INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 8/1/2024

What a summer! I hope that you are all making the most of this warm and wonderful season! We've kept really busy with the farmstand. More and more people are finding us and stopping in which is wonderful. It means we are needing to find new rhythms for how we harvest and manage keeping the stand stocked! It is all good stuff and those are happy problems to have!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
Why should we keep a tidy homestead?

The growth on the homestead of EVERYTHING has been crazy this year. With a wet June and a warm and humid July we have head high weeds growing all over the place. Of course we have our new mower for the skid steer so we are able to manage it to a point. There are some spots where the skid steer just can't fit. The other homestead lesson we are learning especially this year is how if you lay something down it easily disappears under the weeds. So places where we've laid boards, or tools or any other number of items have grown over, and then when we go to mow we are hitting stuff and causing issues. Keeping a tidy homestead is HARD. One project to the next, kids and animals everywhere, it can be easy to leave stuff laying around. It all of course compounds too and suddenly you look around and you've got a big mess on your hands.

Working hard to stay on top of those messes is important and speaks well to our neighbors about the lifestyle we are living. I was blessed to give a message at our church recently. I spoke on 1 Thessalonians 4 11-12, it reads, "and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.” What a great message for homesteaders! I am not going to preach to you here. But the message was to live a quiet life, work hard and mind your own business so that your neighbors would get a good appreciation for the Christian life. I think the same applies to the homesteading life. To make this life look appealing and to encourage others to be more self sufficient we need to make it look good! Easier said than done and certainly a working goal for our family!

The meat chickens arrived last week and we have them in the brooder. They are doing really well. 0 losses so far. We started with 5 turkeys and have 1 left.😞 Hopefully we can keep him alive until Thanksgiving! We've got a handful of egg layers that we hatched out that are looking good. Plus a few more in the incubator. We are trying to rebuild our egg layer flock internally. We will see how it goes! We've been picking up a lot of food from our local food shelf, last night they had a pallet of potatoes, literally 2000 lbs of potatoes in 5 lb bags. As much as I wanted to help them out and take them we would of had to compost them as the animals don't really eat them. And truthfully it was too much weight for my pickup. They also had pineapples, which filled my entire pickup bed. So the pigs will be enjoying some pineapple for the next few days!

We've got a few projects on our list before the snow flies but need to chisel out some time to make it happen. The garden and farmstand have us pretty flat out, plus we've been missing our boys for about 12 days, first on a mission trip and now on a trip with their Grandma. We love that they are getting those experiences but also look forward to them being home and helping out again!

MARKET GARDENING
Finding our rhythm…

We've been pushing hard and trying to stay on our toes through what has been a very hot stretch of weather. The tomatoes have been doing awesome. This week we've been able to keep up with demand and have had a couple days where we didn't sell out. With a little extra disease in the tunnel I am curious if we will have as long of a season as we have had in the past. People's taste for tomatoes does wane eventually! So by mid September it is kind of OK to be done with them. Lettuce is a huge crop for us and a big focus. We are planting it every week to keep up with demand and it seems to be working. The trick of course is if you miss a week or you have a crop failure it can really set you back and you may end up with a shortage a few weeks down the road.

We are now entering the phase in the year where we are planting our fall crops. For fall crops you need to get them in the ground far enough ahead of time so they put on some good growth while the weather is good. If you get them in too late they just won't grow like they should.

As I alluded to in the intro we are working hard to find a rhythm that works on the farm as far as harvest. The goal is to do harvest two times per week but... when we are selling so much Ingrid finds herself harvesting more like everyday. This means that she has less time for the other projects around the garden that need her attention. So far we are hanging on by a thread, there are things that are getting neglected (weeding) but so far we seem to be doing OK. I will say that I am speaking to items like salad greens, kale, carrots, etc as far as harvesting 2 times per week. Tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini all demand to be harvested every day! Otherwise they grow too fast and you end up with baseball bats for zucchinis.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Making use of food waste.

I can't recall if I have spoken about this before but the food waste that happens in our country is one of the more shocking things I have discovered recently. We see it through our work with the food shelf. The food shelf will buy pallets of food near expiration and give it out for free to those who need it. It is an awesome service and something I stand behind. It allows people to get fresh produce for free which is greatly needed in the diet of most people. In most cases the supply of food is larger than the population willing to take it which means there is extra food. This is where farmers come in. If you are willing to do the work to go pick up the food and feed it out to your livestock it can be an awesome tool.

We've climbed to the top of many lists because we are consistent. Of course if you say you are going to show up and then you don't the non profits are left with rotting pallets of food in their parking lots. On the farmer side the packaging side of the equation is a HUGE issue! Picture several hundred plastic clam shells with lettuce in them, then add in tiny packets of cheese, croutons, and dressing. UGH. It is a mess! Then the farmer needs to find a way to dispose of all the plastic and cardboard. Thankfully our organization lets us return the plastic and cardboard to their dumpsters.

The disturbing piece is to multiply that volume of food across the country and the world and then you get an idea of how much food is wasted in our country each day. We can do our small part of course but it is a fraction of a drop in the bucket.

On that happy note I will leave you for another week!