We Run a 42 Acre Farm in Our 60s Here s How

We're often asked how people in their 60s manage a 42 acre farm, a large market garden, cows, chickens, bees, and everything else that comes along with farm life. Today we're going to show you some of the systems and the priorities we use to manage our farm. Well if you've never seen our channel before we're Don and Brenda Wardenburg and we bought this 42 acre farm six years ago. A lot of our friends thought we were crazy at time. Probably some of them still do you know. But more and more of them I think see that we enjoy our life here on the farm. But we've learned a lot haven't we? Yes we have. We've had to learn everything because neither of us had any farming background so we had a lot to learn. And then during that process we also learned what we don't want to do or what we shouldn't do. Yeah we've learned our limits. Yeah so this video is really us just sharing with you what we've learned and what systems and priorities we use to manage the farm. As we just mentioned this is a huge project and we had no experience before so one of the first things we did we had to divide our duties and responsibilities. I had a passion for some areas like I took on the cattle and the bees and I had interest in the orchard. I did that and also just the maintenance of the equipment and working the tractor and the farm equipment. I loved all of those areas. How about you? Well I kind of oversee the market garden the tunnel the chickens and then all the food preservation which I love doing that and just the cooking and household type things too. It's just what naturally comes to us you know. So some of it's not just our interests and passions some of it's also just our the way we're made and our physical limitations we have. Yeah just for example the heat. He can handle very high temperatures. He was actually in Africa for two months on a mission trip. How many years ago? A long time ago. A couple times I went. Yeah but it's like his thermostat changed. He can handle the heat and gets cold easily. I cannot handle the heat. Well you see it the way we're dressed sometimes. Yeah in most videos he's in long pants and a long sleeve shirt I'm in shorts and a tank top. So that's a big difference but we know I have to work in the morning. If it's going to be 90 or 95 in the afternoon I'm done by noon. I mean I have to go in and take a break. I actually get sick if I work too long in the heat. So if something really needs done in the afternoon if it's in my area he'll do it for me because he knows it's too hot for me. You know and we help each other any way we can. Yeah like when I do the bees or in it she's usually with me because it goes much smoother when two of us work it together. I'm the smoker. I do the smoke. And we work in the garden together a lot. I ask a lot of dumb questions but you know I do help out in the garden. Yeah well and like tractor work I can operate the bucket and do all that but actual strengths and weaknesses when I have a full wheelbarrow of compost that's a little too much for me. So he'll wheel the compost in and dump it for me and I'll spread it out. Yeah we just learn ways to do what he's able to do to help me and then what I'm able to do to help him. So somehow for us it's kind of worked out hasn't it? Yeah it does. Yeah just a quick caveat this next section is going to be about a lot of large equipment and they're things that we need on the farm because we're 42 acres and we need the larger equipment. If you have a smaller piece of ground you might not need the big equipment but the section after that is a lot of the smaller tools and techniques that we use to make our life easier and be able to do this at our age. A lot of the things we do are to conserve energy and time. We're in our 60s we don't have as much energy we used to we still have plenty of energy but we have a limited amount and time. One of the things that takes a lot of time is getting around this farm. Our tunnel's quite a distance away if I had to walk to the tunnel every day and back and forth it would be an hour a day it would just take so long. I can do it I'm physically capable but if it takes too long. So my number one loved thing on the farm is my golf cart or my garden cart. This gets me everywhere I need to go on the farm pretty quickly and I can haul all the stuff I need in the back. Yeah it's loaded with your tools and plants and everything you need. It has everything I need the gloves the tools yeah water bottle I mean everything I need is on this I just take off in the morning go to the garden and I have to be switching irrigation so I'm driving all over and it saves a tremendous amount of time. So even with that you still get 15 to 25,000 steps a day. Yeah depending what I'm doing. So you know it takes a lot of strength and energy to work a long day like you do. So if I can save steps coming back and forth from the house to places this is wonderful. Yeah now for me mine is even more fun I have a couple ways to get around and this is what I use most of the time it's a an electric dirt bike and it is great fun to ride around in and you know I'm going to the barn here the cows I got to run back out you know to the other end to check the bees here and there looking at trees whatever I