Berry Fest

We have begun to reap quite a bounty of berries. The previous owners of our property had a sizable berry establishment going. There are a couple of massive blackberry bushes growing in one spot and then a tunnel of blackberry bushes; an entire forest of black raspberry bushes; and maybe three or four blueberry bushes. I also planted four strawberry plants but you may recall I had an issue with bunnies eating them.

The blackberry bush tunnel on Farm Charm — The blackberry bush tunnel

As someone who is brand new to growing food, I am still learning how much effort and time is needed. With regard to the berry bushes (and they are pretty hands off), should I be checking on them every day, every other day or is twice a week sufficient? I am a schedule person and like knowing what I need to do each day. I’m sure it is my life’s lesson to realize that it’s not about checking things off, it’s about enjoying the process, but we can save that philosophizing for another day.

The outside of the blackberry bush tunnel on Farm Charm — The blackberry bush tunnel from the outside

I’m also asking because I had a disappointing experience with the blueberries just a few days ago and wondering whether it could have been prevented had I been more vigilant. I was watching them for about two weeks. The berries started small and green, then turned to grayish purple, then a light blue, and then a nice rich dark blue. On Friday evening, I could see that they were all getting very close to perfection and I wanted to wait one more day so they could be as juicy and plump as possible. And then, for whatever reason, I didn’t do the picking on Saturday like I should have and when I went out Sunday morning, they were ALL GONE!

The single blueberry that the deer left behind on Farm Charm — The lone blueberry that the deer left

I know the deer ate them, those punks! We have an electric fence around the garden but I haven’t turned it on. Up to this point it didn’t appear that the deer had been noshing on our fruit bushes. But they must have been watching me watch the blueberries and picked the most opportune time to make their move. Grrrrrr!

So to my question about frequency. Could I have prevented this by checking the berries on Saturday? Maybe. To be on top of things, I should probably be checking on the things that are getting close to ripe every day during harvest season but I just know that isn’t going to be entirely realistic. But the berries are worth it.

Three big juicy blackberries on Farm Charm

One morning I went out and collected about 6 cups of blackberries in about 10 minutes.

Swallowtail butterfly enjoying the Farm Charm blackberries

I have been reading up on canning from various other bloggers (Preparedness Mama and The Organic Prepper), and on this National Center for Home Food Preservation. I’ll share how I made two cans of blackberry jam in about 45 minutes soon.

Bouquet of Beets

We are a beet family. I didn’t eat them growing up, but some while ago I read they were good for making your blood stronger in Eat Right 4 Your Type. What exactly was meant by ‘stronger’ I don’t remember, but I’m a sucker for health claims. You could tell me that eating caterpillars covered in hot sauce is good for your skin and I would likely try it.

So I started buying canned beets at the grocery store. Please, before you spend time sending me hate mail about how inferior canned beets are to fresh, I know and I get it. But I’m not a foodie. For me, food is mostly functional. Rarely do I sit to enjoy a meal for the crisp crunchiness, amazing aromas or titillating textures. I just need to get the calories and nutrients in and be on my way. My kids eat canned beets (they look like little vampires with the juices running down their faces). I throw them on salads, sandwiches and burgers. Sidenote: ever had an Australian burger? With a fried egg, ring of pineapple and sliced beets? Sooo yummy <says the girl who just said she wasn’t a foodie>. Cactus even makes beet salad. So the decision to try to grow beets was just a “Sure, let’s give that a try.”

Three juicy, purple beets ripe from the Farm Charm Garden — Three of the first beautiful beets from the Farm Charm garden

I planted beets back on April 1st. I seeded them directly into the soil which I think is what the packet said to do. A mere 2.5 months later, these are just three of the amazing purple hearted beauties I plucked from the garden. They were likely ready for harvest two weeks ago but I kept waiting and waiting to see how much of the bulb would continue to push itself out of the soil. I think I didn’t plant them deep enough. Needless to say though, I am very happy with the result and still have about ten more plants I will harvest in the next couple weeks.

The Ferry Morse beet seeds I started with back on April 1. I would buy these again. — The package of beet seeds I bought at Lowe’s for the Farm Charm garden

I’ll be honest, beets were one of the vegetables whose success I was least invested in. Sorry beets, love you boo! I was way more interested in lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and squash because we eat those nearly every day. And, per above, canned beets really don’t bother me.

Perhaps it was that lack of love that made my beets say “I’ll show you. We’re gonna be the best darn beet crop you ever saw.” And they are.

Seven roasted beets ready to be made into a tasty salad — The Farm Charm first beet harvest after roasting

Next step was roasting them for 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees and then removing the skins. Tip: I covered a pan with aluminum foil and sprayed it with cooking spray to prevent sticking and have minimal clean up. In the past I’ve also wrapped each beet individually and put a bit of olive oil in each package. If you wrap each one separately, definitely still put them on a pan and not directly on the oven rack. Similar to sweet potatoes, I believe some beet juice can drip and then you’ll have a mess to clean up in your oven.

