A Crazy Busy Week on the Homestead Repairs Gardening Bee Swarms More

Hi friends, welcome to the farm. In this video we're going to share what we did on a busy week on the farm. On a lot of homestead videos, and even a lot of our videos, we tend to focus on one project, one thing that is going on, but I think it kind of misleads you. It doesn't really give you a sense of what it's like to live on a farm or homestead. Our days aren't like that, are they? No, you have to be ready every day for something different, different things that need done or different things that just pop up out of nowhere. I mean, we have a framework for the day that we expect certain things to happen at times, and then we have, you know, special things that we need to do depending on the season. Like, when you first get up in the morning, what's your morning? I have my routine in the morning. I take care of Ruby, get her breakfast, and take her out to go potty, and I do the chickens. I let them out and give them a special breakfast in the morning, and then in the summertime I head out to the tunnel because I have to open the tunnel and turn on the irrigation. Yep, and then when I get up, I get out, head out to the cows in the barn, and I feed them, make sure they have water and everything's working fine, and then we kind of split duties for preparing breakfast. So, oftentimes you'll ask me, is the chef on duty today? I love his scrambled eggs. He makes the best scrambled eggs. Yeah, and then she has a terrific egg casserole that she makes. I've done videos about that, but it's so handy in the morning. Just, all you need is a plate. That's the only dirty dish you have then, a plate. Microwave the egg casserole, eat breakfast, maybe an English muffin on the side. There you go, one plate. But some days it doesn't even get through breakfast before changes happen, does it? No. So, earlier this week we had a glitch. I went out, opened the tunnel, turned on the hydrant to irrigate, no water. So, of course, I give Donnie a call. We have a problem. What do I do? You call the complaint department. And he took care of it. Yeah. What'd you do? Well, first I just made sure that we had powered and flip a breaker, and then we had to go down into the well pit. Which is a place I'm never going to go. No, one of us has to go down into the well pit. There's a lot of spiders. Yeah, so I cleared out the entrance, went down in and looked, and I saw that there was a fault on the screen, the computer screen. So, I reset it and then hit the manual start, and it got going. Well, we had water, and the day then went smoothly. But when you start off the day like that, it's like, oh no, I mean, we need water. It's been 90 degrees during the day. A lot of the stuff is baby plants. They don't have very deep roots, so they need the water. So, fortunately, we have two wells. Worse come to worse, because there's a backflow valve in their preventer, I could hook up the outside hydrant from the one well system, which is from the at the barn, and it's from the house well, run a hose over and back feed into one of the hydrants, and then you could run your irrigation. So, I had to decide if I was going to drag out two or three hundred feet of hose to connect the two systems. Luckily, it was a fairly easy fix. Yeah, they don't always go easy though. No, they don't. Another thing you had to fix this week was, in our pasture, we have some trees, and of course, we have fences around them, so the cows don't destroy the trees. Well, they were wanting some of the branches that were hanging low, and they were reaching for them and reaching for them, and they broke the one fence. Yeah, so he actually broke there's three trees out there, and they broke the fences on two of them. Yeah, and if the branches weren't hanging down so low, they wouldn't have tried to do it. So, he went out to trim the branches up and fix the fences. You had helpers, didn't you? Yeah, but before I even did that, I had to go to the sawmill in the forest to buy new oak planks, one by sixes. So, we were ready when we went out there, and cows are very curious. Extremely. So, I drove the, you know, the buggy out there with the boards and all my saws and equipment. Of course, they're right on the spot, right in nose, like, what you doing? What you doing? Can I help you? You know, and they liked it when I started trimming some of the branches out. Then they wanted to eat the branches. Yeah, they like the leaves on the branches, so I don't know what. Maple leaves must taste pretty good. I never taste them. Yeah, but he's got the fence all fixed. Trees are trimmed up, so he should be okay for a while. The cows won't be as curious. They might have noticed if they looked closely that the number of cows changed. Yeah, we now have five. We had three before, and this week we got two more little ones. Yeah, for next year's cow, next year's beef. Yeah, they're all steers. Sometimes we call them cows, they're steers. Yeah, we call them cows. Our grandkids, that's the cows, the cows, especially a little one and a half year old. She loves the cows, just moo, moo, and she always wants pop up, feed cows, feed cows. I have a bale of straw right in front of the feeding trough, and she climbs up on it and looks over and makes the noise. I mean, she's a foot away from the cow, and she's going moo, moo, and they're sitting there eating away, but she just loves it. Yeah, that's a delight. So one difference where I'm doing right now, it's June. I'm picking