gardening, self-sufficiency, homesteading, food preserves diary
Blog documenting progress in transforming new property (50 acres - mostly wooded) into garden-farmette . Trying to become more self-sufficient and more self-aware.
The cherry trees in the front are blooming - the ones that survived that is. Actually, some good news on the survival front, one of the tress that I thought had died is showing signs of life! I didn't trim these trees this year in hopes that letting them go might help stabilize them a bit.
Young (2nd year) sour cherry putting on some leaves!
Sweet cherry trees are blooming up a storm!
Thought this guy was dead, but see? New leaves are coming! The top did die out though.
Garden Preperations
I tilled the front patch in its new extended form, connecting the old front patch to the new big patch. Now its all one big patch. The front portion of the patch will hold strawberries and blueberries.
I just added two "permanent" fence posts for the corners. I plan to just pound in some metal stakes to support the rest of the fencing.
Cleaned up the existing strawberry row. There was quite a bit of weeds trying to take over.
I put the fence back in place until I can get the final fence put up. Mom says that deer love strawberries so I figured I had better try to make them a little bit difficult to get to!
Tree Cages
I started putting up some more tree cages. I started with the hazelnut since I figure they are the most at risk. I used the old fencing from the big garden for a lot of these but I still had to use some new fencing. I will need to buy more fencing! I got all of the hazelnuts caged. I also found another stash of old fencing that I will use first before any new fencing. I also caged the new pecan trees.
I mowed this area too - it was still fairly wet as you can tell from the mower wheel marks.
Hazelnuts
Speaking of hazelnuts, the "old" hazelnuts are well into coming out! I wonder if they get nuts on this year?
Birds nest
I found this bird nest right on my fastener shelf! Even has eggs in it. Damn bird. Turns out to be a house wren, so I want to leave it alone. Sigh. Stupid birds!
I have seen her sitting on these eggs. I try not to get too close, but its near where most of the stuff I need is!
Table-saw pusher
I was watching you-tube videos and noticed someone using this type of pusher. Then I realized I didn't have one like this, so I made one out of some of the scrap locust. I just eyeballed the design - sketched it onto piece of wood and then traced the handle from a hand-plane. Then I used the little band-saw to cut it out. I used the big belt sander to smooth most of the edges and the little belt sander to get into inside curves. I discovered I needed some new sandpaper for the little belt sander! I ordered some more from ebay as well as a new small belt sander!
I think it turned out pretty nice for about 30 mins of work!
More plane-blade sharpening
I continued to put my new wide blade tool to good use sharpening the wide hand-plane blades. It takes a long time - so much more metal on these big blades! I really like the new sharpening jig though. I also attached the honing wheel and polished up the blade to razor sharp!
I also read about how far back to put the chip-breaker on this type of plane. Basically, if you want big chips, pull the chip breaker far back. If you want fine chips (ribbon thin) put the chip breaker about half a mm from the edge of the blade. The chip breaker itself should have a clean edge - maybe run it through sharpening process to be sure (don't sharpen so much as put a clean edge on it!)
I put the micro-bevel on using the finest grit wheel that I have (I think its 3000). Then polished it with green chromium polish on a leather wheel. Mirror finish!
Amaryllis still going crazy!
These flowers are doing great things this year! Beautiful!
Big snow-storm over past week. Well, not really that big it turned out. Only about 4-5 inches in Silver Spring. Had about 12 inches at the farm (I wasn't there at the time). I got notified by email that my tree shipment from Cold stream Farm was on its way and should arrive Wednesday! I had it shipped directly to farm for some reason. I got on the UPS website and delayed the delivery until Thursday (I actually meant to delay it until Friday).
First wave of the 2017 tree order is in!
Just in time for the snow! As I said above< i was able to delay it, but I really don't want to delay too long before planting. Fortunately the weather removed most of the snow by Saturday and I was able to get 25 Osage Orange, 25 Black Walnut, 25 Gingko Biloba, 25 filbert (hazelnut), and 4 pecan trees planted! I got 1-2' trees because they were cheaper and small trees transplant better in the long run (it does take them a couple more years to get to size though). Here are some pictures, although the trees are hard to see since they are small - heck, even the orange surveyor flags are hard see!
Here are the filberts (hazelnuts)
Hazelnuts, see the orange flags?
They are there!
A little easier to see in this picture
Here you can kind of see the row of flags for the osage orange along the road. If you look to the left there is also a longer row of gingko!
The row of Osage Orange didn't quite reach as far as I wanted (I planted them 10feet apart) so I ordered another 10 Osage Orange to fill in the space. I would have liked to plant the 30 choke cherry and 25 choke berry trees too, but that area of the property was just a big mud puddle!
