And Summer Comes to a Close

It's been a very busy summer, hence the reason we haven't posted anything for a while.  I began a new job that requires me to be in Tacoma a few times a week in addition to our other jobs!  We have also been busy stalking land in Montana, hiking, camping, hanging out with our handsome little nephew, and of course taking care of the farm!  As summer comes to a close, all crops need to be canned or vacuum sealed.  It's a timely process but so worth it to get to enjoy the fruits (or rather mostly veggies) of our labor.  The garden, animals, corn field, tomato field, and all of our herbs did fantastically over the summer.  Most of our fruit trees are a tad too young to be producing fruit just yet but we did get quite the crop of apples from the one apple tree that our bear friend pushed over a few years ago.

As we move into fall, Kenn and I are trying out a few colder weather crops.  Hopefully we will be able to keep you updated more often on those throughout the fall and winter!  In the meantime, check out our summer's bounty (well, this is just a small portion of it).

Chest High By The 4th of July

Our corn was knee high by June 14th but that doesn't have much of a ring to it.  Ears are starting to come in on our early corn and the other types are growing well too.  Apparently we have done something right with the soil in the corn field because most of the stalks are growing one or more shooters.  I think we are going to leave the shooters on instead of taking them off, just to see how well they do.  Maybe they will grow ears too!

Another piece of good news about the corn field is that it now has micro-irrigation!  Kenn installed it a few weeks back (as well as in the main garden area) and it has saved us a ton of time with watering.

Corn Field

As for the rest of the garden, things are going mostly pretty well.  The unseasonable heat has caused some of the lettuce to bolt and some of our cooler weather crops aren't so happy but at least the tomatillos and tomatoes are loving it.  In fact, most of them have outgrown their typical large pots on the deck for the first time.  To mitigate the problem we ended up creating a little tomato forest in front of the chicken run since that specific spot in the yard gets fantastic sunlight throughout the day.  We still have nine tomatillo and tomato plants in pots on the deck to add to the forest but they aren't in dire need of being put into the ground just yet.

Tomato Forest

All's Well That Ends Well

Have you ever tried to water a garden and corn field with small water bottles?  We have.  And not because we thought it would be fun.  It definitely wasn't.  So why, might you ask, were we watering a massive garden with such small amounts of water?  Because when you're relying on your vegetables to keep you through the winter and your well pump dies of old age mid-garden water you'll do time-consuming things to keep your plants alive. 

Well Crane

If it had been a typical June month here in Washington it wouldn't have been so necessary to scramble for water for the garden.  Given that the temperatures had been over eighty degrees for a week with no rain in sight, we called a well repair man and dug out a case of water bottles from storage in the laundry room.  Luckily, at 12:30 a.m. that night we were blessed with a new well pump and water in the reservoir the next morning.

We learned our lesson about not keeping enough water stored and snagged a rain barrel to set up under one of our gutters.  With our fifty plus animals on the property now, we need to keep enough water around for them to have to drink, for us to drink, and for our garden and fruit trees.

In other news, we finally eliminated the mole that had been creating such chaos in the front yard landscaping and that had made us late to Kenn's dad's birthday dinner.  After months of setting traps and trying to kill the mole's food source we were finally able to get him. 

Proud Mole Hunter

It's definitely a matter of being in the right place at the right time when getting this job done.  When rounding the corner into the front yard on Saturday, I spotted a moving mole hill and yelled for Kenn to grab the shotgun.  Moles are pretty sensitive to vibrations and the mole hill stopped moving with my yelling.   After about fifteen minutes of standing still next to the mole hill though, it started moving again.  Kenn, point blank, shot the hill and after some digging around in the dirt we found our perpetrator.  Apparently this is a pretty effective method as we used it on a second mole the next day.  As I learned from Kenn's dad, moles come in pairs.  Hopefully we get a break from these buggers for a few weeks before new ones move in.

Brave New World

Checking out their new surroundings

Over the last week and weekend we were able to put the finishing touches on the run for the chicks and turkeys.  The gate is on, chicken wire staked down, and netting is up.  Seems pretty predator proof but I think Kenn is secretly hoping for a bobcat to fall victim to our netting over the top of the run. 

For hours we watched our chicks and turkeys take brave leaps out of the barn coop and into their new outdoor world.  It was amusing to watch as they flailed and hurled themselves out the doors.  I thought they needed a ramp at least to get back into the coop, but nope!  Those brave birds were able to hop right back into the safety of their indoor home.

Buzz Kill

Well, not everything goes as planned on the farm.  We have made so much progress on many things and we have also taken a few steps back on some others.  But this is the way we learn.

