We are starting to see spring around the corner.  Sure, it’s 30 degrees outside now….but the sun was out today and it warmed up enough to send the kids outside in a coat to run around.  We’ve had a long, cold winter and we are very ready to thaw out a bit.

I’ve been aching to start gardening.  We’ve been pouring over seed catalogs.  We have a lot of seeds already that we saved from our plants last year, but it is always nice to look at all the nice pretty pictures in the seed catalogs.  I love all the variety that the heirloom seeds offer.  Green stripe tomatoes, yellow and red stripe tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, orange tomatoes, purple sweet peppers, chocolate peppers….  all amazing fruits and vegetables that God created for us to enjoy that are rarely, if ever, seen in a grocery store.

Here’s some of our garden load from last year’s garden.  We grew several different varieties of tomatoes.  We not only enjoyed the wonderful taste of heirloom, home grown garden tomatoes, but we all enjoyed watching our tomatoes grow and marveled at the diversity and uniqueness of these rarely seen garden varieties.  By the way…Wow, look at that green carpet of grass!  We’re looking forward to seeing that again!

Have you heard about Homestead Blessings?  It’s a great new DVD’s series from our friends over at Franklin Springs…and it’s all about homesteading topics!  Gardening, Herbs, Candlemaking, Breadmaking…Canning. 

Franklin Springs says about the Homestead Blessing series…… “The West ladies are back – Vicki, Jasmine, Hannah, and CeCe – in an exciting new six DVD instructional series.  Homestead Blessings is a fun-filled collection of homemaking skills presented in an educational and entertaining beautifully packaged six DVD gift set.  The southern hospitality of the West ladies will welcome you into this unique series that is encouraging to ladies of all ages and teaches valuable skills that can be applied to many homemaking endeavors.  The six DVD set includes instruction in bread making, candle making, soap making, canning, gardening, and herbs.”

I added the Homestead Blessings links on my sidebar over there ——–> Go check them out and watch the video traliers!

I also added a link to the really great Venture Academy .  If you have not seen the trailers for this DVD set…you must go over to Franklin Springs and watch them.  They are excellent.  Paul was able to attend the Venture Academy and loved every minute.  Two Thumbs UP and Highly Recommended!!!

We love May the Milk Cow.  She has a bull calf that is about 6 weeks old now.  They are doing wonderfully.  We have an abundance of winter milk for which we are all thankful for. 

Having that milk drastically cuts our grocery bill as well.  Of course there is a lot of work that goes into getting that milk to the house everyday.  We love the fact that we have a handful of very energetic boys who can milk the cow now.  We look back at when we started farming and see a huge leap in what the boys can do now.  It’s amazing.  We have a 3rd cow milker in training currently. 

We’ve moved up the younger ones to take over some of the chores the bigger ones use to do.  Like collecting eggs…however, this has had its challenges.  A 13 year old is a lot more careful than say…a 7 year old….but after losing a few baskets of eggs to mysterious accidents…like tripping over the goat…he’s well on his way to becoming an expert egg collector.  He hands me baskets of eggs every evening….and now they are consistently not broken!

The 7 year old and 8 year old are also delivering slops to the pigs everyday.  That usually goes without incident, except recently somehow they lost the slop buck on their way back to the house.  I don’t understand how things like that happen…but they do.  Hopefully, we will have some pork soon. 

At the end of this year, our meat is almost gone and we’re having to reevaluate our “planning” on raising meat.  It should be timed so that you go from butchering to butchering without lag time waiting on animals to get ready.  When you are about to butcher your cow, don’t get so caught up in the glories of having your very own meat to stock your freezer with that you forget about the next cow that should be making its way into your pasture before or around the time you butcher the first one.  Keep the cycle going or you will end up with an empty freezer and no “next cow” ready to be butchered. 

Lessons learned…

The citrus fruit order (oranges and grapefruit) will be here on December 18th.  I will have it available for pickup at our farm Friday afternoon and evening on December 18th.  Stay tuned for more details if you ordered Winter citrus fruit. 

Also…the deadline for ordering the fruit is December 10th…. you still have time to get in on the order (if you live near us!)  Order here.

We will be participating in a winter fruit co-op this year.  If you are interested in ordering oranges and grapefruit…and live near us… you should check out the winter orange and grapefruit fruit order for really great prices!!!! 

Like last time with the apples, your orange and grapefruit orders will be available for pickup here at our farm for those who designate our farm for pickup location.  The deadline for the order is December 10th, 2009.  I will let you know when the pickup date is as soon as I know. 

Order here…….If you have any questions, let me know. 

For those who ordered apples…..  They are almost here….

Stay tuned for pick-up times and directions to the farm.  I’ll be sending those out in the next day or so. 

We have a little side business we wanted to let you all know about.  For the past couple months, we have been buying and selling dairy bulls and having quite a lot of fun in the process. 

We have made friends with a dairy not too far from us.  When they have a bull calf or several bull calves, they give us a ring…we load up and go pick up the babies.  Some of the babies are less than 24 hours old when we get them.  They’ve had their colostrum and are sent to us to care for. 

We bring them home and the children teach them how to take a bottle, run and play with them and they even get serenaded often by our little 3 year old.  They are fed twice a day by our boys.  They are selling them as bottle fed bulls or steers (they can castrate them for you if you would like). 

If you would like some great grass fed beef….contact us about getting a steer for your pasture.  We also raise grass fed beef here at our farm for those who don’t have a pasture or who live in town.  You can buy your calf and we will board him, feed him all the green grass and hay he wants, take him to the butcher and deliver your meat.  If you are interested, let us know and we can give you further details about beef boarding. 