strawberries every other day, and we don't have quite as many as we have in other years, I think because of the freeze, but also because the rabbits and the birds were after them. So I've had to net them to keep the birds and the rabbits off, and I even have hawk kites flying around. They're really kind of cool, and I think it does kind of deter the birds because it's whipping around crazy. It's usually windy here, so they're flying. So that took care of that, but now as far as the freeze goes, we had other serious damage. Yeah, and we've had a couple viewers, when we showed you what happened in our orchard, you wrote to us and said, you might want to check on that. It looks like fire blight. Well, we did some other research, and it turns out because of the freeze damage, it's a trauma blight, they call it, and when you have the fruit that dies and the buds, it leaves an opening, you know, for damage for the fire blight, but it comes in through the trauma that's caused by the freeze. So it's all in the family for the fire blight. It affected mostly pears, it's affecting the apples a little bit. Yeah, the pears got hit really hard, so we had to go in and trim and do, I was just going to pull them out, because the damage is pretty bad, but I'm going to try. We cut out all the damaged areas and took them the other side of the farm. We're going to burn them, and we're watching closely. Now, we have had some in the apple area, in the area where there were little blossoms and little apples, and they're decaying and falling. Again, that fire blight and that trauma to the tree caused the blight to be able to get in there, so a couple times now we've had to trim them out. Now, supposedly, when it gets hotter and drier in the summer, the fire blight has less of a grip, but that frost, it was a double whammy. It went down to like 23 and was freezing for eight hours overnight. Yeah, so not only did we lose the fruit, but it damaged the trees. Now, some of that, if I was more diligent, I did spray some of the trees that get leaf curl, primarily, what, the peaches, nectarines. I sprayed them with a copper fungicide. It's organic. Yeah, and that helped them, so they don't get the leaf curl, but it turns out I probably should spray the whole orchard, because that is also a prevention for the fire blight. If there's a trauma or injury on the tree, then that bacteria is less likely to get into the tree. So, we learn more every year, the orchard especially. It's a hard thing to do, but we had no idea. We knew the freeze could damage the fruit. We didn't know there could be long-term effects. Yeah, I didn't know that it would damage the tree. That was a lesson learned. Yeah, so we had something else exciting happen during the week. I think it was last Sunday. I bought a rake. Now, it's a hay rake. It's the one that we pull on the extractor. Now, the video that we did last year, we made hay and we didn't have a rake. We want to see what would happen if we didn't use the rake. Yeah, just with a tether a couple times. Yeah, and you need a rake for good reason. So, I looked all winter for the rake that I wanted. I got good advice around what to look for, and I got a good New Holland rake. Some of you may remember that Brenda and I made hay last year, and we tried to do it without a hay rake. You know, being a homestead, I was trying to get by without having all the equipment, and I heard from some of you like, Don, I can't believe you did it. No, no, don't do that, and as it turned out, we didn't get as much hay. So, okay, I went out and bought a local hay rake, a used one, and this is a Holland 258 hay rake. It's nine and a half feet wide, and this has an excellent reputation. They say it's built like a tank. I just have to take care of it. That's why I got the grease gun out here and making sure that we're all greased up and ready to go. We did use it briefly to make some hay, and it works terrific. So, I'm really happy with it. It was built when it was sparing New Holland. That's before Ford bought them. So, I think it's mid to late 1980s. So, maybe this winter, this will be a winter project. I can sandblast it and repaint it, but really everything is in terrific shape. I'm anxious to use it more. All the old farmers I spoke to like me said, make sure you get one with a dolly wheel in the front. Some of them connect right to the tractor without this, and you have to pick it up. It's kind of a pain in the neck. This makes it a lot easier because this turns easy, and you raise it up down. You just connect it right to your drawbar the tractor, and you're good to go. So, I really like this thing. I'm going to take care of it, and hopefully it's going to get us a lot more hay than we got before. We also worked hard in the market garden, didn't we? Yeah, we did. It was time to plant sweet potatoes, and also plant... Yep, planted pumpkins. So, we used the tractor, and we cut a trough through, and we manually put the pumpkin seeds in, and then just raked them over, and hopefully we'll get a good crop this year. And there's some maintenance things. Every year, I have flowers that just fall over, especially snapdragons. They fall over, and then they grow funny. So, I came up with a plan how to fence them in with some string and stuff, and hopefully they'll stay standing upright this year. Yeah, you had a couple different methods you used. One was a lightweight one with the fiberglass posts, and then the others... A heavier duty one for reindeers that