Spring is teasing us here in Southern Minnesota, with warmer temps, flowing maple sap, and a promise of things to come. Old man winter is off napping, but I don't kid myself, he'll awaken again soon and will likely push the young spring away until her proper time. but we're loving it for now and have so much to do! Ready to read a taste of spring life on our small holding farmstead? Read on!
I love the rhythmic cycles of farm life. Most of what we do all year is in preparation for winter. We tap maples for syrup and maple sugar and put it away to enjoy all year long. Our stores of maple syrup and sugar have to last from March to the following February when it's time to set the taps for a new year. We raise sheep and really enjoy lambing season when the new lambs are born, usually in January and February. They jug lamb in the barn. A lambing jug is a small pen that is just large enough for a mom and her lamb. The ewe gives birth in this jug and the mom and baby bond and live together in this jug for a week. Then, the divider is taken out and the pen joined with the pen of the neighboring ewe and her lamb to give them more room and keep the flock bonded together. We usually raise two ram lambs for our own use for the freezer, and either sell the rest, or keep a ewe lamb or two to add to our flock or to replace an aging ewe. Spring is a time when the chickens and turkeys and guineas and geese start laying again due to the increase in daylight and new warmth. We can eat the eggs or incubate what we need to produce more poultry for the freezer for the coming winter months. We make a few diferent sausages from poultry, particularly buffalo chicken sausages and Thanksgiving dinner sausages. Both are superb! We get piglets in April or May and raise then all summer and fall and butcher them in late October or early November for the freezer. We brine and smoke our own bacon and ham and make several different sausage varieties from the meat, particularly, Italian sausage, Mexican sausage, a savory sage sausage and a sweet maple sausage that we stuff into natural casings for breakfast links. Then, we sow a large garden and baby it along all summer and we put up the fruits of that labor for winter use as well. We can it, dehydrate it, and freeze it. We have blueberry bushes, red currant bushes, peach trees, cherry trees, plum and pear trees, strawberries and rhubarb as well that we harvest fruit from in it's season. Spring, Summer and Fall are very busy on the farm, and Winter is the down time, the time to relax and refresh and spend time just enjoying the fruits of our labors.
When we bought this homestead it had been neglected for some time, at least a decade. Dead trees that hung over the house needed to be removed, the house needed to be completely gutted and rebuilt, the gardens, barns and orchard all needed to be reclaimed. We were definitely overly ambitious the first year and have since learned to have a plan, a schedule, and be happy when that gets accomplished rather than trying to do everything in one month or even two!
While spring is flirting with us, we decided that we'd go out and tackle the dead/dying hedgerow that is so ugly and harbors so many predators and undesirable creatures. (Not that any of God's creatures are undesirable in their own right, however, rabbits decimated the gardens and girdled the little fruit trees, foxes filched all but 2 of our guineas and skunked had lunch at the expense of our honeybees). Putting up a trail camera definitely showed us where these animals were exiting and entering and it's always through the hedgerow. Starlings and red winged blackbirds nest in the hedges and nipped all the tops off our newly planted garden vegetables last year. We choose not to kill all these creatures who are only doing what comes natural to them. As good stewards, we need to be sure we're not giving the foxes, skunks and rabbits a hiding place on our doorstep. Besides, the hedgerow is mostly dead shrubs, predominantly honeysuckle and red twig dogwoods, both of which grow fast and thick when not controlled. We can use the wide swath of land the hedges cover for pasture or some other use.
So we took the tractor out, got a length of rope and activated our burn permit, then headed out to cut down these hedges and burn them on the garden spot. Burning them will help the soil as well.
We also pruned the 3 mature apple trees on the property. We believe we have 2 Honeycrisp trees and we aren't sure what the third tree is yet. Last year the trees were so overgrown and the drought so bad as well as the fact that we hadn't had time to spray the trees, so that the few apples that survived on the tree were small, dimpled and dropped off the tree too soon, likely due to the drought and as far as variety goes were fairly unrecognizable. So this year, we have them pruned and we'll spray them this weekend. We use something called dormant oil spray, a mineral oil spray that is excellent for dormant fruit trees. It is approved as an organic pesticide as it doesn't poison anything, rather it suffocates the little bugs that overwinter in the buds. We spray when the tree is dormant so that the little creatures are killed before they can enter the fruit through the bud when it swells to fruit. Honeybees and other pollinators also are not out yet and won't come in contact with the oil. We spay a second time after the flower buds have fallen and the tiny fruits are just visible. Finally, we spray a third time when the fruits are about marble size. We also grafted a few other varieties onto one of the trees, namely, Arkansas black, McCoun, and Wolf River. We'll see how the new grafts do. We also grafted Dolgo crab apple onto a volunteer apple root stock, so we're hoping that takes!
We have tapped our maple trees already for the year and boiled about 3 gallons of syrup, which is plenty for the two of us for the year and a few pints to give away to his coworkers for Christmas presents at the end of the year. We boiled the last of the sap into maple sugar which we particularly love in oatmeal and rolled onto sugar cookies. We've now pulled our taps, washed the collection barrels out and put them all away until next year.
Hubby is tuning up the farm equipment, getting the tiller ready to till up the garden soil. We'll lay the landscape fabric down and cover it all with wood chips and then plant when the time is right. He's also putting new teeth on his hay rake and getting the baler tuned up and ready to go. We have a zero turn John Deere mower that is having starting issues and we'll likely take that into the small engine repair shop in Austin to have it gone over.
We still have pasture fencing to put up so the sheep can graze naturally once the grass is growing, and as early as this spring has seemingly arrived, that may be sooner than later!
Of course there's the regular work of mucking out stalls and pens and coops for the compost pile, cutting and splitting firewood for the coming winter, keeping the house clean while continuing our remodel, cooking meals, baking our breads weekly, and the more mundane chores of laundry, record keeping, and budgeting.
I wouldn't have it any other way!
