Feed Your Soil, Feed Your Plants | Homestead Vlog | February 7, 2024

Hey y'all, it's Megan. Welcome back to the channel. Glad y'all are here today. I want to apologize ahead of time once again for the wind noise that you may or may not hear today. The wind's been blowing like almost every day here y'all. So anyway, today what we're doing, we're going to compost around all of our fruit trees. That's just something we do this time of year for the health of the trees. But first, I want to show you our compost pile. If you're new to the channel, you may not know how we compost, so I want to show you what we do here. That's right, don't touch that wire. So let me get over here where I can show y'all. So in here, we call this our sacrifice pasture. And come probably the end of the month, all the cows and horses will be put up in this little small area here and give the grass time to grow and recover. We let the animals do the compost and forage for the most part. So to y'all, this may look like so much wasted hay. Well, it's not wasted. It is in a sense that once it gets stepped on and everything, the animals won't really eat it. But this hay with the trampling of the cows and the horses and the manure that's going to be concentrated on it, especially once we put them up and they're walking all over it, it makes excellent compost. What you see here in this pile, that is from last year. So once summer comes and this area dries up real good, we come in and Andy scoops it up with the front end loader on the tractor and flips it several times. I mean, it gets hot. It does the whole nine yards. And y'all, you're talking about growing something now. This stuff right here is excellent. That is black gold. Doing our hay this way keeps it from being so muddy in here because if this hay wasn't in here, especially all the rain we've had, they would be walking in a muddy mess. We still got some muddy spots. You can see right there going into the building. It gets pretty muddy. But when they're put up in here, they're not laying in mud. They've got plenty of hay to lay in. So that's just a little bit about how we compost. Now we got to get this around these trees. I'm actually going to rake back these leaves. These leaves are what I'm going to use for the mulch. I'm just going to put me down a little layer of compost and I'm going to cover back up with the leaves. But it's amazing, just under the leaves of the earthworms, how they went to works. Look at this. There's there, there. I guess the rest of them are done. Right there's one. So I ain't going to disturb it too much. Just want to rake back basically what's on top, the dry stuff. Then we'll throw that back over top of the compost. And the rest of them, we're just going to compost around and then go back with some mulch. This happens to be a pile of leaves that I dumped here back in the fall, I guess. Right there's something coming up. I believe that's the comfrey. Yeah, I think so. Right there's something too. Daffodils. Daffodils and the comfrey should push through all of this. It don't matter if you're getting covered up. Watch some good looking stuff there. You'll notice that I'm not putting anything around the very base of the trunk. You want to leave that, like I said back in the pruning video, what I'm doing is I'm keeping everything away from the very base of the trunk down there. You want to keep that, we can actually throw that away. You want to keep that right there uncovered. You don't want to pile your mulch or your compost or anything directly against the trunk. Cover them up. There's a sign of spring. That's the one you were talking about? Yeah. Okay. All right, that tree's all ready for spring. So this was actually a, I think it got asked a couple of times in the comments during our pruning video, what do we do about fertilizing the apple trees and the fruit trees? And I believe we've had a couple of comments on the Facebook page about it as well. So that's why we wanted to make a video showing you. Matter of fact, several years ago, we didn't do anything to fertilize them. We just put them in the ground and put us a good layer of mulch around them and let it be. And that mulch would always break down, I guess, and like turn into compost. But the last couple of years we've decided to do this and it seems to really help. You know, it helps, anything you can do to help feed the soil will help feed your plants. So let's get on down here to the rest of them and see if we can't knock this peach trees. You can see we didn't do these three right down the middle and we are going to move those. We were just talking about it. We may put them right across here, right across the top side here. I'm just always afraid they're in the way for right there because I might, I don't know, I'm just scared they're going to be in the way. But we are going to find somewhere to move those three to. We just don't know where it is. But the rest of the trees are dressed with compost. I know this looks a little high and deep and everything, but you give this a month or so and it'll all be settled down. We're going to go back over top of this and just put us a light layer of mulch just to help hold the moisture in and keep the weeds from coming up in this compost. We've actually already composted our blueberries across over there on the other hill. We