You would sink 8 inches into that mud! (I know - I tried it earlier!)
Chisel sharpening
While waiting for the snow to melt down I worked on sharpening my "new" chisels. I had planed on doing the sharpening by hand, but after doing a couple I decided that was not going to work for me. So I did some research and decided to buy a WorkSharp WS3000. After watching some youtube videos of others using it I gave it a shot. I did read that you could use any grinder paper that you want on the glass disks and since the roughest they provided was 120 grit I went out to the shop and found some 80 grit so I could grind the horrible edges off faster! Some of these I must have taken an 8th inch of metal off! Well, maybe a 16th. Still, it was a lot of grinding.
It is a reasonable size machine - actually fairly sturdy considering it cost about $180
Notice that this edge looks "un-square"? It is because of the uneven belt-grinding I did, not a flatness or out-of-square issue.
I put a micro-bevel on each as advised by the manual. Even though I only took them to 1000 they are sharp enough to shave! I haven't decided if I will strop these or not.
Most of these are quite useable!
They cleaned up nicely!
I used a belt-grinder out in the shop to clean off the rust and grime. I did it freehand so some of the edges aren't as crisp as they could be. Although, some were not so crisp when I started!
Some of the filings from the considerable grinding my chisels needed.
My setup. Too cold to go out and do this in the shop. It takes a while!
We are not sure what the final yield is - somewhere around 25-26 gallons we think!.
Probably the last major picking of elderberries this season
Last picking for the weekend. Didn't even fill the small bucket!
Potato picking!
Wasn't right on my birthday - but it was close! I picked up the potato plow I had ordered at TSC. After mowing the last bit of tall field grass I took the flail mower off the tractor an put on the plow!
LAst bit of mowing one before I remove the flail mower and put on the potato plow
Because there was so many weeds the plow did tend to lift. When it lifted it would cut up a bunch of taters! None-the-less, it was a heck of a lot easier and faster then digging by hand!
Dirty taters fresh from the harvest. This pick includes the ones I picked own at the city house
Washed, cured and sorted to remove damaged ones
Damaged potatoes will get used first - thinking of FDing some mashed taters!
More berry picking
Strawberries and blackberries are still producing. We got a few.
Blackberries are slowing down. Probably get a few next weekend too.
Some lathe work for friend
A friend of mine at work is creating a animatronic tree for halloween. He needed a couple of shafts turned down to fit some flange bearings. It has been awhile, but I got things running pretty quick. Unfortunately I only did one of the shafts! I will take care of the other next weekend.
Video of the process.
Trimming around hazelnuts
While mowing I noticed that the hazelnut trees where getting a bit overwhelmed with grass and weeds, so I cleaned them up.
Some of these still look pretty rough. I hope they all survive the winter.
I will try to make enough wood chips to help them out.
Trimmed around some of the elderberry plants too
Again, while mowing, I saw some plants getting overwhelmed by weeds so I made a point to trim around these elderberries.
The deer ate most all of the leaves off of several of these plants! I guess this is payback for putting the electric fence around the beans!
Parrot Tree survives!
This is the tree that Tom and Julie gave to me to plant during the weekend of the reunion. It was a bad time to plant, but since this tree is supposely a native to Iran (Iraq?) we figured maybe it would handle this heat and drought. It initially looked like it died, but here I see some new green growth! Notice that some of the new growth seems to have been eaten! Not sure if deer or bugs. I might have to put a cage around it if its deer.
Several new branches of green!
Squash and corn harvest
More summer squash came in - so Katherine will be happy! Also, a lot of the corn was ready. I grabbed several ears and decided that I needed to go get a bushel basket!
We decided to try freeze-drying the corn to see how it turns out. Also, we still have plenty of frozen corn from the previous couple years harvests and we just don't want to fill up the freezer!
The corn is under the cabbages
I had two full trays go into the dryer! I filled the trays to the brim (note that this tray is not full).
I figure I got about 5-6 pints of corn. Not bad for the crappy time I had with corn this year!
Tomatoes are ripening
The tomatoes that I planted are finally starting to ripen. I harvest mostly romas, a few others were starting to blush. I also de-weeded a bunch of the tomatoes and found a tomato worm! I sprayed with sevin.
I put most of these tomatoes in the freeze-dryer with the corn. I saved a few out to make tomato gravy for over some of the new taters!
I noticed that some of the vines were partially eaten, so I looked around and finally found the culprit! (there is a worm dead center of this picture - look carefully!). I applied some sevin to the tomato plants. I hated to do it - but these worms can destroy harvest fast!
Sweetpotatoes
Woohoo - they are blooming! I am very hopeful to get a good yield of them this year. I love them and they are a very good food.
Winter squash
I also noticed that some of the winter squash plants has little squashes on them!