have to do this saves me time and energy. Now the only disadvantage to this is that I can't load it up with tools but this is more for like reconnaissance or just getting back and forth when the tools are already where where I'm working. It is also for fun though because our grandkids all have little dirt bikes go karts all electric vehicles yeah and when they go for rides around the farm they want their pop-up to go with them yeah so he had to have this right so they do have a lot of fun but he can zip around really quickly like if I say I can't remember if I turned a hydrant off he can zip out check it and zip back real quick or run and get waters and bring them back and forth and whatever we need yeah so I wouldn't absolutely need this because I do have a side-by-side and that's what I use when I'm doing heavy duty work and I load all the tools on it it's the equivalent of Brenda's golf cart except it's diesel powered it's also a thing that I use for snow plowing and and some other farm work so well and the electric things since we're solar powered we produce all our own electricity yeah it's nice driving electric things and you don't have to start them and warm them up you jump on them go and they're quiet that's one nice thing about all our kids dirt bikes and minibikes and stuff yeah they go you know the neighbors don't mind them riding all over because it doesn't make much noise yeah so there you go the saving time and energy and our transportation and having fun now I'd say the second area that saves me a lot of time and brings tremendous power and capability are using the two tractors now I'm not going to talk a lot about this one this is really more of a farm tractor I use it for baling hay and it's 55 horsepower diesel it's a field tractor and if you're not farming then you don't need a tractor like this but if you have a serious market garden and an orchard and you've got three four or five acres or so having a tractor like this with a front loader on it and you can put a pallet fork there it also has a three-point hitch and PTO you can run a lot of equipment for example when we bought the farm one of the first things we did we planted 120 trees around the property and when we put the auger on the back of this we were able to dig the holes very quickly I can't imagine what would happen to my back if I had to dig all those holes so and then we get deliveries of things that are heavy sometimes so I can put the pallet forks on go out to the truck and and bring it in and I don't have to struggle to try to carry it inside so well Brenda's also a very good operator with this with the the bucket so if she needs mulch or compost or anything she puts with the bucket on there she goes ahead and loads it up and use it so and that's a lot of fun yeah but with as much compost and mulch as we use and wood chips you have to have this yeah there's no way that I could clean the barn like I do I just put the bucket in and slide it along and pick up the bedding and the manure bring them out to the compost there's no way that I could clean the barn and have the size of compost pile I have without a piece of equipment like this so they do if you have a smaller property three to five acres they do have some that are smaller but very capable buckets in the front so this is a must-have for us on the farm along with my golf cart one of the thing I use is this little wagon this is my handy dandy little wagon and if I'm hauling a bunch of plants or a bunch of mulch this is just tremendous or if I'm weeding and there's a large amount of weeds I can just put it in here take it out and dump it in the compost so I love my little wagon and when I have to carry compost and stuff in a wheelbarrow wheelbarrows make a difference there's heavy ones and then there's nice light ones what's this made of it's a polycarbonate yeah it's delight so I mean if the wheelbarrow is heavy start with and then you load a bunch of stuff in it it's really heavy so this is tremendous and we've gone through several steel ones because they rust yeah and they're just heavier so this is really better and we had a double wheeled we still have a double wheeled wheelbarrow but that does keep it from tipping over but for me it's harder to push and get places and get in around my rows so there's a downside to the double wheeled wheelbarrow yeah and finally we have so many wheeled carts and devices I try to get the ones that are the solid tire because it's very frustrating to have to pump it up or fix a tire when you need a wheelbarrow or a cart another area we're careful in is lifting heavy things we're not as young as we used to be and I do have a back that can cause problems so like the chicken bags chicken bags of feed they're like 50 pounds I can lift them and carry them in there or I can drag it onto the hand truck take it into the coop scoop some out and then lift it up and dump it in the feed thing but what I usually do is just say Johnny can you dump some chicken food because 50 pound bags are easier for him to lift you know they're not a problem but now the cow bags the bags of cow food are how much yeah for the cattle feed they're 100 pound bags and just like her I can pick them up but it's not wise for me to do that I'm just inviting uh trouble so 100 pounds