Weekend Warriors- May 2018

We had another busy month here on the homestead-

Early on in the month we picked up our finished alpaca yarn – it’s been a slow process of putting it into skeins at this point. I’ll expand on this in a future blog tho, as it has been a long and slightly crazy process.

Literally the next day we picked up 4 meat pigs – Tamworths, which are a heritage hog, known for their lean meat and red hair. They were pretty scared at first, but in this last month they’ve almost tripled in size and now eagerly run to us when we approach the fence. We all know its because of the food I bring out 2 to 3 times a day, but its still fun.

Also, we’ve put in our 1000 strawberry plants- 500 sparkle and 500 Honeoye bare roots in the front part of our side yard.  It took two days of concentrated effort.. mostly in the morning because WOW the bugs are thick this spring. We used our alpaca poop from this winter to amend the soil, but have had a deficit of rain so they’re slow going. We’ve seen some growth tho, so that is very exciting.

We have lots of strawberry blossoms on the 200 plants we put in last year and spent some good quality time weeding them out so they can develop their berries. This picture is from early May before the blossoms started out, but I just love how strong these plants have come back after a long harsh winter.

We’ve been slowly planting our veggies in the ground – starting with the cold tolerant ones like peas, beans, onions, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower because we’ve got frosts all the way into mid May.
We prematurely put some peppers in the ground- we thought we had lost them all, but because we put some of our black weed fabric down, they’ve bounced back. We might get a harvest from them after all.

And at the end of the month we celebrated our daughters 3rd birthday! We had a wonderful family BBQ and her cake was farm themed. She got her own john deere tractor, a play set and lots of other thoughtful gifts ranging from bubbles to books to games and back again. But the best part was having so many family members come over to celebrate with us. She had an absolute blast.

And to top it all off – Rhubarb is in season! So I’ve been harvesting that by the bag full to clean, process and freeze for later use. This is not our patch, but MrGillis’ uncle lets us raid his patch every year. We did plant some of our own this spring, but that means no harvesting so it can really put all its strength into growing.

Now, we’re a few days into June, and we’re getting a lot accomplished already- a preview into our month includes, setting up for our meat chickens to arrive, finishing up our garden, my 33rd birthday, our 12th anniversary, working our day jobs, getting our alpacas sheared and goodness knows, a whole hell of a lot more.

Until next time, have a wicked good day!