are going to be there every year, and they fall over every year. Yeah. So, hopefully it works. Stace, what you up to? I am trying to stake up my flowers this year so they don't fall over. Zs and snapdragons, they just get heavy, and they fall over. And snapdragons, if they fall over, the flower then grows up from where it hits the ground. So, you have a really weird bent stem you can't use. So, I use these... What are they actually called? They're to mark our driveway in the snow so he can plow and not hit or go off the driveway. So, they're great to use in the winter for the snow, but in the summer, they're wonderful for in the garden for certain things. So, I'm just going to stick these in. I tie string around them, and I will hold the flowers up as they grow. In this row, I'm trying to decide. I guess I might as well hold the calendula up. I don't use them as dried flowers to sell at the farm stand. I just use them for medicinal things, but I might as well hold them up, I guess. I'm not sure. It's a little noisy here in the tunnel today with the wind. Between the plastic flapping and my wind chime chiming. Yeah. I might just do the zinnias for now and see what happens with the calendula. And I have snapdragons down later, but I'm not going to do them yet. They're still tiny. I want to make sure they're actually going to grow and need held up. They probably will, but I just stick the sticks in and then tie strings around it. These are so much easier than if you have wood, you know, they come in and out very easily. Yeah, they just, you just slide them right in, but they really hold too. They are somewhat flexible. You have to make sure it's tight enough it's not just going to sag on you, but I did all the other beds already, and they're holding pretty well. Yep, nice. Yeah, it's going to work pretty good. So that's for temporary and for light duty. Yeah, light things and things that are just an annual. They probably won't be here next year. So they're easy to move and then the end of summer I'll pull these out and they'll be ready for Donnie to use for plow and snow. Yeah. So now we're going to go over, we have to finish some permanent setups. I have a rope. Heavier duty. I want to hold up all the time. Yeah. So probably a little heavier than this. So I'm a little surprised that the string is enough to keep them held up. It does it good enough, because like I say, this is lightweight. They're not real heavy flowers. It's just to keep them from falling out into the row, and I tie it on, and then I can move it up and down as the flowers grow, or if they start falling over a certain place, I'll raise it up, and I'll probably have at least two strings for zinnias, because they get pretty tall, maybe even a third string. So that way I can add it as I need it, but I just tie it up. You're going to add other layers, but you can also slide that one up and down. I'll probably put this one clear on the bottom, put another one on, and I can move those and then put a third one on if I need it, or a fourth if you really need it. They look really light duty like they might not work, but you know that they work, huh? Well, we're going to see. Okay. Well, this isn't the first year you've done this. But I need clippers to clip this off. Oh, here they are. I knew I left them somewhere in here. If you come to our farm ever, these are everywhere. I leave them laying all over the place. Anybody who works here, volunteers here, finds them. So I'll just tie this one off, and I'll push it down where I want it. Well, hey, I have some good news for folks. If they remember back when we did the video about your tunnel, I put that tool rack up and I said, well, it's probably the only time ever that you'll see all the tools in the tool rack. Oh, they're still there. Well, here they go. Here's a picture of them. Yeah, and I've used some of them. They're still there. I put them back. I was a good girl. So that's our very first step in being more organized, huh? Yes. Well, I'm trying to be more organized. So I can put this down to get the bottom part of the zinnia. I'll put another one on to catch the top higher parts. But it's pretty, I mean, it's pretty tight. It's not like loose. Now, those zinnias, will they get multiple stems? Yes, yes. As I cut one off, another two or three come up. All right, because later in the year, I noticed they look thicker. Oh, yeah, they get full. But that part is, they get this tall, and then they just fall right over into the aisle. Okay. So this should prevent that. No more zinnia collapse. No. And it makes them, keeps the aisles clean for one thing, but it makes them more sellable because they're not all bent up and weird, you know, weird shaped stems. Yeah. Nice straight stems. That's what you want. So now you got two layers already done. Yep. And I can raise them and lower them as I need to. I just have to make sure I catch when they're growing up that I actually do make sure they're inside the string. That would be crucial. But there, those zinnias are ready to go for now. So where did you get these? They're pretty cheap, aren't they? What's that? These fiberglass. I got them on Amazon. I forget. I'll look them up and let you know the link and how much they were. But like I say, we use them all summer and then all winter. So they're used year round. Okay. They work wonderfully. So this is a whole row of yarrow, all different colors, and they constantly just fall over. And then they don't look good in cut bouquets. Plus, they're