Tag: food security

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Pruning on the Farm and More Bees

What beautiful weather this weekend. We’ve had several Saturdays in a row where the weather was just gorgeous. This weather definitely makes for a relaxing day.

Successful Elderberry Pruning Class

Thanks to everyone that came to our elderberry pruning and planting class. We had a wonderful time. We sent many of the elderberry cuttings to WNC to help with stream bank retention for areas damaged by the hurricane.

Expanded Apiary

New home for the bees

Moving the bees to the back field gives us room to expand the number of hives. We hope to have 10 hives in place for this year. I’ve been surprised by the number for people that want local honey. The bees are a great example of function stacking. The bees pollinate the trees and bushes while producing honey

Blueberries Needed Pruning

These blueberry plants are two years old. We have 22 blueberry plants on the farm. 20 on the HugelKultur mound and 2 in the back field (as a test planting). They were not pruned when they were originally planted 2 years ago. This was their very first pruning, we did leave a few cross branches but they weren’t rubbing on other branches so we chose to leave them for this year. Next year they will be pruned away. We did have a small bowl of blueberries last year but this year we are expecting bigger and better harvest. Here are the before and after photos

Blueberry plant needing to be pruned

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Bee News | Pruning Moms Grape Vines and Orchard

Bees Have a New Home Soon

The bees are moving to the back field and more bees should arrive in a few weeks. The plan is to have 10 hives total. We currently have 4 hives. We keep selling out of honey from the farm so additional honey capacity will be good as the farm grows.

Good Family Times

One of our yearly traditions has been to prune the grape vines, blueberries and fruit trees at my mom’s house. We did that this week and had a good time. What a beautiful day. We had a good time as a family and accomplished a lot.

It is wonderful that the orchard, berries and vines produce an abundance that my mom can share with the community.

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Taking a Break for a Few Weeks

We hope you have enjoyed the news and pictures from the farm in 2024. We’re going to take a break from the blog for few weeks.

Expect to see more pictures when it is time to prune the elderberries, mulberry trees, fig trees and goji berries. If you want to learn to prune your berries and fruit trees, let me know and we’ll set up a class for late February or early March.

Goji berries
Starting to put mulch around the mulberry trees
Fig tree
Elderberries
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Making Elderberry Syrup

Link to image file↗

It is that time of year. Time to make elderberry syrup! FoxNews just did a story talking about the benfits of elderberries (click on the image below to read the story)


How we make the syrup

The first step is to put the elderberries in a steam juicer. The steam juicer creates a juice extract from the elderberrries. The extract from the steam juicer is reduced (over heat) to approximately half the volume that came from the steam juicer. Once the juice has cooled to less than 120 degrees, it is ready for the honey. The reduced juice is mixed with an equal part of honey from our place in the mountains. The goal is to keep the majority of the honey below a temperature of 105 degrees. The honey and juice mixes best at warmer temperatures but we don’t want to get the honey too warm and lose the natural properties of the raw honey. We measure the temperature of the juice as it is cooling and then mix the honey and liquid together once the reduced liquid reach a temperature of 120 degrees.

Frozen elderberries going in the steam juicer
Elderberry syrup in a squeeze bottle
First time we have put elderberry syrup in a squeeze bottle
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Planting Pomegranate Trees and More Wood Chips

This time of year is fairly busy on the farm. Activities for this week included:

  • planting pomegranate trees, prickly pear cactus and the last of the goji berries
  • putting out more woodchips (semi composted mulch) around the fruit trees we planted in November
  • clearing a dead tree off the bridge so I could get to the back field
  • moving brush and wood that had been cut a few years ago
  • cutting down more the invasive trifoliate citrus bushes

The weather was spectacular. It was nice to be outside.

Natural Fertilizers for Trees and Bushes

One of the things we have on the farm this time of year is diakon radish (also called field radish). We use it as a cover crop. One of the methods I used when planting trees and bushes was to harvest some of the daikon tuber and put it in the bottom of the hole where the trees and bushes went. The daikon tuber breaks down over time and adds nutrients to the soil near the tree and bush roots. It is especially easy to do when the daikon radish is just a few feet away.

Daikon radish in bottom of hole for tree or bush, a natural fertilizer

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Getting Ready to Plant Trees

This week we have been working to get everything ready to plant trees next week. First step was a trip to Rabbit Ridge Berry Farm in Coats, NC to pick up trees and bushes.

Fred and Amily are great to do business with. We have been buying trees and bushes from them for more than 2 years and it is a wonderful experience.

