Piggies, Planting and Equipment! Third and Last post from leave!

This will be the wrap up post from my leave I think We did not get much more done with the piggies this trip, they did not go through their area as I thought they would so we are holding off sending them to a new paddock until next trip in July.  They are growing fast and have even the more skittish of them (Chew Bacon) will now come up for a back scratch.  Here is an updated picture, Ham Solo is the one with the large white strip on his front and Chew Bacon (Chewie) is the one mostly brown.

So in addiation to the animal front we also did a lot on the equipment front, on a cold rainy day we went to an Auction for a hobby farmer who was moving back to town due to health reasons.  While there we bought a 130-gallon water tank on a trailer with a PTO powered pump that can be pulled behind a tractor, we also picked up what is probably a 5 foot deck mover also to be pulled behind a tractor, I also picked up a nice 12 gauge Iver Johnson special trap shotgun (I did not expect to be the only bidder!!) along with a couple other odds and ends.  So, a water tank, and a tractor deck mower, yep you guessed it next was a tracker that my brother in law Charlie and Sister in law Roxanne found for me.  It is an older model John Deere 3130 pushing somewhere between 80 and 90 Horsepower, it came with a front-end loader which we needed as well as a snow blower, also needed.  She is a little rough in spots but she will get the job done!

The new Tractor, that is Harry fixing the tire on the new water tank :)

Of course, now that we have a tractor and a mower it was time to try it out on the two pastures and old corral that was overgrown with weeds.  So yea, it works 😊

Now we did get lucky and save a lot of time, before we bought the property we had it surveyed, as it turns out there was about 15 or so feet on the south of the property and 30-35 feet west of the property that the neighbor had been farming for years due to some confusion on the property line.  On the flip side my fence line over lapped his on the north side.  During my 3-4 days there on leave before initially going to DC I saw him out there breaking ground and was able to flag him down.  Great guy, seems like the guy who surrounds my property farms organic, meaning nothing to kill off my bees, SCORE!!!  

We agreed that the surveyed lines were correct, but for now we would not worry about the north and south lines and he could continue to farm the south side and I would farm the 30-35 X 600 that was on the west side, that he had already broken up.  The fact that I did not have to break new ground was huge for us! At the same time because he is farming organic and does not use weed killer it makes I (meaning Lexi this summer) have to work to keep our part weed free so it does not spread to his, So far We have about 15 rows (33 feet each) of feeder beats, 15 rows of mammoth sunflowers and about 19 rows of field pumpkins planted back there.  The pumpkins sound like they are a lot more than they are, they are only about 10-12 plants a row since we pot planted this first, where the beets and Sunflowers are mostly seed planted, by hand……  Needless to say, a planter is now on next year’s list.  It also caused us to add a rototiller to his years purchases to keep them cultivated between rows. We also added a couple of off and ends rows, onions, radishes, normal beets and strawberries, this is in addition to what Terri has planted in the front.  Depending on the excess we may decide to over winter a couple pigs as well, but we will see.

With the last cold snaps, we received in Mn it looks like we may have lost a couple of the apple trees, we got those last frosts just as they were starting to leaf out and they have not recovered yet.  We did get a little tree planting done, we replaced two sapalta cherry plum trees that did not take last year, we also planted four unity sugar maples, about 7-8 foot trees, those replaced the sapling of the same variety that did not make it from last year.  One lesson learned from last year is about mulching, the trees that did the best from last year were those most heavily mulched (meaning a wide area of 2-3 inches of mulch).  Most of the saplings that did not make it were not as heavily mulches as those that did so for those planting trees do not be skimpy on the mulch! Don’t make your newly planted trees compete for food!

Finally, the last big project to get worked on was the roofing of the Quonset (in this case a lowered barn).  No this was not a challenge I was willing to undertake but Chris Bachmeier from Fertile Building center did us right on it.  We still have an overhead door to put in but that should come in within 2 weeks and Chris will be back to finish that up.  I will post pics of it when it is done!

There is so much more to cover, but one last part I would be remiss if I did not include it, during this whole process and even more so this last two weeks we had so much help from Family, seems like every member of the weber clan came out to help at some point over this two weeks, including by giving me break one morning to go fishing, check out the pike below 😊 .  Think that is enough for now, thanks all for reading look forward to the comments!