Friday, April 4, 2008

I'm Moving

Following the advice of my wife, I've decided to move my blog to another provider, homesteadblogger.com. I've been happy with Blogger, but the theme of my blog seems to fit in more there, and maybe I'll have more strangers, who are interested in homesteading, visit it and comment.

All of my old posts will be saved on this blog for however long Blogger wishes to keep it active.

You can see all my new posts at http://www.homesteadblogger.com/promisedland/

See you there!

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Farm Tour - Garden

A friend of ours recently showcased her garden on her blog, and inspired me to do the same. I thought I'd start a short series picture tour of our farm, so I'll post other aspects of it later. (By the way Nola, if you're reading this, I would love to get a photo tour of your farm as well as I'm sure I'll never see all of it.

The place we put our garden was an old emu pen that was erected by some previous owner. According to my neighbors, they used to have upwards of 100 emus on this property. The entire fenced area is 40' X 148'. It was completely overgrown with weeds and small mesquite trees when we moved in, and it was a lot of hard work to get it prepared. Needless to say, we have a major weed problem in our beds. It will be years before the perennial weeds are under control. For now we just try to stay ahead of them.

The large pen was seperated into two smaller pens by a fence down the middle. We cut down sections of it to plant climbing veggies like peas and beans. It has worked out perfectly. This picture is of the the right side and you can see the middle fence on the left. The shed at the end was the emu's shelter, but makes a perfect garden shed too. We have tilled 9 seperate beds in this half.


This is the left side of the garden with the middle fence on the right. In the foreground is a sand box we put up for the kids. We spend enough time in the garden that they needed a place to play while we worked. As they get older, they'll transition from playing to helping with the work. We also have 9 tilled beds in this section. We let some of the bigger mesquite trees continue growing in this section to provide a bit of shade for us and the kids.


This is our strawberry bed. They are perennial strawberries that should come back every year. We added straw around them to keep down weeds and keep them from sitting in water after a rain.

This is a picture of some of our first potato plants coming up. The other green stuff in there is the weeds that grow in the paths. We have to constantly keep it mowed or they'll bloom and produce seeds.

Here are some of our peas growing up the middle fence. Some rabbits got into our garden and knocked some back before we could plug the holes they were getting in through, but they're doing fine now.

This is one of two raised beds we have. We eventually want them all to be raised beds because it really helps keep down weeds and helps standing moisture drain away.
Here's some of our lettuce.
Our garlic.
Onions
This is the other raised bed. It is Regina's herb bed and she is in the process of weeding and filling it with cooking and medicinal herbs.
This is some of her comfrey, which is an excellent healing herb. It grows pervasively, which is good because the cows love it.

Lastly, this is our mountain of manure/compost. We collected so much over the winter that it has quite obviously spilled out of the compost bins I built. We get about a wheelbarrow full of manure everyday, just from cleaning out the barn. If anyone wants any, just let us know.

That's the garden.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Mouse Hunt

This is a picture of what I can only assume is an insane woman. She moved probably 1000 lbs of sheet metal in search of one mouse and her four babies. Is the mouse a nuisance or causing trouble of any kind? Nope! She is minding her own business.



After removing sheet metal last weekend to put a wall up on our barn's overhang, I casually mentioned to my wife that my FIL and I had spotted a mouse with babies underneath the pile of metal. I should have known better. My wife LOVES baby animals, and raised mice in college just for fun. I still remember the time one of the mice got out of its cage in her car. A month later I was rifling through some papers on her floor board and out zooms a mouse. Yikes! I don't know what became of that mouse. It might still reside in that car at the junk yard.



Anyway, after spending 30 minutes scavenging through all that metal, she found 3 mouse babies but could not catch the mother. After refusing to help with the first try, I got sucked in to helping resume the search for the mother. I must really love that woman because I have no desire to have pet mice. We were unsuccessful, so she's trying to nurse the babies and keep them alive. We'll see. She's excited about having the babies because if they know us from a young age, they can be tamed.



As insane as I thought she was being, it sure is cute to see her get so excited about mice.