- Fruit with focus on apples, increased peaches, and blueberries that we will plant as soon as possible, hopefully in the next six months. Happily, this includes my beloved bees, which are needed for pollination.
- Limited Market Garden with focus on asparagus, garlic, and vegetables for sauerkraut (and maybe other lacto-fermented foods: kimchi, pickles, etc.) Also a little section for bee sanctuary plants.
- Small Dairy with milk shares eventually, and the beef from cull animals and perhaps breed stock. Maybe we'll do layers or broilers following the cows, but maybe only on a personal scale.
Isn't that a great plan! Every one of those is something we love, every one is something we're excited about. And they have a good mixture of tasks through the year, so we hopefully won't be entirely buried at any one time.
First step: how much could we expand the peaches if we moved the cherries? Incredibly, by pulling the 25 (out of 40 originally planted) trees, we could add just about 100 peach trees in the same area. Wonderful.
I went through the peach orchard and tried to analyze which trees were doing well, and which were doing less well. Some varieties were noticeably less happy than their immediate neighbors: so interesting how some trees thrive and some do less well.
I also went through the top two rows of apple trees, the 80 most dwarfing, earliest producing trees. I had taken specific notes as we planted, but I hadn't yet gone through to see what was doing best since then. The G.16 rootstocks are absolutely the best in our soil. It was fun to make a spreadsheet, too (one of my secret pleasures): place in row, type of tree, type of rootstock, planting notes, current notes. Even date in the ground, almost like each tree has its own farm birthdate.
I went to the next two rows of apple trees on Monday morning. On average, the precocious top trees have trunks the size of half dollars; the trunks of the next two are nickels. A good bit smaller. And, on average, the precocious trees are 8', while the next are 6'. And, since we didn't really spray or do much tending, I was impressed to see how glowingly healthy the Liberty tree looked, known for its resistance to various apple troubles (scab, fireblight, and such). I'm guessing some of my trees are struggling with some of those, since they aren't all glowing.
In any case, energy around a new project is always at a peak, but we had a fun time being with church friends multiple times over the weekend, too. What a joy, to get to know our brothers and sisters better.
Monday tasks for Phil were a bit irritating. He had opted to fix the tractor's auger himself, expecting it to be a fairly easy project. And immediately broke one of the three pieces. After watching various movies online, he has a good idea of how to fix it. So many new tasks he's had to learn to do!
So then he began to move our compost pile. No longer in the center of our living quarters, he's tucked it away back near the woods. Perhaps a little farther to walk, but aesthetically worth it.
As he moved the still curing compost to its new site, the chickens went crazy, eating up the bugs. So he stopped for the evening to let the chickens eat well.
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