just a mess all over the place. So we're going to put up a heavier duty thing here. And I actually have to dig some out. They spread. What heavy duty thing? Heavier duty flower holder lines. Donnie's going to do big T posts and wire. So this is permanent. They're perennial. They'll come back every year. They're going to flop over every year. So we'll put this in pretty much permanently. So retention wires. Okay. That's a good word. Yeah. Flower holders. But I have to dig some out. Like they've spread out into the path. So after we put the wires up, I'll have to dig out the part that's outside. And then I have to move that yarrow somewhere, figure out what to do with some extra yarrow. But it's so pretty. There's so many different colors. I love yarrow. Okay. This is our setup for a more permanent and a stronger deal. So we're going to use T posts. It'll be driven in with the post driver. And I was recommending, I have some leftover high tensile wire that we used for the pastures. But Brenda says, ah, this first year, she wants to just use some baling twine to see how it works out then. But once we put the heavy wire on, I mean, that'll last for, you know, years and years. So, but anyway, it makes a pretty good setup. And if you're driving T posts, this is the second best thing that you can have to drive T posts. Well, maybe the third, maybe the second best one is have somebody else drive them. And the best way is like Honda and some of them, they make the power drivers. So maybe, you know, we're still too young to get them, but maybe another year we'll be ready for them. This is a Don powered driver. Yeah. So another thing in the garden was I had to get the asparagus ready for the rest of the summer. It's done being harvested. The freeze kind of hit that too. We didn't get nearly what we usually do. You probably only had half, didn't you? It's done now. So I want to pull all the weeds, make, start fresh, put some compost on the bed and then refresh the pathway, some new wood chips. And we have plenty of wood chips now. Yeah. We had three loads this last week. We have two different contractors that when they're working in the area, they take down a tree, they run it through their shredder and they drop off. They can come and go as they please. We have a place for them to drop it off, but I try to keep it organized and all the chips pushed to the side to make sure they have plenty of room and they know that we want more and more chips. So I worked around a lot of the trails and put more in and I did about half of the garden and I need to... There's a couple more spots, yeah. But it's starting to look good. I've been working on some of the main pathways down the rows, but there's a couple more I want to refresh. But the wood chips really do keep the weeds down. We're trying to get everything ready for what, in two weeks? Hopefully do a full garden tour. Hopefully it'll be looking good and not too many weeds. It's looking good already. The flowers are coming out. The flowers are just starting to bloom. So hopefully in two weeks it'll be really pretty. We'll see. Under the category of unexpected things, we had a bee swarm this week. Yeah, actually we're a little surprised because last year we had five and that was by this time last year. So this is the first one we know. Our daughter walks by the bees almost every day. So sure enough we got a text from her, you have a swarm. And fortunately it was in a great place. It was easy to capture, all on one branch that we didn't have to remove from the tree. So we got all our gear in place, put a sheet down and put two deep boxes there. Yep. And we were able to shake it. I hold the bucket or the big bin. They go in the bin. We put them in the thing, put the lid on. And then we watch. Yeah. And hope if they stay in, we know we got the queen. If they leave, we know she's still in the tree somewhere. The worker bees can tell if the queen is inside, they go out on the porch, turn around, stick their butts out and they start their wings. They fan like crazy to spread the hormones or pheromones, I guess. Yes. To let everybody know the queen's in here, guys. Yeah. So invariably there's some other bees flying around, or there's still some on the branch that you can't get. Plus there are other bees that were out scouting, looking for a potential home. A permanent place, yeah. So when they come back, they're like, hey, where'd everybody go? But with that pheromone going out, they know, oh, they're right down in that box. So we let them all gather. And by the time the sun's just going down, they're all inside and it's quieted down. So we tuck a towel in at the bottom and then we carefully move them. Carefully. And it's only about 20 feet or so to the hive. And so it's getting dark and they're going to stay there overnight. And then we put some branches in front of the entrance. So when they come out in the morning, they kind of reorient because where are we at? So they change their dials and configuration of how to zoom in to their new home. And that seems to work. The bees' GPS system is amazing. They just know. Yeah. Because there's eight boxes out there and they're all fairly close, like which one is home. So yeah, it's amazing. So we have eight hives. We lost one hive last winter. We had some mice get in and damage. And we got the mouse out pretty quickly, but it did a little damage down below. And they made it through the winter. They just weren't very strong and they couldn't carry