We filled up the truck and trailer and headed to the farm. One of the trees we purchased was a pecan that was more then 8 feet tall. It was longer than the 8 foot trailer!

The next step was to take measurements and put flags showing the future location of the trees. The fields are starting to get wet so we transferred the trees to a smaller trailer and towed the trailer (with the tractor) to areas close to the intended locations. You can see me with the lines that we used to measure out the 20 foot grid.

Weather permitting, the plan is to plant 47 trees and bushes next week including:

  • pear
  • plum
  • plumcots
  • nectarine
  • peach
  • black walnut
  • mulberry
  • chestnut
  • goji berry
  • blueberry
  • PawPaw

Next week should be a busy week.

Garlic and Wolly Worms

The garlic is coming up. We had tried something new with the garlic this year. We planted the garlic then rolled out hay from a round bale (instead of manually spreading it). Once we started unrolling the hay we were concerned that the hay would be too thick. However the garlic is growing through the hay so hopefully this approach will work.

We are still seeing wolly worms. We saw a really big one yesterday

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November Figs? – Go Fig-ure

Still more November figs

We’re trying to put the nice weather to good use. It was a nice day to to put out mulch.

Putting mulch around the trees and bushes helps to

  • suppress grass
  • provides nutrients as the mulch breaks down
  • provides a great environment for the comfrey to grow
  • helps to regulate the moisture at the tree root ball

This is a great example of function stacking. Function stacking is using one plant, material or process to accomplish multiple things.

November Figs and Our First Raspberries

Our fig treses are still putting out figs. We also have our first raspberries. I can’t wait to taste them. The Daikon radish is growing like crazy.

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Pumpkins Are Coming, Maybe

We tried something new this year. We planted pumpkins in withour sorghum / sudan grass and buckwheat cover crop. The plan:

  • plant the pumpkins and cover crop in the area where we had just dug potatoes. The row was already covered with straw that we used around the potato plants
  • let the cover crop and pumpkins grow – the buckwheat grew first and was succeeded by the pumpkins and sorghum / sudan grass
  • weed around the pumpkins
  • let the pumpkins grown out into the grassy rows beyond the cover crop area
  • [future] hopefully harvest pumpkins

Doing this allows us to add organic matter to the soil when we terminate the sorghum / sudan grass and it composts over the winter. The sorghum / sudan grass also acts a a mulch for the winter cover crop. Hopefully we get a good harvest of pumpkins. Innovating in small ways means trying new things.

I’m looking foward to pumpkins!

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Expanding Our Orchard

“The plan” is to install the next phase of orchard just after Thanksgiving. We’ll offer a class in planting fruit trees for anyone that wants to learn and join in as we plant the next phase of our orchard. I’ll post the class invite on the website once it is scheduled. It would be great if you could join us for a day of planting trees and wonderful fellowship.

2 of the walnut trees with room to put pawpaws in between
Test planting of figs and persimmon in the back field

Back Field Plans

This fall we plan to add the next wave of fruit trees to the back field. These include

  • Peaches – Contender, Redhaven, and Belle of Georgia varieties
  • Asian Pear – Korean Giant and Chojuro varieities
  • Plum – Byron Gold, Methley, Ozark Premier and Blue Damson varieties
  • Plumcot – Spring Satin variety
  • Nectarines – Carla Rose variety
  • Black Walnut – native
  • Asian Chestnut – Dunstan variety
  • Mulberry – Dwarf Everbearing

We also have a pecan tree that didn’t survive. So we’ll replace that pecan tree. The variety is Occonee. Pecans have very specific pollination periods so it is important to choose the correct varieties so they can cross pollinate and produce pecans.

Our camping site in the back field is coming along nicely

Campsite Plans

We want to keep plenty of room for tents in the back field campsite as we add more fruiting plants to the mini-food forest there. We hopee to add blueberries this fall. The selected rabbit eye blueberry varieties are Premier, Columbus, and Tifblue.

Food Forest Plans

One of the plants that has struggled in the food forest is the blackberries. We plan to take out part of the blackberries and their trellis. Then we can come black and plant fruit trees. We’ve already replaced part of the blackberries with black chokeberrie (you may recognize them as aronia berries). I’m hoping to add additional chokeberries to the food food forest along with plum trees (Methley and Ozark Premier varieties).

Goji berries climbing the trellis

Field #2 Plan

We have an area of field #2 that stays fairly dry, which is ironic compared to how wet the rest of field #2 generally is. This is most likely caused by the depth of the water in that one area. We plan to add goji berries to the dry area. The goji berries have in the food forest in the hugelkultur mound and we hope to continue the success in field #2.