Have I mentioned how much I like the hay mulch gardening method?  I just wanted to reiterate how GREAT it is!  We are just now getting to the point where we are bringing in something from the garden on a daily basis….and, oh boy, how exciting has this been for our family?  Very! 

Gardening is amazingly wholesome and good.  I love the down to earth, raw feel of the garden.  I love the incredible breadth and depth of God’s miraculous creation of real food simplified to seed, dirt and divine intervention. 

My “in the garden” update isn’t jazzy or spectacular.  In fact, what’s in our garden is what I consider small beginnings and a foretaste of things to come.  Realistically, a family our size needs over an acre of gardens to actually grow the food we need each season with enough to put away for the winter.  However, we are beginners and are still learning the ropes. 

One major lesson we have learned this year is that hay mulch gardening has revolutionized the way we think and the way we practice in regards to growing our food. 

Our green bean patch was planted not too long ago.  We pulled back the hay, exposed a row of dirt, sprinkled the seeds down the row.  Patted the dirt gently over the seeds and waited.  The plants quickly popped up.  Once they were a few inches tall, we moved hay in around the crooked and rows and let the green bean plants continue to grow.  Now the children are picking green beans and we are enjoying delicious foods straight from the garden.  It’s glorious!

Thomas Moore, the chairman for the Southern National Congress, wrote a great essay late last month, that is well worth sharing.  He gives a great high level fly over of the root problem in the corporate food industry.  It doesn’t matter if the new laws, such as the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009 or the Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act, intend to curtail an individual’s right to purchase, trade, or consume healthy food grown from their own land, that is the effect.

In fact, we are already seeing many tyrannical “enforcement” activities on other less intrusive laws that are being used to intimidate and curtail the efforts of small family farms.  The existence of an organization called the “Farm to Consumer Foundation” who’s sole purpose is protecting small family farms against this abridgment of our rights by the federal and state government should tell us something of the times in which we live.

In fact Mr. Moore, declares that in these times planting our garden is a revoutionary act:

Today I committed a revolutionary act. It had nothing to do with firearms or marksmanship training. I didn’t organize a protest march or join the Underground. In fact, it had nothing to do with politics, except in the broadest possible sense. But it was revolutionary nonetheless. Today I finished spring planting.

How can such a benign activity be revolutionary, you may ask. In a sane and normal world it wouldn’t be. People have grown their own food from the beginning of the world. Agriculture has always been the foundation of civilization and the farmer a benefactor of mankind. But today we don’t live in a sane and normal world. The criminal Regime we live under is not content just to rob us of our liberty, our property, our dignity and humanity. It also seeks to control us by controlling the food supply. It seeks to strip us of food self-sufficiency and make us dependent, first on the central state, through food stamps, for example; and second, on the state’s real masters, the giant agri-businesses who determine Federal food policy. I call this process food fascism.

Read more of this revolutionary article here and commit your own revolutionary act by planting your garden today!

I have tried to keep the weeds under control this year. 

The weeds are not taking us over and it has proven to be much better than the previous gardens we have had.   It has required continuous monitoring and mulching.  I have pulled very few weeds and have instead used the hay/straw mulch method to cover the weeds that do pop up in the garden.  Hubby got the weed eater out and mowed down the edges of the garden and fence line…then added more hay. 

In a few areas, I added brown paper grocery sacks, paper feed sacks and card board—biodegradable weed barriers– around my tomato starts.  That is working well…I should have added more when the plants were smaller.  I have found that adding these heavier paper barriers are helping keep the weeds down and the moisture in.  The garden is not weed free…but is very manageable.  I am not overwhelmed with weeds when I go out to the garden and that has been the biggest encouragement!

Overall, I have been very pleased with the hay mulch gardening method.  However, after I saw a 4 foot long snake skin laying near my tomatoes, I didn’t go out to the garden for several days.  I still haven’t managed to overcome the undeniable fact that snakes and rats are probably making  themselves a very nice neighborhood underneath all that hay I have been adding.  I don’t think my gardening days will quite be the same since that unfortunate discovery. 

We have  still had to deal with the normal pests—squash bugs, tomato bugs and various other pests.  We have been using a spray bottle with water and soap to help deter those pests and while they are not completely eradicated…we have made a dent in the population.  We are also checking the leaves and killing any eggs or bugs we see.  Today, we mixed up some out-of-date cayenne pepper sauce with water and will be trying it out as a pest control as well. 

Here’s a Food INC. movie review from some friends of ours:

Well, we just got back from the movie. Their answers to the problem seemed to rely too much on government, interestingly the same people they place a large portion of the blame on. I have put a review on my blog here. 

Update from Paul:

Tony, did indeed post a great review of the movie that I was intending to comment on – but haven’t had the time.  My thought was, that it seems like Fresh, The Movie, is going to be the answer movie and Food, INC. is the movie that highlights all the trouble!

It would be great to hear if anyone else has seen either movie.  We are going to be hosting a local screen of Fresh as soon as we can make the arrangements.  We’ll let you know what we think.

Ok – so in the absence of much writing, maybe you’d like to see what we’ve been reading.  In addition to our family reading story, Every Farm Tells a Story by Jerry Apps, and my private study time book, Arator, by John Taylor of Caroline here are a few links to some good on-line articles.

1. How do you turn a chicken into a nugget?  Here is the answer.
2. Even Walmart is able to read the dollar signs on the real food movement – no more rBST in their milk.
3. And to wrap it up, here is a great article about Joel Salatin.  He is featured in both the films we posted about recently: Fresh the Movie, and Food, INC.