week 29: so how'd we do?
this week on the little dream farm
Last Sunday Chris and I sat down to make our schedule for the week ahead and to go over all the upcoming farm chores we had on tap.
Chris has an important pitch meeting that he’ll be out of town for this coming week that took up a huge portion of this past week and I happened to have physical therapy twice and a dental appointment (each 45 minutes away) three days this week on top of client calls and my regular work schedule.
When we’re both going to be really busy like this past week, the very first things we talk about are workouts, meals, and rest. We plan out what days we’ll go to the gym and which days we’ll walk outside as well as what we’re planning to have for dinner each night since I cook either every day or every other day (if we’ve got enough leftovers) and then our sleep schedule, too—we aim for 7-8 hours every night no matter how busy we get.
Once that’s settled (because fit tip from coach Sarah: you must take care of yourself first!) we add all of it to our weekly chores spreadsheet that we each access from our phones throughout the week to check things off as we go.
I shared via Instagram Stories what we had on tap for this week. Here’s that photo:
So let’s talk about how it went and how we did!
Monday we dewormed the donkeys easy peasy! It’s a paste that you squirt into the side of their cheek that they just eat and it’s super simple to administer. We deworm them twice per year just to cover our bases in case they pick up any parasites while grazing in the pastures. So we got that done…check!
Then our friend Mary Ellen came by in her truck with our eight new hens in the antique hen carrier she delivers them to us in. These new hens are about 18 months old and so they’re already laying eggs and they’re just about full grown. Integrating them with our old crew of eight was a whole different story and for those of you who were hanging out with us on Instagram this week (@littledreamfarm) then you know it was a bit of a fiasco for a minute there!
So, chickens benefit from being slowly introduced or else you get a lot of fighting, bullying, and vying for their place in the pecking order. It’s best to allow the new and old group the ability to see one another but have some type of physical barrier between them for a day or two. When they are introduced, the best time to do it is at night once all the chickens have gone to roost. In this case, we took the eight new hens off their roost in the mini coop and carried them one by one over to the roost in the main coop and placed them all onto it with our old hens. In the morning they all woke up together, but they weren’t ready to get along yet! They spent most of Wednesday bickering and separating themselves into gangs and then it was a whole event to try and get them all to go to bed together. Chris and I went to sleep that night feeling very frustrated, defeated, and gaming out a new plan in case we woke up Thursday to more of the same. But…two evenings together did them some good because they all got up together the next morning and started getting along. By Friday they were one big happy flock family of sixteen hens. Farm win! Integrating new hens…check!
We’re starting to see some veggies coming from the Big Garden—this week it was a few cucumbers, a pepper or two, one ripe cherry tomato, and some of the squash look just about ready. This week it should be a whole lot more of all of that, plus the garlic, beets, a few onions, some more peppers, kale, cabbage, and some Swiss chard. Last year it was incredibly dry which meant it was a banner year for melons. We grew watermelons, cantaloupe and honeydew melons and we couldn’t eat them as fast as they were coming! This year the fruit has been very slow because of all the rain and I’ll be surprised if we get good melons at all this year. So, veggies from the big garden, check! Fruit from the Big Garden? Not so sure yet.
Where the melons might be struggling the blueberries are not! Next on our list was the first picking of blueberries from the 8-10 bushes we have in the Upper Garden. We took some handy yogurt pint jars we keep on hand out to the little berry patch with us and got to picking. Last year the birds got to just about all the blueberries but this year we covered the bushes with bird netting and berry bags and that helped a ton—the bushes are loaded up with fruit and we should be harvesting berries every few days for at least the next couple weeks! Berry picking? Big Check!
If you’re following along on our sourdough adventures then you know we started not one, but two sourdough starters about two weeks back. We managed to get it right on the first go around and if I had to guess, I’d attribute our quick success to the fact that we don’t have central air conditioning in our little home. It’s been about 80 degrees in the house during the day and in the 70s at night so the starters really took off in that warm environment. We do have standing A/C units we use when it gets super hot and we’ll be needing them this coming week when it creeps up towards the 90s for a few days. But this week was snack making with our sourdough starter, and we made graham crackers and cheese crackers and they both turned out awesome in their own ways! We have some notes from the first go of these recipes and we want to try making them again so I won’t be sharing any of those recipes until we stumble upon a version we feel good about sharing! But…sourdough experimenting for the win—Check!
