Brrrrrrrr! It has been especially cold these past few weeks, with lots of wind. It makes it a bit harder to keep at the outdoor tasks, and I find myself working on indoor projects. Our Agritourism group is working on publishing a new map. I am planning our farm events for this coming year. We have some new events planned including an day when other area farmers and ranchers will come display their products. Included will be homegrown beef, lavender, olive oil, fiber and even dairy goats. We will also be hosting our first annual Frontier Day event. Our Heirloom Tomato Tasting was well received, so we will be doing a tasting again as well. We have lots of requests for how to make birdhouses out of natural gourds, so we will be doing two gourd workshops. Time spent in preparation and marketing our events now will hopefully ensure success later in the year.

Mandy has pretty much taken on all the pruning tasks this year. I thought I would post some photos of her work. In the first photo she is pruning a Pink Lady apple tree. The second photo shows her pruning a Santa Rosa plum. She took nearly 5 feet off the top. It is amazing how fast they grow.

Becky is the chicken wire basket expert. The photos show her making wire baskets for the bare roots. The gophers seem to be especially bad this year, so we want to make sure our new trees are protected.

The last photo I took of the front fields this morning. The geese were out for a stroll. They are such characters! They constantly are talking to each other and are extremely curious. You can see the weather is a bit gloomy. The oats and vetch cover crop is just starting to poke through the soil. We have had about 15 inches of rain, however it has been so cold things just aren’t growing. Usually we are quite green by the first of March. We still have a ways to go until the hillsides are green and it is February 19^th.

Another winter project is shelling walnuts. We are fortunate to have several grafted walnut trees on the farm. One magnificent tree in particular is where the bulk of our walnuts come from that we use in our baked goods at our farm store. The walnuts have to be picked up off the ground when they fall from the trees in the late fall. If they still have partial husks on them, the husks must be removed. The whole nuts are then placed on screened trays and allowed to dry. If you were to bag them up before they are dried they would mold right away. Next Uncle Darrell runs them through an antique corn sheller to crack the shells. The next step is to spend many long hours of separating the meat from the shells. The nut meats are then placed in freezer ziplocs, labeled with dates, and frozen for use in our baked goods this coming summer.

Homegrown non-irrigated walnuts taste very different from store bought nuts. They are delicate and tasty. They freeze amazingly well and hold their quality. We thaw the nuts and then gently toast them in the oven before we add them to our fudge, cookies and breads.

We'll talk again soon!

Joy

Wow! Where has the time gone? And to think I was going to try and give a “weekly” update : -).

We have been amazingly busy these past two months. We finished up the final stages of packing up the farm store and covering and securing things which needed to be left outdoors. Things like cream cans, an antique sheller, wagons, display bins, horse collars, lanterns, lassos etc. which we decorate with during the summer months all must be put away to keep them safe from wind and rain damage.

We’ve managed to get all of our fields tilled and cultivated and ready for planting. We picked up Oganic Purple Vetch, Lana Woolypod Vetch, and Kanota Oat seed at Farm Supply today. $80 a bag!!! Ouch! We plant the vetch as a cover crop. Vetch is a legume that helps to set natural nitrogen in our soil (similar to alfalfa, peas and beans). The oats serves as a trellis for the vetch to climb, which exposes more of the plant to sunlight and creates a healthy crop. Some of the vetch will be cut for hay and baled to feed our goats during the winter. The rest gets tilled under to create a green mulch for a healthy crop of pumpkins and vegetables next summer.

We’ve nearly had more rain this past month than we had all of last year. We had a major storm 10 days ago which brought much needed rain. Unfortunately it brought destructive wind too. One casualty of the storm was our small greenhouse. It is amazing what 55 mile an hour gusts can do. Almost every sign at the farm store was blown over, and we lost some of the decorative accents on the buildings. Lots of broken branches too, but no other real harm done.

The girls have spent the last month pruning. Becky finished the berries and grapes. Mandy has almost finished the first fruit tree orchard. She has three more to go. Each variety is pruned a little differently. We are pruning the crowns down further on the apple trees, to control their size, so they will be easier to harvest next fall. We also heavily pruned the persimmon and plum trees. We had an extremely heavy crop last year and lost several branches. The slender branches can’t hold the weight of an abundant crop, and it seems we just never thin aggressively enough. We are hoping that scaling back on the breadth of the branches will make a difference.

Our bare root trees arrived this week and we are getting ready to plant. This year we are planting 36 Angel Red Pomegranates (a new variety that is supposed to be especially good for juice), 20 Fruitless Mulberries (shade for our Threshing Bee event we hold every September) and a few individual fruit trees (Honeycrisp and Mutsu) to replace ones that we lost to gophers or deer.

Something new we are planting this year is a few Feijoas. They are a very pretty, somewhat small evergreen tree. They bear an oblong fruit which smells like a blend of pineapple and strawberry and tastes like a guava. Sometimes folks refer to them as a Pineapple Guava. They are sweet and rich in Vitamin C.

We are also planting some Jujubees, PawPaws, and two different varieties of Hardy Kiwis. We have a lot to learn about how to trellis and propagate them. Thank goodness we have a farmer friend who knows a lot about unusual varieties and she generously shares her knowledge. It will be several years before we get our first crop, but we are anxious to see how they do in our soil and weather conditions..

Before we plant bare roots, we make wire baskets from chicken wire for each plant or tree. We place the wire basket in the ground before the tree is planted, and nestle the roots in the basket before refilling the hole with soil. This offers at least some protection from gophers. We dip the roots in solution of Vitamin B-1 before we plant them, which helps protect the trees from shock and gets them off to a good start.

I will try to weigh in again soon and let you know how planting went.

My best,

Joy