Freedom and Unity

We made it!  I've been trying to write this post for a few weeks now, but whenever I sit down to do anything, the boys make me get up to play with them or go for a walk.  Yes, I'm blaming my procrastination on the dogs.  

The boys love the weather, the landscape, and the house.  They have a lot more energy, and Miles' skin problems and ear infection have completely cleared up.  Must be the air.  

Miles has his own little apartment here, so he no longer has the opportunity to antagonize his brother.  But don't worry, Miles won't be lonely in there.  He said he'd lease one of the rooms to me for a sewing studio.  Thurgood is enjoying the rest of the house, and he spends his down time stretched out on the bed, occasionally lifting an eyelid to look out the window.

Thurgood Morsel

Ben and I start our new jobs on Monday.  Though we'll be working outside of the home full-time, we'll still be able to let our freak flag fly on weekends and holidays.  Luckily, both of us are thrilled about our new careers.

Now let's get to the fun part.  Our new home place has about two dozen giant old apple trees scattered about.  We arrived just in time to harvest some of the later varieties.  Two of our loveliest new neighbors helped me pick (Thank you so much!).  We ended up with four bushels total.  If we had picked all the apples, we would have enough to feed two Asian elephants for an entire year.  

Most of the apples are tart, and some are sweet - a great combination for hard cider!    There are a lot of great resources out there for the home cider maker, so I won't give you a how-to (as I rarely do anyway).  I looked to the Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible, The Homebrew Helper, and Home Brew Hard Cider from Scratch on Instructables.com.  We don't have a cider press yet, so we used our juicer.

This is our first go at hard cider, so everything is an experiment at this point.  The process is not much different than brewing beer or making fruit wine, and all of the equipment overlaps.  

Oh yeah, I never gave a final review of our fruit wines.  Both the dry and sweet strawberry wines were decent and drinkable, but not really good enough to share with the world.  The blackberry wine was a little too good to share, and our blueberry peach wine is still aging in bottles.  

If you ever get a wild hair up your ass, I strongly recommend fermenting your own beverages.  It's not rocket science, but it can make you feel like a genius.  If you can read, you can brew!

Just so you know, we haven't just been sitting around on top of our thumbs watching airlocks bubble.  We managed to plant everything we brought with us!  That's seven varieties of garlic, 105 blueberry bushes (some are in nursery rows), six pawpaw trees, and five Asian pears.  Thanks to Ben's hard work and planning, we've begun a new micro-mini farm here in Vermont.

Baby blueberry bushes

We have a lot of work to do on the house.  Luckily, the majority of it is cosmetic.  Carpet is not a good idea when you have two St. Bernards, and the kitchen counters and some of the walls are pink!  The list goes on.  I'm looking forward to chipping away at these projects.  For now, our living room is our bedroom until we paint and change the flooring upstairs.

I'm looking forward to lots of new adventures, and meeting new people.  So far, I love everything here.

We miss our friends and family, but we don't miss the stinkbugs - they came with us!

Have YOU Ever Seen the Rain?

Boy, have I seen the rain!  It has rained eight days this month, and it's only the ninth day of the month!  It rained fifteen out of thirty days last month.  

Though the rain destroyed almost all of our strawberries (we only had two weeks of harvest), it has been quite a lovely thing for the blueberries.

 We grow about half a dozen blueberry varieties.  The first to ripen are a true treat.  They have delicate vanilla undertones that give them rockstar status around here.  We'll do our first harvest this Friday!

So, how do we know when they're sweet?  The berries are ready to pick when the base of the stem turns blue.  As you can see, the berries above are preparing themselves for market on Saturday.

Much to the birds' delight, we don't use wildlife netting on the blueberries.  We have so many bushes that it just wouldn't be practical.  Luckily, the birds have been kind enough to share the bounty with us.  Unfortunately for the deer, we do have an electric fence to keep them at bay. 

While watching the berries ripen, we've been keeping ourselves busy harvesting, drying, and cleaning garlic.  I've had a lot of fun making braids this week.  The garlic braids will be tagging along with the blueberries this weekend at market!

First Came The Rain, Now The Heat Is On!

 We have had beaucoup rain this spring.  If it wasn't raining cats and dogs, then it was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.  I'm not one to complain about rain (I've seen plenty of droughts, and that ain't pretty either), but we really needed a drying-out period.  It feels like summer now, and it is H-O-T.

The lettuce and asparagus are handling the change in weather just fine, but we've eighty-sixed the spinach in the high tunnel.  The heat-loving crops are now having fun in the sun!

All eleven varieties of tomato are flowering in the high tunnel.

 Some of the plants even have lil'maters on them!