not comfortable for me to carry so I use the hand truck in the barn when I go to the mill I get a thousand pounds and 10 bags that's a lot for me to carry so with this it saves my back and it saves time I think yeah now if our son happens to be here one of our sons when we bring the feed in they just pick it up and carry it in yeah they're comfortable with a hundred not me we are careful about things yeah if you have a garden of any size you're likely going to use t-posts and what I would say is go ahead and get a good quality t-post they're heavy they last a long time they do sell cheaper lightweight ones but they bend up and break you're really better off getting these now managing them if you're glutton for punishment you can hammer them in with a heavy sledge it's a 10 pound that's a lot of work and you can really hurt yourself with that you're better off going ahead and getting a t-post driver it's about a two and a quarter opening and it just slides over the top of the t-post and it uh you know when you hammer you hammer it in it's safe and it's good exercise so uh now the key is if you have these in place for a couple years they tend to be really solid hard to get out so you can't be without a t-post puller and there's many manufacturers that make these but they just use a mechanical advantage to leverage to pull these out so I'm going to uh oops I got it uh this just goes on the post and then with the mechanical advantage of the long handle it pulls it right up you can see it also has a uh connection for chain so if you're not pulling t-posts you can pull other things with the chain so there you go no fuss no hassle no sweat maybe a little sweat first of all I'm excited first sunflower of the season oh that just makes it feel cheery in here and I am in the market garden a lot and that's one thing the very first year I think I tried to grow everything too much I have weeded out what I want to grow what I don't want to grow what's worth my time and efforts um and along with that I've planted willow which the time of harvesting is in November December when there's nothing else to harvest the rest of the summer I don't do a thing to it so it's an easy crop to grow I can either sell a willow or make baskets with it but we're just trying to come up with easier crops we can grow like all the berries they're honey berries jasta berries perennial things things I don't have to plant every year but give us food asparagus you know anything like that that saves me time and energy is a good thing and another thing is the raised beds we had you know little ones like a foot high they're good but we did the one that's like how high is that two and a half feet two and a half that's wonderful I mean as we get older I think I'm gonna want more and more of those like strawberries could be in those beds they'd be easier to pick so if there's a way of getting the beds higher so I'm not bending over completely to the ground that's a good thing this is a wonderful tool my daughter bought me this for Christmas last year Donnie calls it my garden walker but it is very handy when I am working on the ground it really is helpful to kneel down save my knees bend over but it's also helpful when you go to get up showing my age I can actually push up with my arms it helps me stand up I'm not just using my legs so it's wonderful and if I have to take a break I can just flip it over and sit down or if I'm working on something that's higher I can sit there and do it so it just really saves a little bit of energy it's worth it I love my garden walker now another way I save energy in the garden is the way we garden we're no-till so every spring is just a matter of putting compost on top of the beds and wood chips in the pathways and the wood chips are wonderful they keep the weeds down now I also do a lot of mulching where I mow grass with either leaves or comfrey or something and that's what I mulch the edge of the beds with to keep weeds down and to fertilize it it takes a little bit of extra energy in the spring to get it started but then the rest of the summer it really pays off the weeds are down the plants are getting fertilized it's wonderful and one other thing I do in the garden to get it a little bit easier I have a helper I have a teenager a wonderful teenager that comes four hours a week Ava is a hard worker and she helps me keep my head above water this little tool is wonderful what is it dear well it's a power pruner it's battery powered and you know if you're only cutting a handful of things then your manual ones are fine but you know when you're out here with the willow when I'm cutting willow this November I'm going to be making hundreds of cuts and some of them are going to be pretty thick pieces so it's going to be wonderful just this I'm looking forward to this and he uses it all the time in the orchard for cutting branches out and I use it like in the raspberries anytime something's too thick for the clippers to get through and it goes through some pretty thick stuff so this is a very handy tool yeah it keeps you from having to get the loppers out it's something you can just keep as a tool in your golf cart it's always around but you got to be careful yeah you don't want to cut your fingers off another way I save myself a little