Wow! It’s been over a year since I posted here! Turns out creating a bunch of draft post ideas doesn’t count as posting. Ha. If you follow me over on Instagram, you may have noticed that we’ve been up to a lot! We had a huge garden last year during our first summer in our new house. It was a dream, but also a lot of work, especially when it came time to preserve, store, and use it all. We also raised a flock of geese, which was incredibly fun and a good learning experience. We butchered most of them in the fall and kept a male and female for breeding. Our female, Emelia, sat on a clutch of eggs this spring, but must not have sat consistently enough because she then abandoned them after about 30 days, which is about how long it takes for goslings to hatch. So, we now have two pet geese for another year and we’re all a little unsure about that. They can be so fun, but also so loud, obnoxious, and rather intimidating for the kids. We’ll see how long they are allowed to be apart of our homestead.
Our biggest news is that we had a baby in April! Ash Adrien was born at home, in the water, surrounded by his daddy and brothers on April 23rd. He’s happy and healthy and just starting to coo and giggle. We’re all enamored. I’m excited to write his birth story here in the coming weeks.
This year’s garden is up and running! It is not an easy feat, though, prepping and planting a garden in the same season as giving birth to a new baby. Dan has been a huge help to me this year, though. We use a broadfork to prep our garden beds and he did all of that work for me so that I could focus on planting. We had a long winter with many inches of snow remaining into the first week or so of April. But a sudden hot streak in the 80’s quickly melted what remained and dried up the ground enough for me to get most of my cool weather seeds into the ground before Ash was born. Cool weather the end of April and beginning of May also bought me time before I needed to start planting the rest, so I was able to enjoy a few weeks of slow postpartum days without feeling too much of the itch to get down to the garden.
As last year was my first year planting here, I worked with whatever soil I had. This meant that my garden actually had about 4 different types of soil in the different sections from sand loam, to forest loam, to forest clay, to thick red clay. I was so happy this spring when I found all of my soil improved and I hadn’t done much to it other than plant in it last year, add leaves and chicken bedding in the fall, and then let our chickens use the space over the winter. This year I rotated my crops a bit to work the soil in different ways and hopefully prevent tomato blight from occurring again. It was pretty bad last year.
The garden is now giving back to us with radishes, peas, green onions, strawberries, and an array of greens coming into the kitchen weekly. It has been very hard to keep up with the weeding and succession planting of radishes, herbs, and greens. Ash has had a few naps in the garden while I’ve worked and I take any little opportunity I get to pull weeds - whether its during a nap, when Dan is home, or when I’m down at the barn feeding chickens and geese. I’m not getting the hours in the garden that I love and it’s not the prettiest place right now (as my pictures humbly show), but we are growing food and working the soil and that’s what matters most.