Ruger with baking soda on her bee sting

Kenn and I opened our hive on Saturday to check things out and what we found were a bunch of sluggish bees.  After checking the frames we noticed there weren't any eggs.  What happened to our queen?  I'll tell you what happened to our queen... once again, we made a beginner beekeeping mistake.  We hadn't changed out our poor honeybee's sugar water for over a few weeks.  Who would have thought that something so loaded with sugar could go bad?  Well it does and bad sugar water causes bees to starve.  StinsonFarm should write a book titled, 101 Ways To Starve Your Honeybees.  We have already found the first two ways.  Lucky for us, once we changed out the sugar water and threw some powdered sugar into the hive, our sluggish bees came back to life.  We did have to re-queen though.  Hopefully she takes!

We lost some of our rabbits too.  Not as in they hippity hopped away from the farm, but rather, they died.  As I'm writing this I'm realizing how terrible at farming Kenn and I must sound.  I can assure you that it is normal for any farmer to lose animals every once and a while.  It just seems that it happened at StinsonFarm all at once.  We had somewhat of a cold snap during the evenings last week and a few of the baby bunnies got out of their nest box and couldn't get back in.  Unfortunately those babies didn't make it through the night.  The same litter had a runt that didn't make it either.  We're pretty sure that momma rabbit wasn't feeding it and that it died from starvation.

My lesson in rabbit butchering (note: this
is not one of the baby bunnies that died)

Drying anise leaves

In good news, I was able to harvest some of my anise leaves already!  It's so early for this so I'm pretty excited that I'll get more than one harvest out of them this year.  Anise meringues here we come!  My cousin, Nicole, was visiting us this weekend and brought us some perfect containers for storing the leaves.  Thank you Nicole!

Spring Madness

That whole bit about sticking to one project at a time in order to actually finish them definitely doesn't work for us.  We didn't finish the chicken run last weekend but boy did we get a lot of other farm chores worked on and some completed.

The corn field is finally planted with sweet corn and a few other varieties.  We want to see which variety grows best here in the PNW at 1,100 feet.  In past years I have had troubles with birds plucking the corn kernels out of the ground after they've germinated which rips the tops of the plants clean off.  This year Kenn and I put together quite the creepy scarecrow.  It looks more like a Night of the Living Dead character.  We also strung some string across the rows of corn in hopes of deterring the birds.

Corn Field With Extra Creepy Scarecrow

Since the bottom story of the barn coop is all sealed up and temperatures outside aren't too cold, we decided to move the chicks and turkeys out to it from their tiny nest box in the shop.  We're still using a heat lamp just in case and so far so good!  They made it through their first night in the barn coop and seem to like their new home.

Chicks And Turkeys In The Barn Coop

And if these birds weren't enough, Kenn came home Monday night with nine more.  Nestled in their nest box in the shop we now have two Guineas, two Bantams, and five Broilers.  I'm guessing we should make some headway on the chicken run this weekend...

Guineas, Bantams, Broilers

In other news, our garden is doing pretty good so far.  Even with that last cold snap!  Chives are well on their way to producing seeds for next year and the lupines are getting huge!  We can't wait to try these legumes.  Neither Kenn nor I have ever eaten lupine beans so if we like them we will harvest them again next year.  The strawberries and raspberries seem to be very happy and the rest of our starts are well on their way.

Chives, Lupines, Garden

It's None Of Your Beeswax

Week two check on our honeybees was a success!  Well, except for the part where I sent burning embers from the smoker into the hive which really pissed the girls off.  Before our week three check I plan on putting a screen over the opening of the smoker.

So far, the queen has been released and the worker bees are working hard.  Quite a bit of the wax foundation has been drawn into honeycomb on the center frames.  We checked for supersedure cells and swarm cells and we have none.  This is a good thing since supersedure cells are indicative of a sick queen and swarm cells are created in preparation for swarming.  Our frames also show that our queen has been busy laying eggs.  Good job your majesty!

Honeybees

 

 

Barn Coop

In other news... the barn coop is sealed up!  Well, on the lower story anyway.  Siding is up and the doors are on.  We started sinking logs as posts for the chicken run on Saturday.  With good weather on the way this coming weekend we should be able to finish up the run!

Future Duck Pond

Even though Kenn and I keep telling ourselves to finish one project before starting another, we conjured up a new idea which I started on over the weekend.  We decided to use the little stream run-off from the property and gutters as an area for ducks someday.  So, I started digging yet another pond and will create a small dam to hold the water.  So far it's a muddy mess.