Mackay's Back To The Land Project- The Fruits of Our Labor

[lupinfarm]

lol Well we're badddd, we have horses on about 5 acres At the house I have chickens for eggs, we've got ducks for eggs (and the entertainment), goats, and a decent sized garden (raised beds) and last year we started an orchard. There is quite a bit of land still that we haven't used. Most of our land is infront of us, and some of it is on the rocky side since we're on the edge of the Canadian Shield (exposed rock).

Hoping to have some veggies of our own this coming year! So you can do quite a lot on 8 acres, you can be quite self-sufficient on even less

 

[Henrietta23]

Wow! What a gorgeous picture. And it does look cold. I have the strangest craving for salmon all of a sudden too...

 

[Mackay]

Well spring has almost sprung. We are now getting warm days intermingled with high winds and below freezing. On the the good days we head outside to see where we can start to create all the dreams of garden and fields the winter has brought to us.

DH has been busy building me garden beds and I now have two 12 x4 and two 4 x4 that raise up 18 inches. We had to put 1/2 inch wire mesh on the bottom to keep the volls out. I decided to attempt lasagna gardening and have started constructing the beds filling. First a layer of cardboard, then dried leaves, the staw, t and about one wheel barrow of composted soil just to hold the straw in place until I am ready to do the next layer.. wet it all down

Also, I have taken on experimentation in bokashi composting and gardening.... we shall see what we shall see, but if it is anything like what my neighbors have produced with gardening building great soil has been cut from 3 to 5 years down to less than an year.

Today I got a bail of green alfalfa and this will be my next layer but the trees arrived so it will have to be put off for a few days.

i dream of my grandchildren and great grandchildren havesting off of the woodlot that my husband and I are creating

We ordered about 80 trees and decided to put them in pots and have a nursery for about 2 years. In this time they will be easier to water and hopefully in about two years our watering system will be more developed.

I ordered from the University of Utah as recommended to me here in these pages. The trees look very health and a two dollars a piece we ended up ordering 80! What a mistake! My back is killing me from potting 40 of them today.... guess you get out of shape sitting by the fire all winter reading books. Hope I feel better tomorrow to finish up.

we ordered 20 ponderosa pine, 5 bur oak, 5 black cherry, 20 apens, 20 populars, and 10 purple flowering sage... not that we don't have enough sage here. I was hoping it would be a differernt variety, more fragrant with a prettier flower and leaf and I may have done well... I'll know more tomorrow when I plant them.

DH has been working on the house design and I am so pleased with how it is comming out. I am actually going to get a large bathroom with room for an ozone sauna and a glass door out to the back yard where the hot tub will be. The bathroom may actually large enough to set a massage table up in.... cant' wait.

The upstairs will have a loft or two for grandkids that haven't even been born yet to romp in and two decks to the outside. Dh is doing most of the construction himself with help from sons now and then and a long time friend, Bruce, which he designed a house for 35 years ago now.... it is a cool house and ours won't be terribly different.... the sunroom has worked well for them and we will replicate it with modifications in our house.

I am so tired and my back aches from work today and still dinner to do, and already its almost 9pm. Neighbors warned me of this... once it gets nice enough dinner gets put off and put off,, especially if you have no kids to feed

 

[Ldychef2k]

You are such an inspiration. I am grateful for your updates, and think of you and your husband out there in the wild quite frequently.

 

[TanksHill]

Wow, sounds like things are coming along nicely. Except for your back. I strained mine last week as well. Working in the yard. Seems we just go to mush in the winter. Your new home sounds great. Loft, decks, sun room and a sauna!!! Wow, I am very excited for you.

I am sure your trees will be will appreciated by the future generations to come. I will thank you now.

You mentioned a different type of composting called Bokashi. Could you tell us more about this? Sounds interesting.

Great to hear from you.

gina

 

[Mackay]

Sure! The bokashi I'm pretty excited about. Its a process for composting that I think was invented in Japan..Some of my neighbors are doing it and they can get a compost pile to cook almost instantly with it..

One neighbor used it in her raised beds last year and report is she had the best garden around.. She did lasagna method with bokashi. We went over to look at her beds about 4 weeks ago. Now its still pretty cold around here and she had not added anything like compost materials to her beds all winter but she did have them covered with plastic. She pulled the plastic off and they were warm with traces of steam coming off of them. When you reach into the soild it was rich and black and felt like an expensive potting soil from the nursery, but all obtained by layerd methods and bokashi.

So I went home and looked into bokashi.... I don't know what I would do without this internet! really a doorway into every crevice of life and learning..