I love the bamboo stakes Ben procured for us.  They are sky high.

Cilantro on a hot day means it's salsa time!

Basil + Tomatoes = Heaven on Earth

The blueberries are putting on quite a show.

We'll be picking a little over a month from now.  My favorite.

I'm glad that we have enough strawberries to share with the birds.  They've been polite about pilfering so far.

 Strawberry shortcake is in my future.  Whipped cream or ice cream?  Hmmm...

Honey Bees, Butterflies, and Blueberry Bushes

We can't let the bumble bees take all the credit (though they are a lot easier to photograph).  On this day, the butterflies and honey bees were hard at  work!

The blueberry bushes are absolutely loaded with blossoms this season.  I walk through the orchard almost everyday, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that each and every flower is slowly making the transformation into a sweet, plump, complexly-flavored fruit.  

Oh, thhe joys of farming!

The Berries and the Bees: The Miracle of Pollination

There aren't many things I enjoy more than watching the blueberry bushes progress from bud to berry.  It's fascinating to see the bees work their magic, transferring pollen from blossom to blossom.  There are hundreds of thousands of flowers to pollinate, and I think they manage to take care of them all.  Bees are so underrated.  

I'd like to share this miraculous process with you from beginning to end.

Depending on the weather, the buds generally begin to swell in late March.

Beginning in early April, each bud separates into a cluster of several individual flowers.

These flowers are just about ready to bloom.

Open, ready and waiting for just the right bee to come along.

The bees have just begun their work this week, and they'll continue to pollinate the blossoms for another week or two.

There are six hives at the orchard, and I didn't see any honey bees in the blueberries this evening.  Maybe it was just the wrong time of day.  But no worries, the bumble bees were kicking ass and taking names.

 I think this one was giving me the evil eye.

These blossoms have been pollinated and most of the petals have fallen off.  Can you see the berries forming?

This is what we'll have in just a few weeks from now!

And I think you know how the rest of this story goes...

We'll be picking in early July!

A Nice Start

All is well in the blueberry patch.  The bushes are dripping with buds, and we're looking forward to a fruitful season this year.

I expect that the bushes will be in full bloom by mid-week, and there will be some very happy bees!

The strawberry plants are also just beginning to flower.  I better prepare my lower back for the torture that will ensue when strawberry season arrives.

Just about everything is coming up roses - even the garlic.  We planted eight varieties last fall, and all of them are growing vigorously.  We will soon have scapes!

It will be months before we harvest blueberries, strawberries, or garlic.  However, Fat Bear Farm will have spinach, sweet potatoes, seedlings, and perhaps a bit of asparagus available at the next Saturday Cobblestone Farmers Market.

Greenhouse Show and Tell

The greenhouse is buzzing with activity.  We started our peppers, tomatoes, herbs, annuals, and greens a few months ago, but we're not going to talk about that stuff right now.  Instead, let's take a look at Jessica's Pet Projects.

Washington orange, Meyer lemon, Mexican lime (left to right)

We bought these citrus trees about two and a half years ago at Lowe's Home Improvement for about five bucks each.  They were pencil-sized when we brought them home.  The orange tree is taller than me now!

Meyer lemon

The lemon tree is fruiting right now.  All of last year's fruits dropped before reaching this size, but I remain hopeful.

Blueberry whips

I took about 400 hardwood blueberry cuttings last winter, and they are rooting in propagation boxes right now.  I covered the tips with grafting wax this time around.  I'm hoping that it will prevent them from losing moisture from the top.  I had some sticky fingers that day.

Prizetaker leeks

The leeks are growing quickly, and I'm already dreaming up recipes for them.  Soups, omelets, salads, quiches....

Ben will soon be planting ginger in the greenhouse.  It did extremely well last year, so my expectations are high.

It Is Risen!

We've been impatiently waiting for the first asparagus spears to emerge, and it finally happened today!  Due to unusually cold temperatures (it SNOWED a few days ago), most things on the farm are coming up two weeks later than last year.  Punxsutawney Phil needs to find a new job, but let's not dwell on it.  

At long last, I can shake off all the winter doldrums because today has had "spring" written all over it.  The daffodils (that's my Missouri-speak for jonquils), forsythia, and phlox are finally sharing their colors with us.

I just about had a fit when I saw this butterfly.  Does this mean it's time to put out the hummingbird feeders?  

I guess the blueberries got the memo that spring was going to be late this year.  The buds didn't open early enough to suffer any frost damage (but my fingers will remain crossed for at least another week), and the bushes are looking incredibly happy.

The first farmers market of the season is in exactly one week!  We'll be at the Cobblestone Farmers Market in Winston-Salem this year.  Details to follow.