At Last...

What a winter we had out here in the sticks!  I know we haven't updated in quite a while so I'll try to catch up a bit.  We are certainly glad to see the four foot drifts slowly sink away and leave the ground bare once again. Living in the middle of a corn field is fantastic... when there's corn.  In winter we are left with no windbreak for half a mile around, and the results are pretty impressive.  The drift I am standing on is easily chest high if I were standing next to the water jug at the bottom.

During the coldest week of January we somehow managed to have 10 rabbits born and all survived!   We were terrified and amazed at the same time during that week.  Our does are wonderful mothers.

In March we welcomed a new puppy home, her name is Misty and she's WAY faster than she looks. She enjoys chasing pretty much anything, which is why she came with 3 legs :)

Misty's newest friends are 4 chickens, 2 ducks and 4 turkeys.  She absolutely adores them and won't stop staring at them intently.  We inherited a coop and all the supplies from a super nice friend of ours who hasn't had chickens in years.  

We are on our second litters of the year already with our meat rabbits.  We were super nervous about the butchering process at first, but it gets much easier with practice.  I won't get too detailed but if anyone did want to know more all they'd have to do is ask! We currently have 12 bunnies out there about 5 weeks old.  They have turned out to be a lot of fun to raise and a delicious source of fresh meat.  Along with venison we don't need to buy any meat and it's fantastic.

 About two weeks ago we transplanted 40 black raspberry plants from the gnarl on the side of the shed to a nice patch out in the open.  We will be trellising them so that they are easier to access and I hope to kill the grass using cardboard and mulch around the whole thing.  We will also be adding a couple of grape vines a friend gave me and the two blueberry plants I got from Geoff for our 3 year anniversary.  The picture on the right is the way I decided I was going to attempt to grow strawberries this year.  Having seen elaborate build-it-yourself planter boxes, rain gutters brimming with berries and PVC pipe planters I was stumped about what my best option was.  Then I thought, forget going to great lengths to acquire materials and build all this junk. I'll just use some of that mound of drain pipe in the back yard.  So here we are, I hope that they hang down the sides the same way that the rain gutters full of berries do!

The hops have been up and putting on tiny leaves for quite some time now.  This year will be the first year that we get a full harvest from them and we couldn't be more excited about all the beer we get to brew with them.

The progress in the greenhouse is great!  So far we have been eating fresh spinach and lettuce with peas, radishes, cilantro, and garlic coming on fast.  I have white clover taking over everything but I'm not too mad about it.

<-- Garlic

Oh! and some of the most exciting things in my opinion are the four hives of bees we installed this spring!  I am just learning beekeeping but so far it is one of the coolest things I have ever experienced.

Planting season is getting underway at the farm so we will be working hard between Geoff's farming job, erecting the chicken coop, tilling and planting our own garden and green forages for the bees and rabbits.  We seem to take on more and more... it's super rewarding seeing how much we can accomplish :)

A Blur of a Summer!

I went back and read the last post to see where I needed to start and started laughing at how much has happened since then!  There has been no end to the work that has happened this summer.  So where to start...

Everyone says not expect the hops to produce any cones the first year, but lo and behold there they were!  This past week we harvested about 4-5 lbs of hops, primarily cascade variety.  We are super excited to start brewing with our own homegrown hops.  Many of the beers we brewed this summer were made with homegrown ingredients, but it's really cool to take control of another of our inputs.  The list of beers we have made with homegrown ingredients is quickly growing and includes two dandelion beers, a honey basil ale, and a chocolate raspberry porter which is amazing!  We also tried our hands at mead making with a blueberry melomel, but we won't know how that turned out for a couple years...

Geoff loves tending the hops!

Here's a picture of the first attempt at setting up our new pool, we found out when they say put it on level ground they mean it!  I just thought it was a nice picture of the barn :)  The pool is now set up by the house on the only flat piece of ground we have.  Now if we could just get some heat!

Last month I bought a breeding pair of New Zeeland rabbits at the small animal exchange in St. Louis.  I built the cages myself in a morning, winding up with a nickel sized blister right in the palm of my right hand.  It was awful, but bunnies needed a home.  Next month we will start breeding them and growing their offspring for meat.  I hope to get a few more added to the breeding stock soon.  We will be setting up the 20 cages I picked up yesterday in the barn and starting a rabbitry!  This is Mars, named after the God Mars, who was the God of War, but also a guardian of agriculture!  Venus is our doe, you can see her in the background of one of these pictures.  She was named after Venus the goddess of love, fertility and prosperity.  We are very excited to have another meat source that we have direct control of, even if we are terrified of butchering the first batch.  The garden and hops will be enjoying some awesome fertilizer from them too!

This squash plant is a volunteer from the compost pile and is by far the biggest and best producing squash plant we have, go figure.

The first year of gardening has taught us to space things out a lot more!  Seems like the instructions on spacing we read were pretty bogus, we can hardly walk through the growth in there!  It is looking really good though and we are getting plenty of food!  I've been putting up frozen broccoli, zucchini, and pesto and canning pickles, jalapenos, and salsa. The tomatoes are starting to ripen very quickly, I'm a little scared of when the heavy harvest starts, we only have 30 or 40 tomato plants...  We also fenced the entire garden against the darn critters out here, it's been really nice having the fence up.

Green Brandywine tomatoes

Jalapeno peppers

Broccoli, still producing really nicely in this cool weather we've had this summer

Moskvich tomatoes, these aren't doing so well.  As they ripen they're tending to have blossom end rot, so I've chucked a lot of them.

Melons!

My dill is getting enormous!

Here's a harvest I picked one day a couple of weeks ago.  I'm starting to have a lot of work on my hands to take care of all this food!