through. So it's good to get one swarm. We replaced that hive. Yeah. So we're back up to eight. And hopefully that's it. We just were in them. Then later in the week, we were in there and just checked them all over. And it's looking pretty good. They are. I hope we get a lot of honey this year. Yeah, definitely. So in addition to farm chore, we had family activities, didn't we? Yeah. We always have some babysitting throughout the weeks, various kids here and there. But this week was really special. Our oldest granddaughter graduated from high school. That's amazing. And she'll be going off to college in August. Yeah. So that was a pretty special day. Congratulations, Chloe. Yeah. Big time. So last night we had a fun time. Friends of ours came over for dinner and they brought loads and loads of canning jars. For canning, for a person who cans, it doesn't get much more exciting than that. Yeah. So you found a whole bunch of very old ones and names that you never heard of before. Yeah. I mean, we might actually do a video about it because we started researching them and they're very interesting. I mean, yeah, they were names I'd never heard of related to canning. There were at least, what, eight or nine different brands? Yes. Yes. And it was like four or five I never even heard of before. But I'm just so excited. I'm in the process of putting them all through the dishwasher, putting them down there and getting ready to can and put lots of stuff in them. But that was a fun night. Yeah. Well, I enjoyed watching you on the floor, pulling them out, looking at, oh, look at this one. Look at that. Yeah. That's fun for a canner. Yeah. Hey, what are you discovering? A treasure. Friends of ours brought over these huge containers filled with canning jars last night. And if you're a canner, this is like a kid in a candy store, OK? But some of these are old. I mean, there are the Kerr, which I've heard of before. There's Ball, I've heard of before. Kerr, like a square jar. Atlas, completely round. Atlas is an older one, I think. But then there's some I've never heard of. Long Life, I never heard of that. And what was this one? Maggio. It looks like M-A-G-I-O. So I don't know. Here's some canning jars I've never heard of. And then there's a few, they look like a can jar. They're heavy duty, but there's no name on them. So canners out there, would you use them for canning? OK, so how do you tell the difference between a canning jar and just like a peanut butter jar or some other jar? Well, I can tell there are some jars in there that are probably like mayonnaise jars. They're not as heavy. Canning jars are heavy duty. And that feels like a canning jar. It doesn't feel like a mayonnaise jar. So I don't know. But is the lid a standard size? A lot of those, yeah. OK, so the one that's not a canning jar, like mayo or something, it wouldn't go on there? I don't know. Some people do use them to can, but if they're not as strong, I think sometimes they might break in the pot, especially if you don't pressure canning. They just say, the experts say, to use heavy duty, the canning jars. So, so far I've unpacked a lot of jelly jars, which is wonderful because I make a lot of jam. And now I've got some regular mouth pints and wide mouth pints, which I love. Wide mouth pints are so handy, especially like canning peaches and stuff. Of course, we're gonna have to buy peaches this year since ours got hit by the freeze. But I do hope to can some peaches, find them somewhere and can them. But some of the old ones are just so cool looking. The curves, they're like square. You know, they're just they're neat. It's fun looking at the old stuff, but they're wonderful canning jars. I can can my little heart out now. So if they're not canning jars though, you can still use them for like freeze dry foods and things. Freeze dried and some of them, and if I ever find a canning jar that has like a little nick on the top and I don't think it'll seal, it's wonderful for a flower base. I sell, you know, cut flowers at the farm stand. I can just have them arranged and get in a canning jar and then they get to take it with them. So they get used in some way, shape or form. I even had a couple little, they called it, not half pint, but half, half pint, just one cup things. That's kind of nice. So yeah, it's like it's like a kid in a candy store. You know what I haven't seen? These drums, they're like the cardboard kind of drums and they have reinforced, you know, steel rim on them. But I remember those years and years ago. Yeah, they're old. Yeah. So some of the jars are pretty old and the containers are old, but I've got one container done, one big box, another box and a smaller box to go through too. All right. More fun to come. A lot more. So after dinner last night, we had a wonderful dessert. I made rhubarb posset. We did that a couple videos ago and we are in love with it. You made a little extra too, didn't you? Yeah, I made sure I made extra so we could have it tonight too. So we're going to enjoy some rhubarb posset, chill out a little bit and then we still have a couple nightly chores to do that we do every night. Yeah. Closing the tunnel, closing the garden and we can start closing in the chickens. You know, maybe last night was a beautiful evening when the sun going down. Maybe we can sit out there and have a little fire in our pavilion. Yeah. So thanks for joining us as we shared with you what this last week was like and we will see you in our next video. Bye-bye.