Tigger Melons!

Look what came out of our garden today!  Aren't these babies beautiful?!!  I have never seen anything like them!  It's amazing the variety of foods there are to grow when you can choose for yourself what you want to grow!  We are so used to what is sold in the stores, and even CSA's are fairly similar.  I'm glad we tried these!

They are called Tigger Melons and are heirlooms, which means we will be saving seed from one of them, drying the seeds out and storing them until next planting season!  We will never have to buy seeds to grow these beautiful melons again!  If you want to buy some seeds you can find them HERE. 

They are on the small side for a melon...about the size of a grapefruit or softball.  They start out green, but you know they are ready to pick when they turn these bright red and yellow colors.  Some are solid yellow as well.  They are bursting with a sweet aroma and are mild in taste.  We love them!!

We are already planning on doing a much larger patch for these melons in our garden next year so we can sell them at the market along with our broilers and eggs.  I think they will be a hit since most people have probably never seen them or tasted them :)

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly ~ Garden Update

Let's start with the Good, shall we?!

Most everything has sprouted and is rapidly growing!  We've already eaten several zucchini, green peppers and lots of green beans, and the snap peas never even make it to the house...we eat them up on the way in!

These babies were so exciting to see hiding under the vine's leaves...the kids were beside themselves when they picked them!!  One weighed over 3 pounds!!  The other 2lbs9oz

Lots and lots of green beans to be picked.  So thankful to have diligent helpers!

 Now on to the Bad...

Does anyone know what kind of eggs these are??  We have found them all over our zucchini and yellow squash.  I'm assuming they're bad bugs so we intently look for them and squash them!

 And the Ugly...

What is happening to our zucchini?  As much success as we are having with them, we are having this happen!  It's also happening to our yellow squash.  Any thoughts?  

 And more Ugly...

What is rotting our green peppers?  Some are healthy, vibrant and yummy and then we have these all over too.  Is this a bug?  A bacteria?  Too much water?  I have no idea.

We have a farm binder that I created when we moved here to keep track of all yields and all expenses to help track our gains and our losses (or investments).  Everytime we bring something in from the garden we weigh it and record it.  At the end of the season we will add the weights of each individual vegetable up to see how much of our own food we grew and save money on!  

Everything on our homestead has a section in the binder...egg production, hen hatching/deaths, goat milk, bees, meat birds, rabbits, even dogs and cats.  It's a bit tedious in the beginning, but once you get used to pulling out the binder every day, it's now become a habit.  We also have kept ALL receipts for farm/garden/livestock related things to keep track of yearly expenses.  It has been very helpful to see where money is being put, and maybe where we should step back a bit...the bees for instance, are a wonderful addition, and in our opinion a must-have with fruit trees and a garden needing pollinating, but they have been the most expensive addition to our farm yet!  For those of you with homesteads that have several different things going on that need record keeping, I hope this inspires!  It was very easy to create once I knew what information I wanted to record.  I'd be happy to email my blank documents to any of you that want a copy for your own homestead!

I still can't get over the size of this thing!!!

Farm Update

Bright and early, April 16, the kids and I headed out to create and plant our garden.

After our neighbor, Mr. Covington, used his tractor to uproot and drag out all the thorns and brush, Nate tilled the soil to further prepare it...this part of land has never been cultivated before and it was very, very tough ground.

 After Nathan tilled the entire quarter acre all by himself (I'm sure to some of you that is nothing, but for first timers, it was A LOT to do) we had to build our rows.  The gardening method we are following has been created from a gardener by the name of Edward Smith.  He has a great book called The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  His method is called W.O.R.D. 

W= wide rows

O= organic methods

R= raised beds

D= deep soil

We built the rows up by shoveling on the soil from where we designated our walkways.  They are 2 feet wide as well...this has proven to be fun when weeding...because the rows are so wide 2 people can be weeding the same area at the same time, facing one another and talking!

Once the rows were built, and wow did that expend a lot of energy from us all, we placed what chicken manure we had from the eggmobile on the rows to add nutrients to the soil.  Poop?? Nutrients??  Sounds gross, but it's true.  As you can see, we need a lot more!  That will come with time.

This picture here is the same shot, 7 weeks later!!!  Isn't it just amazing?  On the far left we have peppers, then green bush beans and onions.  

We have also planted...

carrots

eggplant

okra

peas

tomatoes

corn

cucumbers

yellow squash

zucchini

watermelon

tigger melon

strawberries

cabbage

spinach

We have been very busy constantly weeding.  There is so much to tend to with a garden, but with many young hands, the burden is light!  I have been more thankful than ever for the rain since we have no watering system out there yet...praise God for the goodness He brings through the rain!!

We have discovered a mullberry tree across the street!  The kids love to ride their bikes in the afternoon and we kept finding squished berries on the road.  I decided to eat a few and they were really good!!  We had never seen berries growing on a tree so we asked our neighbor what they were.  Delicious!!

