Sprig's road to somewhere

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

Figured I might as well start this and give myself something to update and post to over time

So we moved to a 10 acre plot in mid 2018 with our 5 kids and a few chickens. My dream was wanting to start a tree farm to sell native deciduous species to local folks and a few environmental non-profits that support our local ecosystem. I grew up a city kid and have always lived in the city, so 10 acres is a bit of a change. Part of the land was still being farmed in some agreement between a nearby farmer and the previous owners, so I let him continue for that year and then he didn't understand when I said "nope" to allowing him to farm further and still planted part of my property . He said he misunderstood where the property markers were, but whatever. I'm happy to have him off the property now.

My goal is to have an entire 400 tree pot-in-pot system running with irrigation via a 500gal cistern sourced from our well on the property. 2018 was all about just getting situated, so I moved a cyclone fence section that was still on the property and fit it to a coop that my wife bought from someone local and a friend of ours delivered with his dump trailer. Couldn't have asked for a nicer setup to begin


However, I soon learned that chickens are destructive little devils and as we let them free range around our yard they destroyed all the mulching I had done around 12 new apple trees I planted and about a dozen other blueberry plants my wife had my plant. Thus, in late summer of 2019 we finished fencing in about 10,000 sq ft for them to free range in.


However, my wife also decided to get Guinea Keets and those things are just as destructive and keep me up at night, so they're going to get eaten once we buy a defeatherer.

I built some compost bins to store all our kitchen scraps as well as all the chicken poop.


and then built a gravel bed for all my trees, at least those that I get delivered in the spring time and aren't growing from seed. 10'x20' and 2' deep filled with 14 tons of pea gravel, that I had to do by bucket.




Once that farmer got off our property I was able to begin auguring out 175 14" holes and then getting pots in them and backfilling with horse manure (wanted to add some good biomass to the soil that's been corn and bean land for who knows how long. However, with such a wet spring, and the farmer not exactly consumed with happiness regarding me it got me to a late start, which means I was still transferring trees from my bed to the pots until late October.


I was also at the same time planting my raspberries, and of course mulching with horse manure since I had recently made friends with a fella twice my age who owned a horse boarding farm and was more than happy to start up his skid loader to fill up my trailer with yards of manure. He died in November. He was funny as hell and I'm going to miss him. Always had some good one liners and told me to "get my **** and get off his property" every time. You can see in the pic the soybeans planted right up to the raspberries. That was him still planting on my land after I told him not to.


We also had our first shot at growing corn


planted hundreds of trees around the property in addition to the tree farm


and I made my first tree sale and got to deliver them by canoe


Then late in 2019 I mixed up a few hundred dollars in native prairie grass & flower seeds and spread them to 5 different sections of places I mowed to the dirt, hoping to set the stage for 2020 and beyond of restoring it all to a prairie savanna with tons of native trees and our kids running around; and probably me in a hammock somewhere with a cigar and a few beers.

My father died in late 2018. Cancer. He never got the chance to see our property. That hurt me bad. he was a woodworker/stairbuilder by trade and though I learned a lot from him I really wanted some of his help here and am sadly unable to get it. He would have liked what we were doing.

So that's it. April 2020 I sit awaiting the soil to dry a bit so I can expand my farm by 75 pots (250 total) with more irrigation lines, putting our garden plants to soil, clearing out amur maple on the property to replace with more natives and retiring the keets to stop my eye twitching

 

[frustratedearthmother]

So glad to see you start a journal! You've had an interesting start. Can't wait to hear more stories and adventures as they unfold!

 

[Daisy]

I had the same hard lesson with chickens! Waiting for my two old girls to die off and that is IT! No more chickens. Duck eggs are better anyway

Sounds like an awesome place you have set up. Goodluck, I look forward to reading more of your progress.

 

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

I had the same hard lesson with chickens! Waiting for my two old girls to die off and that is IT! No more chickens. Duck eggs are better anyway

Sounds like an awesome place you have set up. Goodluck, I look forward to reading more of your progress.

Oh I'm fine with the chickens, but those Guineas gotta go to the big soup pot in the sky.

 

[tortoise]

Oh I'm fine with the chickens, but those Guineas gotta go to the big soup pot in the sky.

My DH made a chicken plucker out of an old washing machine. Not too expensive and works good. But we settle on doing freezing chicken skinless. Our bird have been so fat it is fine. I like old chickens - 1 - 2 years old - and pressure can them.

The guinea hen market moves really fast over here in west-central WI and prices consistently high. You might just want to sell them? People love them for tick control.

 

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

My DH made a chicken plucker out of an old washing machine. Not too expensive and works good. But we settle on doing freezing chicken skinless. Our bird have been so fat it is fine. I like old chickens - 1 - 2 years old - and pressure can them.

The guinea hen market moves really fast over here in west-central WI and prices consistently high. You might just want to sell them? People love them for tick control.

My wife commented on that market. Then said "sure, if you can catch them you're welcome to them". Those guys will fly a good 30 feet up into trees and happily hang out there for hours

 

[tortoise]

yeah they're..... somethin' else. I have been debating getting guineas for years. When I want them I can't find them for sale. They're so LOUD and annoying, I might regret it.

I worked at a dog kennel that used guinea for tick control. They were trained to coop at night, but they were crazy wild most the time.

 

[SprigOfTheLivingDead]

yeah they're..... somethin' else. I have been debating getting guineas for years. When I want them I can't find them for sale. They're so LOUD and annoying, I might regret it.

I worked at a dog kennel that used guinea for tick control. They were trained to coop at night, but they were crazy wild most the time.

I can get these guys to go in our cycloned run at night, but we've lost some to coyote because they're so dumb they cant see the gate that's open. They'll be out in our yard, outside of the 10k fence, and I'll step incredibly slow towards them so as to not spook them and just make them fly and if I'm lucky one of them might run along the fencing and notice the gate being open, but a lot of times theybrun past it. Then I have to make a wide arch around them and try again from the other side. Inside the 10k fence I've literally had them just freak out and fly over the cyclone, which causes me to have to go out of the fencing, do that wide arch and try to get them back into the fencing and hopefully into the cyclone. Sometimes they'll just freak out and sit on top of the cyclone and not come down. You eventually give up, because it's 3° outside and go in angry with their stupidity.

I have no idea how somebody trained them to coop up at night.

 

[wyoDreamer]

My guineas usually return to the coop every night. But, they were trained to do that before we bought the place, they just came with the property.
Last summer we set up a cheap swimming pool next to the guinea coop. I figured that I would find dead, drowned guinea hen in the pool one day, but they stayed out of it. They sure set up a fuss when I was swimming in the evenings though, guess they wanted to go to bed.