INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 7/11/2024

I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July holiday! For us it meant lots of time at the lake… too many late nights and some fun time with family. We are nearing the half way point on the summer season and we are starting to feel the pressure of what we need to get done before the long, warm days end! Splitting wood has been creeping into my thoughts as well as a few small projects on our house.

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Burning Brush and Managing the Weeds

We have been waiting for a couple of dry days to get a large brush pile burned on the property. It was all the branches from the trees we cleared over the winter. We used a little diesel to get it started and then kept it going using the skidsteer grapple to adjust the pile. It was important to get it burned because we need the space for our annual church kickball game. 🙂 All went well and the fire burned down in about 4-5 hours. The pile of coals are still hot 10 days later!

Ingrid completed a BIG project by getting our fruit garden tidied up. The weeds, including poison ivy and thistles are just awful in the area where we have started raspberries, blueberries, grapes, elderberries and more. It is a full time job to keep up with it. She has been doing a lot of hand pulling on the poison ivy and then went through and did a big clean up with the mower. What a difference it made! Big transformation projects like that are some of my favorite. I wish I had a before picture for you!

Over the weekend we got the pigs moved into their next pen. With the hub system we’ve built it is just so easy and painless! Much easier than moving the electric netting around. I do have a few areas on the property that I may someday want to get the pigs on… that is something I have to think about, could I move them out of this system and onto other parts of our property somewhat easily. I think the answer is YES. just need to decide if it is worth the effort.

With all the rain we’ve had some slug issues in the garden, the seem to really be liking our cabbages. While we are able to sell a good number of them there were also several that Ingrid decided not to sell. Instead she brought them home and turned them into sauerkraut. Along with the cabbage she included carrots and turnips. After trying a few different “flavors” of kraut we’ve decided we like it plain the best. It is always nice to be able to make use of garden products that we can’t sell. Anything of course that we can’t use goes straight to the animals which is then turned into eggs, milk and bacon!

Elias was able to sell a few male ducks and we also sold one of our little bucklings to a nice local family. Living on a small homestead we can only handle so many animals. It is always nice to meet other homesteaders and share the animals we’ve loved.

MARKET GARDENING
Tomatoes are SOOOO Close

It has been a wet early summer in Wisconsin. A far stretch from our very dry summer seasons the last couple of years. Since June 1st we’ve had over 9 inches of rain, that is a more than 3 inches more than normal. When you contrast it with last year it is pretty shocking. In 2023 we had only 1.5” of rain in that same span. So yes it has been WET. Overall we are learning how blessed we are with our soil composition during this wet period. Our soil drains very well and the plants are doing well. We have had to battle the weeds a bit more this year but it really hasn’t been too bad. We are now moving into a dry and warm stretch of weather. I hope that we can keep the periodic rains coming, otherwise we will rely on the irrigation system we got up and running earlier this year. It has been working awesome so far!

The farmers have been sampling a few tomatoes and I think we are going to be able to get them out for sale in the next week or so. Despite getting tomatoes into the ground almost a month earlier than normal it looks like we won’t gain anytime on selling them sooner. Ideally we would be selling tomatoes as early as possible. Last year we sold our first baskets of cherry tomatoes on July 10. We’ve yet to make a basket. That is kind of wild to me but it speaks to the weather we’ve had between planting and now. Tomatoes love the sun and the heat, and while it has been warm it hasn’t been as sunny as in past years. The high tunnel really shows its stripes on hot, sunny days. So despite getting tomatoes planted a month earlier than normal we are actually behind last year in selling tomatoes. We can only control what we can control!