Another Busy Week On the Homestead!

 Don't think for a hot minute that I am complaining about being busy.  No sireeee.  I would rather have loads to do than sit around twiddling my thumbs.....do people still say that?  So last week we had our monthly bee meeting on Monday night.  We have had quite the struggle with bees this year.  We purchased a nuc and set it up and within three days it was gone.  I called a fellow bee meeting member that we bought them from and asked what I did wrong.  He made it right and gave me another nuc at no charge.

Now if you don't know much about bees, a nuc, short for nucleus, is a set of five frames, complete with bees, honey, brood (bee eggs), and the almighty queen.  We ended up with three different nucs of bees and they all absconded.  We had two of the experts from our club come out to identify any problems, but no one could find any.  We assume that the equipment had somehow been in contact with some chemical that the bees did not like.  We purchased a hive from someone else and it is doing well.  

The garden has been growing crazy!  I had so many squash that I had to donate thirty of them to a local food bank.  

I am up to 20 bags of squash in my freezer, have canned 15 pints of bread and butter pickles and some tomato soup.  I also froze some squash for frying.  I found a recipe online but to tell you the truth, it was a mess, took a lot of time, and seemed to stick together.  If it works this winter, I will be amazed.  I have 15 bags of servings for two frozen.  

Off to make deviled eggs!  More later!

Canning Season

 I started canning veggies back when we lived in Colorado.  We always had a small garden and never really enough to can but I enjoy it so much!  Each August, I would drive about 80 miles to the East side of the Denver metro area where there were farm stands selling fresh produce.  I bought tomatoes and peppers, and cucumbers and sometimes zucchini.  When we moved to the Ozarks, our garden started producing more. But the first year I bought tomatoes for salsa and chili sauce.  Last year, my neighbor gave me some tomatoes, so I didn't purchase any, but our cukes and squash were only enough for small batches or daily use.  Each year we have added to the soil.  Horse manure, compost, and mulch were added.  This year we could add additional goat poo from our unending supply and some chick manure.  Finally, we have a garden.  But as the old adage goes-Be careful what you wish for.  

I think we have like 33 tomato plants.  And I didn't just get one kind of tomato.  We have cherry tomatoes, Roma sauce tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, and a few heritage tomatoes thrown in.

Last year, our garden struggled.  Some of the squash that didn't do well last year, came up this year without us planting it.  Most of the plants I started from seeds, except for the tomatoes.  I think I only have four that I started from seeds.

I am now picking twice a day usually.  The white scallop tomatoes are taking over the garden and I had to trim them back.  

I swear the zucchini grow overnight.  

I have enough cucumbers for once to actually can some without buying additional from the farmer's market.

So far, I have canned salsa, dill slices, corn, sweet relish, and tomato juice and corn relish. (not pictured).  I have frozen five pints of freezer slaw, four bags of four cups of blackberries, and 10, yes, 10-gallon bags containing 3 cups each. 

And I still have much more to do.  I will try to include some recipes in my next post but for now, I need to go cook dinner and phew! put my feet up!

My Goats, The Barn, My Happy Place

 Sometimes we find the most joy in the most unusual places, don't we?  Never ever did I think I would fall in love with three little goats.  I never thought I would actually enjoy the smell of the barn, and not mind shoveling goat poo.  But as God is my witness, I have found my Utopia in a goat barn.  

We have had the kids for a year now.  We took my 97 minivan to Kansas to pick them up.  To say I was unprepared would be an understatement.  Our goats were so tiny!  And I had no idea what to do with them. Meet Mr. Bill, Laverne, and her twin sister Shirley.   They cuddled in the van but by the time we got them home on that hot July day, they were ready to eat.

It took them a bit to warm up to us but now they are attentive, loving, and full of mischief.

The year has been a learning experience for us.  So many misconceptions!

  So much to learn!

1. Goats do not eat everything.  Not tin cans, not hay when it falls on the floor, not some goat feed.  They are finicky.  They only want the best hay, the leaves off of all the trees, and whatever the other one has.
2. When one goat gets sick, they all get sick.  I read that you need to pay attention to their goat poop.  It should look like bbs and be everywhere.  So one day I started noticing Mr. Bill's poop was soft and more like it came from a cow.  My husband said don't worry.  I worried anyway.  Within a couple of days, Mr. Bill had a bad case of diarrhea and wasn't eating.   Here I sat washing his behind and cleaning up messes.  By the time it was all over, they all three got it, I treated it, and it was over.  Thank God for Google and YouTube.  
3. Goats can get into everything.  They can climb ladders, steal your hat, and pee on your tools. We learned really quickly that they are curious creatures and that they cannot be trusted.   