did those back in the fall like we should have done these apples, but we just didn't have time to do it. So here it is, a beautiful day. We're trying to get some stuff done. So let's go get us some mulch. I think I'll just carry it down here on the bucket of the tractor instead of putting it on the trailer. And we'll, we've hopefully got enough. We may not have enough to do these trees. That's why I say we're going to put a light layer. Let's see what we can do and see if we can't get them done. So the mulch you see us using here probably to y'all don't look much different than the compost we just had, but this is just pretty much aged wood chips that have been sitting for, these have been sitting now for probably at least a year. Once they dry out, they'll look a lot That's the position she likes to stay in. I'm a good supervisor. Holding the shovel up. Nah, y'all know I'm just kidding about that. I want to show you what you want the finished product to look like here. You kind of want to see a doughnut. So you want a hole in the middle right against the trunk of the tree and then just a good size ring around the tree. And I'll tell you too, the bigger the tree, the bigger you really want your mulch ring. In all honesty, this mulch ring right here should probably come out another foot or so, but being that we're running short on mulch, we're not going to really worry about that today. But the right way is to have the mulch ring out at least halfway from where your branches go across the tree. So if your branches come out 10 foot on each side of the tree, well then you want your mulch ring to come out five foot. And it's just basically keeping those roots covered. Grass also acts as mulch too. You just don't want bare ground on it. Yeah, you're feeding the roots and you're keeping those roots moist. So we got them all done. There's nothing else that looks pretty and it keeps your mower away from the base of your trees. I really hope we get some new apples this year. Hopefully we will. We got what, maybe 10 last year maybe? Yeah, but our trees are still way too young to really be producing. We shouldn't have really let them have them apples. That's true. But we did. Yeah, they shouldn't have produced last year. We should have pulled the apples off, we kind of just was anxious and wanted to see what they did, so we left them alone. But as y'all know, we still have the fruit trees up the road to do. We've still got those two cherry trees over there in the yard to do, but this is about all we've got time for today. And we got several warm days coming up, so I betcha we won't get no peaches this year. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if our peach trees start to bloom. Let's actually go look. They do look a little fuzzy. They're starting to swell. That's no good. And all week long it's supposed to be warm, so yeah. If it comes another cold spell after this, we probably won't get any peaches. Happens every year. Happens every single year. Except for one. One time we got lucky, and frost bit it then, but I don't know how we got peaches that year. It was a miracle. Somehow or another, those buds survived that frost we had. But it just is what it is. They're pretty when they bloom. That's right. Yeah, they're a pretty tree to look at when they bloom. They really are. And truthfully, when they bloom and they do end up getting loaded with peaches, what you should really do is pull about half of them off, because a peach tree will just overload itself with peaches. Like every single one of those buds will try to grow a peach. Yeah, and that's how this one right here broke before. If we had done what we were supposed to and pulled about half of them off, then the peaches we made would have been bigger and we wouldn't have had a broke tree. But you know what? It was so good that year. Me and the kids would come out here and it would be hot, and you walk down here and just get you a peach. Oh my gosh. They were good. They were very good peaches. Yeah. Making my mouth water thinking about them. That's a good snack. Get you a peach, and walk down there and get you a handful of blackberries, and you didn't even have to drink no water. No. Yeah, you got all the snacks you need right here when they're coming in. If they come in. If they come in. Well y'all, we hope you enjoyed this video. Maybe it'll inspire you to get out and get your fruit trees mulched. You know, if you've got that much compost to spare, put some compost around them, but if nothing else, they really do need to be mulched. And the mulch will turn into compost. It does, yes. You can dig down in the mulch here from years past, and it's some really nice looking stuff. And the great thing about doing this is after you've got you some good compost and everything around these fruit trees, well, you just created all these little beds to grow more stuff in while the fruit tree is still young. Now, if the tree is full grown and shaded out, it probably wouldn't do good. We had a bunch of onions down here around the mulch. We grew onions. I think that's all we grew down here last year. We've got a few herbs planted around some of the base of these trees. So anyways, like I said, that just gives you more growing space to grow. But anyways, guys, we hope you enjoyed it until we see you on the next one. Y'all have a good one.