bit of weeding work is to use these tarps they're rubber roofing that we've cut into strips that are about the size of our pathways and our beds if I have a pathway that's gotten completely out of control like this one I'll just pull the tarp over it for about a week or two it kills all the weeds and I'll move the tarp somewhere else so it saves me having to try to pull all these out and it actually kills them so it's a great way to weed now I'm really big about not spraying in my garden anything that's not organic but there's one exception I've made this year I have thistles and I have this wild morning glory weed that I cannot get by pulling the tarps don't kill them nothing kills them so I have been spraying glyphosate if I see big patches of this morning glory I give it a shot and it will kill it to the root so I had to roll over this year because I don't have time to keep pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling so hopefully I'll get rid of it for good as Brenda said before we're very careful with use of sprays on the farm but along the fence lines we probably have a half a mile of fences and if you don't take care of the weeds under the fence they grow up they touch the hot wires and they short it down and then the animals can get out so to be honest I don't know any farmers that don't spray their fence lines so I spray with the 2,4-D and sometimes a glyphosate we find that the mare's tail just the glyphosate does not kill the mare's tail so the 2,4-D does a fine job on that and any of the broadleaf so I can drive the RTV around and hold the wand out and I you can see the narrow strip under here that we spray and that pretty much takes care of the fence so that we don't ground out our wires okay now we're going to cover the tools that we use the most or our favorite tool but this by far is the tool that I use the most here on the farm since I'm responsible for the cattle but I got to tell you when I moved out of suburban neighborhood into this work six years ago I couldn't have told you anything about any of these forks and it's actually critical and it's kind of foolish if you use the wrong fork so this right here the three time fork is a hay and straw fork it's with fewer tines and longer and thinner tines it's able to get in and under and you can pick up large chunks of hay or straw and throw it so I use this all winter when I'm throwing hay down the hay hole in the barn and just moving straw around for the bedding so this is absolutely number one but while we're here talking about forks this one is a close relative this is a four tine fork and if you look closely there's some residue on here I just cleaned the barn out today so this is manure so this is a favorite manure fork a four tine fork and we move up to a couple other four tine forks and here is a five tine fork and this one is good for compost and you can look on here and there's there's some grass and some compost residue on here so this is if you only had one fork on the whole farm probably this one would be the best utility overall and then another five tine fork with a d handle and then finally this one is for wood chips it's almost like a scoop but it's able to get through the chips and pick them up in fact there's some chunks I think it's a it's a piece of wood that's on there as evidence that it's for the wood chips so there you have it now finally I probably would have been able to tell you that's a potato fork but there you go not to be confused with your fine forks on your dinner table well Donnie talked about his rakes and there's probably one tool I get in my hand almost every time I come in the garden it's just these little clippers I use them constantly pruning tomatoes snipping flowers I just I've probably gone through I don't know how many pair of these they hold up pretty well the problem is I lose them we find them laying all over the garden so I buy them in counts of six but this is a handy dandy little clipper my favorite this next section we're going to talk about water management if you have a farm of this size I think it's foolish to try to run it off of one well so we keep the house and the domestic water separate on its own well and then we have an ag well and this is the head for the ag well and right behind this is the pit under the hut here so we have eight of these frost free hydrants the frost free means we can leave them on all year long they drain down about three feet under the ground when you turn them off that none of the piping and the valves up here are exposed to the cold weather so it's critical that we have water out here in the wintertime so we have a big loop that goes the whole way around the garden and the orchard and it goes over in the barn for the animals here's another feature that saves us a lot of time the cattle drink water all day long and all night long and it's difficult to keep a trough clean so this is a beautiful thing it's a drinker has a float ball on it that keeps the water clean and debris going in the cattle just come up and put their lower jaw and push the ball down and they're able to drink all they want and when they're done the ball comes back up and there's a filler just like in the back of your toilet with a float there that keeps fresh cold clean water flowing