Last week we visited Traverse City for vacation and had a blast.  We got to go to several microbreweries that we love, and also saw many many hops growing on the peninsula!    It was one of the best vacations yet!  Special thanks to our friend Mason for putting us up and putting up with us!

Lots and Lots of Work!

Since my last post we have made a lot of progress on the farm...  Hippity Hop Farm is officially born!
We were able to acquire two telephone poles from Geoff's boss, who also let us use the backhoe to put them in!  Thanks Ben!
Here are the photos of us putting up the hop poles a few weeks ago:

That's Geoff in the backhoe digging the first of the holes for the posts to go into.

In goes the pole!

So proud of his work!

Filling in the hole...

Surveying the glory of the poles.  There are three in all to support a 60 foot row of hop plants.

We then measured out our spacing and made a trench to plant the rhizomes in.

Covering up the rhizomes...

Our finished row!  We planted 22 hop rhizomes this year, Tettnang, East Kent Goldings and Cascade hops.

Here they are coming up the next week!

And here we have a hop plant that is about 2-3 weeks past planting date.  As of this morning we had 20/22 emerged! We are relieved they're doing well since the roots lived in the refrigerator so long they started to mold a little.

This week we will receive our order from FarmTek with all of the hardware we need to set up the trellises.  We're so looking forward to having all the infrastructure in place!

We used the backhoe on the same day we put up the hop poles to take out the sod in the new garden area.  Then we hauled two truckloads of bunny manure over and unloaded it on the garden (by hand, oof).  We planted all of the seeds the weekend after the hops went in.  So far we have a little friend who likes to dig up the onions at night... we plan to fence him out ASAP but otherwise the garden is going pretty well.

Sweet corn coming up last week, it is now all up in rows and growing quickly from all the rain we have had!

Our black beans were some of the first things to come up as well, and we now have almost a full row.  The purple beans came up a little later.

The plants in the greenhouse are getting lots of fresh air since we took the cover off the greenhouse a few weeks ago.  It was getting way too hot in there to keep it cool during the day.

We have been eating fresh peas for a week or so now.  The pea plants are as tall as I am almost!

I'm on my third harvest of radishes already, they're so pretty.  I used a tri-colored seed mix from Johnny's for these and I love them!

My giant sea of broccoli plants... I think I may have put them too close together!  They're just starting to form heads this week.  Some critter is eating up all the leaves on these.  Hopefully the fence going up will help.

I found out that I planted way too much lettuce, we are eating salad every day and barely staying ahead of these rows!

Brandywine tomato plant that was transplanted to the greenhouse in late April.  I probably should slap a cage on that!

We have found out very quickly how much work it is to start up a hobby farm!  We have been doing an unbelievable amount of work trying to get everything going.  Up above is a view of the farm from the road, you can see the hop poles in the back to the left of the barn.  The greenhouse and garden are right in front of those.  Upcoming projects, we've got lots!  We plan to re-roof the shed in front of the barn, fence the garden and greenhouse (working on that now), trellis the hops, and start raising meat rabbits!  I'd say we have a busy summer ahead of us... 

Spring Done Sprung

Over the last few months we have been busy brewing a lot of beer!  Since January 1st we have made somewhere around 50 gallons of beer in 10 different batches...  Geoff and I have been really enjoying this hobby, and of course it's benefits (as much beer as we could possibly drink/give away).  Visitors to our house are never wanting for something to drink either, so if you'd like to come visit you know we'd take great care of you ;)  The current brew list includes vanilla java porter, ginger rye ale, chai milk stout, pumpkin pie ale, and soon there will be hazelnut milk stout, cinnamon apple wheat, and a very hoppy pale ale.

Last month we purchased 22 hop rhizomes and are working on getting our hop trellises up!  Hopefully that happens very soon, we are losing time!  Geoff has been working a lot with planting, and I haven't quite figured out how to put in a telephone pole on my own so... we've been a bit delayed.

The greenhouse has become my favorite thing to work on while Geoff is working away from home.  I've been eating some delicious greens out of there for a few weeks now and I was able to harvest a handful of radishes also.  The plants are doing great so far!

This is the garlic, which was the first thing I planted in the greenhouse last fall.  It is waist high on me and getting close to harvest time!  

A sideways shot of the second planting of radishes, there are two more rows planted this week also that aren't up yet.

I don't get why these photos keep being sideways... but OK.  A bunch of the multiplier onions my mom gave us last fall.  

The micro greens mix we've been eating for a month now, still going strong!

Carrots I planted months ago that I thought were lost forever started coming up last week!

My beautiful broccoli plants.  The first bunch I transplanted froze in early April, so I started a bunch more from seed and they all made it!

Snap peas on their trellis are growing very fast!

Recently transplanted brandywine tomatoes, the first transplants froze last week because I was dumb and didn't cover them...

Newly potted basil plants have been living in the hoop house this week since the weather has been warm enough at night.   We will be making oodles of pesto this summer :)

The lone rosemary plant.

Tiny lettuce planted about two weeks ago.

Recently transplanted pepper plant, I only put out two as an experiment...

I'm hoping to get the outdoor garden in in the next couple of weeks... I already feel behind.  The busy time of year is coming up, let's hope the next time I update I'll have a great looking garden!  The plastic has to come off the hoop house pretty soon too, it's getting pretty hot in there during the day now.  

We are toying with the idea of a summer brew party at our place this summer, maybe end of July?  We will have plenty of home brew, venison, and home grown veggies to go around :)  A band would be a great addition and we're working on that.  People would be welcome to come out on a Saturday and camp out, we have plenty of space!  If you're interested in something like this let us know!