 Our goats are Oberhasli dairy goats.  Though they are from the same breeder, the twins are from different parents.  We plan on breeding them in the fall so we can have Springtime babies.  The barn is complete but we are considering a buck barn.  Right now they are separated, but Mr. Bill is really rambunctious and unpredictable.  I think he needs to be farther away.  We just have some logistics to work out with things like power and water.  

 

Water Catchment System

 One thing about living in Missouri, it can either be a week of rainy weather or no rain in sight.  When summer hits, and we found ourselves watering almost daily to keep our garden alive, it made us cringe to think about what it is doing to our well.  So with the addition of the goat barn, we decided to try our hand at a water catchment system.  

Our barn has a roof that is slanted in one direction, with the low side on the back of the barn.  We put a gutter on that side only.

We found the barrels on Marketplace locally for $10 each.  These are food grade barrels that once contained soybean oil.  We also had to purchase concrete blocks so that they could sit evenly and be off the ground.  After getting the blocks level, we had to put connectors between the barrels, so that the water can move freely from one to the other after it comes off the barn roof.  

                                        

Hubs had to do some digging and leveling to get everything lined up.  To connect the barrels, we had to order the parts from Amazon.  We needed two hoses to go between the barrels, and the connectors that attached the barrels to the hoses.  We looked at several hardware stores, but I found them on line and ordered them.  The thing I did not do was order both set of parts from the same manufacturer.  So when the came, the threads did not match up.  Oh, Geez.  Luckily, we went to the local hardware store and were able to buy the parts we needed, but of course that added to the cost.

                                        

Probably the toughest part of installing the connectors is that the top of the barrel is sealed except for a smallish hole to pour from.  So it is difficult to get the connector down to the bottom of the barrel.  So hubby attached a socket to a long pole via duct tape and fed that into the barrel. 

To get the connector up to the hole that was cut in the bottom of the barrel, we threaded a rope through the openings and put the connector on and let it travel down inside the barrel.  Worked like a charm!

The rain fills out each barrel evenly and simply moves to the next barrel as the volume increases.

Once the gutters were installed, we used this flexible gutter to catch the rain into the first barrel.

 

       This was pretty much finished.  We did invest in a small pump that we purchased at Harbor Freight.  It pumps the water at a full stream so we are able to water our garden easily without using all of our well water.

This post is from last year.  A bout with cancer and some other life changes have delayed this post but I hope to catch up soon!  There are some things we learned.  

1. A half inch of rainfall just about fills up these barrels.  I can get about three waterings for the garden out of these three.
2. Missouri has heat and drought.  After draining the barrels it took a long time before they were full again.  We need more barrels.  This week alone we have gotten over 4 inches of rain and we were unable to save all of the water.  

Getting Ready for the Goats

 My son, maybe with a little tongue in cheek, told us he was buying us goats.  My hubby had always said that he would like to have some goats to milk, but we have never really had a place to raise them.  So since we have a few acres here, he thought now would be a great time.  

Here was the problem.  We have no fences.  We have no barn.  We have no money.  So we started small and kept working on it.  First the barn.  We are getting three goats, two does and a buck.  They are just babies right now but we had to think about our future....and theirs.  So we designed a 15 foot by 15 foot goat barn.. It is taller in the front, and slopes to the back.  It can easily be divided into stalls and even an area for milking.  We looked at lumber but it was sooooooo expensive so we economized where we could.  The uprights are actually logged from the property.  They are oak trees that were taken from places where they were either too bunched up or bent over.  We cut them, trimmed them, and set them in concrete.  

We bought inexpensive sheathing for the sides and corrugated fiberglass for the roof.

We have an old concrete mixer that we purchased over 30 years ago.  We have moved it from Arizona to Colorado, and now to Missouri.  We used it to mix the concrete to hold the posts in place.  

We stained it with an inexpensive wood stain in barn red.  It took nearly four gallons.  We are still in the process of finishing the inside and the front.  

Whew!  This was quite the project.  Thankfully we had pretty good weather while we were doing it.  We used lumber from our scrap pile and our neighbor even offered some from his stash.  To place the poles, we used a gas powered auger.  It was supposed to be a one-man machine, but it took one man....and one woman to hold it steady enough.  Our muscles were sore, but not as bad as they might have been if we had dug by hand!

 

                  On to the next project!  A water catchment system. 

 

Time to Stake the Peas!

