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Spooky Season Review

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Hello, everyone!  Guest author Chad is here at the keyboard today.  It's been a busy fall season, and we're finally getting settled in for the winter.  Let's rewind the clock to mid-October and see what it looked like! Julie did as much work as time and weather permitted on the garden.  The berry hills are built, so the blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry plants can go in right away next year.  The fall rains had come and made everything so muddy that all this had to be shoveled up by hand, instead of creating the hills by plowing the trenches to the side.  It was a ton of work, but the harvest will be sweeter for it! Walking around the yard, we found some vivid toadstools growing on the embankment by the old shed.   Speaking of the old shed, our new one arrived!  The delivery man had a neat trailer.  It had an integrated lift/cart underneath,, so he could swing the whole trailer side-to-side by remote control, instead of having to perf...
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Enjoying Fall's Colors

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 As I type, I have apples simmering on the stove for applesauce.  They were beginning to get soft, and they needed to be made into sauce pronto, which is pretty unusual.  I don't normally make applesauce until November.  But then, this has been an unusual year all around. The cold snap in early September tricked our trees into thinking fall had come, and they began to turn the most beautiful fall colors.  The colors peaked here around the first day of fall, September 22.  That's a full three weeks early!  It has been such a dry year, though, and I have heard that it has affected the fall colors.  Outside our valley, the colors are much muddier.  Why did we get treated to such pretty colors?    Chad said it's because God knew we would really appreciate them!  And we definitely do!  Fall is our very favorite season.  We love fall so much, that we got married on the first day of fall.  The first day of fall als...
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Late Summer Update on the Hobby Farm

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Everyone seems to be calling our place a farm these days, both sincerely and sarcastically, so I've decided to lean into it.  I'm not serious enough about being self sufficient to call myself a homesteader, but I'm also not trying to make any money like a farmer would.  Why not call ourselves hobby farmers?  We're just doing this for fun. It's been a busy summer here on the hobby farm.  Most of the pictures I have to share are loads of produce from my garden: An actual hill of beans, and a tomato the size of a coffee mug.   Cherry tomatoes, ground cherries, plus the first wave of slicing and paste tomatoes. I bought a cool new garden basket from a tiny local hardware store.  It's perfect!  Also, that is the longest Tromboncino zucchinis I got so far.  It was 2.5 feet long. We had a frost advisory in early September!  So we went out and picked everything we could use, including all of the green peppers and tiny Tromboncino zucchinis.  My ...
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Tractor Country

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We live in tractor country out here.  As far as I can tell, nearly everyone in our valley owns a tractor, and some people own two!  Most people use their tractors for mowing their fields, but our next door neighbor uses riding lawn mowers to mow his 4-5 acres and uses his tractor for digging and lifting heavy things.    Chad and I had thought about getting a tractor, but considering the smallest ones start at around $15k and that doesn't include implements, we decided to wait on that for a few years.  Still, our fields need mowed at least once a year.  As our neighbor up the hill says, some poor soul 150 years ago cleared out the trees with nothing but horses, and so he only feels it's right to keep it mowed.  I don't have anything against having more forests, but living here these past 10 months, we have seen how important a meadow is to certain kinds of birds.  We have watched Red Winged Black Birds, Eastern Blue Birds, Phoebes, Alder Flyca...
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