Hello everyone,
First, I want to give a big shout out to my Texas friends. I very much hope the flooding wasn’t near your home or affected you or anyone in your family. There has been some strange weather in diverse places.
As usual we have been busy here and here it is half way through July. June started out getting the gardens set up and planted. Mark had a short window of time to help me lay the weed fabric, drip lines and trellises as he was preparing to head back to Juneau, Alaska for the summer of more tour bus driving. He left the middle of June and has been gone for a month now. Time has really flown for me here in Idaho. Each day I set out to do the daily chores of feeding animals, milking my three goat girls, bottle feeding the three little kids and weeding. Lots and lots of weeding. All that aged cow manure we put into our flower bed produced a very healthy crop of weeds. Some even as tall as four feet or more. It has been a challenge to get it under control before it goes to seed and still see my flowers bloom. My hope is that next year there will be fewer weeds and easier to maintain. Will see.
We had a lot of really warm days this spring. I think more so than the last two years. I even wondered if we would get any late frosts like we did in the past. Well, sure enough, I got everything planted and the middle of June cooled down over night and a very light frost did happen. With all that temperature fluctuation I did lose some of my melon plants and decided to direct sow. I hope they will have enough time to produce before our short summer is over. We will have lots of potatoes though, green beans and strawberries. The strawberries started to ripen a few days after Mark left and by the end of the month, I was picking around 20 pounds every other day. I have already exceeded strawberry sales this year compared to last year. Extending the rows last year and adding double the plants really made a difference. I’m guessing we have over two hundred strawberry plants now.
Our chicks that hatched out in April were big enough to move out into chicken tractors in the orchard area. We now have two chicken tractors with almost twenty chicks in each one. I move them every day so they can get fresh greens and soil to scratch in. They have grown a considerable amount. In the meantime, Mark saw that Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa had a limited supply of Rhode Island Red chicks available. We jumped on it and ordered twenty-nine, twenty-six females and three males. They also sent us a free chick and all thirty made it safe and sound the end of June. Eventually when all these new chicks start laying, I will sell a majority of my older hens and two Australorp roosters.
Our three little goat kids we purchased from Trinity Valley Ranch are doing really well and growing fast. We will be bottle feeding them three times a day through July and then cut down to two times a day after that. They got to go out into a real pasture I fenced off with electric rope fencing and now are trained to respect the shocking experience. Each evening I bring them back into the barn fat and happy. I started leash training Talia since I noticed she seems to be the leader of the pack and makes it easier to take them out to their pasture each day.
I’m going to keep this newsletter short since I’m so late getting it out. Anyways, things are going very well here other than feeling pretty tired and sore by the end of the day. I really enjoy this lifestyle though and am thoroughly glad I am still young enough to have the energy to do it. It is a true blessing to be able to live this way.
Many Blessings to you,
Joey E. Barnes