June and July part 1
I am now going to attempt to catch up posting about what has been going on during an extremely busy two months! This is going to jump around a bit. Starting at the beginning of June...
barn work!
We hired our awesome neighbor to do some work on the barn foundation. When we moved in the foundation was dug out like this and there was a big pile of rocks and soil next to this corner of the barn with a section of perforated pipe sticking out. The entire area was totally overgrown and there was a sumac tree growing out of it that had to be at least 10 years old, so it seemed like whatever the project was, it had been abandoned some time ago. I’m not in a position to judge this, my life is littered with half done projects, so it’s only fair that I inherit some.
In this corner of the barn, the stone foundation attached to the barn was not touching the stone foundation on the ground. As I've written about before, this property requires pretty intensive water management and I imagine that during times when that wasn't maintained, water rushed downhill toward the barn. Picked up speed when it hit the silo foundations and washed the foundation out. We would like to do a larger barn stabilization/restoration project, but that’s definitely not in the budget for a while, so this concrete is an attempt to prevent additional deterioration in the immediate future. (we have also worked on the water situation) Not super exciting or scenic, but better than a barn collapse (which I imagine would make for dramatic photos and blog content).
weather!
Our entire month with NO rain ended with this storm on the day that the electricians were here to make a repair to our solar array. They said they weren’t interested in “that kind of electricity” and rescheduled.
New work boots!
My existing boots were insulated and waterproofed for winter, so HOT and also had laces. I am an adult and should be OK with tying my own shoes, but now that I am used to this Chelsea style boot, I’ll never go back. These babies are super comfy and look really great with short shorts! Also pictured are a brand new pair of summer weight wool socks. Is that an oxymoron?
sheep!
While our ram and his wether companions still aren’t in a permanent living / grazing situation, we were able to build them an area behind the barn adjacent to the barnyard. They are still mainly eating hay because there isn’t enough fresh forage to feed them, but they get a little fresh food and they manage the weedy area around the silo footings. They have their little shelter and a couple of shade trees, so they seem pretty happy and I feel pretty good about it. They'll probably stay there until it's time for breeding and then afterward the plan is to move them inside for the winter.
When we moved them to this new pen, the ewes lost their minds! Our sheep are usually pretty quiet. Sometimes one will voice their grievances to me, but they don’t talk a lot under normal conditions. The sheep farm next door has the LOUDEST sheep ever, their bleats echo through the Mohawk valley and regularly trick me into thinking that our sheep are lost or in trouble. Anyway, when they got close to the boys, it was sheep mayhem, there was so much gossipy nosiness.
Looking back at this video, the sheep are all so shaggy! They have shed so much more since then. The neighbors who thought that the shedding was an indicator of illness (which it would be if they were wool sheep) are probably very alarmed now! We still need to shear some, but in the future we should definitely wait until late summer to make sure that they have already done all of their own shedding.
asparagus!
I planted two varieties and here are the tiny babies! I did my usual amount of research before planting them, so I had no idea what I was doing and did it entirely wrong. Apparently they need to be planted really deeply which is pretty impossible around here and I didn't build the raised beds deep enough to accommodate their needs. The risk with planting too shallowly is that you'll get lots of really thin stalks and I made the executive decision that keeping the expensive roots alive and getting them in the ground was more important than an impressive harvest. My plan is to add another 6 or 12 inches of height to the raised bed, along with a lot of our beautiful compost and hopefully this situation will work itself out? Or we will specialize in very thin asparagus, like the haricots verts of the asparagus world. Maybe it will be the next culinary trend!
walking?
The sound of the new driveway crunching under my feet at chore time. I love the sound of gravel crunching, me and the great Lucinda Williams. What counts as blog content around here is really getting problematic.
smoke
Then the wildfire smoke showed up. The featured image for this post is a smoky sunset here. I do tell the livestock not to do any strenuous grazing when the air quality is poor, but they are like teenagers, they never heed or even acknowledge my advice.
garden irrigation!
I only have one photo for a fairly large project, (update! found another!) I think that’s in the blogger handbook, right? People love a lot of descriptive words with very few visual aids. I built a drip irrigation system for the perennial food garden. It’s hard to take satisfying photos of black tubing spread everywhere over half an acre. I’ve never used any irrigation like this. We used soaker hoses and overhead watering at the old farm and the orchard was already well established so didn’t really require any additional watering. It’s really great! I had fun designing and putting it together and I love just turning it on and walking away. We are currently feeding it from our drilled well, but I plan to install a solar powered pump in a dug well on the property and water from there in the future.
The photo on the left is an apple tree, so I used two of the red drippers which allegedly deliver 2 gallons per hour and on the right is a raspberry with the most beautiful leaves which has smaller drippers, I think one is a 1 gal/hr and the other is 0.5 gal/hr. Since as usual I have no idea what I'm doing, I just guessed what they would need and have kept an eye on them to see if they are looking wilty or if one plant is getting more insect damage than another. Since those drip rates are dependent on pressure and flow rate for the entire system, and it's a big system, it's probably more of an art than a science anyway.
nature!
Butterflies get all of the attention, but I’m more of a moth person. Also, they hold still for better photos. According to my iPhone, the beauty on the left is a harnessed tiger moth and on the right is a hickory tussock moth. The jackass in the background of the hickory tussock moth is the adolescent that I am married to.
