Planning for a barn

One of the first projects for the new house is a barn.  We have had a cobbled together collection of temporary and portable structures for our animals and hay storage over the years so I am anxious to get a real barn.  Unfortunately, we can't afford to build what I really want:

I love old barns, but to replicate one is just not in the budget. So we will have to make a pole barn look as much like an old Pennsylvania German barn as possible.  I am hopeful that with the right basic structure I can get the new barn looking like it belongs on a Pa German farm. Adding older doors, big wrought hinges, old windows and aged hex signs should help.
Here are a few of the barns built by the company that came out this morning to look over the site and give us an estimate:

We will look at a couple other companies and, with cooperation from the weather, will have a barn by spring.

Gardening with chickens-part II

I've been spending a lot of time in the garden catching up on all the things that didn't get done while we were focusing all our time and energy getting the old house sold.  And the chickens are helping me.

Here are my girls helping to clear the weeds from the garden. They, hopefully, are also eating up the chiggers as well.  The garden, particularly the red raspberry patch, was the worst place for getting bitten by chiggers.


I planted garlic and shallots today. The hard part will be keeping the chickens from digging them up.

Before I let the chickens into the garden space I fenced off the blueberry and gooseberry bushes.  I planted the garlic and shallots in front of the gooseberries and was able to move the fence around the garlic as well.  Although, after I put the straw bedding on the garlic the chickens came over and were trying to figure out how to get at the straw to start scratching around.

In other poultry news, our one remaining Mottled Java is moulting and looks so pathetic.

But all our old laying hens have a date with the butcher soon, along with our three remaining turkeys.

We had an owl problem and lost a bunch of turkeys and sold our breeders before they were eaten as well.  I hope to just have the nine new pullets and the three goats for the winter. And a busy winter it should be.  We are getting estimates on building a barn and fencing in the pastures.  Lots more to write about!

Good Bye Old House

It has been a while since the last post and in that time we finished all the details and staged the old house.  It was on the market for eight days when we reviewed the four offers we had received.  Settlement was supposed to be on October 8th but was pushed back, not with any input from us, until the 17th.  But the whole saga is over.  Buying a house is a whole lot more fun! Selling a house is not something I want to do again any time soon. It was definitely one of the most stressful things I have ever done. Too many sleepless nights worrying about the house, choosing the right realtor (I don't think we did), getting the house looking good for showings, having my gallbladder out in the middle of all this, and trying to pick the right offer.

But when we moved everything out on what we thought would be our last time in the old house, it was very bittersweet.  So many emotions going through my head, and then the tears started to flow.
Ahh, the memories.  Camping out and freezing our first winter as the water line from the well kept breaking under the driveway.  Cleaning out bags and bags of bat shit mixed with loose insulation from the attic. Huge plastic walls to keep kids out of construction areas.  Our oldest falling face first off his trike into the newly poured concrete for the chimney foundation. So many holidays.  Bringing our three youngest home from the birth center. First days of school, home schooling, back to school, my office for my schooling-a bachelor's and master's degrees.  So much music! It was a great house acoustically.

But we are on to a new project.  The grounds at our new house are my therapy.  Whenever I question why we moved I just walk around outside and the answer is all around me.
So back to the blog to continue chronicling  everything we are doing here.

The tree finally fell

We thought the locust tree would finish falling when the predicted thunderstorms came through Saturday evening. So Alan took the fencing down from around the garden in the area where we expected the tree to fall.  Except, we never got the predicted thunderstorms. But the tree did finally fall down Monday morning, after a gentle rain. And we were close to predicting where it would fall, only off by about 8 feet.  It landed on my ready to be dug potatoes instead of the squash plants.
Now its time to clean up the mess.

Next step, dig up the potatoes, then put the fence back up! The adolescent turkeys are eying the garden!

Agricultural Vinegar

Agricultural Vinegar is 20% vinegar used for killing weeds.
We have been slacking on the new house maintenance and were in need of some weed killing on our patio.

It took some doing to finally get the vinegar, but within 8 hours of spraying, our patio now looks like this:

I'm sold!

Mid July garden update

The weather has been just about perfect for the garden, and the weeds.  My first attempt ever of growing corn seems to be going well.

Not quite as tall as an "elephant's eye" but above my waist.  I was worried about the corn in the field behind the house across the street pollinating my corn, but it is tassling now and should be pollinating way before my corn.  I am growing popcorn and a bantam corn.  I wouldn't have included corn in my garden but I want to make tamales and I want to know where my corn husks came from, and corn apparently has a place in crop rotation.  According to Eliot Coleman, potatoes do well in soil that grew corn the year before.  So we'll see next year how the potatoes do there.

Garlic is another thing I have never tried growing before.  I will definitely be planting more this fall.  It was super easy and the cloves look great.

The hard neck garlic has bigger cloves than the soft neck so I think I will plant more of the hard neck.

The squashes are enjoying all the hot weather with a regular rainfall.  The Boston Marrow has really taken off and I am looking forward to trying that squash for pumpkin pie.

The spaghetti squash is also doing well.

The tomatoes have been hit or miss.  They don't like to be close to the walnut trees.  The plants farther away are doing much better.  Hopefully, I will have enough paste tomatoes to can.

When we were looking at houses one important consideration was firewood.  Well, we don't need to worry about firewood here.  It just seems to come to us.  In the past month we have had at least 5 trees fall down, the majority of which are black locusts.  According to the internet, black locust is second only to hickory in BTUs and it makes little ash.  I don't think we will need to worry about firewood for a long time, as long as the game land keeps sending us trees,
Unfortunately, there is a very tall black locust leaning towards my garden.  I am hoping it will wait till everything is harvested before falling.  Some other large branches came down onto my black raspberries just as they were ready for picking.

Yes, there are raspberries under there.
This is a picture of the big locust leaning towards the garden.

Looks like when it finally falls we will be fixing fencing on both sides of the garden.

The Blueberry Cage

The blueberries are getting close to ripening so it was time to figure out how to put up the blueberry cage.  The previous owners were so grateful we wanted it.  How could I turn down the cage to protect my blueberries from the hungry birds!
Thankfully I had my youngest, Mackenzie, for help.  The longest boards were in the rafters of the garage and required standing on top of a stepladder.  We had no idea how to put the cage together, but all the pieces were numbered. How hard could this be?
Once we got all the pieces out to the blueberry bushes we assembled the three long sections.

This is the crop in need of protection.

It took 5 people to get the three long sections attached to the cross pieces while working around the blueberries.  Luckily my other daughter and her friend came to help. We got a large portion of the netting in place as well before the rain came.  Now we just have to get the rest of the netting on and the berries will be protected.