I found several sites on the topic and most of them explain how to do the bokashi method which is based on putting a serum into your compost to ferment it. The main microbe involved is acidolophis, that is lactobacillis, yes, just like yogurt and there is even a way to make this stuff off of yogurt whey.

These websites also sell the serum to get you going.. its called EM... and there are several youtube videos on it too... but my neighbor directed me to one website www.bokashicomposting.com which tells you how to make your own serum so I am in the midde of that. She also gave me some activated newspapers to get my compost bucket started so I am on my way..

I do recommend that you look for other websites aside from the one I gave you as they are quite informative..... and then one I gave you... they have the procedure for making it on there backwards... you have to find the starting point of washing the rice and making the first step. I ended up cutting and pasting it into a file in the correct order.

 

[TanksHill]

Wow, that sounds really interesting. And makes a ton of sense. I will definitely have to look into it further.

I know what you mean about the Internet. It is an amazing thing to have such a wealth of knowledge right at out finger tips.

Thanks, gina

 

[Mackay]

I just got a mother's day call from Son #1. He is coming up for a visit on Tuesday!!!!
:

Being away from the kids has been the hardest part of moving to the country. He sounds well though. Got to go get the camper ready for him... when we moved out of the camper in December I barely went back in.

Bread to bake, make favorite spaghetti, make favoirte dishes to send home with him for his brother.... finish painiting the walls, plan a fishing trip,

5 glorious days he will be here. Now. How to get son #2 up here
:/

 

[kcsunshine]

Lucky you. Visits from the kids are nice.

 

[Mackay]

Son #1 came and went. It was great to see him and he and his dad got a lot done. I've spent the whole winter starring at "Johns Manville Formaldahyde Free" insulation in the rafters. Now the ceiling is covered with beautiful cedar planks... and they got the ponds leveled out on the edges, they were really busy, and son #1 is a pleasure to watch side by side with his dad.

.......and I was glad to hear that he is continuing with his schooling this summer and plans to graduate next spring from the U with a major in business. Seems Obama is going be sending him some cold hard cash to make it happen.

Spring is long and drawn out. We had snow a couple of times this week, nothing that stuck to the ground but kind of depressing. I have been working on my garden beds. Ive been reading about lasagna gardening and Ruth Stout and biodynamic gardening as per Rudolph Steiner all winter and I'm ready and rearing to go but the temperatures say not yet.

I am in the process of filling my beds right now. They are 18 inches tall. Placed cardboard on the bottom to keep weeds from coming up. layer of staw, layer of leaves. few shovel fulls of dirt so it would not blow away till I was ready for the next layer.. Then a
layer of homemade compost, layer of alfalfa hay, and this is an important layer as it is the high nitrogen source for the mix

I repeated a layer of leaves and more compost. Now its ready for the final layer which will be top soil mixed with this magic valley compost stuff my husband purchased to fertilize our pasture. It dairy cow composted manure. But only about two inches of that, mixed up.

We have been tracking the price of building supples and things are so high right now, but have been coming down over the past month... so we decided to take a chance and start the foundation, as the price of cement is steady. If we can manage to get the framining up and sides up I think we will stock pile other supplies inside as the market allows ........right now it costs almost 2 as much to build a house as when we planned a year and a half ago.

meanwhile we have our field all cleared and we spent a couple of grueling days picking rocks out of it...only for our neighbor to announce that frost heaves will pull more up. Don't know if he was trying to be helpful or make us feel stupid....but it looks a lot better now and I figure we will get better pasture without rocks on top.

our tree seedlings came from Idaho University at Moscow, and we decided to nursery them for a couple of years. We have so many volls that we need to learn to contend with first. So I spent a week getting them all in pots. about 70 of them... and live and learn, we purchased 4 gallon pots on the net for this and come to find out we could have used 1 gallon.... lots of unneeded work and expense. but hey! have we got great pots now!
seedlings we have :

20 ponderosa
5 cherry
5 burr oak
15 populars
20 aspen
5 freebies of some kind of cherry bush I didn't order

Larger trees ready to go in:
1 self pollenating plum
cherry
2 autumn blaze maples
4 large aspens
1 self pollenating apricot
2 apple
2 current bushes in full blossem (hope they make it)
1 lilac



The house is just about fully designed now. We decided to cut back to our original plans when we saw what was happening with prices. It will be 1500 sqft.... small kitchen but large utility, and a root cellar under the stairs with entry from the outside... sunroom cut down to 20 feet long instead of 30 but still big enough to start plants in I'm sure and then a loft for all those grandkids we don't have, and better not have yet!