Gardening... bah humbug!

I am not a master gardener. Far from it in fact. Nor do I find my garden therapudic. I'm lucky if my garden grows! Last year was a flop as we had a cold, wet spring that turned hot and dry. What did grow was decimated by rabbits. Everyone had trouble getting their garden to produce. People who'd been gardening in the area for years found themselves not having their usual success. I can say, however, they still did way better than me.

Gardening is not my favorite task. It really needs to move up in my favorites but that only works is I have some success. It does seem to be looking better this year so far. I have a good deal of cabbage and broccoli already planted. My tomatoes are started and just now putting out their first true leaves. I need to get peppers started, I've just been busy and limited on space.

My seeds... I don't buy seeds from places like Gurney's. I buy from places that have taken the Safe Seed Pledge or are actively preserving seed diversity. Baker Creek Seeds, High Mowing Seeds, Seed Savers, Sand Hill Preservation Center, others and sometimes direct from other farmers. And then I try to save seeds myself. In pioneering days, they didn't have a store to go get whatever they wanted, they saved their seeds and now it's not unusual to have a seed variety named after the family or person who preserved it. However, seed companies were fun as they'd take varieties like that and then give them some jazzy marketing name. Some history was lost that way. I do dislike it when history is lost...

Look at your lands capabilities realistically

It never seems to fail, a person gets a little bit of acreage and boom!! Big ideas occur. To make small acreages be profitable you have to look at it realistically and realize you're probably not going to be able to raise much grassfed beef. Frankly, you're not going to be able to do much with cattle at all! Though you can graze a steer, it can't be the only thing you do.

The key to success for a small holding is diversity. You can actually "stack" different kinds of livestock. Why? Because different species have different grazing habits. For example, cows like grass and will eat some browse (brush, trees, vines, etc) but goats like browse and will eat some grass. Here's the kicker ... you don't need separate pens for them you need to use them on the pasture together.

Sheep, cows and goats are easy... what about pigs? Most people don't think of pigs as a pasture animal but they are. Granted for it to really work you need a breed that likes forbes. We once got a couple Yorks and put them on some of our best clover... they didn't bother eating the clover they just bulldozed the area. We were not new to pigs at this point. We'd been breeding heritage breed hogs for 2-3 years besides raising feeders. The hogs we raise love forbes. Absolutely love it! They're much happier when they have grass. Do they root? Sure! But they eat the tasty grass, roots and creepy crawlies first generally and THEN root it up. It really depends on their nutrient needs at the time. Otherwise, they do a fabulous job cleaning brush out of treed areas. It's also helpful for keeping the pigs cooler in the summer and sheltered in the winter. In fact, I was watching a sow strip the leaves off of a wild rose bush the other day. I've even used hogs to control wild blackberry bramble. The pigs thin it down so you can walk through it and grass grows between the bushes. They fertilized it nicely as well, got some awesome blackberries from that patch.

If you can't tell, I'm rather partial to pigs... I like all the animals but pigs have proven themselves to be useful on many levels. We used pig "tractors" to break the sod for our garden. It made it much easier to till with a garden tiller.

Anyway, now that I have gone on and on about pigs... back to the subject.

I had 5 acres before my current place. When we got it up to snuff we could get 5 grazings per growing season. We were running 3 dairy cows, 20-30 pigs and 50-100 chickens (both layers and broilers). We were maxed out. We were able to rent land but it never went well. What we never did do was vegetables. A market garden would have been more profitable on such a small acreage. Dairy is profitable but the people can be flaky and laws vary state to state.

I'm still working on those vegetables... whatever the case, realize that the best use of a small acreage is not necessarily to graze a few head of beef. The best use is to diversify and bring income from multiple venues which may include staying away from beef altogether.

Bees and the Warre Hive

Since we don't have money and the last time we bought bees was a terrible loss it was decided the only way we would hve bees would be to catch a swarm. We were settled with that. Then one day while we were driving through town we happened upon a swarm in a tree. I may never forget how we captured out first swarm...

Armed with a cardboard box and a roll of duct tape we surrounded the swarm and taped it shut on the tree branch.
No equipment except a bottle if lemon grass essential oil and the homeopathic remedy Apis 30x. Yup. We were prepared. I still haven't decided if we were gutsy or just plain dumb. We ended up cutting the branch off and taking it with, swarm and all. Whatever the case, we got the bees home with no more than a bee sting each.

The next hurdle was the fact that we had nothing to put them in. I spent the next 24 hours building a Warre hive. Without power tools. It was awful but I got it done and then it was back to handling bees without equipment ... not even a smoker. I need to add two more boxes to the stack very soon...

How we got here

Foreclosure ... plain and simple. Well, maybe not that simple but a major contributing factor. God would probably be the main reason.

We started milking a cow, discovered direct marketing and it was a downward spiral from there. Both of us wanted to farm and this presented the path to get there. But in our young foolishness we got a mortgage and eventually my dh was laidoff. The farm didn't pay enough to cover the mortgage. So we lost our original place and found ourselves hurting for land. Then God blessed us and we got our new place. No mortgage. No money owed to anyone. It would be wrong for me to call it our property because in truth it's His. He provided the money and really the land because we got it obscenely cheap for the market. We've found that any of the neighbors would have bought it for a little more than what we paid. God is GOOD! But that doesn't mean it's easy.

So we ended up with 70ish acres of bare land. I do thank God it did have a perimeter fence that would hold cows at least. Thus the move commenced ...

Sometimes I feel like I have dial up

I am an internet junkie... or at least I was until about a year and a half ago when we moved onto this 70ish acres here in Kansas. Then I went from having high speed internet to... nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except a cellphone that I could only use internet on if I had wifi access. Rough. Horribly rough. Now I still primarily use a cellphone but I at least can sit on the homestead and use the internet. Lol

My parents nicknamed me Green Acres. Cell service is pretty awful out here so I often found myself in strange places trying to get uninterrupted service just to make a phone call. My favorite being sitting on a pipe gate facing a specific direction staring into the heart of a honey locust tree. I later found a location where I could stand and talk but I HAD to stand. So what changed? I switched cell service from T-Mobile to Virgin Mobile. I dropped my phone in a mud puddle and it was decided that we might as well change providers to see if there was a difference ... there was.

Unfortunately 3G sometimes doesn't feel any better than dial up. And I do know dial up. Grew up with it. Frankly my parents still have it. But I don't even have a land line to get dial up. So cellphone it is.

Computer wise we have a laptop that we tether using the cellphone. Works pretty well and has saved us money as there is no need to go to town for internet usage.

Now I get to look forward to "throttling" yuck! As if it couldn't get any slower...