I’ll make a beet salad and/or serve them with goat cheese. They are also great on a bed of arugula with chunks of goat cheese and a sprinkle of toasted pine nuts with a balsamic vinaigrette.

Farm Charm beet salad - nature's edible rubies — Farm Charm beet salad

Final thought: are beets always plural? Can I say I ate a beet for dinner? Can you add a beet to my sandwich? Sounds wrong.

Butterfly Bushes

I don’t really have much to say about butterfly bushes except that they are amazingly awesome!!! At any given moment, I can look out the doors to our back yard and see at least five beautiful butterflies fluttering around. I believe they are mostly eastern tiger swallowtails. They are just so decadent to look at. Enjoy these beautiful photos.

Easter tiger swallowtail butterfly on Farm Charm butterfly bush

Two swalllowtail butterfly friends on Farm Charm

Swallowtail butterfly also hanging out on the Farm Charm butterfly bush

3 Ways to Keep Your Chickens Safe

It is with a very heavy heart that I tell you we had a tragedy on the farm. I won’t go into a lot of detail. I wasn’t even home when it happened so only know second hand what took place.

Essentially, Cactus had let the chickens out of their run to a little yard area so they could scratch and peck around. This area is right next to the coop and completely fenced except for the gate that one enters or exits through to get to the coop and run.

Farm Charm Chicken Yard, Coop and Run — The chicken coop is on the left, the run is in the back and the free range yard area is right in front.

When we are going in and out, we use a big rock to hold the gate shut rather than fasten and unfasten the lock (mistake #1: lazy humans). Cactus was doing some weed wacking in the little area and at one point he stopped to take a business call and walked through the gate without properly locking it behind him (mistake #2: having to walk and talk).

While on the phone, he said he heard a scuffle and ran to the little yard area to find our schnauzer, Shume, next to a fatally injured white chicken.

He immediately got the chickens into the coop for safety but only counted six when there should have been seven (we had a total of eight to begin with). He searched the little yard and everywhere nearby but could not find the seventh chicken. Eventually he noticed that our second dog Ozzy, a shih-tzu, was nowhere to be found. He started calling Ozzy and finally found him laying in the grass by the front of the house with a lifeless brown chicken next to him.

There are so many lessons to be learned from this event and I now know that dogs are the number one predator of backyard chickens. I never would have thought our useless little twenty pound dogs who only bark and eat and sleep were capable of anything like this.

Here are a few points to remember to save other chickens from a similar fate.

Your dogs may be loving companions and family members, but there are still thousands of years of instinctual learnings that may make them do things you never thought possible.
Chickens have pretty much no way of defending themselves from a dog, unless they can quickly get to a high enough perch.
As a human with a cerebrum, it is your job to think, plan, and perceive the dangers in a situation and protect any animal in your care.

Now, if we are visiting the chickens, which we do at least every evening after work to say hi and give them treats, we make sure the dogs are inside the house.

Cactus also rebuilt the gate entirely so it is much easier to lock and unlock. He did a really great job and was very upset that this happened at all. Trust me, I was not shy about pointing out that this was his fault.

Farm Charm Gate to the Chicken Coop and Chicken Yard — This is the gate to the chicken coop and yard that Cactus re-built so it now goes completely to the ground and is easier to lock.

Farm Charm Chicken Yard Gate Lock — The new and improved gate lock leading to the chicken yard

I share this to save anyone else from the same tragedy. I feel like we failed these little creatures and hope they didn’t suffer too much.

Bye Bye Bunny Buffet

For the past couple weeks, every few days I was going out to the garden each evening and letting my four year old pick 1-2 juicy red strawberries to enjoy. We’d see them ripen from whitish to light pink to deep red and it was really fun to anticipate when we would get to pick them. Remember we only have four little strawberry plants so I don’t think we’ll ever have a bowlful of strawberries to eat at once.

Then I noticed the strawberry production stop. I’m out in the garden each evening after work and would see that a berry was misshapen, had a chunk missing, or had disappeared altogether. Once I saw the strawberry stumps, I knew it was a critter at work. Prior to that, I was just thinking this is what happens when you grow organic, they don’t look so pretty.

Farm Charm strawberry stump after bunny munching — What was left of a juicy red strawberry

I immediately thought it must be Bunnies! I guess birds would eat berries too, and certainly other animals like groundhogs and mice. But I had recently watched the CGI version of Peter Rabbit (hilarious btw, I heart James Corden!) and thought it made sense. Plus, I never told you about this, but when I was turning the soil back in March to get the garden ready for planting, I found two dead baby bunnies in one of the beds. I was so sad for them and thought that would be a morbid post for a blog.

