Beefy has arrived!

Welcome back Ya'll! We've had a busy couple of weeks around here. Time just flies by! Firstly it was finally time to cut back our potato plants. Then you have to let them sit for 5-10 days. We didn't quite get as many as were expecting but we still did get a big storage bin full of them so i'll take it! I think it was because of the dirt we used. We had a whole truck load delivered when we started building the garden and it wasn't exactly the kind I wanted. It was a mix of dirt and that clay dirt. So to fix the problem we spent all day yesterday tilling the garden beds; adding good dirt, compost, and pig manure. This hopefully will yield more potatoes since they will be able to grow in better soil. The next round is planted and now we can just wait and see. Look for a canning post soon!

Secondly we have two new arrivals to the farm! Welcome our new Nigerian Dwarf goat Rick and surprisingly we now have a Jersey Calf! We were planning on getting another male goat to bred with our two female dwarf goats Maggie and Judith but the cow was somewhat an impulse buy. We have been toying with the idea of a cow for a while but I've been on the fence about it. They get so big and  I just wasn't sure. Plus they are expensive, normally a few hundred if not more. However I was browsing craigslist and found a post for a baby Jersey Cow for just $100! Apparently he was so cheap because he still has to be bottle fed twice a day. So now that's added on to my daily to do list. He's so cute though! He's not getting a name, (Frank is calling him Beefy) I thought about calling him Hershal but have decided against it. Ya'll can probably understand why. We'll have him for maybe year or less and then should get about 600 lbs of meat out of it. In the end i'll let you know if this was all worth it or not. Stay tuned. In the mean time here are some super cute pictures of him!

In the Weeds

Hey and welcome back! So our garden is just growing and producing a ton of peppers and we're finally starting to get tomatoes. This is first year we haven't gotten red tomatoes before the summer solstice, but we did start planting later this year due to having to build the garden. However I think we made a bad call with the beans. In past years we always used buckets, like we did with the peppers and tomatoes, but this year I really wanted to do garden beds because I just think they look better. Well apparently I didn't take into account that the buckets keep weeds from growing up around the plants. So our garden beds become over grown with weeds and I just didn't keep up with them. Needless to say it became a huge pain when I finally went out there to get the job done. So now I have to figure out how to keep weeds under control if I want to continue to use garden beds or go back to buckets. Google here I come...

We have two new additions to farm as well, i'll be introducing on the next post! Along with how our potatoes are doing. I should have potatoes out of the ground by the next time i'm back! See ya'll soon!

My poor onions didn't even grow

Garden Beds?

Hey all! Let me first say that gardening does not come natural to me at all. I don't know why since my mom and my grandfather all have green thumbs, I guess it decided to skip a generation. Frank however has always been into it and has gotten me into it as well. We've been growing different vegetables for years and now that we just bought our first house in January we decided to build our "forever" garden. Although we're already talking about expanding and changing things up next season. Anyway, for anyone asking themselves if they should start a garden I say go for it! It can be as big or small as you want and there are a ton or websites out there to help you go in the direction you want to. We picked the best spot in the yard to get the most sun and started there.

Then we just measured out how big we needed it to be to accomadate the amount of raised beds and buckets we would need to plant in. I'm not going to go into the actual amount of work and how we built all the beds in this post, i'll save that for another day. However we did need to get 2x4s and cemented them into the ground and bought the fences from Home depot and just screwed them in. Again not going to go into all the measurements etc. After we got the fence up came the garden beds, buckets, and then the planting started. This whole process took a couple months considering we could only build on Frank's two days off and all the rain we got. 

These 3 beds are all full of potatoes.

The far beds are lettuce, beans, and strawberries. The buckets have tomatoes and peppers.

Pre Plants

And this is what they look like now. We are about a week away from harvesting potatoes and starting again!

Here is a great link for lot's of different idea's for raised beds, have fun!

Raised garden beds