A Very Busy & Wet Spring

Things are in full gear at the farm. So much to do outside, but it won't stop raining. We are back & forth to Illinois, so when we are up here, we need to get stuff done. I am excited to say that we will FINALLY both be up here full time in July! Our shop building is sold & we are in the process of finishing up the work there & starting to move things up here. And after being in business for 32 years, there is a lot of stuff to go through. Most of the equipment is too big to use up here or has too much power for what we need. So Steve gets to pick out some new equipment for the farm shop.
We bought the farm back in March of 2007. We are so ready to stop driving every weekend for 9 hours, Looking forward to a four hour work day and time to do all the things we love to do, like ride our bikes. I'm sure if our pets could talk, they would be very grateful for the permanent move, too. Riding in the car with two cats & a large dog is quite an adventure! They are amazingly good in the car though.
This winter we continued to work on the attic/guest area space. Today, insulation was blown in by Warm House Company from Viroqua. Dave & Jamie did a great job. It is amazing the difference it makes sound-wise. You can barely hear the rain on the (metal) roof on the side that was done today. The other side is for storage & will just have the soy insulation that was applied a couple years ago.

Looking into the storage space with the soy insulation.

The new cellulose insulation that was blown in today.

We still have the west end wall (pictured above with blue jean insulation) to build out & attach rigid foam insulation to. That wall will be drywall when we are done. The ceiling will get a layer of rigid insulation & then pine wood.

This is a shot of the bathroom & closet area.

Drywall might be done this weekend on the walls that are ready. Then I will call the electrician & plumber to come back & finish hooking up everything. What a difference from a year ago. Last year around this time, I was getting ready to hang garlic in this space. We still have some decisions to make about the space. How to heat it is one of them. We are tossing around the idea of radiant floor heat like we have on the main floor. Of course, in the midst of this, the shop sold & we have been busy with that.

Outside, we have enlarged the front garden and made a new garden area behind the back garden. I bought 16 more blueberry bushes & transplanted 12 two year old bushes into part of that space. That brings the total blueberry bushes to 48. I planted dutch white clover in the rows. In the rest of the space is squash, pumpkins & melons. The back garden is garlic (3,600), peas, beans, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, cabbage, brussels sprouts & sweet potatoes. I left part of the garden to rest & planted a cover crop.

The front garden has everything else. The new part is cover cropped. The rest of it is: potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, lettuces, spinach, radishes, kale, chard, beets, onions, leeks, turnips, carrots, basil, parsley, oregano, sunflowers and I'm sure there must be something else :-).

We grafted apple trees again this year & had more success this year than any other year. We tried a different method. We watched a few YouTube videos and decided to use wax to seal the grafts. There was only three trees that didn't take out of about 20 grafts. There are lots of cherries on both the Nanking bushes & the trees. The pears had lots of flowers, so I am hopeful for our first harvest of those. The plum & peach trees are still alive after the drought too. We have lost a few small trees though that were planted last year. The original hazelnut bushes we planted several years ago should bear fruit this year. The ones I planted last year....well, we can't even see them now due to the weeds that surround them. :-). Maybe after the garlic harvest this year, we will have the chance to trim the weeds around them & see how many made it.

Enough. I hope to post more, but I am not promising anything for a while. I will leave you with a couple pics of my girls...