With my detective badge and notepad handy, I didn’t think it was too impossible to conclude that if they had been nesting in the garden, they were also probably dining in the garden. Nothing against these little furry Easter icons, but I wanted to find a way to ever so gently suggest they do their munching elsewhere. I did some googling for how to deter bunnies and needed a solution that blocked them from the plants whilst not blocking me. Initially I thought I’d put up a 2-3’ wooden stake in each corner and then wrap some mesh netting around the whole raised bed. But then I’d have to bend over all awkwardly to get to the plants myself. Nah.

Instead I had the idea to use some of the tomato cages that were in the shed. We had some left over netting too. I laid the netting out in the grass, folded it once lengthwise so that it was doubled over, and then laid the tomato cage on top of the netting. Cactus helped me with this because it a job for more than two hands. He rolled the cage and netting together until the netting covered the whole thing and overlapped a few inches. He held the netting firmly around the cage while I cut it and then we secured it with a chip clip. It doesn’t get more DIY than this I don’t think.

Farm Charm tomato cages wrapped in netting — My DIY bunny deterrents – tomato cages wrapped in netting

Now we’ll have to wait a few days and see if this does the trick so that we can say Bye Bye to the Bunny Buffet. I’ll keep you posted.

Getting my garden on

Finally jumping in to the dirt

5 things I wish someone had told me about getting baby chicks

Five things I wish someone had told me about baby chicks. If only…

We got peeps!

What’s cuter than a fluffy little peep that goes “cheep cheep”? Eight fluffy little peeps.

The work and the why

Living on a farm is a lot of work. Who wants more work? Here’s why we chose this life.

Starting seeds

One of the things I am most excited to be able to do now that we have a bigger yard is garden. Previously, living in a town home, I would say I dabbled in gardening. I’ve read dozens of articles on container gardening and truly believe it’s possible to have quite a fruitful output with window boxes and pots or whatever you can construct out of a pallet, but that never happened for me. The plants would grow, mostly tomatoes and lettuce and a few peppers, but after picking a few fruits or veggies that was pretty much the end of my harvest. Squirrels and bunnies seemed to have a hay day with my efforts and those were the only creatures who benefited.

So now, I’m hoping to make a much more valiant effort and see a slightly more gratifying result. For the past few weeks I saved seeds from some of the typical veggies we love to eat: red and orange bell peppers, jalapenos, and butternut squash. I let the seeds dry on a plate for about a week and then I filled two egg cartons with dirt from the garden and dropped a couple seeds into each egg holder spot (probably not the correct term). If I recall correctly from when I bought seeds at Home Depot or Lowes, something would start to sprout within 2-3 weeks. I’m hopeful at least a few of them will grow but in case that doesn’t happen, I wanted to start early so I could try again (and again, and again).

For me, that’s a huge part of the beauty of this place. It’s “wide open spaces, room to make the big mistakes” as the oh-so-wise Dixie Chicks once said (and yes, I’ve referenced them twice back to back). While I do not consider attempting to start some veggie plants from seeds and failing a big mistake, it feels so freeing to even have the option now. If this doesn’t work out, I’m sure there are approximately 147,000 blog posts on how to grow plants from seeds that I could read and learn from, like this on The Spruce. But naively, I wanted to just attempt it from the simplest most basic logic that came to my mind:

“This piece of [cucumber] I’m eating has seeds.
Seeds are what you plant to grow the [cucumber].
I wonder what would happen if I just toss some of these seeds in a little bit of earth?”

I’m not convinced that I have to buy some kit that costs $59.99 to start seeds. That just sounds like crazy talk. Full disclaimer: a few years back I asked Cactus Man (aka my husband) to buy me one of those fish tanks that grows herbs on top and he did. Guess how many herbs I successfully grew? Pick a number between 0 and 0 and you’ll be correct.

And of course if the seed thing doesn’t work out this season, I can always buy some starter plants from a local nursery. Not gonna be a purist who insists on growing everything from scratch. Plus, I foresee there being lots of other points along the way where I can very realistically mess this up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not predicting failure before I even start. I’m just recognizing that I could very well get the starter plants off the ground indoors and then plant them outdoors only to have 27 other curve balls come at me, like weather, and animals, and the soil’s composition, that I wasn’t prepared for.

But in the meantime, I’m really eager to think about the bounty that we could have all summer long right from our own backyard. Here’s what I think I want to start with this first year:

Lettuce – red leaf and romaine
Kale
Tomatoes – heirloom and cherry and whatever is good for canning
Spicy peppers – jalapeno, habanero
Bell peppers
Butternut squash
Strawberries
Blueberries

Biting off more than I can chew? (couldn’t resist!) Maybe, but I’ve heard all of these are pretty standard/hearty plants for beginners. So I’ll keep you posted.