Growing food, raising animals and moving forward

 Crafting a great blog filled with entertaining words is a lot like planning the garden.  You pick the seeds you want to plant because you want the garden to not only produce great food but you want it to be a thing of beauty, representing your creative side and showcasing your gardening skills.  This summer we dove in head first and put in one of the largest gardens we have ever endured, and I mean endured!  Weeding a garden like this is beyond words, it is a beast! Sara and I found a new evening quality time, we called it Weed and Wine! Yup, we pulled weeds while we sipped our wine together in the evening! I mean if you are going to have to go at a chore every single night to get those seeds to germinate, grow and provide a quality product, you might as well do it with a glass of wine and have an incredible background to pull those pesky weeds! We joked, if the wrong person heard this phrase and did not know what we are talking about, they might infer we are talking about a totally different weed! We seriously joked as we trimmed the tomato plants that it was just practice for when it was legal to trim other types of plants, hmm, hmm. But, for now weed and wine is just about those pesky weeds choking out the vegetables. 

Weed and wine should be a thing but here's the thing, it is not what you might envision or maybe you nailed it; we are dressed in farm clothes, muddy or very dirty from yanking those bastards out, and our choice of chairs, is a tiny foot stool, for Sara, and me on my knees! There really is something very cathartic, as a good friend used the word in one of my recent social media post, to pulling weeds and providing an opportunity for the plants to thrive.  I literally told our son, the garden was not about hard work but instead a form of therapy! Right, if that's therapy, why not sign up for the ironman adventure? 

The adventure on the farm was never ending, whether it was the Japanese beetles we were fighting off up at the grapevines or shocking deer away from the garden.  We worked we learned.  Sara had a very good friend, who also grows grapes, give her some advice to keep the sneaky deer out of the garden; it involves a solar electric fence, aluminum foil, and peanut butter!  I bet you didn't see that last word coming, lol! Seems, deer like peanut butter, and when you wrap the electric wire with some aluminum foil, and slather the said foil with peanut butter, get your cameras out, they will like it once and race out of that garden! 

Next up, Sandhill Cranes! We have not solved this problem yet but, it was a frustrating issue! I planted all of our seeds, set up the watering system and I had rows not germinating?  I could not figure out what was going on, that's when I discovered the cranes in the garden go row by row and eating the seeds I had planted! Holy hell! First sweet little Bambi and mom now I have Matilda and her family pecking through the tilled garden and finding new shoots and seeds! Omg! I changed up our watering system, and for now having been using t-post sprinklers to freak out the modern day pterodactyls'.  

Once we regained control of the above issues we now have a plethora of tomatoes coming, I am not kidding, the garden has 44 plants, our former garden still has 21 one plants, thus, we are looking at 65 tomato plants to harvest from! The 21 are all volunteers, most gardeners know what this means, plants that reseeded themselves from last year.  Speaking of the old garden; Sara did an amazing job in that area, we have 50 new asparagus crowns planted in the old beds along with those 21 volunteers and Sara had been transplanting raspberries along the pallet fence surrounding the garden; those raspberries produced just like our rabbits! Sara picked raspberries for about a month, and we have a few gallons in the freezer along with making 7 pints of raspberry jam! We have been picking cucumbers for about a week and half. I see pickles in our future! Our leeks are thriving and getting bigger.  We have really great looking and tasting kale,  our peppers are starting to really take off, beets are looking good, carrots are all over the place, and we are just about finished with our first round of lettuce with new heads coming up.  Next to the tomatoes being a huge crop, we are really into sunflowers and have planted them all of the property, it's a jungle out there but a really cool looking jungle! We ending up harvesting around 65 pounds of garlic, that was amazing, and yet a little bit of work. 

We have 4 feeder pigs coming on August 17th, we are excited to bring some more livestock on to the farm and look forward to our venture into the part of the agriculture world. We are still producing rabbits and they have been producing fairly regularly, as rabbits do.  Our hen population has grown smaller, and we will have to increase the population next year.  We are busy and yet we are filled with opportunity to create, grow and provide local food for our community.  It really has been a full circle for Sara and I and as we move forward, grow and learn, we are going to share our experiences and be a part of the growing community to inspire others to grow food raise food and reconnect with the roots of food. Until my next post get out there and enjoy some wine and "weeding" cheers! If you to purchase any of our produce, we are at the Poynette farmers market every Saturday!