anytime they want it we just did a whole video about our irrigation system and that is something we could not live without on this farm we have six zones i have four in the garden one in the tunnel and one on my willow and i have drip tape on all the rows so i just set timers and it drips for 45 minutes or a half hour whatever i set and waters the plants beautifully i could not do that by hand so that saves us a boatload of time now along the lines of saving time and energy this is where i get the water for the chickens and it's a little bit of a hike over to the chicken coop and five gallon buckets of water are a little heavy so i usually drive my golf cart up fill the buckets up drive it over the chicken coop and i just have to take it right into the waters so it just saves me a few steps and a little bit of effort okay while we have eight frost free hydrants all around the farm there are many areas that we cannot reach with the hose because the hydrants simply are not everywhere so that's when we use this tank on the trailer it's a neat four-wheel trailer we'll hook up to the golf cart or the Kubota RTV and it's about 60 gallons we load it up and when we plant new trees just pull up and with gravity feed we put 15 or 20 gallons on each tree well we have just two more tools to show you before we kind of do our wrap up for the day brenda this is just a weeder that i really like it's a fiskars weir and it's strong so many of them if you really have a tough weed or tough ground they'll bend this is solid it's got a serrated edge too yeah i don't use that as much but i do use to pop the weeds up that works good i like that and everything else that we've had and we've showed you is mostly for daylight use but you know what a lot of times you have to go out in the evening we're you know closing the chicken or outside checking on a hydrant or something and it's really essential that you have light sure you can carry a flashlight but then one of your hands are tied up so this is like a hiker's headlamp with a very strong led you know the candle lamp that projects a beam in a long way but this makes it safer a lot more enjoyable to be outside in the evening so i think as we get older we're not as sure-footed you know and not as comfortable running around in the evening with no lights get better safe than sorry yeah so there's a lot of different brands that make these that are good out there so so one thing we wanted to mention is we had have to have an attitude of where things are not going to be perfect you can't have the gardens perfect the house perfect everything done everything off the list you have to be okay to live with things aren't done things are might be messed up now along those lines though somebody commented on a video if i do all the gardening who does the house cleaning the laundry the cooking and i do the cooking and the laundry but i do have a lady come in twice a month to give the house a good cleaning because i can't do it all in the summer i'm in the garden most of the day until i get too hot and i just i can't do it so i i gave in on that one yeah and she does have a grocery and errand running service he's my grocery boy yeah so anything that's needed on the outside i'm happy to do it frankly you don't you just love being here at the house i'm a homebody i like just staying at home yeah and i enjoy getting out and you know so it works for us it works for both of us so so um all in all after six years so would you do it again yes but we do some learn something every year and we are making it a little bit easier every year we knew it'd be hard in the beginning because we had to build the chicken coop get the garden we had a lot of startups but now we're in maintaining mode now we're just trying to every year evaluate what worked what didn't is there something we should get rid of because we're still working a little harder than we want to yeah and we're able to take vacations we have some people that'll come in and help take care of the farm when we're away so that part of it's covered but i think in the summer we're still working a little harder than we want to yeah definitely so brenda mentioned earlier that when it's really hot outside she goes in in the afternoons well she does but she's not just laying down um you know drinking refreshments and eating bonbons brenda also runs a business out of the house that's been what more than 20 years yeah i make jewelry and sell it on etsy yeah so uh she keeps that going too so you get a lot of balls in the air and editing youtube videos that's another thing i do in the hot afternoons when i can't be outside yeah i do the sound and photography and the video and she's the editing specialist i like that part yeah so and this was our story our life how we have to do it with this farm and our capabilities everyone's going to be different as far as what your property is and what your abilities are and you just have to think you know what can i do what can i do and it's going to be a constantly changing goal i think for us yeah so we're just now evaluating what can we do next year at better and if you have any suggestions let us know but for now i think that's all i hope maybe you got one thing out of the video that might help you and we will see in our next one bye