Preparing the Summer Garden

Sunday every week is our day to clean the chicken and duck coops along with cleaning up the goat area inside and outside of the barn.  The nesting material we use for our birds is organically grown barley straw.  Same for the goat bedding, but the goats waste some of the alfalfa they are supposed to be eating; we get a good mix of that from the goat barn.  All of it goes into compost piles.  We have so much compost that I put an ad out giving it away for free.  This week we had a neighbor wanting some so she left her truck down here for a couple of hours and I loaded it up as I cleaned.  I think I have 10 year’s worth of compost at our place.

One of our Fresh Compost Piles Steaming 24/7

 Pam pulled nettle from our blueberry patch and rhubarb bed while I did the cleaning.  I was finished by 2 p.m. and then continued to weed our garlic bed.  I’m half done – when I’m finished I’ll side dress some fertilizer and spread finished compost. 

Filled up our Neighbor's Truck with Hot Compost

We have cool season greens growing, sweet peas coming up, and just seeded an area for this year’s beets.  Next job will be to turn the beds in for corn, squash and pole beans.  Last year I let the Asian greens flower and go to seed as the honeybees love the yellow flowers, so this year we have half of a bed of different types of mustard.

Self Seeded Mustands growing next to the potato bed

Our 5'x30' Garlic Bed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garlic bed Weeded

Small Farming on Whidbey Island

We live on five acres on Whidbey Island.  About three of them are thick with alder trees with Salmon Berries as our dormant understory plant.  I’ll eat a few of the berries but our grandchildren love them.  Our honey bees will visit them early on nice days but prefer fruit trees and the flowers on the huge big leaf maple trees growing on our neighbor’s land.  Our native bumblebees love them and I can hear them buzzing at 5:30 am to 8:30 pm.

We have three honeybee hives this spring.  Two are from last year and I added one this month.  The new one was a queen and five pounds of bees.  Last week we had sunny weather and the honeybees were all over our blooming orchard.  Our Asian pears (four mature trees) were in full bloom the past two weeks and were covered with honeybees.  We had a good crop of them last year and they are our favorite dried fruit.  What we don’t eat fresh we slice and dehydrate, storing them in wide mouth jars in our cool spare bedroom.

Asian Pears ready to pick in 2012

We harvested about 30 pounds of honey last fall from one hive.  We talked to a local commercial bee person and he said, due to the color, it was probably Canada thistle honey.  Canada thistle honey is considered fine and rare, rare because Canada thistle is considered a noxious week in our state.  It grows on our land and neighbor’s abundantly.  It is almost impossible to kill without using chemicals and we don’t use them on our farm, so I’ve learned to live with it.  The flowers are nice, their fragrance wonderful, aphids attach it so they are also full of lady beetles, and the goldfinch bird loves the seeds.  So one man’s noxious weed is another’s gem.   

 

Straining Honey in our House in 2012

We have added to our goat herd this past year, buying one mature doe and breeding one that was born here January 2012.  Daisy Mae is Surely’s girl and is 50% Nubian and 50% Boer.  We bred Daisy to a 100% Boer buck so her kids will be 75% Boer.  I have read that more goat meat breeders are using dams that are the Nubian/Boer cross as the kids have the meat traits of the Boer goat with the mother’s Nubian milk, resulting in fast growing kids putting on weight quickly.  We butcher three to four yearlings every year for our annual meat supply (supplementing our chicken and duck meat).

Cheddar Cheese - one ready to eat and one ready to wax

With all of the extra milk I have begun making cheddar cheese this year – one or two, two pound blocks a week.  I found an old “farmhouse” cheddar cheese recipe and it is somewhat easy to make.  Because I use raw milk I age it for at least 60 days.  Tastes like cheddar cheese but dryer than what you would buy in the store.  With our Nubian goat milk it has no goat flavor – just a very nice cheese.

Preparing the Raspberry Beds

Raspberries, my oh, what a fruit!  We have two 30 foot rows of raspberries, June Bearing.  There are two types of raspberries: Ever Bearer and June Bearer.  My favorite type is the June bearer as all of the fruit ripens within two to three weeks.  I pick and freeze them for use on my morning cereals throughout the year – one half cup of raspberries provide 50% of your daily Vit C among other good things.

Ever Bearers produce two crops instead of the one with June Bearers, but the berries tend to be smaller.  To prune June Bearers I cut down the canes that bore fruit any time after the plants are done fruiting.  These canes are called florocanes.  The new canes that come up in the spring are called primocanes, which will produce fruit the next year.  These I don’t prune at all, but after cutting out the florocanes I weave them onto my trellis.  They are next year’s florocanes.

Our Raspberry Patch after mulching in the Spring

 We mulch with our goat straw bedding and add fertilizer and compost along the rows and that is it.  Last year I froze over 60 lbs at very little cost to us.  Year after year they produce and I have little pest damage (as long as I keep the chickens out of the area).  Besides loving the fruit, the chickens will strip the leaves of the new, young priomcanes, killing them.

Our two 30 foot rows take about 16 man hours a year to work (not counting harvesting the fruit).  Early spring I weed, move the wayward primocanes coming up everywhere but under the trellis, and mulch.