Other trees to plant!

This weeks research has been on what other trees I need to plant on the homestead, earlier I went into some of the fruit and nut trees I was thinking about but I would like to get a little more variety out there as well. When I walked through the property a couple of months ago most of the woodland on the property was poplar. While poplar can make a decent forage and it is fast growing it is not much good as a building material and as fire wood it burns hot but very fast, you are constantly having to put more in! There is three additional types of trees I am thinking of planting other the the fruit and nut trees mentioned earlier.

Maple Trees
I am thinking of planting a variety of Maple trees, a 6-7 sugar maples, 2-3 red maples and 2-3 silver maples. I have to admit the idea of making our own maple syrup does intrigue me and gives me something to do in February! Terri loves the color change of the leaves and as they grow they will provide shade for the cattle in the pastures and the mast will provide additional feed for the birds and wildlife.

Weeping Willow

Weeping willows grow very fast, up to 10 feet a year! The willows will be a great shade tree around the pond as well as in a couple in the lower areas of the pastures to suck up the excess water that will pool in those areas. In addition to the shade aspect willow branches are excellent feed for the rabbits (along with the poplar that is already abundant), the rabbits will chew the branches to wear down their teeth and the willow also acts as a mild pain reliever. The leaves should also serve as a good fodder for the goats. So we are looking at 4-5 of these trees to the homestead.

There are numerous other trees that would do great on a homestead but being in the northern part of the country I am a little more limited in my choices! I do think in addition to the fruit and nut trees however we will have a pretty good selection on the homestead! As always if I missed something let me know!!

Comments

Chickens and Chicken Coop, May Leave post 2

OK at this point we needed to switch gears, so far we had lost 3 of our 50 chickens from what I understand that is not a terrible amount considering they were mail order, what we quickly evident is that the small starter brooder we made was not going to last long they were growing so fast, as we did not have coop yet and meant another intermediate brooder. Part of the scrap wood that was left with the house when we bought it was 2 boards about 10 feet long and roughly 18 inches or so high. The chicks very much seems to like all the extra space, and they seemed to thank us by increasing their rate of growth! It was very quickly evident that we would need to come up with a normal coop very quickly. Out intermediate brooder when we first moved them! about 23 March The previous owners did have a small coup but it would not fit our needs at all, they only had a couple chickens (4-5) compared to our 50 (well 47 now). Their coup also had an overabundance of nesting boxes but no r

Sourdough Fail, it Happens

I am trying to get better about posting my blog every week, it does get difficult at times as I am still in DC for the next 9 weeks or so before returning for good to the homestead. Some of you have noticed there is more posts lately about things like baking, particularly sour dough bread baking rather than farming/planting/livestock stuff. That is because that is something I can work on in DC while I wait, and it is skills that will transfer. I have been working on sourdough bread lately as it is a cultured food, similar to cheese’s and yogurts (which I want to also work on) so it allows me get some of the basics down to dealing with live cultures and further reduces the need for commercial yeasts. The plan for this weekend was to make a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread as well as a sour dough king cake. I even bragged about doing it on Facebook before the fact. Admittedly after last week’s success on the artesian sour dough bread I was probably a little too cocky with my s

Anyone Can Make Sour Dough Bread without Yeast

Making my first sourdough bread So, I have always been interested in trying to bake bread, but I have never had much luck with commercial yeast and getting my dough to rise. Not sure if I would use water that was too hot or what, just never had much luck and it discouraged me from continuing on. Then when surfing homesteading sites/blogs I kept on running into blogs about making a sourdough starter, it piqued my curiosity, so I started reading more on it. Turns out there was a way to make bread without a commercial yeast! As I am very much about self sufficiency and eventually want to culture my own yogurt and cottage cheese, this looked like an ideal place to start, learning to bake bread and gain some experience with cultured foods. Making a sourdough starter is surprisingly easy but time consuming in that it takes about a week from start to finish. While that sounds intimidating, the truth is it only takes a couple minutes a day. A sour dough starter is basically m

TheBar1 Homestead- From a sword to a plowshare

Search This Blog