Hello and welcome to 2018! We thought we’d start it off with a wrap-up of last year’s farming season
Cherries – Our two black cherry trees normally produce very small berries or none at all, but this year we had a surprisingly wet start to the summer and got a superb crop of small cherries. We made a fantastic cherry pie, stored a quart in the freezer, and made a small batch of maraschino cherries which we enjoyed later in the summer with some homemade ice cream.
Strawberries – We put in two rows of strawberry plants, and they did quite well; we were able to get a small handful of berries each night for a snack after dinner for most of June. Unfortunately, the weeds were quite prodigious and it will take some effort to clear them up in the spring, but we may extend their rows a bit this year.
Raspberries – Our new raspberry plants were looking really good; we put two varieties in 4 rows along the path up to the pond, but our wet start to the summer drowned most of 2 rows pretty thoroughly. We think our trenching of the clay soil, and filling with compost, may have created channels that did not allow the water to get out. We got a small batch of berries from the plants that survived; we’ll see about re-planting this spring.
Root stock – we ordered 50 root stock to help start the grafting process next year and set them up in a long row of compost and mulch in the vegetable garden, and they all did quite well! They didn’t get very many weeds in their area, surprisingly. Hopefully the grafting process will be successful in the spring!
Sugar Beets – this was our largest plant experiment for the year, with approximately 1000 sq. ft. dedicated to them. We emptied about two truckloads of compost into the plot an thoroughly tilled it in, then planted ten rows of sugar beets. At first it was not looking so promising, but they grew pretty well and we were quickly overwhelmed with beet greens as we attempted to thin the plot. In the end, our main goal of the plot was to loosen the soil for next season’s wheat crop, but we thought we might get some sugar out of it. We attempted one batch and got a pint of sugary syrup, but couldn’t get it down to crystals and were too busy to try another batch.
Misc. veggies – our veggie plot did pretty well. We had endless zucchini (who doesn’t?) and yellow squash from the four plants we put in. Watermelon did quite well with five basketball sized melons and a handful of single serving ones. The five butternut squash plants produced about 30 squash. Our Adirondack Blue potatoes did excellent as well. The only real disappointment was the sweet corn, which got knocked over by the wind a few times and did not produce anything edible (although the dog liked them).
Apples – this year was an OK apple year. We started collecting apples in August, when big G’s favorite tree started to ripen, but the big wind storm in May really did a number on the blossoms for many of our higher producing trees along the edge of the woods, so most of our apple crop was limited to further away trees. We ended up making about 10 gallons of cider, and a handful of pies. We also tagged about 40 trees with ID tags so far, and keep seeming to find new ones in the midst of the woods, some of which produce very large fruit!
Poultry – on the poultry side of things, we’ve had a hit & miss year. We started out with a new batch of ducks and guinea fowl, all of which seemed to be doing pretty well until we moved the guinea fowl into a new pen inside the barn, and returned one weekend to see a weasel run across the driveway and a barn full of dead birds. Luckily Tractor Supply had fall chick days this year and little G ‘convinced’ us that we needed to get some more chickens. We got a bunch of Cornish Rock hens and now have enough broilers in the freezer for one a month through the spring chicken season.
Ducks - The ducks got an entirely newly constructed pen with 4x4 posts for the fence, a new 2x4 constructed house with thick plywood and a proper roof, and ½ inch hardware netting around everything. That seemed to be going fine until one night at 2AM when M woke up fearing their door had been left open in a rainstorm; indeed a raccoon had managed to rip the latch off the door and only 4 of 9 birds were inside the pen. Another runner duck promptly waddled up from the stream, and an injured duck appeared on the front lawn out of the tall grass with a gash on the back of its neck. We put it in a box in the garage with a heat lamp and some hay, expecting to find it dead in the morning, but it survived and within 2 weeks was ready to re-join the flock. Its head is still a little kinked, but otherwise it is acting normal. We also started to get one or two eggs a day starting in October which was a pleasant surprise, and have even had a few double-yolkers appear.
Overall it was a pretty good year, and now we are settled in for the winter, just need to harvest scion wood for the root stock and pore over our seed catalogs to plan the 2018 season.