I harvested the very first bouquet out of the cut flower patch this week and took those sweet little flowers right across the road to my neighbor Mary. I’m hoping to shower her in flowers all summer long, as she’s had a bit of a tough go of it lately with some really tough family stuff the past year or so. Now that the flowers are coming in like crazy my plan is just to make up bouquets as I go and gift them to everyone I can around here! How fun! Flower harvesting…Check!
The first powder post beetle treatment was great but didn’t totally do the job and thankfully the contract we entered allows for us to call back if we need to and we have a three-year warranty for additional treatments if needed. So the team was due to be out this Friday to re-treat the barns but we had to shift to next week because of weather. We’re hoping to get it done this coming Tuesday instead, if the weather cooperates. So…powder post beetle re-treatment, Semi-Check!
I did sit down with my farmer friends, the husband and wife duo we get all of our meats from, and we talked all the day long about our soils test results for our farm. They made some recommendations for things we might want to think about based on our goals and it gave us A LOT to think about…some of it good, some of it not so good, and some of it begs the question of what we’ll plan to do with this farm for the long haul, but none of that has to be decided today and so I’m trying to remain in the present and not get too far ahead of ourselves. Sometime I’ll elaborate on all of this more but we need more time to figure a few things out before I feel like I can share it with you all. For this year, we’ve decided not to have the pastures mowed at all (that will save us ~$1,500) so that everything that dies off this winter can add organic matter to the soils for next year. We’ll proceed with mowing again likely next year or the following. Between now and then we may add some lime or organic fertilizers to the pastures where the soils tests recommended it, but none of that is set in stone just yet. That’ll likely run us well over $1,500 so part of the intent of not mowing is to be able to channel those mowing dollars into improvements for pasture health. More to follow on this front but Check Check on the very helpful and informative meeting with our farmer friends!
Tuesday morning we loaded Micro, Little Lady, and BWK into their carriers and into the car for their annual vet appointments. We break it up like this:
February: Dodger, Oliver, Buist, and Black Kitty
July: Micro, Little Lady, Black and White Kitty
That way we don’t have to spend all that money all at once and we don’t have to have all seven of them in the car at one time and at the vet that long because they’re all there. So, Micro and Little Lady both weigh 8 pounds now at a year old and they got their shots and they’re both doing great. BWK couldn’t even be seen because she was so mad and scared, which we knew would be a very likely possibility since she’s still really shy with us at home. Our vet’s advice is to just simply keep an eye on her at home but that vet care will be unlikely for her since she’s still got a little Philly feral kitty in her. That’s a-ok, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing with her and see if she comes around some day. So…Vermont vet trip for the three musketeers, Check!
Then of course we did our usual mowing, weed whacking, weeding the garden spaces, and cleaning the coop and donkey area chores like we do each week so nothing significant to report there, other than that I recently had to replace both back tires on our zero-turn mower because I mowed too closely to things—twice—and slashed the back tires two separate times while mowing. Learned that lesson the hard way and we paid a pretty penny for it!
If you’re still here with me—thanks for coming along for the download on this week’s farming adventures! Every week is different, there’s always new challenges thrown into the mix, and I wouldn’t have it any other way! This was a great farm week and we’re wrapping it up with lots of gratitude that we GET to live this life!
How about you—what’s up in your world? Got anything particularly cool or challenging or new or fun going on? Catch us up if you’d like…we read every single one of your comments and we can’t tell you how much it means to us for you to swing by here and catch up with us from week to week on all the goings on here on the farm. We appreciate you—have the best Sunday and a beautiful week ahead!
I love living vicariously through you guys. BTW, I though I only lived in a house with no central air. My house is at 80 also and I live in Texas. I did something different yesterday. Friends and I went to Grapevine, Texas and participated in an attempt to make the Guinness Book of World Records for most S'mores simultaneously. We did it, broke the record from 2018. 891 S'mores made and eaten!
I still don't know how you get it all done. It makes me tired just reading about it.