see me write about politics, religion, prepping, conspiracies, or anything else that I consider to be private. If you do, then you are more than welcome to flame me.

It's a busy time at the moment. Just last weekend we planted ten flowering trees along the bottom of the front yard. These are all native trees and they are hopefully going to break up the monotony of all the green with lots of spring color from the blossom and the color throughout the summer and fall from the leaves.

We have also cut a vegetable bed behind the well house and planted three rows of potatoes. I am in the process of cutting another bed for onions. It's heavy going though, even with the tiller. I've probably picked up enough rocks to build a wall.

Lea Ann has been busy in the side garden with all her other vegetable seedlings. Also the Iris' we were given last year are starting to blossom so she is excited about them too.

The fifty native fruit trees arrived this week and we will be planting them this next weekend. These were bought at a very good price from the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Soon after we moved in we noticed a small dark cat snooping about the place. It would come sneaking around the house at night and occasionally I would see it around the pond in the morning. I assumed it was a neighbor's cat that visited for the cuisine. Well the kids were playing Frisbee around the barn the other evening and Lea Ann said she thought she could hear a kitten crying. I crept into the barn and sure enough, tucked behind a bit of baseboard was a single blond colored kitten. We had named the dark cat Midnight, so the kids named the kitten Sunshine. I've been quietly checking on the kitten each day and it seems to be doing okay. I wondered if it had been abandoned by the mother and she had taken the rest of the litter elsewhere, or that it was the lone survivor of the litter and the others had been killed by a possum or raccoon.

The dead oak in the front yard has been felled and the wood from that should keep us in fuel for a couple of years. It was a load off our minds as this was large, and too near the house for comfort.

We feel there is going to be a lot to do this year, but it will be worth it in the end. To think that by the end of the summer we will have our own vegetables and even our own eggs if I can pull my finger out and build the chicken coop.

Back to Plan A

What was plan A, I hear you ask? And why did we go to Plan B? Well let me take you back a few years. About 10,000 of them actually. Before that time everyone fed themselves on what they found, and they left it there because they knew that when they came back again next year, it would give them another bunch of food like this year. They moved about and fed themselves on raspberry from the edge of that wood, and then they ate hazelnuts as they traveled through the wood. Maybe finding some Oyster mushrooms growing off an old log.

This went well for a short while... about 50,000 years. But you know how it is. There must be change or else everything will stay just like it is. Also, we have to feed the growing population. Did you know that at the last stone age census, there were fifty people living in McDonald County? How the heck are we going to feed all those people with just a few raspberries and hazelnuts. I know, lets cut down those woods, dig it all up and plant some corn in nice neat rows. Then when someone eventually invents a combine harvester, we can quickly harvest all the corn we've grown and make lots of recipes that I saw on primitive Pinterest last week.

Well that's been okay for a while but now there are thousands of people in McDonald County, and do you remember Jed Clampit found that black gold that we used to make gas for that combine harvester we eventually got invented? Well it turns out that the black gold is running dry and the insects have started eating all our corn. But we sorted out that last problem because some clever people invented a spray to kill all those insects, and they also invented a bunch of stuff to put on our crops to make them grow quicker and bigger. What does it matter that the soil is turning to dust, we just have to pour more stuff on the fields each year to make the corn grow. What? You say you don't like corn? It gives you allergies? What are allergies? We never had them when I was a kid. Must be something else we need to invent to stop that.

Now I've heard there are some strange people about these days. Subversives I dare say. They say they have come up with a really great idea. They say they are going to plant different stuff all over their farms. They say they aren't going to grow just corn, and what's more, they reckon they aren't going to use any of that brilliant stuff that the clever people invented. They say they are going to bring the soil back to what it used to be like. And they are going to let nature take it's course with the insects and stuff. It all sounds a little far fetched to me, but I do like a raspberry now and again and apparently there are more calories in hazelnuts and chestnuts than all the corn we have been growing. I do think it's a bit subversive to me. I think it will cause a lot of problems for all those clever people in time. Those clever people will probably have to get a job at Walmart. What? Walmart will be turned into a Farmers Supercenter Market? Are you telling me that I won't be able to buy my chemical enriched food anymore?

Hello, my name is Graham and I'm a subversive.