 The goats are growing up like crazy!!  They are almost as big as their momma.  We decided, for the betterment of the herd, to sell our one goat, Latte...she was the mom of Jack and Jill, our first kids born here on the farm.  She was very mean to all the other goats and was always restless.  And when it came time to milk her in the mornings, she was a serious pain...less than a quarter cup of milk we would get from her to top it all off.  Literally the day after we got rid of her, Mocha's milk production skyrocketed!!  I believe she was stressed out from Latte!  We are getting 3-4cups from her a day!!  We have made goat milk soap with it and I use it to cook/bake with every day, and we are stocking it up in the freezer.  Our next adventure will be attempting to make goat milk fudge...yum!!

The next batch of meat birds are 3 weeks old now and have been moved to pasture.  We have 100 again and will be butchering the weekend of July 13 for those of you interested in helping/buying!!

Our bee colonies are doing magnificent!  I check on them once every 2 weeks.  Can you see the larve in the picture?!  It's fascinating to open the hives and see all the work they are doing.

After long mornings tending to the garden, feeding and caring for all our animals and doing some school, we LOVE to relax outside under the trees.  Spring is beautiful...we are so blessed to be here!!!

Spring has Sprung

Oh flipflops, tanktops and popsicles...how we have missed thee!!  It's finally warm here in SC.  Warm enough anyway to enjoy being outside all. day. long.  Nights are still chilly, but we are past the last frost date for our zone.  SO garden plans are underway!!  We've had our garden plot plowed...here is our neighbor, Mr. Covington, who graciously offered to plow some land for us!

...we've made garden stakes to mark our rows with our friends, the Perry's...

...and we have started our seeds!!  We came up with a clothespin idea for the trays.  Each row of seeds will be marked with a pin so we know what it is.  No doubt, there are many different ways to do this, but clothespins were what we had on hand. 

We saved seeds from last year's garden...saving and replanting can only be done with heirloom seeds!  GMO's are incapable of this...make sure you invest in pure heirlooms so you don't have to re-buy seeds each year.  We bought a different brand of heirlooms last year and we are doing an experiment in this year's garden.  We are comparing the growth of last year's choice seed to this year's choice seed.  Last October I stumbled upon a wonderful seed company, Baker Creek.  They have an abundance of seed to choose from...many things we've never even heard of!!  The husband and wife team collect the heirloom seeds from around the world, grow their own crops, then save seed and sell them in their catalog and on their website.  Hopefully I followed the drying of seed instructions properly and ours will grow!  We dried and are replanting...

green beans

red peppers

basil

tomatoes

Little gardeners hard at work preparing!

That's a good start!

After we got all the seeds planted in our starter trays we headed on down to the creek at the back of our property.

Big, protective, loving brothers are the best!!

Searching for salamanders!

Our hunter (we seriously should've named Christian just that!) found a snake on our hike to the creek.

Salamanders for the snake.

Our peach trees are blooming beautifully, and we have noticed our bees all over it!!  Hopefully, because of the bees, we will have a bountiful harvest of peaches...I can't wait!!

Our pear trees are adding beautiful color as well!...these aren't actual pear producing trees, they're just called that because when full-grown, the tree's look the shape of a pear :)

And our broilers are growing!  Only 3 weeks until processing day!

Hooray for Spring!!

barn hop #106

Pickles!

What fun making our first batch of canned goods from our own garden!  Nate's cucumbers are growing like crazy!  We eat them every night on our salad, but we wanted to preserve some of them since there are so many!!  Pickles it is!  They've been prepared with salt, vinegar, dill and garlic, canned and given a water bath for 15 minutes....now we just have to let them sit for a month then they are ready to eat!!

Homestead Scriptures

We have wanted to give each area of our farm a scripture verse.  We finally sat down and thought of some of them. 

We want to use our farm to be a light for Christ!  We have a vision for the future of our farm...right now we're learning everything as a family, but as we grow and become a business people will be visiting our property to purchase nourishing foods for their families.  When they come to get their chickens, eggs and other grass fed goods we want not only for them to sense God's goodness, but to taste it!  Our plan is to have a massive garden where they can come and pick what they please and take it home for free!  

We are reading and learning about saving seed...that will be something we will offer to teach others when they visit the farm.  The hope is that others will save seeds from the produce they take and plant their own garden!  Megan painted the first scripture verse today!

Everything is growing so fast now that its hot and we have long, sunny days.  We also have been blessed 3 times with coolers full of fish from our neighbor...after fileting the fish we cooked the meatless bodies to make a fish stock, but instead of using it for soups we diluted it with more water and poured it on the garden!  No doubt, that has helped everything grow!

 What a miracle to watch all this come from tiny seeds!  We are so blessed!