 It seems like once the garden is planted, time just flies by.  I keep a simple garden book so i can look back on what worked, what didn't, and a record so I don't forget what I planted where.  I just used an old vinyl notebook that I had on hand.  

I punched holes in some typing paper and drew a map of the garden.  I put what I planted and when I planted each item.  

I keep a journal as well.  That way I can note anything that happens that is weird like the late frost we had or when we fertilize, or whatever.  

And I keep all the seed packets and pot pokes that identify species, planting depth, germination times, etc.  For example, I planted two types of peas.  One variety is doing much better than the other.  So I can look back and find what kind I planted and when.  

Speaking of peas!  If you have ever grown peas, there are a couple of things that you probably already know. Peas like cool weather.  Hot....not so much.  Peas like to attach themselves to anything and everything that they can.  That makes them hard to weed and harvest if they are growing in a ball and grabbing on to weeds and each other.  So it is important to get your peas planted early and some kind of stake or trellis is essential.  We planted our peas on March 27.  Even with a freeze they are doing well.  One type was really getting tall so today I went to the garden and staked them up.

So you know that I am cheap.  So last year I found these stakes that I think are used for electric fencing.  You can see that they have these little arm things that hold fence wire.  Well they also hold pea support wires as well.  (Pea support wires aren't really a thing, but they could be!)

After I pounded them into the ground with a small hammer, I wound wire over the arms, wrapping around the post to make them more secure.  I had to go back and get some of the pea plants that were taller to help place them in the wire supports.

Last year I did this but I used baker's twine.  Although it looked really cute, it wasn't right for the job.  The twine stretched when wet and did not give the plants the support they needed.  This wire is very thin, and of course it was free, so I used it and I am hoping it will work as well as I have imagined.  

We are tackling our fencing for our goat babies tomorrow.  I can't wait to show you Randy's $0 invention to roll the wire.  Stay tuned!

Spring Has Sprung!

 It is springtime here in the Ozarks and that means getting the garden ready.  This is our third garden since we moved here.  We are learning as we go.  The first year we planted in a side area on our yard.....Big mistake!  The soil was so rocky that it tore up our nearly new tiller.  I'm not talking pebbles, but rocks the size of your hand.  And then there are the tree roots!  All the big beautiful trees, well they have big, not so beautiful roots.  We had a great crop of green beans, a few tomatoes and peppers but not much else.  

Year two we moved the garden back near the orchard.  Yep, we have an orchard.  Well at least that's what I call it.  It has a peach tree, two pear trees, a cherry tree and this other tree that blooms but doesn't ever bear fruit.  More on the orchard later.  So we knew that we would have to fence in the garden to keep the critters out, so we had moved a bunch of chicken wire from our house in Colorado.  For fence posts, hubs cut posts from our woods in the back.  

These posts were still green but I was shocked a few days later when they sprouted!  Haha.  The fencing was all set up but we still needed a gate.  It had to be wide enough we could get tillers and wheelbarrows in and maybe in the future a tractor.  But we were trying to keep the cost down.  I remembered seeing some metal posts in the fence row.  There were a bunch of them laying there so I showed Randy where they were at and asked him if there was a way we could use them for the gate.  Well, he has a welder, so he welded them together and trimmed them with some boards that I had salvaged from one of those cable reels.  He painted the metal with some spray paint we had on hand, added a wheel off of a broken little planter and I think it turned out beautiful!

This gate served us well all last year.  And for $0!  We added and electric fence to the bottom (we already had that too).  This year, we decided to expand the garden.  We cut down a tree that was giving it to much shade and too many roots, had to buy some fencing, and we changed the electric fencing to solar power.  We only needed an additional 50 feet of wire which ran us about $37.  The solar fence charger was on sale and we were able to pick it up for $120.  And it will power up to 5 miles of fencing!  Enough for our goats!  Yes, I said GOATS!  

Last year our garden gave us lots of tomatoes, peppers, green beans, peas.  We had a few squash and cukes but not as many as hoped for.  Potatoes and onions and sweet potatoes struggled.  In researching the reasons, we figured out that we needed to enrich our clay soil.  This year we have treated it with Gypsum and compost.  Our neighbor has horses and offered us some of his manure and we jumped on it.....well not literally.  He even delivered it!  So far the soil looks much better but we only have a few things planted so only time will tell.

Our weather is rainy and dreary today so it is a perfect time to be indoors getting ready for my first craft show of the year.  Yes, I have a lot going on but I like it like that!  I hope your day is great and the sun is shining where you live  

Blessings.