Busy time ahead

I have recently been studying the world of permaculture. I had heard the word being used for a while but had never really known what it was. I just thought it was one of those buzz words that get bandied around. But when I sat down and started reading about it, I realized that it was something I had been trying to do for a while.

Basically it is a design concept that you use to get the most out of your garden or homestead without using up the natural resources. Using recycling, positioning and sustainability, you can keep a property feeding you as well as making it a clean and natural place at the same time.

We are awaiting the arrival of fifty native fruit trees that we will plant around the property to use as a food source, attractant for the wildlife and as a natural boundary. We have also ordered some Oyster Mushroom spore to grow in spent coffee grounds. There is a good example of recycling waste and reaping the benefits by growing what is a staple food in this house. Once the myceleum has eaten all the coffee grounds, it will be put on the compost heap to carry on the recycling process.

I have just finished building the top bar bee hive and it will go out on the edge of the property on the other side of the orchard. Now I have to build a trap hive, which is a smaller version of the main hive. I t will be set in a tree on some property that a friend of ours hunts. He has seen bees there and if I can get some free bees out of it, then I'm all for that.

We have also got to order some fruit trees for the orchard. These will be apple, pear, and plum. I was going to order some grape vine cuttings, but a friend gave us some from his garden. These are black concord grapes and I look forward to making some nice red wine from them.

One other thing I have been reading about is aquaponics. This involves keeping fish in a tank, pumping the water from it up to a growing bed where we will grow vegetables. The action of flooding the growing bed with the dirty fish water will feed the roots of the vegetables and then draining back into the fish tank as clean water. I f I can source all the parts, I am going to give this a try.

So as you can see, our family is going to be pretty busy this spring.

Pesky neighbors

We had our first fall of snow last night. It was only a dusting but it certainly transformed the place. I was glad that the snow didn't settle on the driveway as it is steep and winding and my go to truck is 2WD. Going down that with either ice or snow on it would probably find me in the fence, or worse, in the gulley at the bottom of the drive.
Nearly every evening this week we have got home from work and found one or two of the neighbor's cows in our field. It's a little annoying that I can't say for certain where they are coming through. There are a few saggy spots, but some of these beasts are big and don't look like they could jump the fence. It's going to take a day of working around the property, fixing and tightening the wire, because we are hoping to get a couple of bottle calves in the Spring and we need the fence to be 100%. I might wait until this cold snap has passed through first.

End to the year and plans for the future

So the year comes to a close and if anyone had told us at the start of the year that we would be in our own homestead with a dog, we probably would not have believed them.

We have quite a few plans for using the land, and a kind of time frame for these ideas, but as it is our first winter here, the main job is to get through the hard weather to come. The driveway is steep and curved so if we get snow or ice, it will be a little tricky to get out without slipping into the gulley. The well has already given us concern this year, and although it is working perfectly at the moment, we are still not sure if there are any pipes that are exposed and run the risk of freezing.

We have a dead oak in the front yard, that if it comes down in any direction will cause severe damage. We have had several people come knock on the door and offer to take it down, but only one of them mentioned insurance and the quotes have ranged from $100 to $500. We don't have the cash available at the moment but as soon as we do I will be getting it taken care of.

One of the things we want to do is keep some bees. I have spent the Christmas break building the hive so it will be ready for them in the Spring. The type we will be using is the Tanzanian Top Bar Hive. If you don't know of this type, it is a very simple design of hive consisting of a box with bars resting on the top. There are no frames as there are in the regular hives, rather, the bees build their combs on the underneath of the bars. This produces a much more natural comb although it makes less honey.

We have ordered fifty wild fruit trees from the MDC and they will arrive in March. Most of them will be planted around the edge of the orchard with the remainder planted sporadically around the pasture.

The main fruit trees will be ordered in the next month or so. This means we will be digging a lot of holes come springtime.

The other projects for the coming year are to build a chicken coop and raise some laying hens, buy a couple of cheap dairy bull calves and then feed them up for the fall. There are a few squirrels and rabbits on the property, so I would like to work at maintaining habitat for them as well as farming it. It would provide an alternative meat source. We have already started a small vegetable garden but there are plans to build on this and provide us with enough vegetables to prevent the need to buy in.

I wrote this today so we can look back on it in twelve months time and see what worked and what didn't.

Happy New Year to you all from Outlaw Farm.